Community Building vs List Building

For the past 18 or so years I have been in the marketing industry. Ever sense it began it has been plagued with bad advice, marketing tactics that stop working before the masses ever hear about them, crooked businesses, scams, and snake oil products.
I can’t even remember the first time I heard the advice “the money is in the list”. At the time, perhaps it was true, but that like all marketing advice, has also become stale and invalid. The trouble is, that’s the marketing advice that seems to be hardest to kill.

Unfortunately, so many marketers build a list so many years back while list building was still viable, that they don’t understand it no longer works for the masses. So they insist because it still works for them, its the best of marketing advice. Well times have changed.
List building doesn’t work. It hasn’t been for years. That isn’t to say list building won’t work, but clearly its not the best way anymore. These day we have much more interactive ways of communication.

At Marketers Cooperative bi-weekly education classes, one of the things I teach is that instead of building lists, people should be building communities. I would equally say the same is true for social marketers, bloggers, or any other form of marketing.
Most bloggers, actually get it even if they don’t realize it. Community building is really the act of building an audience around your content, your topics, and your views. The more communities, the larger the audience. The larger the audience the more sales.
Most marketers attempting to build lists, spend weeks, then months, then years attempting to build lists of a few ten thousand people. When you build communities around your content, you can gain a much larger audience in a tiny fraction of the time.

Instead of attempting to build lists, one could find 50 or so social networks to join that they can use to build an audience. Every 100 connections they make and bring into their communities on each social network ends up being 5000 people total paying attention to them.
The problem is most people think of social networks and can’t see past facebook, twitter, and the other mainstream networks. They don’t stop to realize there are social communities for everything.
They can join social networks, such as medium where I am currently wring this, specific to writing content. They can build an audience around their blog posts. They can join sites like pinterest and create communities around infographs and meme graphics relating to their topics. The list is endless of course.
Now, the differences between building lists and building communities around content are vast. With a list, you have direct access to a person. They are absolutely going to see your email so long as it doesn’t end in their spam. So in this respect, email does have an advantage. However I think it mostly ends there.
First the biggest advantage of building audiences and communities around your content, is that your content ends up being spread across a multitude of sites, not just people on your list. This can have long term SEO effects. More importantly it has the effect of bringing users into your community that otherwise may not have ever found your list.
So instead of just building social groups on major social networks, or instead of just building blogs, or just building lists what we try to teach members at Marketers Cooperative is that its far more important to focus on having a LOT of content to share.
The more content a person creates, the more they have to share to build those audiences. Now with that said, allow me to also add to my above statement.
Content is not king. That is also something that is vastly misused. Content is not what is king. Sure having good content is essential to marketing, but it is not the true king. The audience, or the community, is the true king.
No matter where you go, no matter how you attempt to build that audience, it is in fact the audience that is king, not the content, not the list. The content and the list, are just a means to an end — the audience.
Please check out Marketers Cooperative and reach out to us on the community forums to learn more about becoming a cooperative member and what the benefits are.