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Step 1
When you visit a city and don’t know anyone, don’t have a car, don’t know the bus, trolley, or train schedule, and don’t know where to go, a free tour can help you to meet new people, walk in safety with a group, and learn some historic or contemporary information about a particular area. In New York City, for example, check out the free walking tours by viewing the Web site at: http://www.newyorkmetro.com/urban/guides/nyonthecheap/pleasures/walkingtours.htm.
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Step 2
The advantage of a free walking tour is that you learn details that people who lived there may never have heard. The New York metro.com site contains a headline from an article that explains: “Free walking tours dish the dirt on neighborhoods, landmarks, parks, and celebrities. Rediscover City classics or set out for the road less traveled.”
Check out the San Francisco City Guides site at: http://www.sfcityguides.org/ where free walking tours of San Francisco have been offered for the past 25 or more years. If you really love any city, its history, lore and legends, you can volunteer to offer free walking tours. Build experience by volunteering in your area.
When you’ve learned the lore of any city you want to travel too, consider gathering a group of tourists or travelers who will pay to travel with you to a particular city. You go to that part of the world free in exchange for conducting a walking tour of that city.
There are in many cities, people who give walking tours for pay. They usually negotiate with a tour bus or travel service to give a number of tours in an agreed upon time frame for commission or pay. -
Step 3
You can offer walking tours free as a volunteer, or organize a walking tour business of your own. To get paid and still go free on the tour, you’d have to get a certain number of people to pay for the tour and work out a deal with the airlines, cruise ship, hotel, hostel, school, tour bus or travel service whereby you work by giving a certain number of tours in exchange for free travel.
Another way to go free is to run your business from scratch. Tourists pay you a fee. You make all the arrangements, and take them on a walking tour of a certain country or city. Your fee per person would be enough to pay for your lodging and travel expenses.
After you’ve taken several free walking tours of any city, consider whether you’d like to start a home-based business offering walking tours of any city, anywhere in the world that you’d like to see and where walking tours are relatively safe.
Find out what kind of insurance you need and which travel agencies you want to contact. Promote your walking tours in travel and entertainment publications and Web sites that reach tourists and travelers, including business travelers and those attending conventions.
You could conduct walking tours of any city, anywhere. Often travel agencies have arrangements. Some stipulate that if you find a certain number of paying tourists to go take a tour of a particular area that you can come along free as the tour guide.
Or start your own independent walking tour that specializes in taking people to another part of the world. If you sign up enough paying tourists, you can go free, if those type of arrangements are made with your travel agent, a particular cruise company, hotel, hostel, or as part of your own independent business. -
Step 4
WALKING AS A BUSINESS
If you love to walk, contact various offices of any type where the people usually sit all day. Offer to take groups on lunch hour walks in a particular area of the city in which you live. Take the office employees--whether you work there or not--on long walks during the flexible lunch hour.
Start a home-based weekend-only neighborhood walking tour business on a shoestring budget. Give your walking tour business a name such as “Inside Details” or “Images and History.” Pick an original name for your business that explains in two words what you offer on your walking tour. Start with sedentary office workers and offer lunchtime walks with a stop so they can sit somewhere and eat or buy lunch, sit down, and eat for 15 minutes before walking back to the office as a group.
During vacation periods from your usual weekday job, take tourists on walking tours all over the most fascinating cities of different countries. Pick a country that’s relatively safe for walking. Eventually, your walking tour business can offer international walking tours of foreign cities as well as local, neighborhood, and wilderness sites.
You start local at first, obtain knowledge of where to walk in which countries or cities, and finally, turn your small business, into an international walking business with a new name that explains where you walk. Finally, turn your international walking business into a nonprofit group dedicated to promoting neighborhood walking in urban, suburban, and rural environments throughout the world. As you expand, you’ll have to hire people to run the walking tours seven days a week. You also can work with volunteers as well as paid employees. You decide how far you want to go as a nonprofit group with a commitment to promoting safe walking around the world.
You can charge a small fee, such as $3 or walking, or let everyone walk free and operate as a nonprofit business to promote safe walking for health and stress reduction. You can cater to older adults or office workers or all age groups, or specialize in walking for people with special needs.
If you operate as a nonprofit agency, you can offer free walking tours and run on donations to your nonprofit agency. You’ll be able to maintain a rented office with a volunteer staff if enough donations come in for your nonprofit safe walking tour group.
Most people would not like to spend a fee for walking. You’ll probably find your people dropping because the walks cover the same area re -
Step 5
INCOME POTENTIAL
Sell advertising for the directories and leave them at various stores and hotels, convention centers, and chambers of commerce meeting rooms. The directories of free entertainment also can be free which dramatically increases circulation, a positive selling point when trying to sell display or classified advertising in the directories from companies that provide free entertainment.
Use current rates for free newspapers and other publications to sell advertising. For example, you can charge $25 or $50 for a small display advertisement or as high as $100 depending on what type of businesses advertise.
Good targets are restaurants, theme parks, museums, zoos, and any other establishment that has a free day or offers free entertainment or walking tours on any particular day of the year, perhaps as a sideline to some other product being sold. Free lectures and seminars offered at convention centers or meeting rooms are an excellent source of advertising. Also try mall walking clubs, food courts, and shopping malls as well as park and recreation district offerings, free classes, adult education or continuing education, writers’ clubs, craft and hobby clubs, library lectures, concerts, and folk dancing classes.
