31: 10k in Under 60 Days: My Amazing Email List Building Strategy Without Ads

In this episode of the podcast, I telling the whole story of my email list building strategy, from idea to execution – that took my list of email subscribers from zero to 10,154 subscribers in just 57 days, without spending a single dollar on ads. This strategy isn’t specific to health coaches, but I’ve used it for both online and in-person businesses so I can vouch that it’s a flexible list building option! What’s inside this episode:The BIG ProblemThe BIG IdeaMy ResultsThe Tech Stack💡 Why It Worked (The 3-Part Framework)1. Purpose2. People3. PlanFinal ThoughtsListen to the EpisodeFAQEpisode Transcript Have you ever wished your email list would just grow itself? Or wondered how to get more visibility in your community—without shelling out for ads or begging for attention? The BIG Problem No List, No Traffic, No Recognition In early 2020, like so many others, I watched local businesses struggle. Facebook was flooded with desperate posts—“We haven’t had a sale in days… we may have to close.” These weren’t strangers. They were the people who owned the yoga studios, bakeries, and vintage shops that made our community feel like home. I realized two things: People wanted to help, but didn’t know how. Businesses didn’t have a centralized place to share updates or get discovered. I had an idea: what if I built a website to showcase and support them? The problem? I had no list, no traffic, and no brand visibility or authority. The BIG Idea Run a Contest That Does the Heavy Lifting I asked myself: how can I build an audience and attract local businesses at the same time? What’s fun, shareable, and community-driven? I decided to run a “Best Of” contest, asking locals to nominate and vote for their favorite small businesses in categories like best coffee shop, best personal trainer, best burger, and more. The plan: Nominations Phase: Let people write in who they love. Voting Phase: Create a final ballot with the top 10 nominees per category. Celebrate the winners: Use the entire process to drive traffic and capture email addresses. And guess what? It worked way better than expected. My Results 10,154 Subscribers in 57 Days Here’s how the numbers played out: Day 1: 45 subscribers Day 3: 500+ subscribers End of Nominations (Week 3): 1,600 subscribers Final Day (Week 8): 10,154 total subscribers During the peak, I was seeing 10,000+ pageviews per day, all from free traffic on Facebook—no paid ads, no dancing on TikTok, and no viral “hacks”, The Tech Stack I used tools I already had: WordPress + Divi Theme for the site and contest pages ConvertKit & SendFox to add subscribers to my email list A form builder – I recommend Smart Quiz Builder Canva for branding and graphics a free Facebook page for traffic—no paid ads, just tagging and engagement 💡 Why It Worked (The 3-Part Framework) After running the contest and sharing this email list building strategy in a few Facebook groups, I heard from people who tried it and didn’t get the same results. That got me thinking… what made my experience different? It turns out, there were three key elements that make a huge difference: 1. Purpose This wasn’t just a contest, it wasn’t just an email list building strategy, it was a mission. People weren’t voting just for fun. They were helping their community thrive. I tapped into an existing movement, which was already emotionally powerful and easy to align with. 2. People I actively engaged local businesses and tagged them when they were nominated. That gave them a reason to share the contest with their audiences. The virality came from people wanting to support their friends, family, and favorite businesses. 3. Plan I had clear messaging, simple tools, and a way to capture and validate email subscribers. It wasn’t fancy, but it was organized and systematic. Final Thoughts Whether you’re trying to build your first 1,000 email subscribers or looking for a new way to connect with your community, this email list building strategy works because it’s grounded in real people and real value. The key? Make it about them. Support the movement your audience already believes in, and the rest will follow. Listen to the full podcast episode to hear how I did it step-by-step! Or check out the first lesson in my 10k in Under 60 Days course for free! Listen to the Episode FAQ Here are some questions I get about my contest list building experience Q: Were all of those 10,000+ emails real? What about fake or junk entries?A: Yes, they were real, valid, and filtered. While the contest used single opt-in for a smoother user experience, I still had a confirmation email go out to each participant. If the email bounced or was clearly invalid, I was notified, and any form entries associated with those addresses were automatically discarded. I actually collected over 11,600 emails, but I filtered out about 1,500 junk or fake entries before finalizing the list. So the 10,154 subscribers I counted were fully verified and ready for follow-up. Q: What kind of contest is this exactly?A: It’s a two-phase “Best Of” contest where your community nominates and votes for their favorite businesses, brands, or products in specific categories. It’s time-limited, interactive, and designed to generate massive list growth, engagement, and visibility in a short period of time. Q: Why did you choose a contest instead of a lead magnet or quiz?A: I needed something fast, community-driven, and buzzworthy. A typical lead magnet or quiz didn’t have the viral, gamified appeal I needed to get people talking and sharing. The contest created excitement, tapped into the shop-local movement, and let people participate in something bigger than my business. Q: How long did the contest last?A: The full campaign was 6 weeks—3 weeks for nominations, 1 week to organize data and prep the ballot, then 3 weeks for voting. You can adjust this timeline to fit your own goals