The one thing all business success stories have in common is that they’re not overnight 

successes. They’ve all had their share of failures along the way, but every successful 

entrepreneur has learned three important lessons: persistence, following your passion, and believing in themselves.

We’ve assembled this handy guide to share with you everything you need to know about how 

long it might take for your business idea to succeed. And while it doesn’t guarantee your 

success, this information will help you plan for the road ahead so that when your business does reach its potential, you’ll be ready!

##Objective 2: Research topics relevant to different industry blogs. Put in a call to action with a 

link in the body of the email asking people to sign up for your blog e-zine. If you have an existing 

list of people who have already signed up, ask them to share this article with certain criteria in 

order to get them engaged. Send out a series of these over time to keep your subscribers 

engaged. It’s called topic targeting and it’s one of the most important concepts that will help grow your email list substantially.

(For more examples on how I target my newsletter topic ideas, see Appendix B. If you want to 

learn how I wrote the original version of this article, read on! I learned by doing it.)

When I first started the Business Blogging eNewsletter in 2007, it wasn’t an e-zine at all. It was 

just a newsletter that went out to people who signed up for my blog. Within a few weeks after 

launching, I found myself flooded with emails from people complaining about having not received the newsletter.

I was in pure panic mode because I hadn’t even sent it out yet! What do you do in this situation? 

You need to quickly throw together a quick fix strategy or course of action in order to get people 

engaged and bring them back into your system again.

So I created a redirection system with a simple web page where anyone who inquired about not 

receiving my newsletter could sign up to receive the next one. This fixed the problem for the time being.

Soon thereafter, I realized that I needed to create an actual e-zine so people could come back 

and read it over and over again. So each week, I would spend time researching topics relevant 

to my blog posts, write up an article, take screenshots of other articles that were relevant to the 

topic, and then put everything together in a nice little package with graphics and links to other 

resources on the web. I’d put this little “e-zine” together and send it out to my subscribers once a week.

I knew it was the right thing to do because I’d looked at the statistics of how many people were 

actually reading my blog posts versus how many people were signing up for my newsletter. And 

the numbers revealed that the amount of people who read my blog posts outnumbered those 

who signed up for my newsletter. (You can see both these numbers in Appendix C.) I also knew 

I needed to put something like an e-zine together because subscribers kept saying they wanted 

more, but they didn’t want to subscribe to an e-zine for $39 every month.

This pricing system is important. I know now that I can charge what I want for it now because it 

was free to the people who got the e-zine via my blog. The people who signed up for the e-zine 

directly would pay $39 per month to get access, which I decided to take advantage of later on. (But more on that later.) Macl Edge

Looking back at this decision, I can’t believe how much time I spent worrying about the price! 

How silly of me. If you want to know how to start an e-zine, the best thing you can do is take 

advantage of your current audience if you have one.

(If you don’t have a blog yet, I recommend reading my free eBook on how to start a blog. In 

addition, my friend Nathan Barry has put together a 5-day Blogging Bootcamp that will teach 

you everything from idea generation to creating scalable content.)

As for those people who signed up directly from the redirection page, I reached out personally 

and told them that they could still continue to receive the e-zine as a gift for signing up directly. 

So technically speaking, any of the people who signed up directly were never charged anything. 

And if those people stopped receiving the e-zine as a gift, I would immediately start sending 

them an e-mail stating that they’d been charged for it since it was no longer a gift.