Earn a living while doing what you love! 1000 true fans is still relevant. Stay focused on finding your thousand true fans… and win.

I remember my first business plan.

Well, to be honest, it wasn’t much of a business plan, because in 1995, I knew next to nothing about ‘business’. After reading an article about how critical it was to have one, I put pen to paper and jotted down some notes to myself.

And then,

I plugged numbers into a template.

For “Desired number of prospects or subscribers” I put “75,000”. If I could get 50 to 100 leads per day, and then work in a viral mechanism where readers invited new subscribers, this would happen within a year or two.

Under “Target number of customers” I wrote “25,000”. After all, with the quality of content and value I planned to deliver, it was likely to be more than one-third of my audience!

Remember, this was way back when email was killer.

We had ‘open’ rates in the 70% to 95% range, most readers being eager to see what was in their inbox. No spam, no email overload, no body part enlargement or lottery scam messages – yet.

And very quickly, even with my little knowledge about marketing, I grew an email list of 15,000 subscribers in a health niche.

Being A Digital Publisher

Every week, I would mail out an email newsletter or ezine. Two – or sometimes three – articles. News stories and updates. Links to authority content and valuable, informative resources. A ‘question and answer’ section. Readers loved it.