and energy. Q: What kind of results can I expect?A: I started with no audience, no list, and no traffic—and ended with 10,154 verified email subscribers in 57 days. While results vary, the key is how well you plan your messaging, categories, prize (or recognition), and community involvement. Some contests bring in more, some will bring in less. Q: What tools did you use to run the contest?A: A WordPress site using the Divi theme, a form builder, and an email marketing platform. I started with MailerLite and then switched to SendFox when I outgrew the free tier. I also used Canva for graphics and Facebook for all organic promotion—no ads. Q: Did you run paid ads?A: Nope! I didn’t spend a single dollar on advertising. The entire contest was promoted through free Facebook posts and organic sharing by the businesses and people who were nominated. Q: What if I don’t have a list, traffic, or any business nominations yet?A: Neither did I! That’s the power of this strategy. The community helped generate the content by nominating their favorites, and their votes created social sharing momentum. The contest becomes the engine that drives traffic, content, and email signups—all at once. Q: How did you get people to participate and share?A: I used a “You’ve Been Nominated!” tag-and-share strategy. After people submitted nominations, I created simple Facebook graphics and tagged the businesses. Those businesses were excited to be recognized and asked their audiences to vote and support them. It created viral loops without extra work on my part. Q: How many categories should I include?A: I had 144 total across several subcategories (food & drink, pets, home, services, etc.)—but you don’t need that many. You can start small with just a few meaningful categories in your niche or community. It’s better to go deep with fewer categories than overwhelm your audience with too many. Q: What’s the most important key to success?A: Having a strong mission behind your contest. My contest tapped into the “support local businesses during COVID” movement. People shared and participated because they believed in the cause. Your contest should connect to something meaningful to your audience—not just free exposure. Q: Can this work for digital businesses too, or just local?A: It can work for both! After I ran this for local small businesses, I ran it for one of my other sites that’s 100% online. It can easily be adapted for a coach, course creators, and community builders who want to highlight the best products, services, or voices in their niche. LISTEN TO MORE PODCAST EPISODES Episode Transcript (Transcribed by TurboScribe. Go Unlimited to remove this message.) I’m Mari Mallon and this is the Profitable Health Coach podcast, the show where we’re all about creating a sustainable, enjoyable and profitable online coaching business that gives you the freedom and flexibility that you want. We’ll hear about strategies, systems and solutions from experts and fellow coaches who’ve created the business of their dreams, providing amazing transformations and connecting with clients across the globe. You’ll learn how to get started without the technical overwhelm. Join me on this journey to become a profitable health coach. Welcome everyone, I am Mari Mallon and today I’m going to be sharing my story of how I grew my email list from 0 to 10,154 subscribers in just 57 days using a list building contest. And the best part is that I didn’t spend a single penny on ads. So during this session, what I’m going to share with you is exactly what I did. We’re going to talk about why it worked and then we’re going to talk about how you can adapt this strategy to build your own email list. And quick disclaimer, I cannot promise you that you are going to have the same results with this strategy, but I’m going to share what I did and the things that really helped make the most difference and then some insights that help you to tweak the strategy to work for you. Okay, let’s dig in. So just to introduce myself, I am Mari Mallon, I’m a WordPress developer and a web designer. What I do is I help small businesses create profitable and sustainable online systems. First I’m going to go behind the scenes of my first contest, how I went from zero to subscribers to over 10,000 and the factors that made the most impact on my results. Then I’m going to walk through the tech and all the behind the scenes set up of like all the different parts to make it work. I’m going to show you the tools that I used and then I’m going to get really detailed and show you how I set everything up step by step in each individual platform. Okay, so you may have heard me talk about how I grew my list running a best of contest and if you’re not sure what this means, let’s cover that. My best of contest strategy is a two phase real time engagement event. It’s not evergreen and the way that it works is that a community nominates and then votes for all their favorite products, brands or businesses in that particular nation and the winners in each category can then have bragging rights that they’re the best of whatever their category is to use as social proof in all of their marketing materials. Why did I even run a best of contest to begin with? You don’t see a lot of this promoted as a list building strategy and as an online business, it wasn’t like my first go to idea to grow a list but let me walk you through what happened. So picture late spring 2020, we all know what was happening then COVID came and basically we were at a standstill. What happened was my local community, much like others across the country, the world was hit pretty hard, especially that small business community. They really relied on that foot traffic and regular in-person revenue to stay in business and many of them were on the brink of closure because they could not afford to go months without that stay stream of customers and clients from doing in-person business. So