Blog Entries from the WeHuntSC.com blogging crew
Coming in first place was Jimmy Bradley of Pageland, SC with a nice 4-bearded gobbler
2nd place went to Bruce Puett of Marlboro County
And 3rd place went to Tony Pope of Kershaw County
If you were a winner please contact me here through the site and we'll get you your prizes shortly!
Thanks again everyone..
Regards,
Clint
Could you use $50 extra dollars right around Thanksgiving? If so, then get as many of your friends and fellow hunters to register to WeHuntSC.com in the month of October and you could win. Here are the competition rules:
How do you refer somebody or what does that mean? A “referral” means that you tell someone about the site and as a result they register to the site. When someone registers to the site they see a “Welcome Screen” and on this welcome screen they can indicate the person who referred them to the site. This is where they would put your name.
It doesn't take much to share the link on Facebook or Twitter or to get some of your hunting club members to register to the site. Spread the word and be rewarded!
This September weather has been brutaly hot and really tested our endurance and love for the sport. Though, with plenty of crackers, gatorade, and bug spray, we've managed to do pretty good this season. We were able to get some more youth interested in the sport of waterfowl hunting while having their parents spending more time in sporting good stores, purchasing their needs, and some of their wants! We worked with them in the field, discussing firearm safety, decoy placement, conservation, and of course "calling". As we always say, youth are our future!
Sometimes people ask me ?What is WeHuntSC.com???so I figured I?d write a blog about it and try to give an adequate answer...
I guess the web site can be different things for different people, but it kind of depends on your perspective. Since the perception of the site can differ, I?ve tried to write from a few different lenses in case you happen to fit into one of the below vantage points.
From a Hunter?s Viewpoint WeHuntSC.com is a website geared toward the hunters of South Carolina. We are an information hub and an online location for hunters to share information, photos, videos, and stories. We are flexible and open to suggestions from our site audience and we try to adapt and accommodate as much as possible.
We promote hunting and conservation and we respect the game and land we are blessed enough to hunt. We support our governing body (SCDNR) and promote and abide by their regulations. Our site gives hunters another online area to debate and dialogue about whatever?s on our minds. Our site offers hunters in South Carolina a location to connect with other hunters who share the same interests and who are regionally close to them. By providing an avenue for information exchange, our site fosters relationships among the outdoorsmen of South Carolina and beyond.
From the metrics, it?s evident that hunters in states all over the US and from several foreign nations are also interested in seeing what we?ve got going on in SC. Hunters in other states view the pages of our site and seldom comment?they are just curious about us and what we?ve got going on. In that regard, our site is a window to the rest of the hunting world for what kind of animals we?re harvesting in South Carolina and how we go about hunting the game in our state.
Hunters come to our site to connect, to compete, and to communicate?and we try to have a good time with it!
From a Sponsor?s Viewpoint We also host various online competitions throughout the hunting seasons to give back to SC hunters. For an organization, these competitions represent opportunities to directly interface with hunters throughout the year. Organizations can donate products and sponsor competitions in exchange for publicity and marketing on our site. We monitor our site?s metrics daily and we continue to grow. If you have an organization interested in promoting via our site, just let us know and we can send you some metric reports if you?re interested in cost per impression analysis.
We also have a team of bloggers who blog about their hunts. Some organizations give us products to use/field test and blog about. This offers organizations a grass roots means to connect with hunters throughout the hunting season and the year. Our bloggers aren?t professional hunters with TV shows?we?re just normal guys who like to hunt?and write about it. We utilizemedia rich techniques of images, lightbox image galleries, and YouTube videos to document our hunts and any products that we may be field testing. When SC hunters have memorable hunts we?ll also post guest blogs that they submit. We have also done blog series when it made sense. An example of this is the Tecomate Seed Food Plot Journey where we did a year-long blog series of creating food plots.
We, our bloggers, our hunters, and fans all promote different areas of our site via social media. Organizations that partner with us receive product promotion, increased logo awareness, and greater brand recognition on our site, on YouTube, on Facebook, and Twitter. From this standpoint, we help organizations reach people in several different online locations.
From a Web Viewpoint Ah yes, the web! I am a web guy (actually a "webneck") by trade and this site offers me a place to sharpen a skill set. I keep this site up on the side with the help of a couple other individuals. Running this site helps me gain a greater knowledge about this platform, gives me a creative outlet, and helps me keep my mind turning. The challenge to innovate, keep fresh content, and keep users engaged is interesting and fun, but most importantly it forces me to learn. The push to try to be on the fringe with technology is an endless task and the struggle breeds knowledge.
I hope this entry has helped communicate what WeHuntSC.com is about from whatever perspective you find yourself. The site may change in time, well, it will have to change in order to survive, so stay tuned as we keep pushing to find ways to connect and engage online.
I recently went hunting with one of our duck bloggers, Gavin Jackson, and when we were hunting I noticed something unique on his gun. Gavin had a put a very small vinyl WeHuntSC.com decal on the barrel of his gun! Creativity. Of course I liked the innovation and took some pics of his setup.
Pic of Gavin?s gun
Turns out that Gavin had Josh Johnson of J-Graphix to create this for him. Josh works with us a lot on graphics and can also help you out if you would like some vinyl WeHuntSC.com decals for your gun barrel too!