BEST LOCALE TO OPERATE THE BUSINESS
Look for free entertainment by various music bands that come to malls on certain days of the week at certain times, such as a noon lunch hour. Some churches offer free concerts at noon or evenings for downtown works to spend their lunch hour.
Check out FreebieDot.com at the Web site: http://www.freebiedot.com/3p1.htm. Look at FreeMovieMayhem.com at http://www.freemoviemayhem.com/index.cgi?src=WC-31275aaa:33320:
Look at sites such as Memolink.com or FreeDVDs.com at: http://www.freedvds.com/Default.aspx?N=1&P=168. In short, there are freebie sites on the Web. Check them out as to what the conditions are.
Free entertainment is available without having to go online. Find out what free entertainment such as music exists at your local college campuses, high schools, churches, public libraries, art galleries, concert halls, museums, and community centers or shopping malls. Public places often have days of the year offering free entertainment or admission. -
Step 6
RELATED OPPORTUNITIES:
Museum, Institution, or Gallery Docent Gift Books, Discs, and Newsletters
Talk to docents from various museums and outdoor events programs or groups to list free entertainment. An example of docent training and free walking tours would include Las Angelitas in California. If you attend their docent training when it’s offered, you can learn about early California and Los Angeles history and how to give small group tours.
After completion, requirements are to give tours 2 weekday mornings per month or 1 Saturday morning. Las Angelitas is a diverse group of people from all over Southern California who also go on historical tours and have social gatherings.
With free entertainment such as walking tours, they are useful if you’re interested in history. Most docent groups include social gatherings. It’s a good way to make new friends with similar interests and experience the free entertainment.
Historical walking tours can be started in almost any place where people are willing to take walks and discuss the historical events of that community.
Every spot in the world has its own history. And history is as much entertainment as walking. For persons with disabilities, for example, wheelchair historical tours or tours for the deaf community also are resources to help others learn the history of a neighborhood, institution or city. Also try campus walking tours.
For example, the University of California, Berkeley has walking tours of the campus where there also are nearby museums. Cultural tours are forms of entertainment where you learn where your values direct you.
Join professional or trade associations and offer to find people to give presentations or speakers for their panels. Whenever an expo, trade show, conference, convention or meeting is scheduled, the professional association or society needs volunteers to help run the show. You get to attend the expo or show free, listen to speakers or enjoy the entertainment.
To find speakers for panels, you contact speakers’ bureaus and members of the association with expertise in an area and experience in public speaking. Bring the speaker to the convention and get rewarded with free entertainment. You work through either event planners or the trade association/professional group, or volunteer to work on the group’s newsletter.
Another way to work the conventions is to greet people and register newcomers. You can be a ticket-taker or help the event planner. -
Step 7
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
Other forms of guides to neighborhoods or entertainment and learning gift books can be published and then distributed to hotel gift shops or hotel convention offices and chambers of commerce. Include with the text paperback or hard cover book free CDs or DVDs. These may be obtained or designed by you if you volunteer or perform paid work part time as an audio book reviewer.
Check out the various audio publishers’ associations. Then contact magazines that publish short reviews, usually about 100 to 110 words per review. Offer your reviewing services, and you’ll be placed on the publisher’s or the publication’s list to receive several audio books each month.
In exchange for reviewing the book for a publication, you’ll receive the books free which you can keep or sell on eBay or other online sales sites or sell at garage sales. Or you can just enjoy the free entertainment and eventually donate your audio CDs or cassettes to libraries, libraries for the blind, or schools where they are needed.
Some publications pay writers to review audio books. You can contact the publishers of the audio books directly or go through magazines that publish reviews. When you’ve made yourself known as an audio book reviewer, video or DVD reviewer, or print book reviewer, publishers and publications will contact you.
Also, your Web site can be used to practice writing reviews. Keep them one paragraph in length and about 110 words. Emphasize the audio presentation, not the literary review, unless you’re reviewing a print book.
Contact authors for “author interviews” in addition to reviews, and offer the interviews to magazines with the approval of the author for a taped interview. Ask the magazine in advance for a go-ahead before you contact the author.
Give the author the chance to change anything he or she said before you send out a transcribed and edited tape interview. Keep the number of words to what the publication wants as space is very limited. -
Step 8
If you’re looking for a career as a party-planner, working with event planners is one way to learn the ropes.Entertainment is a broad area to define. Looking for free entertainment can be found at libraries or theme parks, hotels, casinos, and at performances of musicians or artists at college campuses.
A quick way to find out what’s free is to call talent agents and promotional companies in advance and ask what you can do to help in exchange for free tickets. Of course, the easiest way is to check with convention and visitors’ bureaus and information bureaus for any city and ask what the free admission days are for the local events such as zoos, museums, galleries, theaters, concert halls, and theme parks.
Free university lectures are given almost daily. Check the particular college’s newspaper for dates of free lectures.
Also check each department’s list of events. My field of interest is listening to anthropology lectures. I’d call the department of anthropology at several universities nearby as well as the museums and ask what days free lectures are given that are open to the public.
