10 Tips to Save on Gas at the Marina
Gas isn’t getting any cheaper, especially on the water. Here’s a few tips to get the most out of your fill up this summer.
- Install a fuel flow gauge if you haven’t already.
Not only can you find out what speed is most efficient for your vessel, but it will help you evaluate the effectiveness of these and other gas saving measures. - Tune up.
A yearly work over will keep inboards and outboards alike working at maximum efficiency, and will easily pay for itself in gas savings over the course of the year. - Lose some weight.
Too often we leave the dock with everything we ever need on the water. Try to lighten up by leaving unnecessary items, especially the heavy ones. Examples- full water tanks on a half day trip, or trolling motor (and battery) while heading out deep. - Throttle back.
Running your boat wide open uses a tremendous amount of energy. Throttling back to 80% can offer huge savings in both MPG and GPH. - Maintain that plane.
Once up on a plane, a boat will use much less gas even if only going a couple knots faster. - Plan it out.
Try to minimize miles traveled by planning the best route, or doing a little research before hand. Wondering for hours will certainly burn more gas, and may not get you more fish. - Check your prop.
Lower pitch props. may help you get out of the hole faster, but will bleed efficiency at higher speeds. Remember to check for dings, dents, and chips that will affect fuel economy and balance. - Balanced running.
While it’s a great idea to test MPG for different trim levels on your boat, it is certain that it will perform better while balanced evenly from side to side. - Drain livewells.
Out of bait or done fishing? Drain those wells before leaving to come home, at 8 lbs. per gallon the weight can add up. - Keep it’s bottom clean.
Whether it’s barnacles , or slime and grime, it’s slowing you down. And it’s costing you at the pump too.
Bonus tip:
Warm up time…. Most new engines with electronic fuel injection, etc., don’t require lengthy warm up periods. Try warming a minute to three depending on engine size and age.
Posted by: Wade Sonenberg | Sunday, April 27, 2008 | one comment | 
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NEW: Great Outdoors Photo Contest
We’ll make ya famous.
April’s Photo Contest Theme: Fishing in General
What do you win? We’ll feature your shot & contact info. on our homepage for a month.
….. and we’ll announce it in our Outdoor e-Marketing Newsletter too.
Who decides? You do. Winners are chosen by votes from all the participants.
Always Fishing? No. We’re thinking about a hunting theme in May, maybe gobblers? Suggestions welcome.
For rules, deadline, and how to enter visit the Photo Contest page.
Posted by: Wade Sonenberg | Sunday, April 27, 2008 | no comments | Email This Post
DIY SEO: Blog Commenting
Another simple way to increase to increase your website or blog’s inbound links is by commenting on blogs related to your industry. It takes just a few minutes to gain high quality, one-way, relevant inbound links - and you might just learn something you can use while you do it! It’s important to stick to blogs about your particular industry, since Google and other search engines give higher priority for links coming from pages with similar topics.
Where to find relevant blogs?
- Simply Google the industry + “blog” For example, the term “fishing charter blog”
- BlogCatalog directory (there are many other directories). Browse or search
- Technorati Search your targeted keywords, and check out the top results
Add to the Conversation
Nobody likes the guy who posts “I’m the best Fishing Guide in FL, check me out.” Blatant advertisement is likely to be deleted quickly, and very few people will follow the link to your site this way. Rule of thumb is to either add something complimentary, or something thoughtful is even better - it doesn’t have to be esoteric however.
How to Comment for Maximum SEO Effect
On most blogging platforms, there will be three boxes that you’ll need to fill out. Here’s a couple tricks to get the most out of the comment you’re about to enter:
- Name
The name attribute is what’s going to make up the written text of the link. It helps (greatly) in SEO to have keywords in this text because it tells search engines what the link target (your website) is all about. Now some bloggers won’t take kindly to the name “best Florida fishing guide.” That said, if you’re business name includes some of your target keywords, then it should be OK to use that name. To simplify, entering the name “Bob” doesn’t help much unless your trying to rank well for “Bob” in Google. - URL/website/address
Called by various names, but in all cases it is the target of the aforementioned link. Usually you want to include your home page, but it’s good practice to vary them a little bit, especially when you have a page that is relevant to the blog post at hand. Also, if you have other content rich pages that you’d like to rank well for a given term, include it here. An example of this is if you operate a guide service off of a particular island or offer an “overnight” charter option.
