Evelyn Hannon leveraged her fear of traveling alone and used it to build a successful online business with over 66,000 other traveling women also facing their fears and traveling the world. 

 

 

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Tracy:    Hello. This is Tracy Matthewman, publisher of WomenCanDoAnything.com and I’m here today with Evelyn Hannon of Journeywoman. Hi, Evelyn.

Evelyn:     Hi, Tracy.

Tracy:     Hi. Okay, so you have a wonderful little business online and it’s called Journeywoman and I was wondering if you could just tell us a little bit about how you got started and a little bit about what your business actually does.

Evelyn:     Okay. It will be my pleasure. First of all, I’ll tell you that Journeywoman is the largest online travel resource for women on the internet and we also have a newsletter that I send out to 66,000 women in 100 countries. Now, how did this all start? It started because I fell in love with my future husband when I was 14 and he was the wrong husband to fall in love with because at 42, we were divorced and I was left in a little puddle in my house crying my eyes out.

And one of the big things that I was worried about was, oh my god, I traveled with my father when I was young, I traveled with my husband when I was older but – I should say this was 1982 and in 1982, women were not traveling on their own and I was petrified that I was never going to get a chance to see more of the world. And the more I worried about it, the more I thought, “Okay, this is it. I’m going to do something. I’m going to give myself a challenge,” and I asked myself to go out on my own to Europe for 35 days. Don’t ask why 35 days. I don’t know. That’s the number I picked and I said, “If you go out there and you can do it, then – and you don’t die, it will probably be a metaphor for the rest of your life.”

So to make a long story short, I went out and I did get to Europe. I was by myself for 35 days and I did cry a lot but I did meet people along the way and I began to kind of experiment with what it feels like to be alone and still be able to go out there and explore. And I was really an anomaly because people weren’t used to seeing an – well, I wasn’t an older woman. I was 42 then, traveling by them self. But I actually – I got the travel bug and when I came home, I decided that it was time to turn my life around.

I went back to school and got a degree in Film and Television. For the five years that I was at university, I traveled on my own for two months every summer while I studied at different – in different universities in Europe and at the end of it all, I thought, “Okay, I learned quite a bit about what it’s like to travel alone as a woman and why it’s so different and decided that I was going to start a small magazine. I called it a mini magazine. It was only printed without any photographs. It didn’t have a colored cover but I put it on the newsstands anyway. It was called Journeywoman and it – I started it up with the $1000 that I received from my daughter who was writing a book at that point and I was editing the book. She gave me the $1000. I had never published before but that wasn’t going to stop me. I just said, “Okay. I think I know how to do this,” and I went out and put this on the newsstand …

Tracy:     And so did you write everything yourself?

Evelyn:     I wrote everything by myself except I did ask women that I know to give me their women-centered travel tips and don’t forget, we were all beginners at that point.

Tracy:     Right.

Evelyn:     What we didn’t know, was that we were at the beginning of a wave, a wave where in the 80s, women were starting to divorce their husbands. More women were going into the job market and getting higher paid jobs. More women were deciding they want to just stay single and then there was that whole unknown, the widows or the older women whose husbands didn’t want to travel anymore because they had been traveling all along. But women had been home taking care of their children and at 55 and 60, they were raring to go.

And so suddenly, there was this whole market of women and once we started feeding them all these tantalizing tips and bits, they too said, “I want to go,” and for me, that was incredible because my mandate from the very beginning was not necessarily to run a business but it was to inspire women to travel faithfully and well and if there was any woman out there who was crying their eyes out the way I had done when my husband left, then I wanted to hold her hand via this magazine and I wanted to give her the courage to get out there and travel.

Tracy:     Amazing. That’s – it’s a wonderful thing to empower women like that. I know through – with some of the stuff I do as well. Okay. So then, how did you transition from the print version to the online version?

Evelyn:     Well, after three years of doing this, the thing that I couldn’t do – the thing that I loved to do was to travel. This – anybody who knows anything about publishing will understand that I was up at 6 o’clock in the morning and I think I went to bed 2 o’clock at night because I didn’t have enough money to have an advertising person or an editor or anyone to write. So basically, I was doing this all by myself and after three years, that was it. I just said, “I can’t do it anymore.”

But after three years of publishing, I had all of these juicy tips. I had such good heartfelt stories and I hated to lose it so it came to me in the middle of the night and honestly, I still don’t know. It was like my fairy godmother was standing over me because really, at that point, if – I must have been about – maybe I was in my early 50s. I said to my kids, “Well, I’m going to put this on the internet.” It was 1994. I remember that. And my kids just looked at each other and rolled their eyes and they said, “Mommy, you’re digitally deficient. You don’t even know how to put on a microwave. How are you going to do this?” And I said to them, “You watch me,” but inside I’m thinking, “Oh my god.”

