10 Ways to Grow Without Social Media (or Ads) Using Your MemberVault

Social media can be fun, it can be inspiring...it can also be a grind that tanks your mood, and craters your business if you anger the algorithm gods. (Oh yes, we've experienced the wrath of Facebook, and it's NOT a great experience)

So while it can be a great compliment to your business growth strategies, it's our vote that it's good to have a core growth strategy or two that doesn't depend on social media. The whole "all your eggs in one basket" thing. 🐣 

MemberVault has grown over the past 7 years almost entirely thru word of mouth referrals, people buying a course or membership or group program or challenge, etc, that is hosted on MemberVault and loving the member experience so much that they sign up too and thru strategic growth efforts that involve us getting in front of our people's audiences (i.e. thru podcast interviews, asking our audience to share in exchange for X, etc). 

Early on we decided not to use social media posting as a growth channel. We do run a highly engaged community on Facebook, but in general the people involved in that community have already signed up for an account. So it's less of a discovery channel and more of a nurture space.

While our community is currently hosted on Facebook and has been for almost the entirety of MemberVault's life (we tried Slack early on, and *meh*), once our gamified community feature is launched in early 2024, we'll start to migrate on over. Bu-bye FB.

Two of the things I'm MOST excited about with the migration (other than leaving FB and never logging in again) is that our community feature will allow your free community to be SEO indexable (if you want it to be).

That means all of that awesome community engagement? It'll help you show up in organic search results, for the very search terms that people are using to ask questions naturally. 😍 And secondly, we'll be gamifying things so when someone shares a community post, they get points (again, this is for ungated free communities where you want them sharing, not paid gated communities). Wins for your most engaged people, and wins for you as you grow, auto-magically.

More on that once that feature launches, but for now...

Here are 10 of our favorite ways to grow without social media using your MemberVault, whether you're just starting out or you've been in the growth game for awhile.

1. Affiliates. 
2. Summits.
3. Bundles.
4. Challenges, Co-hosted with Other Experts.
5. Expert Swaps.
6. Email Swaps.
7. Gamify Asking Your Audience to Share.
8. Podcast Interviews.
9. SEO, Including Things Like Backlink Partnerships.
10. Creating a "Street" Team.

OK, that's the quick list, but let's dive into them a little bit more to get your thinking cap buzzing. 🐝 Keep in mind that not every strategy is going to be best for you. It depends on your unique way of showing up in your business (and your preferences), your unique business model and offers (i.e. needing only a few clients a month vs needing a lot of new eyes on an ecosystem of low cost offers, etc), your goals and your audience's preferences. 

#1 - AFFILIATES

We include our affiliate feature on every plan level, unlike most course/membership tools, so everyone can give this a whirl. There are a lot of ways to play the affiliate game. Perhaps you want people to share your paid offer(s), over time, and so you have an on-going affiliate relationship with your affiliates where you remind them about your offers, etc. Or maybe you want to try out affiliates as part of the launch for a paid offer.

Another option is to have your affiliates share a FREE product in your MemberVault. Learn how to do that here.

Having a free product to share makes it even easier for your affiliates (this is a great option for first time affiliates), and can help you grow your list more quickly than just having affiliates for paid offers. This would make a great stacked strategy as part of a launch or evergreen promotion. Have a free challenge, summit, etc that your affiliates can share (bonus points for upsells on the thank you page!). Nurture the people who join your list. Go into the launch for your paid offer, and have your affiliates share the paid offer. Boom! 🧨

#2 - SUMMITS.

Whether you're hosting the summit, or joining someone else's summit, a summit is a great way to grow your list (and also your revenue if you choose to connect it with a launch, or offer paid elements to your summit like lifetime access to materials, a pop up community, etc). And if you're choosing to host a summit, MemberVault is a great place to do it. 

You can automate your speaker admin using an invisible speaker product, and create a high engagement experience for the actual summit. We're running our own summit in January 2024, and so far it's been an absolute breeze using MemberVault to manage the process. It's also been super easy to participate in someone else's summit as a guest, because we have existing content inside our MV that we could just whip up custom coupons for. 🙌 Here's to re-purposing content and saving time/energy!

Want to see how we're setting our own summit up, and get a step-by-step walk thru? Check out the $9 Launch Your Summit Action Lab here. <- All Action Labs are included for free on our Unlimited plan.

#3. BUNDLES.

Just like with summits, whether you're hosting the bundle, or joining someone else's bundle, a bundle is a great way to grow your list (and also your revenue if you choose to connect it with a launch, or offer paid elements to your summit like lifetime access to materials, a pop up community, etc). And if you're choosing to contribute to or organize a bundle, MemberVault is a great place to do it. 