You’d be surprised at how many people are speaking at university ballrooms and auditoriums, for which most of these lectures are free and open to the public interested in that particular subject. Some people giving an oral presentation for a graduate thesis welcome strangers to quietly sit in the room or auditorium and listen to their presentation to their faculty advisers.
Entertainment that’s free can come in the form of seminars. For example, the Federal Technology Center presented a free seminar on negotiation. Business information is a form of entertainment. Contact your local small business and economic development center. Free seminars are frequently offered.
Newspapers that emphasize niche markets such as job listings and information often present career fairs. Attend a free career fair. It usually offers free lectures, seminars, and sometimes entertainment. Attend the free franchise expo circuit. These franchise expos at hotels offer seminars, exhibits, or entertainment, and sometimes free giveaway items such as pens, note pads, samples of products, mugs, book marks, or paperweights.
Make the rounds of exhibits and trade shows. The vendors’ rooms are often free to attend. You can also ask a local weekly paper for an assignment to write up the highlights of the convention in exchange for a letter asking for a free press badge. -
Step 9
WALKING AS A BUSINESS
If you love to walk, contact various offices of any type where the people usually sit all day. Offer to take groups on lunch hour walks in a particular area of the city in which you live. Take the office employees--whether you work there or not--on long walks during the flexible lunch hour.
Start a home-based weekend-only neighborhood walking tour business on a shoestring budget. Give your walking tour business a name such as “Inside Details” or “Images and History.” Pick an original name for your business that explains in two words what you offer on your walking tour. Start with sedentary office workers and offer lunchtime walks with a stop so they can sit somewhere and eat or buy lunch, sit down, and eat for 15 minutes before walking back to the office as a group.
During vacation periods from your usual weekday job, take tourists on walking tours all over the most fascinating cities of different countries. Pick a country that’s relatively safe for walking. Eventually, a walking tour business can offer international walking tours of foreign cities as well as local, neighborhood, and wilderness sites.
You start local at first, obtain knowledge of where to walk in which countries or cities, and finally, turn your small business, into an international walking business with a new name that explains where you walk. Finally, turn your international walking business into a nonprofit group dedicated to promoting neighborhood walking in urban, suburban, and rural environments throughout the world. As you expand, you’ll have to hire people to run the walking tours seven days a week. You also can work with volunteers as well as paid employees. You decide how far you want to go as a nonprofit group with a commitment to promoting safe walking around the world.
You can charge a small fee, such as $3 or walking, or let everyone walk free and operate as a nonprofit business to promote safe walking for health and stress reduction. You can cater to older adults or office workers or all age groups, or specialize in walking for people with special needs.
If you operate as a nonprofit agency, you can offer free walking tours and run on donations to your nonprofit agency. You’ll be able to maintain a rented office with a volunteer staff if enough donations come in for your nonprofit safe walking tour group.
Most people would not like to spend a fee for walking. You’ll probably find your people dropping because the walks cover the same area rep -
Step 10
You Also Can Start A Walking Business with Neighborhood Tours or Walking with Your Dog Tour of Appropriate City Spots Anywhere
What’s the most important and powerful lesson you’ve learned from traveling? For me, it’s taking walking tours of an unfamiliar city—anywhere in the world or in my own locality. Two types of free tours exist if you’re looking for free travel. The first kind is where you visit a city and take advantage of the free tours offered of the city. These usually are walking tours of streets, galleries, government buildings, theaters, or museums on free admission day. Make a list of cities and check the Web at sites such as Chicago Traveler at: http://www.chicagotraveler.com/attractions/chicago-greeter-free-tours.html, or New York City for Visitors at: http://gonyc.about.com/cs/toursbr/a/bigapplegreeter.htm, or The Paramount (free theater tour) at: http://www.theparamount.com/artists/public-tour.asp.
When you use your search engine with the key words “free tours,” you’ll see a list of cities or places that offer free guided walking tours of an area or buildings.
When you visit a city and don’t know anyone, don’t have a car, don’t know the bus, trolley, or train schedule, and don’t know where to go, a free tour can help you to meet new people, walk in safety with a group, and learn some historic or contemporary information about a particular area. In New York City, for example, check out the free walking tours by viewing the Web site at: http://www.newyorkmetro.com/urban/guides/nyonthecheap/pleasures/walkingtours.htm.
The advantage of a free walking tour is that you learn details that people who lived there may never have heard. The New York metro.com site contains a headline from an article that explains: “Free walking tours dish the dirt on neighborhoods, landmarks, parks, and celebrities. Rediscover City classics or set out for the road less traveled.”
Check out the San Francisco City Guides site at: http://www.sfcityguides.org/ where free walking tours of San Francisco have been offered for the past 25 or more years. If you really love any city, its history, lore and legends, you can volunteer to offer free walking tours. Build experience by volunteering in your area. When you’ve learned the lore of any city you want to travel too, consider gathering a group of tourists or travelers who will pay to travel with you to a particular city. You go to that part of the world free in exchange for conducting a walking tour of tha -
Step 11
There are in many cities, people who give walking tours for pay. They usually negotiate with a tour bus or travel service to give a number of tours in an agreed upon time frame for commission or pay.
You can offer walking tours free as a volunteer, or organize a walking tour business of your own. To get paid and still go free on the tour, you’d have to get a certain number of people to pay for the tour and work out a deal with the airlines, cruise ship, hotel, hostel, school, tour bus or travel service whereby you work by giving a certain number of tours in exchange for free travel.