I don’t even know the difference between sending out an e-mail and finding a website. I knew nothing about the internet except that it was out there and if it was out there, that meant that women around the world will eventually be able to read it. Again I say, I didn’t think of it as a business. I just – I asked around and [Indiscernible] [0:07:32], I didn’t know that it would be called the webmaster but someone who knew how to put these things up, I found one young guy and of course, being a young guy, he was very excited about all the bells and whistles I would have on this website. And it was 1997 then.

I said, “No, no, no. No bells and whistles. I want the prints bigger,” because at that point in my 50s, I understood that I didn’t want tiny print. I thought if women are like me, they’re going to know very little about the internet so let’s make moving around the site very, very simple. We didn’t have high speed internet then so it took forever for a website to load and I said “Uh-uh-uh, I’m not putting photographs on,” because then, you know, it’s going to take forever and people will become discouraged. I never ever ask for a password. I felt, “Why should I do this?” I know I could save e-mail addresses and sell them to marketing people but I said, “My job is to inspire women to travel safely. Why would I give their e-mail address away?”

So, even while the New York Times was collecting e-mail addresses and before our whole world now of never selling names. You could sell names then, but I never ever did it.

Tracy:     Wow. So you really were a forerunner in the internet, you know, newsletter style site.

Evelyn:     That’s right. I think they called me – in books, they called me an early adaptor of the web.

Tracy:     Yes.

Evelyn:     And I thought, “Okay.” They also said, “Oh my god, she’s fabulous because she thinks outside the box.” And I wish I could have taken advantage but I’m an honest – I’m too honest, I guess because I said to them, “No, no, no, don’t give me these awards for thinking outside the box. The truth is I was never in the box. I have no idea what the internet is about so I’m making up my own rules in order to be able to get these messages out to women.”

Tracy:     Yes, that’s so inspiring. So you had mentioned to me that you’ve been in quite a number – and I’ve seen you in a couple of these publications but you’ve also been on some pretty recognizable television shows. Can you tell us a bit about that? How these people – like – it wasn’t like you were out there trying to get publicity. They actually were coming to you so can you tell us a bit about that and also why you think these huge media outlets were so attracted to you?

Evelyn:     Well, I think first and foremost, they were attracted to me because there was nothing out there like what I was doing. There were some big sites. I think it was American Airlines that was trying to do something for women travelers but the truth is, it was corporate and corporate, their whole idea is to sell. They have a hidden message and so, they’re not giving their all. They’re just trying to send you to places where you’ll spend money or where you’ll become a customer.

I wasn’t anywhere being a businesswoman. My whole idea again was to inspire women to travel safely and well, to know that they’re safely in numbers, to make people unafraid to go off by themselves. So, I think that the media took me under their wing because they were so excited to read this pure, pure material that didn’t have an ulterior motive. I think they were also intrigued with this wave of women because they saw that more and more and more women were beginning to follow me. And because more and more women were beginning to follow me and a lot of them were journalists who were traveler, they began writing about me as well.

But again, I was very naïve so I would be – say on a Saturday morning. I remember this so clearly because it was the first really big one. My girlfriend called me at about 9 o’clock in the morning. She said, “Have you seen The Globe and Mail? There’s a whole story about you.” Now, this was done by Russell Smith, a columnist for the Globe and Mail. He never called me to interview me. He just found the website and loved it and so, he wrote a complete column about it.

Well, you know, the Globe and Mail reaches a lot of people and other journalists began to call me. I like to tell the story about sitting at my desk, figuring out how I’m going to get all this work done and then e-mail comes in from People magazine. And it’s a surreal experience because …

Tracy:     Did you almost think it wasn’t like it was a spam at one point like …

Evelyn:     No, I did – I thought it was maybe a story about People magazine. I didn’t think it was for me, you know, but People magazine, okay. It intrigued me and I opened it up and here was this guy in Chicago who said, “I want to interview you for People magazine.” I called him back so quickly, the guy was killing himself laughing on the other end. He said, “I’ve never had someone answer me so fast.”

But I explained that, “Listen, People magazine has never called me before,” and I remember them sending me some place on Queen Street for – to have photographs taken and I was photographed surrounded by antique suitcases. I didn’t know that was a metaphor for my age or whether they were just talking about travel but I saw the bill on his desk and it cost him $400 to rent those suitcases for the travel shoot and I thought, “Oh my god, this is –“ You know, then it seems like so much money to put around me for this shoot.