Posted by: Wade Sonenberg | Wednesday, April 16, 2008 | 3 comments | Email This Post
15 Places to Post Your Fishing Report Online
Timely fishing reports are a valuable commodity for fishermen in unknown waters and their local playground alike. The web offers an unparalleled opportunity to share your wealth of knowledge on a particular water body or species, and in turn, it can be a highly effective strategy for increasing charter boat and fishing guide bookings. The goal here is two fold: First, to generate human traffic (potential clients) whether they are visiting your website or giving you a call. Second, it’s a great way to increase your search engine rankings by including a link to your website in the report, or in the “About” section provided by some report services.
Here’s a list of 15 17 (*see below*) websites offering free services to post fishing reports on the web. Remember, you can post last week’s report to them all if you like.
***UPDATE: Thanks to the great response, we will be continually updating this list***
If you have or know of any other fishing report sites, please comment below and we’ll make sure they are added.
- Big Fish Tackle
- Fishing Reporters
- Sportfishermen.com
- ReelReports.com
- Ultimate Bass Forum
- ReelFishingReports.com
- 2CoolFishing.com Message Boards
- CyberAngler.com
- Fish Eye Soup
- FishingWorks.com
- FishyFishing.com
- LandBigFish.com
- TheFishFinder.com
- TheFishingGuide.com
- US Angler
- Waders On
- Fishing Reports at Fintalk.com
- Fox Lake Fishing
- GoFishingForums.net
Posted by: Wade Sonenberg | Thursday, April 10, 2008 | 8 comments | Email This Post
Outdoorzy.com: Social Network Business Directory
I’ve been involved at Outdoorzy.com for nearly a year now, and I would suggest that any serious outdoors related business join for a business account, even if you’re not into the whole social networking thing.
What is Outdoorzy?
It’s a social network, like MySpace or Facebook, for outdoors types. Forums, to-do lists, trip reports, etc. But it also has a Business Directory!
Why should I register?
You get photos or screenshots, an explanation of your business, and more, for the enormous price of $0.00 - all in front of your target audience on a growing social network. Lastly, and maybe most importantly, you’re allowed to place one-way, inbound links from your profile to your website which helps to increase your site’s standings in the search engines.
Posted by: Wade Sonenberg | Wednesday, April 9, 2008 | one comment | Email This Post
DIY SEO: Link Baiting
The second pillar of DIY SEO is generating inbound links, or links that point from other websites toward yours. Link baiting is an effective strategy for generating one way, high quality inbound links for your website or blog, and especially so for genres of popular interest such as fishing, sports, or news.
Wikipedia defines Link bait as “any content or feature within a website that somehow baits viewers to place links to it from other websites. Matt Cutts defines link bait as anything “interesting enough to catch people’s attention.”[3] Link bait can be an extremely powerful form of marketing as it is viral in nature.”
Link baiting is all about creatin the buzz, and can take many forms, but in all cases involves content that is working talking about, and therefore worth referencing via hyperlink. There are four general types of link bait, but they can contain elements of any or all.
- Linkworthy content
A tutorial that is so concise, and so well written that it becomes the de facto manual on a given subject. It could be winter bass fishing in Lake Lanier or qualifications for a great P.R. firm. Example: Spousel Conversion Kit: Video to get your wife on board for buying that new boat. - Controversy
An information peice that is so over the top, sometimes lacking all reason, that stirs up an online community or the blogoshpere at large. Something titled “President Bush Hates Puppies” is sure to draw a debate, and therefore generate links from people who agree and disagree. Example: Polar Bear Future - Political or Scientific? Global warming, conservation, politics, and those cute, rip your arms off, white bears wrapped up in six words - who doesn’t want to read that? - Killer Apps
A tool or application that is so useful, bloggers and webmasters will link to it to spread the word. It could be a tool for checking inbound links, or a lure color selector based upon weather and water conditions. Example: Georgia DoT Traffic Counts on Google Maps An easy way for retail/commercial realtors to look up traffic counts for a proposed shopping center. - Humor
Everybody wants to share a joke, especially good ones. A collection of jokes, or one especially humorous one pertaining to your niche or industry is a sure way to draw links from related sites. Example: Fishing Jokes Give a man a fish and feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and he will sit in a boat and drink beer all day?
