An Interview With Alan Greenwood
Vintage
Guitar, Bismarck
www.vintageguitar.com
Q. Tell us about your
business
Our
magazine is Vintage Guitar magazine and it's kind of a marketplace
for information about old guitars and amplifiers and the people who
played them. And it's also a marketplace for buying and selling and
trading the same. And each issue has articles and guitarists and they
have tech articles in them about guitar repair and amp repair. We
interview a lot of guys like here's John Mayo. A lot of guys who made
the guitars famous and the music famous, and then each issue also
has lots of ads from guitar dealers around the country, even outside
the country from people selling, for the most part, used and vintage
gear. We do have a lot of companies, here's a company that sells new
guitar cases but they're made to look like old ones. We get a lot
of that. A lot of retro stuff. And that's mainly what it is.
We started it back in 1986
as a part-time thing, and the first issue was eight pages and the
second issue was four. It originally was supposed to be a shopper
for musical instruments in maybe the five-state area. Our logo used
to have five states on it. It was called "The Music Trader" at that
time. But right away, I'm a guitar player and the limited ads we did
receive were about guitars and we didn't have any articles at that
time. We started adding in an article here and there to fill in the
big blank spaces because of ads that weren't selling. And it just
kept building up from there. We would add a new writer, we'd add new
advertisers. About from 1994 it would double and quadruple in size
every year. to bring us up to where we're at now.
We have about 40 writers
we use each month. One was from Bismarck, John Heidt who now lives
in Minneapolis, but most are from around the country. One of our main
interviewers lives in Alabama. One of our main historical writers
lives in Philadelphia. The tech writers live in California, Texas,
they're kind of all over the place. Some of them are pretty big names
in this industry. They've kind of grown with us. None of them are
professional writers.
Q. How did you start
your web page?
I
had been reading about the web back in 94, 95. And there was an article
in the paper about a place called the Internet connection. So I called
them up and we were their first business customer, so I believe we
were the first commercial web site in Bismarck. I think that was May
of '95. There was a lot of stuff on the Internet at that time, but
it just pales to what there is on there now. And originally it was
just to put our products out there. Subscribe to our magazine, buy
our books. That is still one of our main focuses, but it's grown a
lot since then.
Q. You're a perfect
business for the Internet, not having many local customers.
We're a perfect business
for the Internet for a couple of reasons. We don't have a lot of local
customers, although that shouldn't hinder anyone from getting on there.
We have what is called "a lot of content." That's the biggest problem
on the Internet. You can put up a site with a lot of razzle, dazzle.
That might get people to look at it once but they won't come back.
Content is just what we have in the magazine. Articles, we have bulletin
boards, classified, so if somebody is thinking about a web site, they
have to have something to get people to keep coming back. It might
be the joke of the day. It might be that simple. We have a lot of
content. We've done over 160 issues of this magazine. We have filing
cabinets full of professionally shot pictures of instruments. We have
a very small amount of that on there now. This year we plan expanding
that quite a bit.
Q. But you don't have
the magazine on the site?
No, we have part of it.
We might excerpt part of it. We are going to get a little more interactive.
We might say in an interview, "If you want to discuss... " Say we're
interviewing Joe Blow, "If you want to discuss Joe Blow," we'll set
up a bulletin board on our web page to do it. We're going to start
doing more of that. But, again, we're not. At one time we thought
about starting another magazine on the Internet. Same subject, just
different interviewers. But if you want to read the magazine, you
have to pick it up at a newsstand or subscribe to it.
Q. What was the thought
process you went through when deciding what you were going to put
on it (web page)?
That probably changes every
week. Two months ago the hot thing was banner ads, that was the wave
of the future. Now it's selling, e-commerce, that's the big thing
that's on the news all the time. But the thought process for how we
developed our web page? Well, it's constantly changing. Business plans
are worthless as far as I'm concerned. If we tried to do what I originally
planned with this magazine, it would have failed. It wouldn't be where
it is now. We have a basic concept of what we want to do up there
and, basically, that's just to cover our costs of putting it up there.
If you want to get down to the nitty gritty. It's constantly changing.
You look at other web sites to see what they're doing. So you get
all fired up about this. Then you start looking into it or you do
it and it doesn't work, so you have to be really flexible.
Q. So why did you want
to do it, start a web page?
Well I think being a magazine,
being the kind of magazine we are where we are driven by ads where
people have stuff for sale, we want to get a jump on any competition
out there and get these guys who do this on the Internet. Now the
problem that people find on the Internet: people will take out a web
page and it doesn't do anything for them. It would be the same as
printing up this ad on a sheet of paper and keeping it their desks.
They have to get out in front of people's noses. So that's why you
put an ad in a magazine, and if you have a web page on the Internet,
you have to get a way to get people to come it. People aren't going
to come to a site because you have something to sell, they're going
to come to a site like ours because you have stuff to look at or read,
and then hopefully they'll get exposed to what you have to sell why
they're there.
Q. So you have some
of these ads (from Vintage Guitar Magazine) on your site?
We
have about 60 advertisers on our web site right now. We sell links
to a number more. It's slow going. It's another form of advertising
expense to them. It's no different from the local television or newspaper
guy coming in and trying to get ads from them. They only have so much
money for that stuff. So, we're chipping away at it. We are on the
Internet to protect our position in the business that we're in. If
we don't do it, somebody else will do it and we'll lose the customer
base we have, so we have to do it to keep our position. If we were
a different type of business that might not be the case. The music
industry is the most represented on the Internet and that includes
record companies and musical instrument companies and I don't know
if the technology appeals to that kind of person from the get-go,
but they're real heavy. So we have to have a big presence on the Internet.