But I can remember sitting and having him photograph me and in my mind saying, “Oh my god, it’s People magazine. Oh my god.”

Tracy:     [laughs]

Evelyn:     So anyway, there is the People magazine story. Another time, I got a note from the New York Times and this was a gentleman who runs – he was head of business in New York Times. He gave me three columns and he talked about all the other travel – I think he talked about American Airlines then and he said, “They think they know how to do it. You want to know who really knows how to do it. Go and look at Evelyn Hannon’s Journeywoman.com site.” And I said to him I was willing to give him my first born who at that point, I think was maybe 30 and he started to laugh and he said, “No, thanks. I have one of my own,” and she’s giving me enough trouble.

So – but anyway, it was an amazing interview and another one that stand out in my mind is being at my desk and getting a phone call from Good Morning America. That is a cool one and they said that, you know, we want you to come to New York and to be interviewed and of course, I think I didn’t eat for the full week before I went because I was so nervous and even – I remember being in the green room and thinking, “I am going to faint. I’m never going to be able to give them travel tips.”

And so, I said to my intern in the most authoritative voice possible, “Before every interview, I meditate and could you please bring me to a room where I can relax and meditate because I’m going to be on very shortly.” And she said, “Oh, yes. Okay.” And she took me to a room and I sat down and I prayed. I said, “God, please let me get through this.” That was my [laughs] – that was my meditation.

But I remember a high point being my make-up person was from Canada and she was the make-up person for Peter Jennings when he was alive and we had such a lovely discussion and she said, “I know you’re going to be terrific and I’m coming down to watch you.” And she did. She was in the audience when I went on and I remember that so clearly. I also remember walking down 5th Avenue and people stopping me and saying, “You were just on Good Morning America, weren’t you?” And I said, “Yes, yes.”

[Laughter]

Tracy:     Oh, man.

Evelyn:     And do you have time for one more?

Tracy:     Yes. I would love to hear one more.

Evelyn:     Okay. The last one was I got a phone call from Time Magazine. I think – I’m thinking back now to 2000 or 2001 and they said, “We’re going to ask you three questions and we might interview you. You’ll hear about it in 10 days.” And I put down the phone and I had a little chat with my girlfriend who was there. We were going out for a walk and before we left, the phone rang again and said, “This is Time Magazine. We’ve decided yes, absolutely. We want to interview you and we’re sending a journalist down.”

And I think they sent the journalist down in three days and again, it was surreal. Here is New York – excuse me, Time Magazine sitting opposite me on my sofa in my living room and I had no idea – she had no idea when it was going to go in and I then went to visit my mom who lives in Florida and I called in for my messages. This was probably about a month later and there was no space. All my message space had been taken and it was all – CNN called, “You just made the news in Toronto. Could we have an interview with you?” I forget how many people called and so, I called the first person because I couldn’t figure out what it was and they said, “Didn’t you hear? You were chosen one of the 100 innovative thinkers of this new century.” And I was – I was absolutely in shock and I grabbed the car, ran out to the supermarket and got the magazine and sure enough, there I am in living color and I couldn’t resist it. I said to the young guy in front of me in line, “Doesn’t this person look like me? And it’s absolutely uncanny. There’s such a resemblance.” And he looked at me and he looked at the magazine. He said, “Oh my god, this is sick.” He said, “This is exactly like you.” And I never told him that it was me. I just needed – I was so excited. I needed to get it out of my system.

So those are my good stories about media and there were thousands more but those are the main ones.

Tracy:     Oh, that’s so funny. That’s amazing. It must have just -- it extremely boosted your subscriber list in your …

Evelyn:     Oh, I got – it just …

Tracy:     Yes.

Evelyn:     It just went off the charts and suddenly, there was a thousand people coming everyday then 2000 people coming everyday and you can imagine it was a milestone when we registered over a million visitors in one year. And those visitors were reading five and six pages so we were getting a lot – a lot of coverage. And basically, what was this – what was it about? It was networking, women telling other women – women sending their tips in.

I always said to them, “Look, I’m giving you all of this free. It’s my pleasure to give it to you to pay to put it up there. All I ask in return is one gift from you over the full year and that is to send me one woman-centered travel tip.” And it’s amazing. Not everybody but every day, someone says, “Here is my contribution.”

Tracy:     Oh, that’s …

Evelyn:     So, it’s something really great for women as well and their ability to network.

Tracy:     And it really does create that community feeling, right?

Evelyn:     That’s right.

Tracy:     Yes.

Evelyn:     That’s right.

Tracy:     Great. Okay. Well, wow. That’s some big media.