Another way to go free is to run your business from scratch. Tourists pay you a fee. You make all the arrangements, and take them on a walking tour of a certain country or city. Your fee per person would be enough to pay for your lodging and travel expenses.
After you’ve taken several free walking tours of any city, consider whether you’d like to start a home-based business offering walking tours of any city, anywhere in the world that you’d like to see and where walking tours are relatively safe.
Find out what kind of insurance you need and which travel agencies you want to contact. Promote your walking tours in travel and entertainment publications and Web sites that reach tourists and travelers, including business travelers and those attending conventions.
You could conduct walking tours of any city, anywhere. Often travel agencies have arrangements. Some stipulate that if you find a certain number of paying tourists to go take a tour of a particular area that you can come along free as the tour guide.
Or start your own independent walking tour that specializes in taking people to another part of the world. If you sign up enough paying tourists, you can go free, if those type of arrangements are made with your travel agent, a particular cruise company, hotel, hostel, or as part of your own independent business. -
Step 12
For the working crowds, keep offering midweek lunch break walks. Some of these office workers will be happy to take your walking tours to other countries when they get vacation time. Your clients would be sedentary office workers.
Other features offered by your free and safe walking tours in addition to offering walking the various neighborhoods of your area could include a once-a week lunch group that visits different ethnic restaurants. You can offer a Saturday walk for older adults or singles so they can walk and chat.
Offer free walks through local parks focusing on older adults or singles groups to meet, walk, and talk. One day of the week offer a walk through various wilderness sites in your area. Schedule different types of walks throughout the week depending upon demand and needs of various age groups and special interest groups.
Besides walking within one city, take a group for a weekend trip to another nearby city to see a show and spend two days overnight for a reasonable price—perhaps for under $200. Contact a reputable bus line and take your group to mountain resorts or other areas where they can walk safely. Make sure you and everyone else has insurance in case something happens to someone on a walk. Keep insured for surprises.
Take walkers to see a play or other event combined with a day of walking. Let them see a show and rest after a walk, and make sure there are places for them to eat, perhaps at different ethnic restaurants or have a take out lunch. Take the walkers to a resort where they can have a wine and cheese party and in the summer, use of a swimming pool (provided the resort, you, and the walkers are insured against accidents or other surprises). Make sure you have liability insurance.
Your walkers would enjoy a Sunday spent with breakfast at a hotel followed by a tram ride and a sightseeing walk. Let them look at lakes. Keep rules, such as never allowing a tourist to pass the leader. If they walk ahead of the leader, don’t let them participate again in the walk. You need to follow these rules for safety. No one can walk ahead of the leader or move out of site. You don’t want people getting lost in a mountain or wilderness setting or moving out of site and being late or missing for the ride home.
To start your walking regimen, lead a downtown walking group. Specialize in older adults or the group you want. Morning walks starting at about 10 or 11 AM are excellent for older adults. -
Step 13
Take your walkers on a golf course walk around dinner time—between 5 and 6 PM. Another walking group can start with a train ride to the old town of your city followed by an hour and a half walk with a stop for a refreshing snack and water, including breaks for restroom use.
Older adults and non-drivers who use public transportation usually prefer morning, afternoon, or early evening walks.
For all ages, Saturday night walks are excellent as free entertainment. In addition, Saturday night walks traditionally draw younger singles and those who still drive. Families with young children in strollers enjoy morning or afternoon walks on weekends.
You also can offer an early Saturday morning hike if you live near a mountain. Volunteers can take this tour with walkers in good condition who like steep and strenuous walks. For persons who need to take it easy, Saturdays could unfold at 8:30 AM, beginning with eating together at the Y or elsewhere, meeting people, and chatting, followed by a volunteer-led mild walking tour of downtown or another area that offers historic and cultural points of interest.
As a nonprofit service, your walks can continue all day with a variety of volunteers focusing on different areas such as a river walk, a beachcomber walk. At 6:00 PM, you could have a volunteer conduct an evening walk. Offer a Sunday breakfast walk at 7:00 or 9:00 AM, followed by a merry-go-round walk at 8:00 AM. By 3:30 PM, you could offer a coffee or high tea walk led by volunteers. Different volunteers would offer the walking tours each day of the week.
Your high tea walk could offer herbal tea followed by walks past your harbor or other point of interest to enjoy sights and sounds. In winter, volunteers could show the walkers the colorful sunset on a 5:00 pm. Spend Sunday evenings at a coffee or tea house for an optional visit after the walk. Offer flat walks for those who can’t climb steep sidewalks or hills. Classify your walks into mild and moderate. Offer a large variety of walks and give your walking group a name.
Find fit volunteers to offer family fitness walks at 9:00 AM one day a week when families can walk together. At 10:45, a good time for older adults who don’t like getting up early in the morning for 7:00 or 9:00 am walks, offer a mild walk. Award a price for the oldest walker.
Take senior citizens from various senior community centers on a mild one-hour stroll that emphasizes spectacular views. -
Step 14
For example, some walkers like to look at views from the 40th floor or higher of a building to see the panorama of their city. Others like to stroll outdoors. Include wheelchair walks for those who use power chairs and scooters as well.
Walk at the pace of the slowest walker and have volunteers trained to work with older adults. Patience is a virtue when people need to walk slowly. The goal is enjoyment of the walk, stress reduction, and relaxation.
