Attracting eyes with clever, targeted farm advertisements

Most of Small Farm Central's farmers are focused on their local communities for sales, but some are looking outside of their locality for sales of shipped products. This is a challenging, but potentially rewarding market.

This morning, I was viewing my personal email on Gmail and I saw the following advertisement at the top of my screen and couldn't help but click on it.

I couldn't resist clicking on it to find out about the "Fruit and Veggie Guru"! This is an example of a perfectly executed text ad. I like strawberries! I know they are red and tasty...but I am sure I can learn more, so I clicked. And look, now I am writing a blog entry about the site.

The key in these ads is creating interest and excitement -- with the limited space of about 100 characters that is no small feat.

This advertisement is part of Google's Adwords program which allows you place small text ads in the search results of Google pages, affiliates, and in this case, Google mail. This can be a very inexpensive way of advertising your goods or services because you pay by the click and you can set a budget.

Perhaps you want to spend $100 per month or $5 per day, you can tell Google your exact budget. Maybe you only want to pay 20 cents per click or maybe you can pay up to a dollar -- just tell Google what you are willing to spend and they will show your ad on related searches only.

Google Adwords may even be viable for a locally based business because you can geo-target the ads to a specific region.

This a very large subject and it would take many more blog entries to explain fully; there are whole blogs devoted to the subject. I am not sure how many farmers out there are interested in this subject.

Do you want to learn more about the Google Adwords system?