Well, things could be changing for me.  My oldest Chinese friend, Zhang Kai, went with me to a party over the weekend.  There, with a bunch of his friends, we ate at the local foreigners bbq house.  We started to talk about Clickboards and how the CEO of mGuanxi liked it and then about what I do.  I told them I was the Chief Editor of the local foreigners magazine and they started to take interest.  I found a copy at the front of the restaurant and let them take a look.

I told them that this magazine probably makes about RMB1,000,000 a year.  That got their attention and they asked if I could do it on my own.  I started telling them about printing, which is probably RMB2 per copy, the staff needed, and fact that the magazine should probably be an emag.

They are still interested in we are in the midst of thinking this over.  My idea would be to make about a forty page editorial and journalistic magazine.  We would launch it at the same time as our new website.  The website would have all the listings and maps and relevant info on it.  And I will discuss the Clickboards option with them.

What I want is to have all the information on the website able to be sent to your phone.  So if you are looking at a listing or a coupon, you can send it to your mobile.  So in a sense we would be launching three things at once: a website, a magazine, and a mobile application.

The mobile application would be created by Alvin from mGuanxi, this group I am now in contact with would create the website, and I would create the magazine.

I would also be responsible for bringing all the advertising clients from Jin and Tianjinexpats to the new magazine lineup.  I want to call the magazine and website ‘The Grind’,  but I’m sure I will think of something better.  Selling advertising in the beginning is going to be hard and cheap.  But I think I could get people to sign contracts that they would start at a base pay and then month after month the price would go up 5% until the retail price has been met.  However, with the whole operation based on advertising sales based on a very infantile start-up, things are shaky.

So let’s see.  I want to do this, thing is I will probably have to support myself till there is actual revenue.  Hopefully the others feel the same way.  Maybe my old professor Shafa could help out because he keeps telling me I should buy Jin Magazine, where I currently work.

Clickboards are a new type of Internet advertising that I developed. I have chosen to use them in conjunction with print and mobile couponing.

Clickboards.net is currently under construction. Coupons will be able to be collected from the site and around the Internet using the Clickboards and sent to users coupon feed on Clickboards.net.

Coupons in users feed can be redeemed and verified at the point of sale for the records of the vendor and then be expired from the users feed.

Print and other media can use mobile device to collect coupons and send them to users feed to later be redeemed again using their mobile device.

Right now the mobile number and service is going to cost me RMB5000 a month.  The set up for the application to be used with the website will cost me RMB10000 a month for development.  The initial cost for development is water under the bridge and probably won’t be recouped for maybe a year.  I do believe I can sustain the site with no losses making RMB5000 a month.  Charging advertisers RMB1 a click or maybe RMB3 per acquisition of the coupons, that would mean I need 1500 coupons collected each month.  So if most people collect at least three coupons I would need 500 unique visitors to my site.  I believe that that number is attainable if I promote myself well and people see the relevance of the coupons.  Either it will become sustainable or die a quick death.

Alvin wrote me, “Quickly scanned your materials, but didn’t have time to fully dig in and digest all the materials. Would be helpful if you just sent me 5 slides telling me what you are proposing, how we could help each other and the benefits/cists to each side.”

The last part got me thinking, ‘the benefits to each side.’  My current thinking has been very one sided.  I wanted him to hire me and support me as I developed and integrated Clickboards into his platform.  But what do I get out of it? A salary and advertising shares?  Well that is not exactly a trade.  I mean I have to do business with the guy and show there is a future with my involvement and provide some measure of growth for his products.

So it struck me.  I can approach Alvin saying that I want to add a Clickboard portal to your website.  I could explain the benefits to him and how this will help spur his current business.  But here is where the real opportunity comes in.  The Clickboard portal can be added to any community site whether it be local, national, or global.  People can manage their Clickboards at any and everyone of these portals no matter which website they are on.  Granted each Clickboard portal will be tailored to the site that it is on and the management of the coupons will be more in line with the site they are on, but the access to all their coupons from Clickboards across the Internet is universal.  And this will be key to Alvin.

Any and all Clickbaords can be redeemed using Alvin’s mGuanxi mobile media application.  So now I am not stuck to supporting one website but able to grow the Clickboard portal across the web while it is hosted by other people’s websites, now all of them will be integrated for the use of one easy to use phone application, produced and manned by Alvin.

Now I just have to come up with those five slides.

JIN MAGAZINE
Six month Outlook
The overall objective is to combine all our medias into one package.

Newsletter

With the advancement of our Newsletter we can now incorporate more into this giving more reviews and news that we cannot otherwise in the magazine.  This also allows us to concentrate more on giving deeper information in the magazine that we cannot otherwise in the Newsletter.

The future of the Newsletter is to provide quick promotions to our clients as well as encourage them to interact with the magazine.  For example a current project I am working on is to have Newsletter recipients to write reviews for our Website and to promote our Survey and Subscriptions.  Rewards will be given in the form of Coupons for their participation.

Coupons

In the next six months it will become fairly important to collect Coupons and Gift items that we can give away to stimulate activity on the Website and Magazine.  The Magazine will act as the initial stimulus to any promotions we want to promote.  For example at the end of the summer there will be a party (probably at the Sheraton) where we will give away the prizes for the writing and photography contest currently underway.  Prizes have been sponsored by Hyatt Hotel Jing Jin City.

Coupons can also be used to stimulate activity on the Website.  Daily, weekly, and monthly prizes can be given away for the most involved.  Other contests we can have include tickets for concerts, dinners for special occasions at hotels, drinks at bars for special events, DVDs and CDs for new releases, talent contest prizes, best weekly news about the foreign community, and more; all of this will be funded by the Magazine promoting these reward programs for the various venues.

Radio

We will begin working with the local radio stations that have English hours.  We will invite the people in our focus stories to come to the radio with us where we will interview them on the air.  If there is a band that we focus on in the Magazine we will invite them to play.  The Radio also allows us to sell advertising on our show time and to help promote our sponsors and contests.

Website (jin-emag.com)

The Website’s main new focus will be to stream the Radio programs that we create.  Again we can sell advertising before and after the streaming of the shows.  We will modify the website to be a true emagazine and we also need to change the name to jin-emag.com because Tianjinexpats.com has bought jinmagazine.com and this redirects people to their website.

Also using a new service I have found we can sell advertising on other websites for our sponsors that will drive them to our website.  We will promote our sponsors through local advertising on major Internet sites that are frequented by foreigners.  So our Website alone does not limit us to the amount of web advertising we can supply.

JIN MEDIA
JIN Goal
To create interactivity in the community

JIN Card

In the next year we want to work towards making the JIN Card.  This will allow users to redeem any promotions that they hear on the Radio, see in the Magazine, or browse on our Website or the promotions we display through other local online media outlets.  The discounts will be easy to redeem and collect and I want to just bring this up at this point.  The JIN Card will be unlike other cards that only get you standard discounts like 10-20% at participating vendors.  Actually discounts can be quite varying depending on product and time the clients want to put something on special.

As I have recently read, people do respond quite heavily to numbers in the discounts rather than flat rates.  This is a promising market and I believe with the combination of these five factors we can put much greater value into the Newsletter, Magazine, and Website, as well as our Radio portal on the Website.

This of course would include my Clickboards especially with the coupons and the redemption process through the Website and using the JIN Card.