[Laughter]

Tracy:     So, you’ve been doing this online – sorry, hard copy since early 90s, was it?

Evelyn:     Hard copy, I did from ’94 to ’97 and then went online in 1997.

Tracy:     Okay. So what is it throughout that period of time up to today that – what is it that you think has been the underlying factor that has made you successful?

Evelyn:     I would think it’s because I never lost my grass roots feel for it. I never charged for any of my services. I never put my advertising rates up and said, “Well now, I’m so fancy schmancy, you’re going to have to pay a whole bunch more. I knew that most of my advertisers were women who were struggling, who were starting on the internet. Why would I want to gouge them and take more money than I should?

So they always knew that they could count on me. They always knew that they could pay me in four installments even if it was $200 and they didn’t have the money, it was $50 a month. And many times, I never kept track of it. I just said to them, “Okay, pay me when you have the money.” And you know what, I think in all of the years I have been working, maybe three people didn’t pay me and one of those was a man so we’re not even going to count it as a woman’s – you know, not that I’m discounting men, not at all. But, how women will work hard and make sure that I get my money. They weren’t going to leave me hanging there.

Tracy:     Right, right.

Evelyn:     So, I think it’s – and also, when women like something, they tell their friends. If they don’t like it, they tell their friends as well and it basically has been word of mouth because I never had the dollars to really have advertising campaigns.

Tracy:     And even the media that you have [Indiscernible] [0:22:39] was free and it was word of mouth through the media so …

Evelyn:     Exactly. Exactly and …

Tracy:     Basically, you’ve grown your entire through word of mouth.

Evelyn:     That’s right.

Tracy:     Yes.

Evelyn:     That’s right. And we both know – and all women entrepreneurs understand that as quickly as someone likes you, that’s as quickly as they will dislike you if they see a reason to.

Tracy:     True.

Evelyn:     So, you know, you have got to be really careful about how you handle your business.

Tracy:     Okay, we’ll talk about handling your business. We just talked earlier on some of the tools that you use and so maybe you can talk a little bit about what you’ve used in the past and what you’re using today because you seem to be using a fairly – you know, like you’re – again, you’re probably a leader in your area using some of these tools so maybe you can just expand a bit on that.

Evelyn:     Alright. Well, what are some of the techniques – I think talked a little bit about that just now, about always listening to the people who are supporting you. I don’t think I have missed very many e-mails and I get hundreds of e-mails. But if someone needs some help, I’m always going to send them in the right direction and a lot of my women might be older women and they don’t know how to use the internet. I will explain all of that.

So basically, what I’m saying is, I’m taking a couple of hours everyday to be personal, to look at what my readership wants and to give them the answers that they need. I will – I don’t mind putting notes about other companies into my newsletter. My newsletter, as I explained at the top, goes out to 66,000 women in 100 countries and if someone says to me, “I need a break. Would you talk about this?” I will say, “Well, I need some background,” and if I can see that these people can use a break, I am going to do my best to put the word out there for them and usually, they do the same for me, whatever it may be. So again, we’re networking and we’re cooperating.

I’d run competitions again, asking for their best travel tales, their best travel stories and I think basically that. I never did any big, big campaigns. It was always on a very personal level. But to me, I think that personal level is the one that counts. You can have huge advertising campaigns but once it’s over, it’s over. But when you get the people’s hearts, it remains there. You don’t lose them.

Tracy:     Yes, yes. It’s the relationship.

Evelyn:     It’s the relationship. That’s the exact word. That’s right. Thank you, Tracy. And now, again, my kids are laughing at me but I spent one full week learning how to use Twitter and everybody says, “Well, you can’t make money using Twitter and you’re better off trying to sell your classified advertising.” And I said, “No, because I see it as the wave of today and of the future.” Twitter is going – it may not be around in the degree it is today or in the way it’s being used today but it is part of the wave of the future and I really recognize that and so, spent a lot of time on it. I have – when someone has a question – if someone posts something that says, “I’m going to Prague and I need some help,” I will then go and look at what my articles are and then I’ll say, “Well, you might like female-friendly Prague. Here is the URL.” That’s all I do.

And it was very funny because I did that for someone not knowing who she was and one of the tips – the first tip was go to the opera. Well, what I didn’t know is that this woman is an opera diva and she is – she is going to perform in the opera …

Tracy:     Wow.

Evelyn:     … and in Prague and she wrote me back and she said, “Well, I don’t think I need your opera tip but I need all the other ones. Thank you very much.” [laughs].