Posted by: Wade Sonenberg | Friday, April 4, 2008 | no comments | Email This Post
Spanish Translation for your Website; and other languages too!
According to the U.S. Census Bereau, nearly 15% of the American population is Hispanic or of Hispanic descent. Want to communicate with them, but don’t know Spanish? Heck, want to communicate in French, Greek, and Chinese too? Don’t worry, this isn’t a crash corse any any language - not even HTML.
Translate Your Website with Google Language Tools
- First, we must get a link to the page we want to translate. Go to Google Language Tools, about a third of the way down to the “Translate a web page” dialog. Simply enter your web page’s address, and choose the language conversion option at the right. Hit enter, and your page in the chosen language should appear.
- Next, copy the link and place it in your blog, website, or email.
- Whamo, you’ve just learned Spanish, Greek, or Chinese on the web in 10 minutes…
Hint & Example:
Try linking to the translated page from a flag representing the language…
Click the flag to see RainmakerWebDesign.com in Greek:
Posted by: Wade Sonenberg | Wednesday, April 2, 2008 | no comments | Email This Post
10 minutes, more traffic with Google & Yahoo! Local
Have you ever typed in a search to the effect of “dry cleaner roswell, GA” and had a map pop up with dry cleaners in or around that city? If you’re not on the list for your trade area and industry, you may be losing out on highly targeted traffic to your website.
But never fear, you can sign up for Google Local and Yahoo Local within 10 minutes! Oh, and it doesn’t cost you a thing.
Google Local Signup
https://www.google.com/local/add/
*you will need a Google account to sign up, but it’s free too.
Yahoo Local Listings
http://listings.local.yahoo.com/
Posted by: Wade Sonenberg | Friday, March 28, 2008 | no comments | Email This Post
Embed Tide Charts into Your Website with FreeTideTables.com
I ran across this cool tool from FreeTideTables.com that allows you to embed an auto-updating tide chart or charts in your website or blog. It’s absolutely free, and they actually give you the code - all you have to do is copy and paste!
Here’s why this tool is even cooler than it looks:
- It’s a great resource for your visitors.
- It’s a simple and free way to differentiate your website or blog from the competition.
- It builds visitor loyalty, as they need to come back to the page over and over.
- It’s great link bait, which helps your search engine rankings.
Screeshot:
:
Or view a live demo on my Bonefish Demo Website
Posted by: Wade Sonenberg | Friday, March 28, 2008 | one comment | Email This Post
Blog Or Relegate Your Internet Business To Slow Death
If you have an internet business, or some form of online home business which doesn’t currently support a blog then you are losing a lot of ground to your competitors and quietly signing the death warrant of your online money making ventures.
Blogging Is The Future Of Online Activity
Actually to be honest blogging isn’t the future of online activity Blogging Is The Now of Online Activity and has been for some time. Everything and everybody is leaning towards web 2.0 based sites such as blogs and when I mean everyone and everybody I’m talking about the people who count and search engines. That’s right search engines…remember those pesky not-so-trivial online dictators that we just can’t seem to do without but fervently wish we could?
SURE…a lot of savvy internet marketers are harping on how the golden era of the search engine has been one-upped by social media sites and is for all intent and purposes over; truth be told that’s a pile of steaming hogwash. Why? Well let’s look at some figures…you can’t go wrong with figures and stats; just as long as they are right I guess:
Search Stats End of 2007
* Google: 63.98% (The bigboy has muscled up)
* Yahoo: 22.87% (Retained the same balanced diet)
* MSN: 7.98% (Looks like Microsoft’s search is on a slimfast diet)
* Ask.com: 3.49% (The toddler of the pack…must be doing good because it won a PC World Nomination for 25 Most Innovative Products of The Year)
Fine And Dandy But What Has Mainstream Search Got To Do With Web 2.0?
Hmmm,wasn’t the whole point of social media websites and the explosion of new refined niche-category search engines supposed to circumvent bigboy online mainstream search? After all Google is no longer the darling of the people it once was and doesn’t seem to abide by its “Do No Evil” motto anymore. Be that as it may Google ain’t going anywhere anytime soon no matter how loud disillusioned acolytes may chant. Google is making sure of that by strengthening its grip on search and its influence in the social media theater…that’s why it bought Youtube for $1.65 billion dollars despite having its own Google Video platform which however, in comparison, performed dismally.