Take walkers on tours of high-priced homes or home tours when available. Looking at the outside of expensive homes is free, whereas looking inside a home, usually around the holidays, usually costs money that often is donated to charities to raise funds for various causes. Morning tours are best for viewing expensive homes from the street. Make sure the homes don’t have loose dogs running in the street before you take a group on a walk of neighborhood sidewalks.
Your nonprofit walking service needs several vice presidents, a treasurer, secretary, and numerous corresponding secretaries. Have an emphasis for your nonprofit group dedicated to walking—such as family fitness. Make sure special groups are taken on walks, such as those with disabilities. To contribute to causes, do fundraising as a nonprofit group.
Make sure any leaders are trained and certified where fitness is concerned. Conduct several walks as fundraisers. Shoes are important in the walking business. Contact shoe manufacturers. Negotiate with companies that sell walking shoes to help you arrange a shoe fund and annual picnic. Ask the manufacturers and sellers of walking shoes to provide shoes to needy children in your area. Support your shoe fund.
You’ll find that there will be some people who like to walk for miles.
Others want to stroll around posh areas. Volunteers who are trained, certified, and fit can conduct walks for those who are fit enough to take eight-mile hikes. Schedule the walks around the lovely areas of your town. Include the expensive and beautiful country clubs, the places famous for attracting vacationing movie stars, and resorts or hotels with golf courses that attract the wealthy and world-class golf professionals.
What you need for your nonprofit walking group are high teas and coffee klatches. The best day for these events is on each Fridays morning after the walk or at noon lunches after the walk. It’s one of the “Thank God It’s Friday” type of events. -
Step 15
After a Friday morning walk or at lunch time after the noontime walk, a lot of office workers still have spare time to get back to the office. So make time for lunch. Or offer your high tea at 9:45 instead of the usual 4:00 PM.
Walkers will look forward to stops for scrumptious breakfasts are made after the early morning walks that might typically run from 7:45 to 9:45. Friday morning walks followed by breakfast or lunch are for those with flexible working hours and retirees. Early morning, lunch, and after-work hours draw a crowd of office workers, work-at-home parents, people who work afternoon shifts, and those into family fitness.
Total family fitness walks can be your most popular offering. Schedule at 9:00 AM a toddlers and grandparents walk together around flat areas such as lakes or beach areas that run about a mile in length. Allow families to decide how many laps around a lake, beach, park, or other area they want to walk. They can choose a nature trail or the sidewalk to finish the workout.
Include training and walking, a jaunt with lunch, or a midweek wilderness walk on trails plus lunch. Train and certify your volunteers on how to lead people on walks. Give them awards.
Talk to newspaper reporters about your need to recruit volunteers to lead the walks with free training provided. The training is not only about safe walking. It’s also about the sights and events discussed on the walks. Leaders can earn money by taking walkers on their own customized walking tours anywhere.
On one of your walks, include seeing a musical play. For example, an hour’s walk can complement taking in a dramatic theater play at a discounted fee. The walkers could meet in front of the theater at matinee or evening time, walk for an hour, and return at 1:45 PM or 6:45 PM to wait for the play performance in the theater.
Focus on walking throughout the world as a fitness recreation. Classify your walkers and volunteer leaders as casual, moderate, moderate/plus, brisk, and very brisk, depending upon the speed at which the group walks. Casual is clocked at 2-3 miles per hour, moderate, 3 miles per hour, moderate/plus, 3 ½ miles per hour, brisk, 4 miles per hour, and very brisk, more than 4 miles per hour.
Start a nonprofit walking group that attracts a certain group of people—for example, families with children, fitness enthusiasts, older adults and retirees, singles, sedentary office workers, persons with special needs. -
Step 16
Include mall walkers, artists, photographers looking for a clearer focus, birdwatchers, dog-walkers, or a job/client-hunting community seeking to net-walk. Your photographers, artists, or birdwatchers may want to stroll with cameras, camcorders, or sketch pads ready for the unexpected in nature.
Don’t forget the large number of people, including older adults who enjoy morning or noontime mall walking as exercise. If you want to learn how an actual nonprofit walking group operates, contact the National Organization of Mall Walkers, at PO Box 191, Hermann, MO 65041. Check out Web sites at: http://www.peternielsen.com/walking.htm and at: http://www.chiropractic-software.com/mall_walking.htm. If you want to bring more walkers to malls for walking combined with culture rather than shopping, offer poetry or drama readings in shopping malls, perhaps near food courts and book stores. Reading excerpts from books near a bookstore might also bring in the walkers, and the food courts may look inviting even to rest, after a long mall walk.
Design your own walking program. See the Web site at: http://www.peternielsen.com/walking.htm. For more information, The Rockport Guide to Lifelong Fitness tells you more about an easy-to-use test that helps you design your own walking program. Send a self-addressed, 45-cent stamped envelope to Walking Test, The Rockport Walking Institute, 220 Donald Lynch Blvd. PO Box 480, Marlboro, MA 01752. -
Step 17
How to Open a Business Publishing Walking Tour Guides of Historic Neighborhoods, Galleries, Museums, and Dining Anywhere
DESCRIPTION OF BUSINESS
Publish entertainment, dining, or tour guide gift book directories of museums, art galleries, cities, or institutions showing people how to find a variety of entertainment, dining, and/or learning experiences in any city of the world. Most university campuses offer free concerts where graduate or advanced music students present rehearsals or master’s thesis concerts and similar free performances, plays, or lectures open to the public.