Below is a quick video of the images of the decals on Gavin?s Gun
If you would like to put some of these on your gun, just contact Josh Johnson and he can assist you!
I just wanted to post a quick blog and relay some news. I was recently contacted by Billy Dunlap, publisher of two online news papers in the Clinton and Laurens areas. Billy was interested in re-posting our blog entries in a newly opened outdoor portal of his web sites. I checked out the two sites GoLaurens.com & GoClinton.com to see what was going on and it seemed like a good fit.
Billy and I exchanged some emails and I think it?s should be a win-win situation for everyone. Billy has already posted two of my blogs on his sites and will continue to do so. Hopefully this will give his readers more outdoor content as well as help promote our site more in his area of the state.
I would like to introduce you guys to a personal friend of mine, Gavin Jackson. Gavin is a childhood friend of mine that resides in Jefferson, SC, which is where we grew up. He fits in very well with the WeHuntSC crew because he has a great passion for the outdoors. If he isn't working or hanging out with his family, he is in the woods hunting or fishing. Gavin is like me, it's not as much about killing the animal, but the work and homework you put in beforehand. To me, that is what true hunting is all about.
Gavin is going to help us blog about deer, turkey, boar, coyote, and ducks, but he will mainly be blogging about duck hunting and coyote hunting. He said those two are his favorite types of hunting. I just got off the phone with him a little while ago and you can tell he really loves to duck hunt and coyote hunt. By the time he finished describing duck hunting and coyote hunting, I was ready to go and I don't really hunt either. Anyways, I will let you guys learn more about him when he post his first blog tomorrow. We are thankful for him helping us out and we look forward to reading about his hunting experiences this year. Good luck hunting and be safe!!!
With anything that you put a lot of time into, I think it?s important to stop every now and then and look at the big picture to see where we?re going and where we?ve been. So at the 1 year mark, I think it?s a good time to look at the progression of the site.
I?d like to say thanks to the site visitors, registered members, the WeHuntSC.com team, and our sponsors. We couldn?t do it without all these groups coming together. It?s neat to meet hunters across the state and beyond and to discuss hunting via the blog, message board, pic/video pags, etc. I?m glad that we are able to host an environment that facilitates sharing of information for hunters in South Carolina. We also enjoy delivering the prizes to the competition winners. It?s neat to see the winners get their prizes, especially the kids. The kids really eat it up and make a lot of the work worthwhile.
When we first started the site, I really wasn?t sure what to expect and didn?t know how it would go over with everyone. Since then there has been a lot of enthusiasm, excitement, and synergy around the site. I?m glad everyone was upbeat about it or I probably wouldn?t have continued to make edits and update the site. Throughout the year, I?ve learned a lot about this platform (the web application that our site runs on) simply from running this site. So, just as I enjoy seeing what?s going on around the state, I also enjoy figuring more out about web design and learning the ins and outs of the framework. I?ve got some more functionality that I?m trying to dream up and add to the site, but there just aren?t enough hours in the day for me to get it all done, but hopefully I will be able to make it happen at some point in the future. So it?s a constant learning process for me?and I enjoy the challenge.
As far as the site goes, in less than a year we?ve noticed considerable growth in interest from sponsors. Hunters are a tough group to reach and I think this is why sponsors are open to working with us in hopes of reaching you all! So the more you come, the better the sponsors will be, and the more prizes you?ll be able to win! We?re starting to look at some duck hunting competitions and will be adding some new bloggers soon. Hopefully we?ll continue to reach out to hunters from all ends of the hunting spectrum and be able to host more competitions. All we need is a couple sponsors and we?ll put a competition together. So if you?re reading this and want some exposure for any kind of product or service you have, just let us know. From the standpoint of metrics, we?ve been gradually rising in hits. Over the course of a year (Sept 9, 09 ? Sep 9, 10) we?ve observed the following data:
I anticipate that the hits will go up some here as deer hunting season approaches especially with the competition prizes being very nice this year! The images below demonstrate the hits from SC, NC, & the US. We only lack 2 more states before we have had a visit from every state.
So thanks again to everyone who has been part of the site whether you?re on the WeHuntSC.com team or are a registered member of the site, or simply someone who comes and reads, but never comments. We?re going to keep pushing and try to find ways to make the site better in 2010 ? 2011. (Send us your suggestions if you have any and I?ll get with my web buddies and see if we can code something up)
And don?t forget? if you?re entering a competition READ THE RULES and PUT THE DATE IN THE PICTURE!
Throughout the past year we?ve had some vinyl decals and bumper stickers printed up, but the demand for the stickers has outpaced our ability to come up with them. Fortunately, an organization out of the Charleston area has added our vinyl, site address decals into their arsenal of vinyl decals.
If you?ve ever gone into convenience stores around SC and seen a stand of vinyl decals near the counter then you?ve probably seen the display where WeHuntSC.com decals will now start appearing. These stands usually spin around and have several SC based vinyl decals on their racks. We?re pumped to have this medium to spread the word about the site.
The stickers will be available in more stores in the future, but for now you can find them in the following locations:
Should you desire a larger version of the WeHuntSC.com logo, please contact Josh Johnson of Johnson Graphics in Pageland, SC