If we lose an advertiser on our magazine to the Internet technology,
hopefully we'll lose him to our Internet technology that we have out
there. And again, it's all up in the air. Maybe the Internet won't
replace magazines anymore than radio and TV did, but that's kind of
what we're doing, just protecting ourselves
Seventy percent of our
revenue comes from advertisers. And our advertisers, 70 percent of
them are guys who have something for sale. So if they can put it on
the Internet, a guy walks in, they buy a guitar from him, if they
can have it on the Internet that afternoon and, hopefully, sell it,
why wait 30 days until my next magazine comes out.
But these guys who have
set up web sites are finding, it might end up they have to have a
web site, but they still have to have an ad in our magazine to direct
you to that web site. I've noticed that on TV Honda or Chevy, those
companies they have their logo, underneath they have their web address.
They're trying to get you to go to their site.
How our web site differs
from most commercial web sites is we're trying to be a site where
other commercial web sites want to be. So it's almost like an electronic
magazine. We're going to put more photos on there, more bulletin boards
to get people to come to our web site free, and hopefully while they're
there they will go to our advertisers web sites and buy something.
It's almost like an electronic magazine, it's different, it's the
same concept but it's the same thing only different.
Q. Would you ever want
to have subscribers on the web?
Oh,
I'd love to have that. Our two biggest expenses are printing and postage
and if I can do an electronic magazine, I don't have any postage.
And if I put something out there, I don't have to print 25-thousand
copies of this magazine every month. Our printing bill is huge. So
if you can be successful with something like that on the Internet,
you wouldn't have those expenses. You'd still have a lot of technical
expenses. There have been several online magazines that have folded.
Bill Gates even folded his magazine and he's better financed than
I am. Everyone is giving something away, so why would someone pay
us? Maybe as things get more refined, people start dropping out...you
might be able to do that. Really the only one that's been successful
at it, ESPN has been able to do it...
The Wall Street Journal
has an online paper. But they've been successful with that because
they have something that nobody else really has. What you're paying
for there is the opinions and information you can't get otherwise,
but when you're talking about old guitars or old cars, there's thousands
of sites out there with that.
If you type in guitars,
you might get 170-thousand places to check out. And you'll go check
out Jim's Fav Page or something like that and it might be wrong information.
There's an awful lot of wrong information out there or it might not
have anything on it and you might have wasted your time, so. We have
a good name in our industry. Vintage Guitar is a respected magazine,
so we're trying to take that to the web. We want to get to the point
where if you're looking for stuff on old guitars you'll just come
to our page rather than just going through some search engine and
stumbling through the dark out there.
Q. You talked about
doing an auction.
We tried that and ebay
has been very successful at it. That's one of the Internet companies
that's making money. Now everybody and his brother is doing it. Yahoo
has an auction service . A couple of them have gone public, computer
auction services. Wall Street has thrown scads of money at them. So
it's getting real fragmented. Again, we're a niche marketer, so if
you want to look for old guitars on the Internet, you can go to EBAY
and they have quite a few guitars, but for the most part nothing real
special on there. So if we can build up a site, instead of going to
Yahoo and hope you run across something, if you're looking for guitars,
hopefully you'll come to our auction site. We kind of stumbled with
that, we put it out there. it gets used, but not like we have. Mainly
because you need someone out there all the time promoting the web
site. We're working that right now which is another expense. You need
to update it all the time, you have to police it. We've got bulletin
boards. We look at them every day to keep the name calling down and
the immature behavior. We always have someone with a chain letter
out there. You have to keep it cleaned up or your web site becomes
polluted. To maintain a site like ours you have to be active. Whereas
if you're a Chevy dealer or something you just throw out your models
out there and if a new model comes out you put it out there. But how
many times have you been on a web site and it says, "Last updated
October 1997," and you're thinking, "I'm not coming back here."
I think there's two types
of web sites to consider. It's a great communications tool with your
customers, and email is free compared with long distance phone calls
and 800 numbers. If you are a manufacturer or wholesaler or even retailer
of specialty products, if you can get your information about those
products on the web site, I think a lot of people do and in the future
will increase shop on the Internet. That's why the car companies all
have theirs'. They can only tell you so much in 30 seconds, but you
get on their web page and you can spend hours looking at the specs
of a new Toyota and comparing them and all that. You can service your
customers there. That one's not expensive to do, that's relatively
inexpensive. If you're really trying to go out and find new customers
on a web site, which is what we're trying to do, that can get expensive.
That's where you have to have the content so people will come to your
site and, hopefully, subscribe to may magazine. But say we sold new
guitars, say we were a new guitar company, you could go to our web
site. If you go to the store, they maybe have two models. You get
on the web site and find out they have all of these other models.
Then you can go to your local music store and order it. That type
of web site is not as labor intensive or capital intensive. You read
about these companies that develop web sites that cost millions, and
you read about these companies that develop web sites that cost millions
and you think, "I don't want to do that." But the actual space that
a web site takes on your host server computer is cheap. That might
be 150 dollars a month. But you can spend as little or as much as
you want. It's like anything else in business I wouldn't go into it
with a lot of money. I'd just see how it works. It's like advertising,
you take out an ad and it sells for you, well, take out more ads.
If it doesn't work, well.
Q. Is it possible to
get into it without spending a lot of money?
Sure the technology is
there to set up your own web page. America Online and other online
companies, they'll let you set up your web page for free. And if you're
just serving your own customers, you can put your web address on your
business cards, your letterhead. That's relatively inexpensive. But
if you're looking for new customers or new people to come to your
web page to buy stuff, then you have to go out and get on these search
engines and maybe buy banner ads on them and get links with other
web sites and that can take a lot of work. It's just like anything,
you don't want to spend 10-thousand bucks on it until you know if
it's going to work for you. And see what your competition is doing.
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