There was a time in marketing when the conventional wisdom was that small businesses just needed to have social media pages. Having a website was a luxury because Facebook can do anything a website can do but is more accessible. And that’s true. A Facebook page is easier to set up than a website, and practically all of your customers will have a Facebook. Plus, you can quickly pay Facebook to promote your page. While Facebook pages can do all of these things with a website, it’s more complicated. However, what that conventional wisdom missed, or wasn’t aware of at the time, was that if you got banned(or shadowbanned) from Facebook, your business was screwed. The truth is conservatives and conservative businesses are under much scrutiny from the big tech monopolies. They are banning conservative voices left and right. It’s widespread to have ad accounts banned or disabled. And no one is safe from it. If they can ban the former
president of the United States, there’s little hope for the small business owner. A conservative business cannot rely on social media to have a relationship with its customers. At any moment, Facebook or Twitter can delete that social media page, and all the work will have been for nothing. This is why list building should be the top priority for any conservative small business. Then, even if you get canceled or banned, you can still maintain the relationship with your customers.
What is list building?
At its simplest, list building collects contact information from your customers and builds a relationship with them over email or text message, but that’s less common. For example, a small business can create a newsletter and contact their previous customers and prospective customers by collecting contact information. And the great thing about these lists is that they are uncancelable because a list can be as simple as an excel file on your computer. There are a few ways to build a list. If you’re an e-commerce website, the platform you use, Shopify or woocommerce, will usually automatically collect emails of customers for you. The other option is to utilize sign-up forms, which this site does for the weekly newsletter(I practice what I preach!). An email marketing platform stores these emails after you collect them. I said the list could be an excel file saved on your computer. And you should keep your list on your computer and multiple other places. But they’re not very helpful, just in an excel file, so you’ll want to make sure you’re utilizing some form of email marketing platform. The ones I recommend are
SendInBlue(What I use),
Campaign Monitor(What the Blaze uses), and
Iterable(What the DailyWire uses). Each platform is pretty easy to use, and they all have extensive pieces of training. The one platform to avoid is
MailChimp. MailChimp has a history of canceling
conservatives. This is why you should always make copies of your list. Because while you’re far less likely to get canceled using an email platform, it can still happen. This post is an introduction to the idea of list building. I will be writing more articles on list building and list nurturing. Building a list is a crucial part of any
owned media strategy. You need to talk to your customers directly without having to go through a social media network. Decentralization is necessary for building a robust business. You shouldn’t have to worry about your Facebook account getting banned and, with it, your livelihood. Be on the lookout for more posts, or if you want help directly, feel free to reach out, and I’d be happy to help you start building your list.