Part 3 : "Hooking" and keeping new customers

What has proven the most effective for you in promoting the site and "hooking" in new customers?
Providing constantly updated, time sensitive news is the most effective tool we have. Many fishing related sites try to either use "how to" articles, fishing reports written by state agencies, and other canned content that we do not really consider time sensitive news.

We will run just about anything fishing related, but the bulk of our content is from the tournament results, product releases, and industry news. Currently we have over 4,700 articles in our newsroom database, which we switched to about three and a half years ago.

Fishing is a sport that has about 35 million licensed participants in the US, which is close to 18% of the adult US population. But mainstream media provides very little, if any, coverage of fishing. We fill this gap, better than anyone else does.

When many are losing their "dots and coms" because of a lack of sales and interest, your online "sales" from various distributors to your customers is quite strong - what do you think is the primary reason for that strength?
Variety. Consumers can come to our site and shop from many stores, browse the online inventory of marine dealerships across the country, research products from the manufacturers, keep up with the latest fishing news from around the world, communicate with each other in our forums, or buy and sell goods in our free classified ads section. We try to be a "final destination" point for the angler.

But, you have to understand how we make money; we are not like most other dot-coms.

Take our eStores for example. Instead of the retailer having to hire someone to design and set-up their site, find a place to host it, then try to get the consumers to actually visit the site, we provide the tools and space for retailers and manufacturers to do business online, in the stream of heavy traffic that we have built. We do not actually sell anything to the consumer. Our income comes from selling web solutions, the tools and systems, hosted within our traffic stream to the businesses, and the businesses pay on a monthly basis; if they do not sell anything, we still get paid.

How important do you think it is to change and update the "stores" on your site?
It is definitely important to keep the inventory fresh and updated. We have designed our eStore system so that the store operators can add, edit and delete their own inventory, as well update many other aspects of their online store.

Having a "good" selection of products is very important also. There are many stores online that try to carry a wide selection of products, but they still do not have a "good" selection of products. For example I have been to other online fishing stores that will have maybe 20 different kinds of soft plastic worms, but if you went to a real tackle store you would easily have choices of several hundred to even thousands of soft plastics.

How has word of mouth worked for the site and why do you think it has been successful in bringing new customers to the site?
Considering we have not paid for any advertising online or offline, it must be working pretty good for us.

We are amazed at how many people come up to us at trade shows and thank us for providing them with news about our industry. Also, when you look at our site, you will see that our stories contain the names of everyday people, and we know that not only do they like to see their names in the news, they also tell all their friends about our site.

Tell us what is the most integral part to cyber marketing?
Keep them coming back for more - give your users a reason to come back tomorrow, the next day, the day after that, and so on. Make them feel or worry that they might miss out on something. For different sites and businesses that means different things.

For us, that means keeping fresh and updated news up all the time. We also have an email list that our users can join, and we will send them a nightly email with the titles of all the news stories we posted for that day - just in case they forgot to come by the site or missed a story that day.

For our online stores that would mean keeping their inventory updated, when a price changes get it updated, when a new item is available get it online. For our marine dealers that would again mean keeping their inventory fresh and updated.

Continued...