Impressions - is every time someone sees your name or your sponsors name, that results in an impression. These are important because they create "Brand Awareness". Your name and everything about you is your "Brand" and your sponsor’s logo is a "Brand". Every time someone sees those items it makes them "aware" of that brand. Think of it like this: you are driving to a tournament and you see a billboard for Arby's, well you haven't had Arby's in forever and it is close to lunch but the next Arby's is 45 miles down the road, you pass up every exit to get to Arby's, that billboard created an impression for Arby's and got you to their store. Meanwhile you passed up 10 McDonald's and 6 Burger Kings and 4 Wendy's. This same thing happens in fishing, you have a Triton TR 21 X and you pulling it to the lake and along the way you pass a family who's on the way to look at a new family boat, the husband sees you pulling that Triton Bass boat and decides without telling his wife that they are now going to look at bass boats instead of pontoons. You have a Zoom sticker on your truck and you pass someone on their way to the bait store. They buy 10 packs of Zoom because they saw that sticker on your truck. I think you guys get the idea.

You should keep track of every time you make an impression, every time you make post on a message board, keep track of the number of people who read the post and how many hours you have spent on UltimateBass.com. I just finish updating my resume and I added an additional 20,000 impressions to my overall impression count just here on UltimateBass.com in the last month. Every impression is valuable for one reason or another and you should keep track of every one.

I drive about 39,000 miles a year for fishing. Some people say that I generate 3,900,000 impressions, thats 100 per mile. I don't know where that number comes from. But I do know that there is a marketing industry excepted standard and that standard comes from a company called TAB On line and they perform impression audits on every billboard in this country and their numbers have become the measuring tools for all advertising companies in this country. But you just can't go to their site and get those numbers, you must be a member, and it's not cheap. Bass Anglers Network is a member and we have access to those numbers. I can tell you how many impressions you will generate by driving from Kansas City to Shreveport. Through our statistical software we use, I can show you the route you took to get from Kansas City to Shreveport by the people who visited your web site (if you had one).

Exposure – No matter if you are a weekend warrior or an up and coming Pro, exposing yourself to those around you is key. One of the first things you need to do is become familiar with your local newsaper sports writer. Every paper has a sports writer and they are always looking for help with articles. Go meet, email or call them on the phone, but get in touch with this person and introduce yourself. Offer to take them fishing and offer to provide them a weekly fishing report of your local lakes. Make these people your friends, and when that win of a local tourney comes around I promise you, you will get one heck of a story about it in that paper and then your sponsors get noticed and it snow balls (in a positive way) from there.