If you’re concerned with the methodology behind growing your business or brand, you may have noticed, time and time again, that marketers sing the praises of email lists.

What is the value of an email list? Email subscribers reflect that group of potential buyers who are interested in what you’re doing and selling. Whether you’re selling a service or a product, your email subscribers represent the prospective customers who are ready to buy, and that’s exactly what you need to be successful.

If you’re trying to grow your email list, but you’re unsure about where to start, you might employ a variety of tactics, hoping that the results will pan out. Take a step back and consider the one, pre-eminent factor that’s missing from your equation- online traffic to your website. Without traffic to your site, it doesn’t matter whether you’ve optimized it for search engines or whether it functions to convert. Without that initial website traffic, you’ll have no one to convert to that coveted email subscriber list.

How do you drive traffic to your website, therefore? One strategy you can employ immediately is to start by paying for online advertising. Now, before you dismiss that as out of the question because you don’t have a marketing budget, you should keep in mind that you can get started straightaway and without a hefty investment. Paradoxically, if you don’t have money to advertise, then that is a sign that you should, in fact, be advertising. Advertising equals more opt-ins, which result in more sales, which gives you money to re-invest in your business. If you contend that you don’t have money to start out with, however, keep in mind that advertising is extremely affordable these days. You can start with $5 a day on Facebook, which amounts to about $150 a month.

To take full advantage of your advertising budget, aim to execute a plan. For example, you could run video ads on Facebook, which are quite inexpensive. This functions to warm up your audience and direct them to your website, which results in traffic. Once you spend a small amount of money to get your audience engaged, you can hit your site traffic with an opt-in offer. Offer your audience something of value for free in exchange for opting-in to your email list. Everyone has a freebie these days, but no one will know it exists unless you promote it on your social media pages via paid advertising. You could have the most incredible opt-in in the world, but no one’s going to sign up for it if they haven’t heard about it.

Once you’ve run your opt-in campaign, get signups. Keep in mind that the average subscriber is worth around $1 per month to you. So, if you have a thousand subscribers to your email list, expect a return of $1,000 of profit per month on average. Naturally, each subscriber is not spending $1 per month on your business, but overall, they tend to be worth this amount. Expect only about 10 percent of those subscribers to buy from you. Therefore, for the new subscribers you’re getting, plan to pay slightly more than $1 per person if you’re using Facebook advertising, which is reasonable, given that each subscriber is worth around $12 a year. If your subscribers only stay on your list for only six months, which is typical, you’ll expect a sixfold return on your investment, therefore.

The key here is to get out of the mindset that growing your list for free is a viable strategy. If you’re a professional, and you’re willing to spend money to make money, then paid advertising is the way to go to generate traffic to your website, and, ultimately, opt-ins to your email list.