We Started out with a few good electrons....
Glad you're here! This Offbeat Life is part of a Vast Global Empire of web sites (didn't that sound grand? And vast?) which includes me, a mailbox, a rag-tag bunch of contributors, and quite a lot of bravado, electrons and hot air.
Our history:
Back in 1999 I wanted to start my own travel and natural history magazine with no money for ink, paper, printing, salaries or distribution. So I did it on line, with Get Lost Magazine. It cost me $70 for Adobe PageMill, and $9 a month to pay my funky local ISP to host the magazine. I had dial-up and 10 megabytes of server space. At first I wrote and photographed everything myself. Then lots of people materialized with stories and pictures and the willingness to take assignments including tracking down whale bones in a sewage treatment lagoon, doing a martini scavenger hunt in Vancouver BC, and smuggling a kayak over the border.
What I liked best about writing for the web was that unlike print publications, you could provide links to zillions of things to support a story, and update it on the fly. There was immediacy and webbyness which appealed to my rather dithering mind.
After a while our contributors began writing for bigger publications for real money and I began monetizing the pages with Google ads. Our traffic remained modest and yet our little project grew to support itself. What I wanted was more readers and for the magazine to support us as well as itself. Why? Because, in the words of Barbara Sher, it's more fun than a bucket of ants!
And today...
A competent web site is pretty easy to make. These days it's also possible to make something akin to an actual living on line. It's not the one trick slam dunk marketing miracle so many ads imply. It's a matter of doing the right things with very few digressions, and provide value to you readers.