what I started to notice was these Facebook posts from these businesses saying hey we’re about to close, we haven’t had a sale in two days, we’re going to shut down, we can’t keep going like this. They were basically begging for people to come in and support them. Seeing these posts repeatedly, I realized two things. That one, there was not a centralized way for the community to support these local businesses that were in need and what would really be helpful is if we had a way to connect the community directly with these businesses. So that’s when I had an idea. Being a web designer, my first thought was of course, set up a website. So I was thinking well what if there was like an online directory of all these local businesses that people could look up and find out who they could support or who needed support in the community and kind of go and support them and spend money and help to keep them in business. So I thought that would be really good if we had this online listing of all the local small businesses that needed help. The only problem was I needed a list of the businesses. But the businesses probably weren’t going to join the site unless there was already traffic coming to the site. And also I’d never created an online directory website. So this would be a whole new type of project for me. So kind of a big learning curve. Also, I had no audience for this. I didn’t have a social media following. I didn’t have any helpful content to put on the site. I didn’t have a list of the businesses. I didn’t have any brand recognition as like a local business supporter. I had no website traffic because I didn’t have anything to point them to. And I didn’t have an email list. So I kind of had this catch 22 of why would people visit a website without the content and why would people put content on a website with no traffic. So I kind of needed to get the ball rolling in one on one side or the other. And so that’s when I was thinking in order to kind of get the ball rolling and get things moving, I needed a strategy that was first of all going to be fun and interactive. I wanted to get people excited to participate. I wanted it to be gamified because I wanted it to be fun and kind of bring people in and create a buzz and have some kind of reward that would get people involved in the process. I wanted to leverage community generated content because like I mentioned, I didn’t have a list of businesses to put on the site. So I kind of needed the community and the businesses to tell me like, who’s out there? Who do we need to support? Who do you like to support? You tell me. And I also needed a strategy that would bring in the website traffic. Like I needed a reason for people to keep coming to the website. I also was thinking it would be great if I could use this to build some brand awareness, right? Because I did not have any kind of clout as a local business supporter. I didn’t have any visibility. Nobody knew who I was. So something to build some brand awareness, something that could kind of give me a little bit of a social media following and something where I could build an email list to be able to communicate with the community when I had information and updates on what was going on and who they could support and really have that direct line of communication. So my first thought was a quiz. These quizzes are fun. They’re a little bit extra. I needed to go beyond quiz. I just still didn’t have that information about the community and the businesses that needed support. And at first I was thinking, well, what if I combined a quiz with a poll? I could ask the community to share who’s your favorite pizza place? What’s your favorite burger place? Where’s your favorite place to buy home furnishings? And while it gave me that community generated content, it lacked that gamification and brand awareness that I was looking to build. So I stumbled upon the contest strategy and I’d never run a contest before. I didn’t know anybody who was teaching it. I didn’t have any resources to walk me through the process. So I looked online and I kind of cobbled together my own strategy based on the way that I assumed these other contests were being run. So if you’ve been in your community and you’ve seen like maybe newspapers or realtors will run these contests that are like the best of Boston or best of your town or whatever, people will nominate and vote for their favorite businesses that provide different products and services. So I put together my contest plan and the way that I figured I would do it is I would run it in two phases. I would spend three weeks on each phase. So I would have the nomination phase where I would ask the community right in who would you nominate for best pizza place, best flooring, best personal trainer. Tell me who should be on the ballot for this. Then I would take all of those entries, put them on a ballot and then give people three weeks to promote it, share it and submit their ballots to vote for their favorite. Now, if you’ve ever seen these contests, they can be pretty extensive. And I went a little bit extra with this. And I think my contest was 144 categories total. And I’ll show you what they were in a bit but and I broke them down into subcategories. So I had food and drink, pets, home and garden, professional services, right? I tried to cover all of my bases with all of these different categories. And the other thing was it had to be run on a very lean budget because this was not something anybody was paying me for. I wasn’t monetizing this at the time. I really wasn’t doing it for money. It was kind of a labor of love. I really just wanted to help support my community. And I’m not going to lie, my expectations for this were pretty low. I was thinking, if I could create a list of a thousand subscribers, right, that would kind of be the beginnings of like a community list that I could reach out to. If I got 500 businesses for my community