How You Can Be A TruckMaster Fuel Finder™ Friend

When TruckMaster first began tossing around the initial concept for a free online fuel finder in the fall of 2008, diesel fuel prices were averaging over $4.00 per gallon, and trucking companies everywhere were struggling to keep their tanks full. It was obvious that something needed to be done to help the situation, even in a small way, and TruckMaster had existing technology that it had developed for use in it's trucking software product. The decision was made to make this product available as a free online tool that anyone on the internet could use, no strings attached.

The tool was out of beta testing and online in early November of 2008. The initial challenge of letting people know about the tool was overcome by initiating a pay-per-click campaign through Google AdWords, where ads were displayed when a searcher typed in terms that we felt were relevant to the traffic we desired, such as "truck stop", "fuel stop", etc. We immediately had visitors to the new tool, and were able to continue development, driven primarily by feedback we received from the users of the product.

The tool quickly grew from a single page website where a text listing of fuel stops (initially around 600) were displayed, to a large site that had single pages for over 2000 truck stops, as well as listings by state, chain affiliation, amenity listings, maps, etc.

The TruckMaster Fuel Finder™ currently receives over 20,000 unique visitors per month. To say that we're extremely happy about the response that we're seeing from the tool is an understatement. However, 90% of the traffic that we receive is still as a result of pay-per-click advertising. Between the advertising costs and development time, TruckMaster is expending over $10,000 per month to support a free tool.

So say you find value in the tool, and want to know how you can help us keep it online, and allow us to continue to develop new features for it (we've got quite a list we've come up with, many of them from you!). There are some things you can do:

• Tell your friends about us. This is by far the most important thing you can do to help. The more visitors we receive by means other than pay-per-click advertising, the better. This lowers our direct costs in supporting the tool, and allows us to display the TruckMaster brand and products to a larger audience (which is how we justify the expenditure).


• Have a truck stop that you frequent that we don't have a listing for, or no live pricing? Ask their manager to check us out. We've set up an area of the website for truck stops that allows them to send us their details, after which they can log on and update their fuel prices as often as they like. It costs them nothing. The more truck stops we are tracking, the more valuable the tool is to our visitors.


• Bookmark our site rather than using Google to find us each time. We're amazed at how often our ad that displays for a "truckmaster fuel finder" Google search is clicked on. Keep in mind it costs us for each click on any of our ads.


• Have a website? Know someone that does? Ask them to link to us. To a large extent, regardless of the value of the tool that we're providing, being listed high in the "organic" (i.e. non pay-per-click) listings for search engines is driven by the number of links that are pointing to our site. Unfortunately a large portion of our visitors are not webmasters, or in a position to give us some of the "link love" that other free tools in other industries enjoy.

We are adamant about keeping this tool online, and keeping it free. With a little help from our friends, we're convinced that we can grow the tool into something truly amazing. And if this "trial run" of a free trucking utility works out, we have a list of other free tools that we would like to bring online, don't tell anyone, but.. a free site to do road and fuel taxes and a free load finding site have been tossed around in a few meetings.

Thanks for your patronage.
The TruckMaster Fuel Finder™ Team