E-TravelMagazines

E-Travel Magazines Proposal

This "plain Jane," style, full-disclosure, Business Plan is what is needed in a non-razzle dazzle format so it can be for printed for the ease of marking paragraphs with questions for discussion between traveling partners.

Here is a summary to interest a curious, but casual reader who has clicked through so far—

1) E-Travel magazines is looking for content for individual "State"TravelMagazines.com publications, that eventually will provide a national revenue stream covering a life of traveling, and a real "cash out" way to take care of the expenses of aging.
2) I feel by far by that traveler's know best, what is exciting to fellow travelers.
3) All the video and computer stuff can be learned through on the job, and on the road training.

The long term objective of E-TravelMagazines at this time is to develop fifty "YourState"TravelMagazines.com following the format and standards developed by myself, Barry Murray, and Bobby Murray (of Mac&Murray Multimedia — MacandMurray.com) for www.AlaskaTravelMagazine.com, under this business umbrella of E-TravelMagazines.com, with a public presence of www.USATravelMagazines.com (not yet online). Barry Murray controls the other 49 state TravelMagazine dot com URLs owned at this time by Mac&Murray.

More specifically, I am already 68-years young (where did the time go) and I need some help to make my dream of rolling a mouse over a map on USATravelMagazines.com, and having Alaska, or Oregon, or Florida pop-up, ready to provide travel information.

Background—

From Barry and Bobby Murray's early experience with web marketing —if it isn't fun don't do it— through their advertising/publishing/multimedia development from 1997 through 2002 for clients that sold a quantified total of $12 million of goods and services — basically by taking market share away from established Industrial Age businesses who did not have a clue that generic niche, keyword phrases were more powerful than the mantra of "branding" they had learned in marketing classes in grad school.

One of Mac&Murray's travel clients was daughter Colette Murray who —just as the developer of the Fed-Express system— who had her biz plan for starting an Alaska travel company that offered, "independent itinerary based tours," that could require over a 1,000 computer generated transactions per traveler, was almost laughed out of her MBA class. Helping her go head to head against, and win, shore based travel excursions, over a foreign monopoly CCL (Carnival Princess , Holland America) enabled by small U.S. businesses being excluded by absolutely stupid legislation by our own Congress (the Jones Act), was a giggle.

Once Colette Murray's www.RainbowMountainAdventurs.com reached a demographic saturation point, Mac&Murray, with Colette Murray's permission, kept up web marketing their home state using material partially acquired when documenting her "off the shelf tours," for the benefit of other Alaskan's finding it difficult to compete with 65¢ of every AK travel dollar going to a "Common Market" country, just because they had the dollars to sell the broad-based idea of coming to Alaska in the first place.

Following strings in web developer blogs most web professionals (No, not your teenage nephew!) understand that thinking this new media through is simple, once a competitor has shown how to make something work. "Well, duh!"

AlaskaTravelMagazine started showing up in search engines, just about the time the industry phrase "content is king," was established. The surprised Barry Murray was that typing keywords out of his articles, into a search engine query, his bootstrap, up-start, magazine started beating out his own efforts through Mac&Murray of what jargon smarties want to call SEO (for Search Engine Optimization) for the branded RainbowMtnAdventures.com.

Thinking it would be fun to publish yet another motorhome magazine, the Murray's went full tilt down the road based on the assumption that those who built, supplied, or serviced motorhomes, would love the idea (this was six years ago) of virtual motorhome travel video. Wrong. Also wrong that Chamber of Commerce directors would love linking through to fun content.

The WWW.MotorhomeTraveler.com feel-good project turned out to be a great platform to develop our online video / article format.

My Proposal

All of what I have experienced in developing a successful online magazine is what is driving this business plan. Or lack of. Yes, I was foresighted in buying the total block of URLs. I could turn around right now get my money back and then some by selling out the block, on a dutch auction on E-Bay. Make me an offer for the whole thing, because I already have enough money to go sit on a beach, somewhere cheap.

