Many business owners are surprised at how e-zine publishing can bring in good business. It seems like email marketing has been so marginalized in recent years by major changes in spam filters, but, in fact it is still both a powerful and reliable means of getting constant streams of traffic, upsales, and repeat buyers.

One way to use an e-zine to bring in upsales is to build a course that has a natural upselling mechanism. For instance, you can use Jimmy D. Brown's “useful but incomplete model,” which stipulates that you should create an email course or e-zine that provides excellent information, but leaves out something critical that subscribers must purchase in order to make that strategy useful.

With a five-day course e-zine setup, you could have a natural upsale in each lesson, at the end of the course, or at the beginning course. For instance, at the beginning, you could say “Thank you for subscribing. Here's a one time offer.”

At the end of the course, you could sell a tool or information product that synchronizes all of the information they learned about, expands on it, and makes it all easier to put together and actually use.

In addition to simply making it easier for you to sell stuff, using a list also helps you get closer to the most valuable – and yet most neglected – asset in Internet-based marketing: people. Yes, that's right: if you actually talk to people on a regular basis, that will generate sales for you. Especially if you give them useful information and genuinely care about their success in implementing the specific solution you articulated to them.

So how can e-zine publishing bring in good business for you? In dozens of different ways, but it is all dependent on the way in which you decide to use your e-zine. Neglect it, and at most, you will get negative press from it. Pay attention to it and actually care for the people who are helping you build your business, and it will bring in sales and new subscribers with minimal effort.