#4. CHALLENGES, CO-HOSTED WITH OTHER EXPERTS.

You'll notice A LOT of these strategies depend on partnership with others, and this one is no different. Find 1-3 other experts in complimentary businesses to your own, and reach out to invite them to share their genius in your challenge. Make it something that they'll want to share, that shines them in the best light. And if you really like partnering up, you could even consider co-hosting a paid group program, course, private podcast, etc to continue the fun in a paid capacity once the challenge ends.

#5. EXPERT SWAPS.

I went with a vague category on this one because it can encompass so many things, but in short, you're exchanging your expertise and getting in front of someone else's audience, and they'll do the same for your audience. Think workshops, communities, memberships, group programs, bonuses that you create and share for each other's programs/launches, etc.

And yep, you guessed it, you can use MemberVault to make the most of this effort by having a gift to offer during your expert swap. This is why we recommend putting all of your best content into MV so you can slice and dice things up into bonuses, incentives, gifts and more without a lot of effort. Copy a product, whip up a new offer, add a custom coupon code, etc.

#6 - EMAIL SWAPS. 

In this case, you're either doing a full takeover and sending an email to someone else's email list, or it's just swapping a blurb and each of you include it in your next email. The full takeover is a great way to support a leave (like if you have a surgery coming up, parental leave, or you know you'll be really busy with something in your life) without having to batch out a lot of emails. Consider even setting up a few email swaps with different experts to create a curated series for your audience around a specific topic/goal outcome in areas that you aren't an expert in. 

Make sure that you always have an introduction and end cap on your emails so your subscribers don't get confused!

#7 - GAMIFY ASKING YOUR AUDIENCE TO SHARE.

This one works great whether you want more podcast reviews/shares, or you're launching something new and want more eyes, or you want to grow your email list with more eyes on your opt in/newsletter, etc. This is also a great way to test out new messaging and see if it improves your conversion rates, because you can rinse and repeat over and over. 

We've done this by asking our audience to share a blurb in their email, or share a post over on Facebook (obviously if you want to stay off social media, that one isn't the way to go...unless you're OK popping in to interact on the posts without doing anything else on the channel). The reward can be a special invite to a workshop, or a discount, or their pick of a low cost offer like we do with our $9 Action Labs, or offering to spotlight them in a roundup visibility post like we did. 

#8 - PODCAST INTERVIEWS.

This is an oldie, but a goodie. The key here is that you're not just sending people to your website, but instead, giving a gift.

Podcast hosts will be wary of people being spammy, so it needs to be presented as something that is a benefit to their audience (and that makes them look good). It could be a discount code for something that is normally paid, a la "So and so is giving our audience 100% off their [product name] that will help you [how does the product help]. Normally it's $X, but you can get it for free as a listener of [podcast show name]." 

You can absolutely host your own podcast as well, with guests, and then make it super easy for them to share the episode by adding it as a blog post on your MV and dropping the link with them. Again, the key here is to think about how you can make the guest look good so that they WANT to share the interview with your audience, and make it easy for them to do so (with a blurb, with an easy link, etc). 

#9. SEO, INCLUDING BACKLINK PARTNERSHIPS.

Another classic. Good ol' SEO, aka "search engine optimization", or how people can find you when they search on Google. By building out your MemberVault using search terms in your copy throughout (i.e. your welcome area, pages, posts, footer, announcement bar, product descriptions, offer pages, product promo text and/or free un-gated communities once that feature is released), people are going to more likely be able to find you when searching. 

Beyond that, think about working in partnership with people in complimentary businesses. You each can write a blog post(s), linking back to the other (again, giving a gift will work wonders for conversions) and building up your backlink reputation. 

The SEO strategy is certainly in the LONG GAME category, although the backlink partnership idea can add some short term benefits when they share the blog post with your mention in it. 

10. CREATING A "STREET" TEAM

This can be your affiliate group, if you have affiliates, or it can be something totally different. The idea here is that you have a group of people that are helping you drive traffic over time. We've done this in the past with our certified partner program, and have plans to do more of this with our preferred partner group. Think of it as your most engaged people who are already talking you up, and you're adding structure (and hopefully bonuses, goodies and/or more access to you or insider knowledge as a way to thank them and keep that awesome recommendation loop going).

You can use your MemberVault to manage your street team, by having a product with comments enabled that has all of your important blurbs and other materials. Plus, make it easy to onboard new street team members, and reward them with goodies that you already have inside your account (i.e. a bonus from one of your other programs that you gift them for free, etc). And once our community feature launches, this will become even more powerful.

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*You're all caught up! I'm still working on building out more deep links into this blog post!! I'm going to keep adding more resources to each section. If there is something you REALLY want me to dive deeper on...tell me in the comments!*