What was the real driving force behind the Google buy up of Youtube? How about the fact that Youtube has over 100 million videos viewed a day and well over 72 million unique visitors each and every month!
But this is happenstance digression, time to get back to the point!
Mainstream Search Engine Web Traffic vs. Social Media Traffic
If you think of mainstream search as enormous relatively unrefined web traffic and that of social media websites as more niche-oriented or refined web traffic you wouldn’t be far wrong. But that is not the complete story because conversely search-engine based web traffic is more valuable to you as an internet marketer or if you have an online home business. Catch is, it ain’t easy to get to the top of the search engines where it really matters! Luckily this is where social media sites and web 2.0 truly shine.
It is a lot easier to get a good flow of web traffic from web 2.0 and social media sites than it is from the search engines, most especially if your website/blog is spankin’ brand new! However getting internet traffic from social media sites also requires a level of input from you (Yup! What one-time big-hair advocate and internationally recognized hairstylist Vidal Sassoon quipped stands ever strong today as the day he uttered it: “The Only Place Where Success Comes Before Work Is In The Dictionary”).
Social Media And Web 2.0 Is All About Community
Much as we like to think of ourselves as unique creatures and largely independent-minded the truth is we humans are little more than herd animals. We tend to appreciate and hangout with like-minded individuals, people who mirror our thoughts and ideas. In other words people gravitate towards people who share the same interests. True there is some time-whipped saying which states that opposites attract but that’s best left to the field of love not the frenzied amphitheater of social media.
Social Medialites are all about the community and friends!
If you wish to capitalize and make any headway using social media sites you need to become part of the community; a task that involves active participation and not merely flagrant self-promotion! Blatant self-promotion without community service is the quickest and most assured way to get banned from a social media site (oh did I mention that most social media sites loathe internet marketers with a venom that Cleopatra’s Asp would’ve envied, though there are a few good ones solely devoted to internet marketing and online business).
Participation in this context means:
* voting for posts
* reading posts (and not just wanton voting)
* making comments
* joining and inviting friends to lists
* writing your own posts
If you’re new to this whole social media thing a good point to begin is read the TOS (Terms Of Service and conduct of behavior) then start making friends by voting for articles or posts you actually like (leaving a comment tends to warm even the coldest of hearts…assuming the comment is positive; social media afficionados tend to favor positive affirmation, much like what goes on in the real world) which will in turn make it easier to get votes for your own posts. The whole point of votes is that that the more of them you have the greater the exposure of your post which translates into more web traffic.
Mainstream Search And Social Media Sites Feed Off One Another
Undoubtedly building up a quantifiable list of friends and fellow voters can take time but when all is said and done that time spent on amassing friends is time well spent indeed! A well-written, intriguing, controversy-juiced post (otherwise commonly known as a linkbait piece) could send anywhere from 1000s to 100,000s of visitors to your site in next to no time.
Web traffic to your blog or website translates into greater love from the search engines which means better positioning in the SERPs (search engine index pages). The bottom line is your social media and web 2.0 efforts will draw web traffic far quicker to your fledgling website than the bigboy search engines, plus that web traffic will push your website further up the search engines.
A good linkbait post helps your seo efforts not only through the links garnered from your amazing penmanship (post) but also for the fact that the search engines these days ascribe greater rank and influence to such links that are heavily and often trafficked! Many heavy-weight links of yesterday that largely exist today as shadowy relics of their former selves (one-time high PR links that now boast little to no movement across their borders) are being consistently and all too frequently downgraded with each passing Google update.
If Content Is Still King; Fresh Content Is His Queen
No denying it, original content is still, as ever, the engine that powers the internet as well as being the enviable darlingest of darlings of the search engines. And you don’t have to be a genius here to figure out that in this respect static sites just cannot compete with mobile platforms such as blogs. King Content’s queen (HRH Fresh Content) is the driving force behind your site being crawled by the search engine bots on a regular basis. With a blog any new content automatically gets inserted on the homepage and pings (notifies) the search engines almost instantaneously. This means even a short post is going to bring the search engines sniffing to your site within hours (sometimes minutes) like a panting beast hot with lust. Just try and get that response with a static website even with a totally original, lengthy article in play!
Make Money
Ba Kiwanuka is the webmaster of http://www.internetbusinessmart.com
Posted by: Wade Sonenberg | Saturday, March 15, 2008 | one comment | Email This Post
