Part 1 : The World of Fishing goes "online"

Hi Britt, thanks for speaking with us. Can you tell us where World of Fishing is based and how it got its start?
Since its launch in 1995, the World of Fishing has been based in the northeast Texas town of Lindale, located just outside of Tyler.

As the publisher of Tournament Angler News, a print publication, we began experimenting with e-mail in late 1994 to receive our news stories in a digital manner in order to reduce the time required to re-type stories. In early 1995 we started hearing about the World Wide Web and immediately knew that this would be a way of having our publication online. Since we felt we should serve the total fishing market, instead of just the tournament market, we selected the domain name fishingworld.com for our web community. At first, much of the content was from our print publication, and initially the information was posted after the monthly edition was printed.

Choosing a different name proved to be a smart step for us but we quickly recognized that trying to protect the status of our print publication should not hinder our on-line publication. The World of Fishing did indeed become a stand-alone publishing entity and we quickly realized the potential of becoming a major web player within our market.

The World of Fishing web community was established in May 1995 by renting server space located in Houston, Texas. I had become knowledgeable in HTML programming and quickly saw the need to be knowledgeable about the server software as the support from the hosting service was minimal during the weekdays and non-existent over the weekends.

By September 1995 we were able to have our own servers housed at a newly established ISP local to our area. In January of 1996, a T-1 line was laid to our offices with connection to a local ISP, which enabled us to house our own servers at our office. During November of 1997, we established a T-1 direct from our office to a backbone connection in Dallas, without going through a local ISP. This insured that we were able to provide reliability to our customers while having our transmission lines carrying only our own traffic.

In reference to your site our CEO (David Yancey) said, "The World of Fishing is based in a small Texas town and has had visitors from all over the world - proving it's possible to be a dominant source of information resource in a very tiny niche." How did World of Fishing rise to be the leader in this area?
From our beginning we decided that World of Fishing had to be a true community, where anglers can find the latest news, information and stories, as well as a place to research products and services, to shop, and to interact with each other.

What do you think were some key strategies that worked in establishing it as the leader?
Build the stream of consumers, so to speak - bring in the traffic. But we were totally self-funded, and did not have "million dollar marketing budgets", so we had to use the tools and resources that were already available to us.

At first we tried to tie our news delivery in with our monthly printed publication, but we soon realized that we didn't want to restrain the site to the limitations of our print publication.

Instead of waiting to go to print, we started posting news and articles as soon as we received them, which proved to be a good move. It didn't take long for us to become known by anglers, as well as industry people, as the source for up-to-the-minute news.

Continued...