How To Sell to Your Audience Without a Website

If Your Audience Is 100% On Social Media, They’re Not Your Audience

Most aspiring creators build their entire brand on social media platforms like TikTok, Instagram, or YouTube.

It’s one of the fastest ways to grow an audience but it does comes with a hidden catch: control.

One algorithm update can cut your reach in half overnight.

Reduced reach and visibility means stalls in growth, income drops, and you have no way to contact your audience directly.

This means your followers aren’t truly yours; they’re rented. They belong to the platform. Your job now is to take control of as many of them as possible because they can disappear at any point.

Gumroad Alternative (Because, Yes, It Really Does Sucks)

When most new creators try to monetize, they often reach for quick fixes like Gumroad which lets you sell digital products and downloads with relative ease.

But there’s a catch: fees.

Gumroad stiffs you for 10% on all your sales and that doesn’t include the transaction fees you also have to pay.

This means you can end up paying as much as 15% on some sales.

Now, I’m not saying Gumroad isn’t a decent platform. It is, and it used to be fantastic before it went nuts with the transaction charges.

Building a full website means months (or weeks, depending on your experience level) of work.

It’ll also require expensive plugins, hosting, domain registration, setting up DNS, and a myriad of other things including developers if you want / need anything custom.

Alternatives To Websites For Selling To Your Audience

Platform	Cost	Best For	Downsides
Gumroad	~15% per sale incl. fees	First-time sellers	High fees, no CRM
Instapage	Flat monthly fee	No-code pages + email marketing	Limited CRM
Squarespace	Monthly subscription	Full site with e-commerce	Slower to launch
ActiveCampaign	~$29/month combined	Full-stack email marketing and automation	Slight learning curve

To sell to an audience without a website requires three things: 1) a way to take payments, 2) a place to house your products, and 3) a platform for emailing your subscribers.

This is the absolute basics. But it is all you need to run a business that can generate anywhere from $1,000 to $100,000 per month.

Use InstaPage For Lead Capture and Selling Products

I like Instapage because it takes care of points 1 and 2 without the overhead of a full website.

Plus, it’s 100% no-code, anyone can use it, and its landing page and form templates are amazing.

Here’s how it works:

• All-in-one mini storefront: You can build high-converting landing pages, capture emails, run newsletters, and sell products all from one place
• No website headaches: Skip hosting, DNS, plugins, and maintenance, just drag, drop, and publish
• Conversion-focused design: Templates are designed to drive clicks, sign-ups, and sales, not just look nice
• Full ownership of your audience: Collect email addresses and build a contact list you control, independent of any platform

Do I Really Need Email? (Short Answer: Yes)

Social media gets attention, helps you to find potential customers and new subscribers.

Email is how you turn your audience into revenue.

Here’s why every creator and influencer needs to double-down on email marketing in 2025:

• Email ROI is $42 for every $1 spent (DMA)
• Conversion rates are 3–4x higher than social media
• It’s the only channel you own outright

What Email Marketing Tool Is Best For Creators?

You don’t need thousands of subscribers. With as few as 200 true fans, creators can make anywhere from $5K–$15K per month.

I’ve used Mail Chimp (avoid like the plague), ConvertKit (now called Kit), Aweber and even Mailer Lite but the past 24 months I’ve been all in on ActiveCampaign.

Why? ActiveCampaign costs less than ConvertKit, my old provider, and it comes with more features. That’s the kind of win/win that’ll make anyone switch.

You get a built-in CRM and lots of useful automation tools that let you cover way more ground than most other email marketing tools.

And while there is a learning curve, it is worth learning because email marketing is the key to turning your side-hustle into a five or six figure business.

It also connects with everything, so if you do eventually decide to get a dedicated website built, ActiveCampaign can easily plug into it.

Pricing: What to Expect

OK, that’s the recommended tech stack for selling online without a dedicated website. But how much will all this cost?

To put the figures below into context, this site costs me around $1200 a month to run.

That includes hosting, tools, plugins but that figure does NOT include staff costs (that’s way more; overhead walks on two legs, after all).

• Instapage Build Plan: $79 (monthly). Includes 15,000 visitors, conversions, post-click scoring, heatmaps, A/B testing, and more.
• ActiveCampaign Lite Plan: $29/mo to start (500 contacts), scales affordably as your list grows.

So, with these two tools you can get started selling and leveraging email marketing for less than $100.

Not bad, right?

Of course, as your audience and subscribers grow, costs will go up, but by then you’ll already have your funnels setup and revenue flowing in on the regular.

But as a jumping off point, this is all anyone needs to turn their social following into a viable business.

And the best part? It’s not even hard. If you’re regularly getting new followers, you’re already doing the hard part.

The Bottom Line: Own Your Audience, Control Your Sales

If you’ve been relying on “link in bio” tools, you’re leaving money on the table. Most people never buy first time. They want to be wined and dined.

That’s why smart creators get a person’s email first and then start talking to them about their product and/or service.

The actual process is insanely simple: isolate a problem, create a resource that solves it, capture the email, add it to your list, and then send them updates about what you do / problems you solve.

If everything is done right, meaning you have a good market-fit and your copy is on point, you should be converting 20% to 30% of your subscribers.

Switching to Instapage + ActiveCampaign lets you do all of this on easy mode, here’s why:

• High-converting pages for every campaign
• Email automation to nurture and re-sell
• Analytics + testing to constantly improve
• Direct ownership of your audience