Work Boat World, Ships and Shipping, Ausmarine editorial – June 2008
It took us perhaps a little by surprise (though not really, of course) when on Monday April 28, 2008 Baird Publications quietly slipped across the dateline marking its thirtieth birthday. It does fill us with a certain steady pride and represents something of a coming of age.
It has been an amazing voyage.
Baird Publications began by publishing its successful Professional Fisherman magazine thirty years ago.
Today, Baird Publications publishes a fleet of monthly marine trade magazines including Work Boat World, Ships and Shipping and Ausmarine (incorporating Professional Fisherman), a flagship web portal featuring free access to extensive databases and a daily updated news service. It also organises and presents a number of well-known marine trade events around the globe.
We are delighted and proud to have worked with so many dynamic companies that have done so well over the period and it has been fascinating to grow with such a vigorous global industry.
It is especially gratifying that practically all the companies which started with us in our first twelve months are still advertising with us today. Most have gone on to become much larger and more internationally focused, with many now leaders in their respective fields.
We thank them for their support as well as our many passionate and dedicated readers who have supported us for so long and made our publications and events so useful to our advertisers.
We look forward to many more successful years in the industry.
baird-online.com: Dramatic growth continues
Our web portal (www.baird-online.com) is growing at an amazing rate. By all measures, the performance since we started seriously measuring it in May 2007, has been outstanding.
The number of unique visitors, which is the most useful measure, has increased 15 fold to 6,249 in the 12 months to April 30, 2008. Similarly, page views – another important measure – have increased 12 times over the same period to 186,573. Hits, also, have increased from 200,000 to 751,125.
Regular visitors and users of our news alerts are increasing at similar rates. The positive feedback we are receiving from those regular and frequent users/visitors is particularly gratifying. Our only disappointment is that many of them are unaware of the full range of services offered by baird-online.
While all of them are very familiar with the NEWS and GEAR sections, too few have moved on to check out the very useful DIRECTORIES into which we put so much effort. Much the same applies to the REVIEWS and EVENTS sections and the BLOGS and MARKETPLACE.
All these sections are easy to access; very informative; up-to-date; and, above all, FREE. Everyone who tries them agrees that they are enormously useful.
baird-online.com has now achieved a critical mass in terms of both quantity and quality of readership and visitorship. We are still, though, confident that its strong growth will continue albeit, probably, at a somewhat slower rate.
I urge readers to familiarise themselves with baird-online.com It is a riskless and easy exercise that I can guarantee will be worth the effort. You should also venture beyond the NEWS and GEAR sections. I have no doubt whatsoever that you will find the DIRECTORIES section, in particular, both easy to access and very useful.
Finally, with visitor and page viewing numbers such as I have described, www.baird-online.com becomes a very effective and outstandingly cost effective advertising medium. It is well worth a try.