Yes I had fun experimenting with AlaskaTravelMagazine, but that investment could be recouped, right now, by selling the eye-balls of a search engine established to an offshore gambling operation. Of course, the name would be trashed, and then eventually resold. URL names are after all, are just a pathway to a commercial endeavor.

What I really want to accomplish is, as a freelance photographer / writer who raised a family freelancing to magazines, as LIFE, Holiday, etc., and news columns selling my wares to editors who thought they knew what was happening in this world, of pompous ad clients only into control. is to develop a bottom-up empire that through following enthusiasm, actually make a living sharing something of value with my readers.

I love Alaska, I love Oregon, I love Nevada— I love cowboys, Cajuns of delta Louisiana, the hill people of the Carolinas— I love Americana, the Blue Grass of Tennessee, and even the bustle of NY,NY. I would like to share it with the demographic of all the Baby Boomers coming up to the age where they promised themselves they would actually take a look at this country they have been crisscrossing on high flying jets on business class flights. I would be delighted to ship "additional" information to Germans via the affordable Internet, instead of lying it had been sent, but really wasn't as the bean-counter chamber of commerce manager had a moratorium on wasting overseas postage.

The timing is of so right to take those URLs and have a group of gray-hairs turn them into a contributor owned mega company that offers travelers cultural tourism articles, accessed by an honest search engine position. All I really want in return —besides what I built via AlaskaTravelMagazine— is a statue outside the corporate office to remember me by.

That is if we do not abuse our trust of the reading public looking information on what to really look for in Washington by bypassing obvious state tourism bureaucratic manipulation of motel/hotel room taxes. Enough said that we bought the URL WashingtonStateTourism.com, six years ago, and the acting director still doesn't have a clue that there are tourists who would actually have to fly into Seattle, to pick-up a beautifully four-color dead tree brochures? The remnants of a promising www.MtStHelens.net, the first part of a Cascade mountains loop is still online even though the Kalama Port Commission —who desperately wanted our publicity years ago— will not answer phone calls as to why they abruptly closed a tourism specific park that will be missed by motorhome travelers. We have no accommodation recommendations on the exploited Castle Rock side of the mountain — after a local business hired a hacker to actually steal our commercially viable URL. For this reason our MtStHelens.com site features the more realistic east side approach.

So with this demonstration of a bit of win-win-win philosophy — after days, weeks, actually months of deliberation with Me Myself, and Bobby "Magee" Murray my AlaskaTravelMagazine partner, I have come up with the following:

Changed my mind once again. I liked the idea of holding video training seminars while traveling in a RV group of gypsies down the road in Baja, working on www.BajaTravelMagazine.com. Alas, no response.

Knowing that as an individual I can't afford to pay for quality video / articles across the nation, what if we offered a contributor all of the online ad revenue of a piece we hosted that didn't look as if it came from the snot noses at a high priced PR firm (I do have some funny stories about these guys to share around a campfire.) Our part would come from our developing between articles "catalog" pages where a person can actually buy something featured in the story. Or, we will take the listed advertising, and you mind the store by drop and shipping product.

Obviously hosting all this takes money. I would really like to start a whaling vessel, or law firm partnership, to cover costs — especially the hours spent fixing the exposure on video clips, music royalties, the advertising and programming grunts. Until then these tweaks would be on an individual basis

The best I can come up with today is to charge a flat $10 per month to host your (acceptable) video article. Early contributors would not only benefit by the whole growing through the strength of hypertext links, they would be locked in at this rates until their was enough online to have one of those dot-com magical buttons that got so many people in trouble, looking for the office of investor relations.

Yes, the author would have the promise of some sort of revenue. But once 50 time 50 pages of content is established, I think all (including myself) should be offered a conversion of existing online pages into some sort of security that wouldn't get us thrown into prison by the SEC.

All I really want to do is have fun doing what I have been doing for 55-years. If you are not a corporate lawyer looking for business, or an "inside" position, call 503-753-5868 and talk the rest of, "how does this work/what do we do?" through with either Barry, or Bobby Murray.