As a small business owner, you have probably heard that you need a website or a landing page or a squeeze page or an ebook download, or some other kind of lead magnet or an audience on a social platform so that you can start building your email list.

Like, you’ve been told that that is where you need to start.

You need to have all these professional things and all the stuff done before you can even start building your email list or even that you have to run ads to build your list.

After of course, you have all of these other things made.

Well, guess what? Guess what you do not have to have or need?

You don’t need a website. You don’t need a lead magnet. You don’t need an audience to start building and growing your email list.

Will you want those things eventually?

Yes, absolutely.

You’re going to need them as you grow your business.

But in the beginning, you do not need to have all of those things in place, because the most important thing you could do for yourself is start building your email list, as soon as possible.

I’m going to walk you through exactly what you can use and how you can quickly set it up today, so it starts working for you today.

I’m Christina and I help small business owners simplify their marketing so that they make more sales and keep their friggin sanity.

That is a big deal.

And today I want to actually help you bust through the idea that you need to build out a website or that you need to have a fancy lead magnet, or that you have to have a social media audience in order to start building your list and growing your list.

We need to actually stop allowing gurus and experts to overwhelm us with all of these things that “must be done” in order to actually start and grow our businesses.

You don’t need a single one of those things to start. In fact, it’s in your best interest to start building your email list, the way I’m going to show you, so that while you’re building your other resources, like your website, like your lead magnet, like your social audience, like your pictures, like your business cards, like your logos, like while you’re building all that, you’re still building an email list.

So while all of that stuff is being built while you’re actually building pieces of your actual business, your email list is going to start and it’s going to be growing as you’re building.

So you’re not waiting to build your email list.

See, the number one regret of every single successful business owner is that they didn’t start building their email list sooner.

I don’t care who you talk to. Their answer is always going to be “I wish I had started building my email list sooner, especially in the online world.”

So I’m going to let you in on a simple secret so that you can make that happen right now, today.

See, I’m going to have you leverage the power of a Facebook group that you create and control and don’t get all panicky going, oh no, You don’t have to keep this group active.

You don’t have to do anything special about this group, except do these three quick steps that I’m going to tell you.

The Three Steps You Need to Start Your List Without a Website

First, Create Your Facebook Group

Number one, you're going to create the group, right?

You want to name the group something that will actually attract your audience. So it can't be your name. It can't be your business name.

It's gotta be something that'll attract the audience.

For example, I have a group that says Email Marketing for Overwhelmed Business Owners.

While email marketing is not exclusively how I help business owners get more customers, it is at it's core. It is a lot of what I teach people, how to get their emails engaging, how to get people going, how to get their list built, et cetera. It's all about email for business owners. Okay? So that's the name of my group.

What's the name of your group going to be? Be around that?

Make sure it's something that will attract your audience.

Make Sure Your Facebook Group is Private But Not Secret

And number two, in, in this first one, you're going to make sure that you make the group private and you're going to make sure that you have join questions, questions they have to fill out when they join.

And one of those questions is going to be, "what is your email address?"

And you want to make sure like, I'll send you this, or I'll send you that - you can send them something if you want, but just say, "Hey, what's your email address?" They can put it in or they don't have to. And then you get, decide if you're going to let them in the group or not. Right.

And then make sure before you approve, when people like go to request membership, make sure before you hit approve that you grab that information into a spreadsheet.

Facebook doesn't hold it for you. They don't keep it for you. There's no real automated legit way because Facebook doesn't allow you to actually use the scrapers. It can hurt your account. You can get banned.

So just be aware that you're going to need to grab that information that they submitted to those boxes before you approve their request.

So make a group, make it private, make sure that one of the questions that they asked to join that you asked them to join is what is their email address.

Second, Share You Facebook Group Link in Your Personal Profile

Now, here's what you're going to do next. You're going to take that Facebook group link. And you're going to put it in your personal profile. And you're going to make sure that it's in your personal profile.

And that part of your personal profile is public. You need to make sure that people can view that about section of you.

And so in my personal profile, the part that's public is join the group, Email for Entrepreneurs, Email for Entrepreneurs, they click the link, they go right to the group.

So you want to make sure that this is public and you want to make sure that that is like one of the number one things people see when they look at your profile. Okay?

So number one, you created a free Facebook group. You didn't have to pay for it. It's free. You did those two things I said.

Two, you put the link to that group in your profile, right? So it's visible, and you made sure that that is public.

Now, here's what you're going to do. You're going to go out into Facebook.