Museums and galleries, “old towns” and theme parks also can use gift book directories and tour guide publications. Include the symphony orchestra and local theatrical playhouses including the various acting troupes. Pitch to the theme parks.
With a library card, you can view free educational, business, scientific and literary videos, attend the free days for museums and galleries, and enjoy free concerts given in places such as shopping malls, museums, or library galleries. On the Web, you’ll find The FreeBay.com site at: http://www.thefreebay.com/.
There is a Freebie site also at: http://www.eversave.com/eversave/consumers/CampaignReg.jsp?sourceid=7632&cid=163 . You can find free coupons and other free offers. Discover ideas about what people buy from sites such as Shop.com at: http://www.shop.com/. -
Step 18
INCOME POTENTIAL FOR PUBLISHING FREE WALKING TOUR GUIDES AND SELLING ADS TO FUND YOUR TRAVEL AND TOURISM OR CONVENTION-RELATED PUBLICATION
Sell advertising for the directories and leave them at various stores and hotels, convention centers, and chambers of commerce meeting rooms. The directories of free entertainment also can be free which dramatically increases circulation, a positive selling point when trying to sell display or classified advertising in the directories from companies that provide free entertainment.
Use current rates for free newspapers and other publications to sell advertising. For example, you can charge $25 or $50 for a small display advertisement or as high as $100 depending on what type of businesses advertise.
Good targets are restaurants, theme parks, museums, zoos, and any other establishment that has a free day or offers free entertainment or walking tours on any particular day of the year, perhaps as a sideline to some other product being sold. Free lectures and seminars offered at convention centers or meeting rooms are an excellent source of advertising. Also try mall walking clubs, food courts, and shopping malls as well as park and recreation district offerings, free classes, adult education or continuing education, writers’ clubs, craft and hobby clubs, library lectures, concerts, and folk dancing classes. -
Step 19
BEST LOCALE TO OPERATE THE BUSINESS
Look for free entertainment by various music bands that come to malls on certain days of the week at certain times, such as a noon lunch hour. Some churches offer free concerts at noon or evenings for downtown works to spend their lunch hour.
Check out FreebieDot.com at the Web site: http://www.freebiedot.com/3p1.htm. Look at FreeMovieMayhem.com at http://www.freemoviemayhem.com/index.cgi?src=WC-31275aaa:33320:
Look at sites such as Memolink.com or FreeDVDs.com at: http://www.freedvds.com/Default.aspx?N=1&P=168.
Research the freebie sites on the Web. Check them out as to what the conditions are. Free entertainment is available without having to go online. Find out what free entertainment such as music exists at your local college campuses, high schools, churches, public libraries, art galleries, concert halls, museums, and community centers or shopping malls. Public places often have days of the year offering free entertainment or admission. -
Step 20
OPERATING YOUR WALKING-TOUR-PUBLISHING BUSINESS
Publish a directory online and/or in print of free entertainment at parks, museums, church picnics, church concerts, brown-bag luncheon concerts downtown for workers, poetry readings, recreational presentations, street entertainment, art walks and art shows, student concerts, campus lectures open to the public, free film presentations at campuses and other public places, club meetings open to guests, community centers, galleries and libraries, targeting days with free admissions. You can plan a writer’s presentation panel in a shopping mall’s food court.
Explore the possibilities for gift books on various media players. Demonstrate your gift, directory, and guide books at exhibits, conventions and city information offices, local visitors’ bureaus, chambers of commerce, hotels and convention centers, tourist industries, museums. Publish a directory of historic neighborhoods including historic homes open to the public, galleries, and professional association meetings.
Gift books may be displayed at expos, public lectures, and national association meetings. Trade shows and events related to a wide variety of industries and educational programs are shown. Look at listings of free offerings from professional associations and their meetings announced in newsletters and trade journals.
Sell advertising to make income from your directory. It’s logical and easier to sell the advertising and give the publication away free than by trying to persuade any consumer to pay for a directory of free entertainment.
If the zoo or museum cost too much to bring your family to frequently, buy a year membership at a discount or volunteer to work there as a docent a few days a year in exchange for a free pass for you and a guest.
Zoos also have one day a year with free admission. To cut expenses, show up early. If there’s a particular museum, gallery, or exhibit you want to attend, offer to volunteer there a few days a year in exchange for a free admittance to the exhibit.
Conventions, conferences, meetings, and theatrical presentations also offer free attendance in exchange for volunteer work as an usher or registrar, people-greeter, ticket-taker or other helpful work.
When various theaters present plays and music concerts, they usually need volunteer ushers who get to attend the play or concert free. Call a few weeks in advance and offer to be a volunteer usher, people greeter, helper, or ticket-taker. -
Step 21
If you like to attend a lot of plays or, offer to volunteer for university or even high school plays. If you’re an older adult, contact various senior centers and theaters and volunteer to give information or help people when the plays or concerts open. You’ll get a free admittance in exchange. The same works for art galleries and museums.
