The money is in the list. If you’ve been working online for some time, then you’ve probably heard this before. Your email list is a very important asset to the growth of your online business.

To build an email list you need two ingredients:
1. Traffic
2. A signup form

There are many different ways for you to get traffic to build your email list. Social media is a great way to build your list, especially if you use Facebook. As one of the biggest social media sites, Facebook is the ideal place to invest your energy into list building. There are people building massive businesses, using the power of Facebook.

Let’s take a look at how you can tap into the power of Facebook to begin growing your online business.

Create An Opt-in Form

An opt-in form is the first thing you need to begin building your email list. Your form should be simple and straightforward for people to sign up. All you need from them is their name and email address. Keep it simple.

A Facebook Fan Page

A Facebook fan page is how you can begin building your audience on Facebook. Through the use of a fan page you allow people to find and learn more about your business.

Knowing your audience and the type of content they respond to gives you an idea of the type of content they are more likely to respond to.

To learn more about your audience, you can take some time to look at other pages in your niche. Look at the posts and types of content that gets responded to. Doing this allows you to craft content with a similar theme and test the response rates.

You have to know what it is that the people in your audience are more likely to respond to or your page isn’t going to grow. It makes no sense putting out content that isn’t relevant to the people in your niche. So when you putting out content on your page be sure to keep your audience in mind

Facebook now allows you to add a button to your page that allows people to sign up to your email list without ever having to leave Facebook.

Add A Pinned Post

As you drive traffic to your Facebook page you’ll want more and more people to respond to your content. A pinned post, is a post that puts valuable content at the top of your page which your followers are more likely to respond to. Within the pinned post you can have a link that goes back to your site and have them go to your opt-in form.

Create Your Lead Magnet

To get people to sign up, you have to offer them something in return for their email address. Everybody wants value and people will only give you their email address if they feel what you have to offer is of value to them. Create a lead magnet that gets them to sign up to your list. A simple pdf or video which helps them to solve a problem is all you need to get them to sign up.

Drive Traffic To Your Page

With everything in place, you now can start driving traffic to your page. Facebook ads are a good way to begin doing this. A simple like campaign can help to get your page up and running. This helps to get your followers interacting with your content. Facebook ads offer precise targeting options which can help you to reach the people in your audience easily.

Conclusion

Building your email list is the number one thing you can do to grow your online business. The earlier you start building your email list the better. An email list gives you more control over the traffic you send to your offers.

It’s not only about building an email list, but about cultivating a relationship with that email list also. A huge part of building your email list is traffic and Facebook has lots of it. So set up your opt-in page, build out your fan page and start driving traffic to your page by sharing the page and driving traffic using Facebook ads.