Things are beginning to really get busy with the bucking horse sale committee. I seems that we get calls daily about things at the sale. How people can get tickets, get a booth space, can they sell something for the sale, and so on. Everyone wants some part of the event in one way or another. We bring a lot of people to town and that inspires a lot of organizations to get involved trying to get a fund raiser out of the event. The board of governors is interested in hearing ideas that will help bring people to the event and buy a ticket. Without the ticket sales we can't continue the event at the level we are doing. Ticket sales have been fairly level the last few years with Sunday's attendance on the decline. Sunday use to be one of the biggest days. Suggestions are welcome.

Hi Donald,
I don't really have any suggestions, other than perhaps to create a nice web site that illustrates some of the history and good times of the Bucking Horse Sale and Miles City itself.

Something that people would want to visit (lots of pictures and stories) and would find useful (includes an easy to use ticket purchase system and other information that visitors might find useful, such as lodging information/etc).

Perhaps something slightly on par with the look and feel of the http://www.montana.com web site -- it has a bit of an old west feel to it.

I added a link to the Bucking Horse Sale web site to the front page of MilesCity.com. I really don't expect it will really affect things that much, but perhaps it will help a little bit.

Regards, Larry

I don't know if http://www.buckinghorsesale.com is the offical web site for the Bucking Horse Sale or not, but it would probably be wise for whomever runs it to submit the site to some of the directories.

I noticed that the stats for buckinghorsesale.com say that it received only 3 hits yesterday... and 2 were referred from MilesCity.com.

I went to http://www.dmoz.org and typed "Bucking Horse Sale" and it came up with zero results. (DMOZ is a "core" directory used by many different places -- so that is why it is important.)

I also went to http://www.yahoo.com and typed "Bucking Horse Sale" and the only thing it came up with was the "Cody Wild West Days" which evidently occurs May 11 - May 13 2001... and I assume is basically competition to Miles City. I looked at the page to figure out why it came up, then I looked at the description (embedded in the HTML) and see it is described in part as "Three days of Bucking Horse Sales". (Ya'all want to round up a posse for a lynching???)

Now the web probably doesn't make that much difference, but in a tight situation a good Internet strategy could make the difference between growing or not. If someone has heard about the Bucking Horse Sale, but doesn't know many details, it currently may be difficult for them to find information about it.

Regards, Larry

[This message has been edited by Larry Antram (edited 3/3/2001).]

Larry,

Using the "Bravenet" counter at the bottom of the BHS page you could see that mc.com has certainly upped the hits to the BHS page -- last five were all referred from mc.com (and Bravenet only shows the last five, so who knows how many there actually were.) Now, I know all about the BHS, go on Saturday, but was interested in this Bravenet counter. How does that thing work? It looks free from their site, but is it actually? I would be interested in putting it on a school web site.

As for mc.com, just from looking at the forum what are your stats? It looks to me like hits must be way up.

I don't know much about the BraveNet counter as I haven't tried it. It probably is free though.

To answer your question: MilesCity.com had 33,999 hits during Feb. 2001. The most active day was the 26th, when it received 2,669 hits. Hits really aren't a very useful statistic though. Visitor sessions and unique visitor statistics are better. During the timespan (Feb 2001) the site had 3,110 visitor sessions (average of 111 per day) created by 931 unique visitors (606 visited once, 325 visited more than once). The average visitor session length was about 14 minutes. Traffic has been steadily increasing. Several months ago we were probably getting about only 20 visitor sessions per day.

[This message has been edited by Larry Antram (edited 3/3/2001).]

Bart,
It is free as long as you leave their ads as part of the counter etc. go to bravenet.com and sign in. they send you an email and then you need
to go to the site and pick up the code and paste it on your site. It is really pretty simple. they have a number of different things you could
try. I am just learning about it.
don

Larry,
Bhs inc appreciates all the help we can get. We sent our stuff out last year to all the search engines in the country via
mcn as they were known then. I was also told that we would have to do it again. And some of the biggies like yahoo dot com
don't really keep us around very long unless we get major hits per day. Our link to the montana travel bureau and the search
engine excite seems to be the biggies. Now your link may provide us a lot of hits especially since the event is coming up
soon.
As to your suggestion about the web site. I get at it as much as possible and keep thinking I am going to do more. It is a
never ending project for me to keep all my irons hot.
Don