Believe it or not, email marketing is really a simple process.
I always thought it was so hard to do and set up until I actually tried.
You're probably thinking way too much about the potential difficulties like I did when I started.
All you need is a product or service to promote, an optin page to get the subscriber email address and an autoresponder to send out your follow up emails.
Now, if you're going to do this from scratch and on your own, it will take a while. You will have a learning curve and you'll learn more by trial and error. You'll probably also get frustrated like I did.