Building an audience = Sharing high-quality, valuable, and relatable content.

However, digital trends have limited this to sharing high-quality, valuable, and relatable content on social media. Which isn’t entirely the case.

Social media is awesome. It’s where 4.74 billion people, which make up 59.3% of the world’s population hang out. But it’s not the only place to find and build an audience.

More so, with social algorithms acting up, showing your content to less than 10% of your audience, ads expenses increasing, and more restrictions on the type of content you share. It is important that digital creators explore other methods of building an audience without social media.

In this article, we’d discuss 5 effective steps to build an audience without social media. These methods are proven to be effective and can also help your business grow.

But before we get into details, here’s why you shouldn’t put so much effort into social media.

Why You Shouldn’t Put In So Much Effort On Social Media

Social media is everyone’s first choice for advertising a business and building an audience. However, it is also safe to say it shouldn’t be your business’s only plan.

Here are a few reasons to explore other channels and build an audience;

#1. Social Media is not yours

This simply means you do not own your social media channel, you’re just a tenant. Even after you’ve spent years building your page and gathering millions of followers, you can wake up to a banned or restricted account.

You can also spend time and resources sharing every detail of your life on social media to give people something relatable and wake up to a hacked account.

It happens all the time.

And then you have to appeal to the platform and validate your claim to reinstate your account. Which can be tiring too.

Situations like this are out of our control. But a better strategy is to keep all your information safe and secure in one place before spreading it to social media. You can own a blog, then use social media as a distribution channel. However, posting only on social media is setting yourself up for heartbreak.

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#2. A small fraction of your traffic comes from social media

According to a poll on Twitter with about 124 votes from marketing executives, 41.1% of them say that traffic from social media is about 3% or less.

Another study by Growthbadger shows that, after analyzing over 3 billion websites, traffic from social media is about 6% or less on average.

This means that outside the hype, social media contribution to overall traffic is a very small percentage. So, if your business’s major traffic goal is social media, reconsider it. While social media is a fantastic way to stay in touch with your audience, it shouldn’t be the only method to get traffic or build an audience.

#3. Your post doesn’t get to all your followers

Notice how a social media account can have “1 million followers and an engagement of less than 1,000?

Welcome to the social media algorithm.

You can share content and less than half of your audience would see it. In fact, for Instagram, only about 10% of your followers see your Instagram post.

In this situation, how do you build an audience when people can’t even see your content?

How to Build an Audience Without Social Media

Here’s how you can build an audience without social media.

#1. Start a blog

At Selar, we get between 53% to 59% of our traffic from Google searches while about 30% comes from people who have bookmarked our blog and can easily enter the URL without any misspellings.

So how did we achieve this feat?

By having a blog, which is where you are reading this article right now. Blogging is still 100% a thing and you can use it to write articles relevant to your brand, build an audience and sell to them. Articles can get you more traffic than videos, images, or any other platform.

People are naturally drawn to information. So starting a blog and writing about something valuable lures these people to you.

A blog is an integral part of your marketing strategy. The more high-quality articles you write, the higher your chances of ranking on Google search. Also, the more you write about related topics, the more authority you gather online about those topics.

Now you ask, how do I sell to my blog readers?

It’s easy.

Focus on blogging for at least 6 months with no primary focus on monetization. Accumulate as many keywords as you can by writing high-quality articles and ranking for them.

Afterward, create a lead magnet and offer it to your readers for free. Tell them you have ABC that can give them XYZ. Download a WordPress popup plugin that reminds your readers every 5 seconds to download your lead magnet. In exchange for your lead magnet, collect their email addresses to help you build an email list.

While the emails you get through this method may not be customers ready to buy, you can create a sales funnel and develop a content strategy to turn them into customers.

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#2. Build an email list

Unless you are a part of the Meta family, you should know by now that email marketing is a huge deal.

It is your best method to communicate with your audience and nurture them till they eventually buy from you. Mostly because you send campaigns directly to their mailbox that either helps them solve a problem or increases their knowledge.

One unique thing about emails is that it doesn’t rely on algorithms, unlike social media. It is a guaranteed access to your audience.

So, you can send customers information about new products, discounts you may have, and valuable content, and generally build relationships with them.

With Selar, you can integrate your favorite email marketing tool, host your lead magnet product, and monitor the progress of your business all from one robust dashboard. Watch this video to know how to integrate Mailchimp and Convertkit to Selar.

Although email marketing is effective, be careful to not overdo it. Somewhere around once a week is enough. Any more than that you risk ending up in the trash.

#3. Talk to people

Introverts probably left the group at this point.

Networking is another way to reach out to people and talk about your business with them. So, whenever you get a chance to speak to people, speak passionately about your business, the products you sell, and the story behind it all.

By talking to people, you can learn things from their experience like marketing and sales tips, team motivation, leadership, and so much more.

And if they’d like to connect with you, recommend your blog or ask them to sign up for your email list. You can also exchange your phone number if you’re comfortable with it. In-person conversations will never go out of style.

#4. Start a podcast

Podcasts have grown to become very popular today. In fact, the number of listeners worldwide is expected to be 424.2 million this year. A 10.6% increase from the previous year, and represents 20.3% of all internet users.

The best part is that people search for podcasts on Google, not majorly through social media. So with a good SEO strategy, you can optimize your podcast keywords to get more traffic.

Additionally, if your podcast content keeps people engaged so much that they learn new things, you may have a large number of the 74% of listeners who tune in to learn new things daily.

As your podcast listeners grow, create a group where everyone shares their views on each episode. Utilize collaboration tools like Slack to create a large community of podcast listeners who can be monetized later.

#5. Utilize collaboration tools like Slack

Creators who enjoy constant sales are those who have built a large and loyal community. Users who feel safe asking each other questions, and sharing moments about their life.

Creating this safe place for people is the perfect way to not just build an audience but a community.

You can share resources with them, and when someone asks questions that you already have an article on, you can send them a link to it, directing more traffic to your blog.

And because tools like Slack give notifications, you are sure your customers can see your content and engage with it. Depending on your plan, you can recommend your products to your audience and get them to buy from you.

What’s Next?

With an audience, you can offer incentives and create referral and affiliate programs to boost sales of your digital products. You can also host webinars to educate your audience about a topic. The average webinar conversion rate is 55%. That’s all the motivation you need to remove all your eggs from one basket – social media.

Selar, helps you to monetize your knowledge by getting paid for what you know. Over 60K creators across Africa use Selar to host and sell digital products and receive payment in any currency.

Try Selar to create a sustainable income from your knowledge.