AskPat 399 Episode Transcript

Pat Flynn: Hey what's up everybody? Pat Flynn here and welcome to Episode 399 of AskPat. Thank you so much for joining me today. As always I'm here to help you by answering your online business questions, five days a week. We have a great question today from Bill, but before we get to Bill's question I want to thank today's sponsor, which is FreshBooks.com.

You can get a 30 day free trial to the number one software to help you manage your finances by going to GetFreshBooks.com and by entering AskPat in the “How did you hear about us?” section. They're going to help you manage all the income, the expenses, and even the invoicing that you do for your business as well and they have an award-winning mobile app too, so you can check the financial health of your business on the go. Again, 30 days for free by going to GetFreshBooks.com and enter “Ask Pat.”

All right, here's today question from Bill.

Bill: Hi Pat. This is Bill from TheMakersGuide.com. I've been listening to your podcast for a few years now and I really enjoy the work that you do and the way that you help people. Recently I started a Facebook group about my niche topic and that group is growing very fast, but I have a question for you about the group. We're getting a lot of likes and a lot of interaction between the members, so I set up a website with the same URL as the group name. I'm wondering, Pat, how do you get the members onto a email list from a Facebook group? Is there some plugin or page service that you could use, or any other hints that you could give as to how you could transition the members from the group onto a mailing list? Thanks Pat for everything you do.

Pat Flynn: Hey Bill. What's up? Thank you so much for the question today. I really appreciate it. You know I have a Facebook page as well and it's doing fairly well. Lot of engagement like yours, and I think it's great that you got this started and started to build a community. I think it's really smart of you to want to collect and start to build your email list from there as well. There's a number of different ways you can begin to do that. The first thing I would do is something that's very simple, especially if you have a Facebook page, as opposed to a group. On a Facebook page they've recently, or Facebook has recently, gave you the opportunity to put a button at the top.

You'll see this button over your cover art and you can find it in the settings, if this isn't set up already, or the little three dots that are there as well next to your cover art image on your Facebook page, as well. You have to be signed in as the admin, and then as the admin you have the option to do this. You can create a button. A sign-up button. Actually, this button you can have a lot of different options for this button. You can have it go to a specific link, promote something that you have to offer, and things like that, so it's the call-to-action button and you can edit this. There's a lot of different options you can choose' sign up, book now, contact us, use app, play games, shop now, sign up or watch video. You can direct it to any sort of website or mobile website, which is an option and you can go from there.

That's the first thing. So what I would do is I would create a landing page on your website for people who are coming specifically from Facebook and on this page it would say, “Welcome, Facebook fans. Thank you for joining us. Please sign up for my email list.” Hopefully you have some sort of incentive to give away there as well. You know if you don't, I mean you could still build an email list but it's very nice to give something away for free at least, and it doesn't have to be huge. It doesn't have to be a big 30-page ebook or anything like that. It could be just access to a video, for example, or it could be access to one specific page, a resource page, a PDF file people can download with a list of the top tools that you have to offer. Top helpful tools in that particular space or anything that you might find useful. You know, put on that PDF file and give people access to it when they subscribe. That's something we're also going to use later in something else as well.

On that landing page, “Hey guys. Welcome.” Again making sure it's like, “Hey guys. Thanks for coming over from Facebook.” It makes that connection so people know that they're in the right spot and that there's a continuity there. “Make sure to sign up. You get this free PDF. It allows you to do this, this, and this. Sign up below using your email or enter your name and email and then you're off.” That's one way to do it and that just makes it automatic so that when people come to that page and they see that button, that they'll sign up from there.

You can also promote that landing page right there in the feed as well. You can mention from time to time, maybe once a week, “Hey guys, make sure if you haven't downloaded this already, you can download this here.” You can even continue to add new lead magnets down the road to get people who hadn't signed up already. Maybe they weren't interested in that first PDF file, but they're interested in the second one or they're interested in the next video, what have you. You could mention that on your profile there as well in the status update and get people to go to that landing page. Again, the landing page is very important because that's kind of the connector. What brings people back to your website, but also incentivizes them to do that particular action. Sign up for your email list on your particular page. That's something that you can do as well.

Probably the number one way, however, to build your email list through Facebook–and this is something I've learned through Amy Porterfield, I know John Lee Dumas has done very well with this as well—is to do webinars. Webinars are high-value items where you could give away information for free; maybe it's even a 30-minute webinar. Doesn't have to be anything huge, but on this webinar people have to subscribe, or excuse me, register, to claim a seat for this webinar. You give away some high-value training, and this might lead to something that you're selling—maybe not, but whatever it is, you're going to build your email list by doing this, because when you get people to register for your webinar on something like GoToWebinar, perhaps you can use a tool like Leadpages to start building an email list and getting people to sign up and register for a webinar.

When people register for the webinar, which they're going to do by entering their email, you are also collecting that email address and building that email list over time. If you wanted to get advanced with it, you could segment people into different lists based off of the different webinars you do, so that you could even see, okay, well these people are interested in this part of my niche, and these people are a little bit more advanced, so they're interested in this part of the niche, and you can have different webinars if you want. You could even record a webinar once, and have that play and have people get access to it through giving their email address as well. Having people get access to it through giving their email address too. Something that you've already prerecorded. Hopefully that helps out.

That gives you a lot of suggestions to build that email list, but I think if you really wanted to get as many people as possible from your Facebook page onto a webinar, and even people who aren't on your Facebook page, if you wanted to promote and advertise that webinar to other pages or other targeted or like-minded people on Facebook, that would be a great way to do it. Probably nothing faster to build your email list than doing those webinars and starting to get paid traffic coming to those webinars so that you can build those email lists, because again people have to register and send in their email to register for those webinars. Hopefully that makes sense Bill. Thank you so much for the question. I really appreciate it. We're going to send you an AskPat t-shirt for having your question featured here on the show.

I also want to thank all of you out there who have been leaving questions. If you have a question you'd like featured here on the show, just head on over to AskPat.com. You can ask right there on that page. I also want to thank FreshBooks.com for making it super easy for me to manage my finances and they are also serving three million other small business owners as well with the ability to keep track of the income, the expenses, and also making it really easy and professional to complete invoices, or do invoices, or submit invoices to your clients, your students, your customers, and that sort of thing. Go ahead and check it out for 30 days for free by going to GetFreshBooks.com and by entering “Ask Pat” in the “How did you hear about us?” section. Again, that's GetFreshBooks.com, enter “Ask Pat.”

Finally, to finish off the week, here's a quote from Richard Branson. He said, “You don't learn to walk by following rules. You learn by doing and falling over.” I love that because it's true. I have two young kids and when they started learning to walk, they kept falling and falling and falling, yet we forget what it's like when we're older and we're trying to do things, and maybe we fall for the first time and we give up. No. If we gave up the first time we fell when we were kids, we'd all be crawling around and that would just be silly. Anyway, thank you guys so much. I appreciate it. Thank you for all the love and support on iTunes. Head on over to AskPat, leave a review. An honest review for AskPat on iTunes helps out the show so much. I appreciate you. Thank you and I'll see you next week in episode 400. Cheers. Thanks so much. Appreciate your support. Bye.