to list on the directory, then that would be a good start. And if I could get about a thousand page views per week, I would be pretty happy. So what I ended up using, I mentioned that I wanted to keep my budget lean and use tools that were either free or ones that I had already paid for and I already had. What I ended up using to run my contest was a WordPress website with Divi theme for all the contest pages and a directory plugin, an email marketing platform. I talk a little bit more about which ones I use specifically in a bit. I was very familiar already with MailerLite and ConvertKit and I knew that they both had that free tier up to a thousand subscribers or whatever. So I was thinking that was a perfect fit because I didn’t think things would go beyond that. So I figured those would be a good match. I used Canva to create my logos and all my other graphics and I needed a form builder that not only allowed for free text entry, but also single choice question types. And I also wanted one that would integrate directly with my email marketing platform. And then I just used Facebook for that free social media marketing. I don’t even know how to run ads, so I didn’t run ads. I just used a regular Facebook profile page, which at this point, I think had about 800 followers. I created the page when I had the idea of creating the website, but I never did much with it. I might’ve like here and there I would share posts from local businesses, but it was never an all out like campaign to grow that list. And I amassed about 800 followers over those three years. So that kind of gave me a little bit of an audience to kind of get the ball rolling. Let me walk you through the details of the contest plan. I split it up into two phases and that first phase is nominations. Now nominations ran from March 6th to March 30th. And during that time, participants could write in whatever business they wanted for any of these categories. So they were all optional. They could do as few or as many nominations as they wanted. They could only submit one nomination form per valid email address, and then would automatically send a confirmation email to them with their nomination information. This also helped me to validate emails. So if anything bounced, I would know that that was not a valid email. Nominations closed on March 30th, and then I took a week to review all those nomination forms, collate and clean up the data, count up the nominations, and then identify the top 10 nominees in each category to put on the final ballot. Then on April 8th, I released the final ballot to the community. So each category had the top 10 businesses that received the most valid nominations. And participants could vote for one nominee per category, just like with the nominations, they could only submit one ballot per valid email address. My expectations were pretty low, right? I was thinking a thousand subscribers, a thousand weekly page views average, and then maybe 500 businesses would be nominated and added to the website. Here’s what happened. So on the first day, March 6th, when I announced that contest on Facebook, I immediately got 145 new subscribers and the website got 500 page views. By the second day, I had 350 subscribers and 1,500 page views. By the third day, I had about 500 subscribers and 3,400 page views. By the end of the nominations phase, I had 1,600 subscribers. And then by the end of the contest, I had over 10,000 subscribers and was getting about 10,000 page views on the website every day. So what I’m going to do now is show you in my interactive graph here, how the list grew over the course of the contest. Let’s start at the beginning. The contest officially started on March 6th. You see a couple of subscribers sneaking in before then, and that was really me testing and me doing some soft launch, having some other people go in and submit nominations just to make sure all the forms were working and the emails were getting captured and everything was working the way it was supposed to. But to formally launch the contest, I went on my Facebook page and I did a little graphic and I said, hey, we’re doing this contest. Vote for your favorites. Tell us who you love for the following categories. And I kind of listed the categories. And on the 6th, by the end of the 6th, I had 145 new subscribers come in on that first day. And what I did to kind of keep things moving was I went in and I looked at the nominations that were submitted and I identified a handful of the businesses and I went on Facebook and I created a little graphic with a little video and said, you’ve been nominated. And I tagged the businesses and I posted it. And from there, a handful of them shared that post and asked their audiences to go in and support them. So by the next day, you can see the list grew to 350. And I just kept doing the same thing. And it wasn’t too labor intensive. I didn’t do a lot of, I didn’t tag a lot of the nominees. I really just grabbed a handful that I knew were on Facebook, tagged them, and then they would take it from there. So you can see the growth for the nominations phase is pretty linear. It’s pretty steady every single day, up until the 31st, right? And that’s when, right, right up until the end. So you can see this is when the nominations ended. So then I took a week to go through all the nomination forms, clean up the data, and identify who the top 10 nominees in each category were, create the ballot, test it, do all of that stuff, and then announce it on April 8th. Now, and I mentioned earlier that I had specifically chosen an email marketing platform that had a free tier because my expectation was so low that I didn’t think I would get more than a thousand subscribers for the whole contest, let alone not even make it through the first phase. So about halfway through here, I ended up having to move to a different platform because I wasn’t willing to invest or upgrade to the paid