Can the Internet increase your farm and ranch profits? Let me share some E-mail from one rancher who has seen the future and grabbed on for the ride. Tom Ezell, who runs the King Springs Ranch, came out of the chute three years ago by opening a web page to market all of their ranching enterprises on the net. He has ridden that bronc until he now has a 30-page website with all sorts of money-making activities. He even gets a commission from sales from his Virtual Mall on the site. You can view his site at www.kingspringsranch.com.

He has some interesting website innovations that I haven’t seen before. One is that each web page has a link at the top of the page that says "tell me when this page is updated." That is one powerful marketing tool. Tom tells me that another advantage of the website is targeting specific markets.

He markets his cattle, both sport and beef, hunting, horses and rodeo activities. He is located about as far from civilization as a ranch can be. His site lists the nearest motel as being in Sanderson 4.5 miles away. I went through Sanderson when I made a trip from Houston to El Paso by rail and I know it is a long way from anywhere. A website is one way to attract customers from more populated areas. To quote his E-mail, "We receive an average of about four e-mails per day responding to our website and our site gets about 150 page views per day, which ain't bad considering there's no dancin' girls or gamblin'."

I looked at his book site on his virtual mall and object to the fact that I can’t look for books by the author’s name. Also, under westerns he lists Comanche Moon, but not the much better book, Comanche Dawn.

As I told you before, you should have your ranch operation registered as a dot.com page at a cost of $35 per year.

This Dot.com world is something else.

You can e-mail your dot.com stories to me at crodenberg@aol.com.