If you enjoy hanging around radio or TV stations, call in advance and ask to be put on their volunteer list. Most duties involve answering questions for people who call. Galleries and museums use volunteers as docents.
You can do fund-raising work for public TV and radio stations in exchange for free tickets to various functions, such as theatrical or musical productions or live shows.
If you want to work in public relations roles, volunteer to help out at conferences, conventions, or concerts. If you want to become more involved as an event planner, join professional associations for event planners and offer to help find speakers for a panel.
By volunteering, you can learn more about how event planners put together an event or how artists or musicians are promoted.
Another field in the entertainment business is selling the music of professional musicians to the movie industry. You’d be the middle person or go-between finding the right musicians and placing their work with various movie producers and directors.
For those who only want free entertainment without much complexity or involvement in the industry, by volunteering a few days a year in any media, you can ask for free tickets to an event in exchange for being a helper when help is needed.
Helpers in the entertainment industry answer phone calls at a radio station or greet and register people at a convention. It’s a form of bartering a few hours a year of volunteering in exchange for tickets for you and a guest to attend specific entertainment events.
Not everyone wants an actual career in the entertainment industry You may only want free tickets to see a show or look around in a museum, zoo, or at a convention. Another form of free entertainment is to become an independent tour guide.
You find a required number of persons to pay for a cruise or tour, and you go free on the tour or cruise. Check out the cruise lines and various tours and travel businesses that allow you to go free if you find a required number of paid guests. Take advantage of free walking tours of various cities. -
Step 22
For example at the Web site: http://www.newyorkmetro.com/urban/guides/nyonthecheap/pleasures/walkingtours.htm, you’ll find New York metro.com. The site explains that the free walking tours give specific details and history of a neighborhood.
Almost every city offers free walking tours. That’s another type of free entertainment. To find free walking tours for other cities, just use your Internet Web search engine and put in the key word “free walking tours.” What pops up, for example, at http://www.google.com is a list of Web sites from various cities offering free walking tours.
Look for docent organizations, and consider giving a free walking tour yourself of your city to meet a lot of new people. Become a docent, a volunteer who offers a tour of a place, city, neighborhood, museum or gallery. Join docent groups and receive free training to be a docent. Or just take advantage of the free walking tours of any city. You’ll see online free walking tours of various European cities. It’s your choice of where you want to take your free walking tour or offer one in your neighborhood.
If you’re looking for free entertainment, the walking tour will give you some exercise and outdoors experience. You can choose where you’d like to walk. -
Step 23
RELATED OPPORTUNITIES:
Museum, Institution, or Gallery Docent Gift Books, Discs, and Newsletters
Talk to docents from various museums and outdoor events programs or groups to list free entertainment. An example of docent training and free walking tours would include Las Angelitas in California. If you attend their docent training when it’s offered, you can learn about early California and Los Angeles history and how to give small group tours.
After completion, requirements are to give tours 2 weekday mornings per month or 1 Saturday morning. Las Angelitas is a diverse group of people from all over Southern California who also go on historical tours and have social gatherings.
With free entertainment such as walking tours, they are useful if you’re interested in history. Most docent groups include social gatherings. It’s a good way to make new friends with similar interests and experience the free entertainment.
Historical walking tours can be started in almost any place where people are willing to take walks and discuss the historical events of that community.
Every spot in the world has its own history. And history is as much entertainment as walking. For persons with disabilities, for example, wheelchair historical tours or tours for the deaf community also are resources to help others learn the history of a neighborhood, institution or city. Also try campus walking tours.
For example, the University of California, Berkeley has walking tours of the campus where there also are nearby museums. Cultural tours are forms of entertainment where you learn where your values direct you.
Join professional or trade associations and offer to find people to give presentations or speakers for their panels. Whenever an expo, trade show, conference, convention or meeting is scheduled, the professional association or society needs volunteers to help run the show. You get to attend the expo or show free, listen to speakers or enjoy the entertainment.
To find speakers for panels, you contact speakers’ bureaus and members of the association with expertise in an area and experience in public speaking.
Bring the speaker to the convention and get rewarded with free entertainment. You work through either event planners or the trade association/professional group, or volunteer to work on the group’s newsletter.
Another way to work the conventions is to greet people and register newcomers. You can be a ticket-taker or help the event planner. -
Step 24
If you’re looking for a career as a party-planner, working with event planners is one way to learn the ropes. Entertainment is a broad area to define. Looking for free entertainment can be found at libraries or theme parks, hotels, casinos, and at performances of musicians or artists at college campuses.
A quick way to find out what’s free is to call talent agents and promotional companies in advance and ask what you can do to help in exchange for free tickets. Of course, the easiest way is to check with convention and visitors’ bureaus and information bureaus for any city and ask what the free admission days are for the local events such as zoos, museums, galleries, theaters, concert halls, and theme parks.
Free university lectures are given almost daily. Check the particular college’s newspaper for dates of free lectures. Also check each department’s list of events. My field of interest is listening to anthropology lectures. I’d call the department of anthropology at several universities nearby as well as the museums and ask what days free lectures are given that are open to the public.
You’d be surprised at how many people are speaking at university ballrooms and auditoriums, for which most of these lectures are free and open to the public interested in that particular subject. Some people giving an oral presentation for a graduate thesis welcome strangers to quietly sit in the room or auditorium and listen to their presentation to their faculty advisers.