So you never know who you’re going to meet. I met someone who wrote a wonderful article because she is a specialist on expats and how you would get into a new culture, the problems of becoming comfortable in a new culture and she offered to write an article for me. More readers in Japan are reading about me because I befriended someone from Japan on Twitter. So, I’m seeing that between 300 and 500 more people everyday are coming to the site, now maybe a third of that would have been just natural progression but I think a lot of it is coming from Twitter and I believe that not everything you do needs to make money. But it’s – again, as you say, about building relationships.

Tracy:     Right. And so, how many followers do you have now?

Evelyn:     I have 1200 and something.

Tracy:     Okay. And how did you get those? Like how do you – did you initially start off getting followers?

Evelyn:     Okay. What I did was I registered myself and then I began following people in travel. That’s what I thought would be interesting, to follow people in travel and then to follow people in the mommy category because my daughter is Erica Ehm and she has the website Yummy Mummy Club and I’m the resident granny on Yummy Mummy Club so I’m writing Aging Disgracefully, an Aging Disgracefully blog for her so I thought, “Well, okay, I want to target the mothers and I want to target the travelers,” and slowly, I began to tell them I was following them then they followed me back and then on Fridays, people follow Fridays. People suggest other people that they follow and that they think gives good advice and you pick up new followers and then every morning, I wake up and I see oh, five new people following me and I go to see who they are and whether I want to follow them back.

Tracy:     And so, you also do this tip of the day things for Twitter.

Evelyn:     I do. I do. I believe in Twitter, you can’t be all about talking about yourself and what you want from other people and selling things. What you want to do is give. Again, give to the community before you expect the community to give back to you. So I give a Journeywoman tip everyday and they would be, you know, anything from traveling with children to traveling yourself.

Today, I talked about if you wear a very small purse, a shoulder purse across your chest, keep just your regular – like your daily spending money, just today’s money in it and then put a jacket, a sweatshirt or whatever over that. Pickpockets will hate you because they will never be able to get to your purse.

Tracy:     [laughs] So that’s our tip from you today.

Evelyn:     That was a tip for today.

Tracy:     Great. Okay. So, what are some other words of advice that you give to women who are looking to build either an online business or to expand their business to the online presence, with an online presence.

Evelyn:     I think the first thing, I keep going back to it but I think that it is the most important that you want to give before you take if you want to establish relationships before you can expect those relationships to pay off for you. And don’t be impatient. You can do it and do it and do it and one day, you wake up and you see that you’re part of a huge community who are willing to support you and willing to help you. And, I find that other sites that are run and your audience is probably going to be a younger audience so these are people who are starting to build online businesses and so, you’re using – they’re going to be using video and bulletin boards and much more hi-tech and that’s good because you’re – excuse me. You’re speaking to your audience. But don’t forget that the internet is huge and it’s not only young people that you want to attract. You want older people as well. Remember the baby boomers. They are going to be – they are huge now and they’re going to be huge now.

So, make at least part of your site available to these people who will not be as tech savvy so if you have – if you have video and they’re not equipped to get video, put some of your – put some photographs up as well so it makes it easier for them. Don’t make them download programs in order to be able to read what you’re doing. Make it clear and make it simple for them.

Tracy:     Okay. Great. Alright. Well maybe, just before we wrap it up, you could just share your website and how people can subscribe to your mailing list.

Evelyn:     It will be my pleasure. So, Journeywoman is simply Journeywoman.com. Make sure that you remember it’s singular. A lot of people go to Journeywomen.com and you’re not going to get anything so it’s Journeywoman.com and right at the website, there’s a place where you can click to subscribe to the newsletter. We don’t ask very much. We ask for your e-mail. We don’t even ask for your first name. We ask for your e-mail address, the city that you live in and the country that you live in because that’s good for our statistics.

You can also go to something that I didn’t talk about but it is another adventure of mine and it is all totally free and we have over 20,000, and probably more this week, over 20,000 women again, from around the world at HerMail.net. Don’t go to HerMail.com because that’s a porn site so HerMail.net and that’s a directory of women wiling to mentor other women as they come to their part of the world. It’s all free and thousands of women have helped each other and they have remained good friends via the Journeywoman website.

Tracy:     Wow, that’s amazing. I didn’t know about that site. Well, thanks for sharing that.

Evelyn:     Thank you.

Tracy:     Okay, Evelyn. Well, thank you so much for your time today and sharing everything you’ve gone through and it has been very inspiring and also, I – even myself personally, I’ve picked up a few little tidbits that I’m going to now take to the next step. So, you’re a great inspiration and thank you so much for your time.

Evelyn:     Thank you, Tracy. It is my absolute pleasure to be able to chat with you today.

 

*****

 

You can visit Evelyn's Journeywoman website at www.journeywoman.com.