version because I really didn’t know where this contest was going, if this was going to turn into something I could monetize, if this would be profitable at all. So for me, this was still a funsy side project and I didn’t want to sink a lot of money into it. So outgrowing this free tier for the email marketing platform, I then went on a hunt for another email platform that would let me host a bigger list for free. And I ended up moving over to SendFox about halfway through. So at this point, I move over to SendFox and SendFox is through AppSumo. I think they have a lifetime deal. It’s a very super basic platform. It worked for my purposes. I don’t use it anymore, but it was good in a pinch. So here we are nominations and voting is scheduled to begin on April 8th. I’ve announced that’s when the ballot will be available and I’m getting messages. People are sending me DMs or posting on the page. Where’s the ballot? When’s it going to come out? They’re all excited about it. And this is really funny to me because I mean, I just got I was just so tickled by this because three weeks ago, nobody had heard of my page. Nobody had ever heard of this contest. It did not exist. And then people were just really excited for it. So I got a big kick out of that. So you can see on April 8th, I put the ballot on the Facebook page and I immediately jumped from 1600 subscribers to 2441. So 800 subscribers the first day of ballot voting, right? And that was just wild to me. The next day, we jumped up to 4270 and then 5889. And this was blowing my mind because like I have other businesses where I grow my email and I’ve never ever, ever done anything that was this simple and this effective. And it was just mind boggling. So the growth at this point stops being linear, right? Once the ballot comes out, it’s now growing by about 1000 subscribers a day for like the first week, the first few days, and then it kind of slows down to a few hundred every day. And it’s steady, right? We’re still, it’s still growing, it’s still growing. And it was really steady right up until the end. So all told, I got 12,000 people who submitted nominations and ballots. But after doing some cleaning and scrubbing the list, getting rid of duplicates, getting rid of anything that was invalid, I ended up with 10,154 total. So just to recap, before this contest, I had no list. I was absolutely starting from scratch. After cleaning up the data, I had 10,154 new subscribers. As the contest progressed, I got really excited and I started sharing my results in these different Facebook groups. I wanted to share this with other people because it seemed really simple, create some nomination forms, create a ballot, tag the nominees on Facebook, and set up some email automations. This was nothing complicated. Just basic WordPress and email marketing. It was essentially two opt-in pages and a bunch of emails cobbled together. But then something interesting happened. People started to come back to me and say, hey, I tried your contest strategy and it didn’t work. I did everything that you said, but it just, I didn’t get any subscribers. And this was really weird to me because it seemed like a very straightforward process to me. Create a form for nominations, take in the data that the people submit, turn it into a ballot, let people vote, and then announce who got the most votes. I really just did not get it. Why was this so easy for me, but not for others? What did I do differently? What had I failed to explain to them about my process? So I took a closer look. I realized that there were three elements to my contest that made it successful. I put this together in a framework that I’ll detail more in the next section. But here’s the high level overview. First, it needs to have a purpose. And this goes beyond just making money or building a list. Your contest needs to have a mission or an objective that’s bigger than just your business. It needs to create a movement or align with an existing one that clearly benefits your community. And your messaging needs to communicate this with all of your posts and your emails. They should help your audience make the connection between their participation in the contest and how they’re going to benefit from it. Now, my contest tapped into the shop local movement, which was already well established. And this gave me three advantages. One, people already understood why shopping local was important. So two, I didn’t have to spend the time educating them about the benefits. And three, the messaging was clear from day one because we were already aligned in our mission. The second element is people. You can have a great mission and tap into a very popular movement. But without your participants, your nominees, your voters, and your promoters, you will not have a contest. And third, there’s the element of your plan. And this covers all the logistics and I call it the when, what, and how. So first you have timing. When are you going to run your contest and how long will it last? Think about your categories, how to group your nominees, and whether to focus on brands, products, or services, and how many categories you’re going to have. And the last part of your plan is your tech stack. While this strategy doesn’t require really expensive or special software, it helps to use tools that integrate and that you can automate to streamline the entire process. In the next section, I’m going to get deeper into this framework and really show you exactly how to use it to create your own list building contest. Thanks for listening. And if you liked this episode, go ahead and leave us a review on iTunes or wherever you listen to podcasts. And be sure to subscribe so you’ll be notified when the next episode is live. Check out our show notes for this episode where you can find any of the links and resources that were mentioned during the show. Thanks for listening and we’ll catch you in the next episode.