Entertainment that’s free can come in the form of seminars. For example, the Federal Technology Center presented a free seminar on negotiation. Business information is a form of entertainment. Contact your local small business and economic development center. Free seminars are frequently offered.
Newspapers that emphasize niche markets such as job listings and information often present career fairs. Attend a free career fair. It usually offers free lectures, seminars, and sometimes entertainment. Attend the free franchise expo circuit. These franchise expos at hotels offer seminars, exhibits, or entertainment, and sometimes free giveaway items such as pens, note pads, samples of products, mugs, book marks, or paperweights.
Make the rounds of exhibits and trade shows. The vendors’ rooms are often free to attend. You can also ask a local weekly paper for an assignment to write up the highlights of the convention in exchange for a letter asking for a free press badge. -
Step 25
For the working crowds, keep offering midweek lunch break walks. Some of these office workers will be happy to take your walking tours to other countries when they get vacation time. Your clients would be sedentary office workers.
Other features offered by your free and safe walking tours in addition to offering walking the various neighborhoods of your area could include a once-a week lunch group that visits different ethnic restaurants. You can offer a Saturday walk for older adults or singles so they can walk and chat.
Offer free walks through local parks focusing on older adults or singles groups to meet, walk, and talk. One day of the week offer a walk through various wilderness sites in your area. Schedule different types of walks throughout the week depending upon demand and needs of various age groups and special interest groups.
Besides walking within one city, take a group for a weekend trip to another nearby city to see a show and spend two days overnight for a reasonable price—perhaps for under $200. Contact a reputable bus line and take your group to mountain resorts or other areas where they can walk safely. Make sure you and everyone else has insurance in case something happens to someone on a walk. Keep insured for surprises.
Take walkers to see a play or other event combined with a day of walking. Let them see a show and rest after a walk, and make sure there are places for them to eat, perhaps at different ethnic restaurants or have a take-out lunch.
Take the walkers to a resort where they can have a wine and cheese party and in the summer, use of a swimming pool (provided the resort, you, and the walkers are insured against accidents or other surprises). Make sure you have liability insurance.
Your walkers would enjoy a Sunday spent with breakfast at a hotel followed by a tram ride and a sightseeing walk. Let them look at lakes.
Keep rules, such as never allowing a tourist to pass the leader. If they walk ahead of the leader, don’t let them participate again in the walk. You need to follow these rules for safety. No one can walk ahead of the leader or move out of site. You don’t want people getting lost in a mountain or wilderness setting or moving out of site and being late or missing for the ride home.
To start your walking regimen, lead a downtown walking group. Specialize in older adults or the group you want. Morning walks starting at about 10 or 11 AM are excellent for older adults. -
Step 26
Talk to newspaper reporters about your need to recruit volunteers to lead the walks with free training provided. The training is not only about safe walking. It’s also about the sights and events discussed on the walks. Leaders can earn money by taking walkers on their own customized walking tours anywhere.
On one of your walks, include seeing a musical play. For example, an hour’s walk can complement taking in a dramatic theater play at a discounted fee. The walkers could meet in front of the theater at matinee or evening time, walk for an hour, and return at 1:45 PM or 6:45 PM to wait for the play performance in the theater.
Focus on walking throughout the world as a fitness recreation. Classify your walkers and volunteer leaders as casual, moderate, moderate/plus, brisk, and very brisk, depending upon the speed at which the group walks. Casual is clocked at 2-3 miles per hour, moderate, 3 miles per hour, moderate/plus, 3 ½ miles per hour, brisk, 4 miles per hour, and very brisk, more than 4 miles per hour.
Start a nonprofit walking group that attracts a certain group of people—for example, families with children, fitness enthusiasts, older adults and retirees, singles, sedentary office workers, persons with special needs, mall walkers, artists, photographers looking for a clearer focus, birdwatchers, dog-walkers, or a job/client-hunting community seeking to net-walk. Your photographers, artists, or birdwatchers may want to stroll with cameras, camcorders, or sketch pads ready for the unexpected in nature.
Don’t forget the large number of people, including older adults who enjoy morning or noontime mall walking as exercise. If you want to learn how an actual nonprofit walking group operates, contact the National Organization of Mall Walkers, at PO Box 191, Hermann, MO 65041. Check out Web sites at: http://www.peternielsen.com/walking.htm and at: http://www.chiropractic-software.com/mall_walking.htm. If you want to bring more walkers to malls for walking combined with culture rather than shopping, offer poetry or drama readings in shopping malls, perhaps near food courts and book stores. Reading excerpts from books near a bookstore might also bring in the walkers, and the food courts may look inviting even to rest, after a long mall walk.
Design your own walking program. See the Web site at: http://www.peternielsen.com/walking.htm. -
Step 27
Design your own walking program. See the Web site at: http://www.peternielsen.com/walking.htm. For more information, The Rockport Guide to Lifelong Fitness tells you more about an easy-to-use test that helps you design your own walking program.
Send a self-addressed, 45-cent stamped envelope to Walking Test, The Rockport Walking Institute, 220 Donald Lynch Blvd. PO Box 480, Marlboro, MA 01752.
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Comments
our5kids said
on 4/3/2009 Very informative article on How to Start Up a Walking Tour and Walking Tour Publishing Business Online thank you for all the tips 5* and I recommended you!!