Three, Find Ways to Be Helpful in Other Facebook Groups (I Promise, It Works)

You're going to find Facebook groups where your people, where the people that you want to attract to your business are.

Okay. So if you're somewhat, let's see. Let's say you're a crafter, right? And you want to start selling some of your crafts. Well, you're probably going to want to go either into some local groups because you're selling things locally or you're going to want - and/or - you're going to want to go into groups that are related to craft supplies or whatever it is, because those are things you can connect with people on.

Those are playing with your location, the thing you do, et cetera. And you're going to go into that group and, and stick with me here on this.

You're going to start engaging and you're going to do relationship, genuinely focused on engaging with people.

Here's what you are not going to do.

You are not going to post in that group. One cotton picking even breath about your business or what you offer. You're not going to do that. You're not going to comment one cotton picking breath about or whatever about what you offer.That is not genuine relationship.

Here's what genuine relationship is.

Let's pretend that the Facebook group is a party that you've been invited to. Would you walk into a party and announced to the world, Hey, I got my crafts here. Come buy them. If you would. Yeah. Nobody's inviting you to a party.

But if you wouldn't walk into a room of people in person and just suddenly blurt that out, don't do it on Facebook and a Facebook group, go into the group, start looking for groups of people - and I mean posts - posts that you can actually engage with or contribute to.

And I don't mean about your business. I mean, as you as a person, so maybe you're in a local group and they're talking about, I don't know, some event that was at the park that you went to that event. And you're like, it was great. I love seeing this, this, this, and this. You do not need to say a word about your business. The next post is going to be, Hey, do you know, I'm new to the area? And I'm looking for a great hairstylist.

Who would you recommend? You have your favorite? You're going to recommend them. Then another post is going to be something else, not a single one of these are directly related to your business at all. You are just saying, you're just showing people that you're a real person that lives in this area that engages in this community, et cetera. That's all you're doing.

And because of that, what happens is the more you show up, people start hovering over your little icon and they go, oh, who is this person, oh, what do they do? Ooh, that sounds interesting. And they go click and they request to join your group.

They give you their email and you start building your email list.

Now some of you're like, oh, this takes a lot of time. Yeah. This can take a lot of time or not. If you literally just put it on your calendar to show up once a week for 30 minutes and a group where you just literally show up and answer some random questions, guess what's going to happen. Your email list is going to start growing. And it's going to start growing with people who are generally interested in following you, engaging with you and eventually buying your products. And that's, what's going to happen with it. I'm telling you, it is the easiest way to start an email list without a website, without a landing page, without a lead magnet of any sort, without any type of social following. And, and it's free. It's free.

You don't have to have anything that you do anything. This is the easiest way to do this.

Continue Working On Your Lead Magnet While Leveraging Facebook Groups

Now, while you're doing this piece, while you're engaging in your normal groups that you are engaging in, you're going to be creating a single one page lead magnet that you can eventually put out there, not in the groups, but just in general, that attracts your ideal audience so that you can ramp up your list building.

But in the meantime, you're going to have your list growing and going. See, one of the times that I used, this was when I launched a new business and I wasn't ready. I wasn't ready to announce that I had anything going yet. I wasn't ready to do any of that stuff, but I went ahead and created a free Facebook group.

I did exactly the steps that you wanted. And within three months I had added 734 people to my email list, just because I was in Facebook groups once a week, engaging with people answering questions. It was all related to being an entrepreneur. It was all related to all those kinds of things. Even though I very specifically help with one area, but I was still able to help them.

They were like, well, Hey, I want to learn this technique. I'm like, Hey, I learned that from this person, or what are your favorite books to read? And I would answer with some of my favorite books or what are these, or what are that? It was all genuine relationship engagement stuff. And it didn't take any more than 30 minutes a week, but I was able to add 734 people to my list before I even actually launched my lead magnet or launched my list. So it was going while I was building the pieces to my business and that's the point of this stop letting the gurus and experts tell you that you need these things in order to start, you don't fricking need them in order to start.

You just need a quick, free way to meet those people and get them on your list.

That's it.

And then once you get that lead magnet, of course, you can go and build your list everywhere else. And I actually have a thousand things to do to build your email list for free. Like you can do all of these things that are free to build your email list.

I want you to start with this one. This is the key one where I want you to start, but you can download the gigantic list. I put the link below for you, if you want to.

So you can keep going on, but I just want you to start. I want you to start. I want you to stop listening to those gurus, those experts that say you need all these things, and I want you to start building your email list today.