farming the web

A little work on your website each week will add up over time. This is the final installment (Part 10) of the "Farming the Web" web development course for small farms.

Many aspects of web marketing are frustrating; I think the most difficult for most people to accept is the here-but-not-heard nature of the web. Once you have a website on your own domain anyone, anywhere in the world can type in your address and read about your small farm, but still it is so difficult to rise above the noise of the Internet and be heard especially to the people that matter: your customers. But it is possible and beneficial in the long run.

Your small farm requires attention on every front from employee issues to equipment to taxes; it is difficult to invest time in a website that may not pay back for a year or more. Each photo you upload and each blog you write gives your visitors more context and keeps them coming back over the long run. As I have advocated many times before, these loyal readers will also be loyal customers because they support and understand the work it takes to bring food to their table. They will also be more flexible with price increases, crop shortages, and quality problems due to weather (for example, a freeze or hail). They will also market for you by talking to friends and electronically forwarding on interesting articles or opportunities that you provide. In short, they become part of the extended farm family and the bigger the community around your small farm the more resilient and financially successful you will be in the long run.

Of course, you may pay more attention to your website if it is making you money directly instead of just a cost and time center. By starting locally based ecommerce you are building a market "out" and "in." By this I mean you are growing your customer base through information in blogs, photos, and other content ("out"); with ecommerce you are eliminating barriers like coops, farmer's markets, and grocery stores between you and your customers ("in"). Read last week's article for more ideas on local ecommerce.

In some ways, building your website is like working with your soil. There is a lot of advice out there on how to build both soil and websites, but in the end you have to find a way to apply those concepts to your particular situation. It may take years to realize what advice was worthwhile and what was a waste of time. Over the years, with consistent effort in doing and learning you will build your soil and your web marketing to sustain your successful small farm.

As I noted above, this is the last installment in the "Farming the Web" web development course. I hope this has been helpful -- I would love to hear your ideas of web marketing for the small farm or anything else. I am always available at info@smallfarmcentral.com.

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Small Farm Central bridges the gap between technology and agriculture by providing web services to direct marketing small farms across the country. We help farms reach their marketing potential with inexpensive, professional websites that any farmer can use. Come get a free demo today.

Ecommerce is a smart way to build another revenue stream for your farm. This is Part 9 in the "Farming the Web" course in farm web design.

Ecommerce and the small farm can sound like opposing forces: ecommerce encourages sales across state and national boundaries, while small farms focus on the local market. Ecommerce can be very effective to sell goods nationally or internationally, but it takes a very robust and focused marketing plan to get your message out on the Internet. It is very difficult to retain the attention of the average web surfer, especially to the point of actually buying a product from your farm. Many farms will be best served by using ecommerce to augment existing customer relationships and to make it easier for these local customers to patronize your business.

In the past, I have discussed the softer side of web marketing most often on this blog, such as posting photos and writing blogs. Having ecommerce capabilities is a great feature because as customers connect with your farm through your postings on your website, you can guide them directly to the stores. This is how Steve Sando of Rancho Gordo is able to make a third of his sales online.

But how can ecommerce work into your current local marketing plan? I'll list a few of my ideas and things that have been tried in the past. These are just starting points: the ways you use ecommerce on your website are only limited by your ingenuity.

Restaurant Sales

Many farms already have existing restaurant customers. What about using internet sales to streamline that relationship for you and the buyer? With the Small Farm Central ecommerce system, you may create a "store" page that is only accessible by the restaurants you already have a relationship with. There is a mechanism for creating a user account in the control panel that gives each user a unique login name and password, so that they can login to view the available items and build their order at their leisure. Also note that ecommerce does not necessarily mean "credit cards." With Small Farm Central, you have the option of taking their order and invoicing through your traditional invoicing system just in case you don't want to give up that 2% to the credit card company.

I know that the personal contact with the chef or buyer at a restaurant is very important. Ecommerce does not necessarily replace the human touch unless you allow that to happen. Say you make your restaurant deliveries on Thursday afternoons: you post the items for the week on Monday morning and call the restaurants later that day. If they are ready to make the order over the phone, you can go into your control panel to manually create the order for the restaurant buyer. Otherwise, if they would rather make the order at their leisure, allow them to login to your site with the login and password you provided and make the order at their pace. This workflow gives you the best of both worlds: allowing tech-savvy buyers to use the online system and keeping the hands-on ordering approach for those customers who are not ready to go online.

Farmer's Market Preorders

For farmers who go to a farmer's market and want to get higher revenue per customer, a preorder situation may make sense. Two days before the market, post the inventory of products you will make available for preorders. Then allow customers to come online (who have been primed at the market about this idea in previous weeks) and make their order. Just before the market, print out all the orders and box up the orders before you leave or as part of your market setup.

Preorders will take time to grow, but after a number of years I wonder if farmers could forgo the market all-together and rely on these dedicated weekly customers. This is way for busy customers to streamline their farmer's market shopping and for you to build a strong relationship with each customer. Customers who can't arrive at the beginning of the market will also appreciate getting first pick of items.

CSA Shares

Sell your yearly CSA shares online. Making the CSA sale easier for your supporters will create higher retention rates. This is especially useful for email announcements about the share sale because you can simply link to the CSA share store on your site and watch the orders roll in!

CSA Weekly Extras

Many farmers offer extra items each week that are above and beyond the cost of the CSA share. Whether the items are bulk products like bushels of apples, boxes of basil, and meat products or products from other sources like coffee, dairy products, and baked goods, an online sale is ideal because you can limit the "CSA Extras" store to just CSA members using a private "store" page option (as detailed in the restaurant ordering section) and tightly control inventory. So if you only have 25 dozen eggs to sell in week, the option to buy eggs will not be available after the first 25 are sold.

6 benefits of using Small Farm Central's ecommerce solution

I will probably cover these in more detail soon, but here are few benefits to using our ecommerce solution:

• Control inventory: let the computer shut off sales of sold-off products.
• Take credit cards (or not).
• Take control of your sales: Ecommerce allows you to create your own sales. Over the long run, a well developed marketing plan will create local markets for your produce that rely on your website instead of farmer's markets, coops, restaurants, and grocery stores.
  
• Take down barriers for customers: people spend more and more time online and are hopefully looking at your active farm website from time-to-time. Make it easy for customers to support your farm financially.
• Order processing: Email invoices are automatically created for customers and your farm.
• Control your data: Download excel files containing orders, customers, and inventory for your own records

Cost and Contact

The Small Farm Central ecommerce system can make all of the above possible. There are some other options that cater to farms, such as LocalHarvest's product but that system is mainly for shipped, value-added products and does not integrate directly into your website.

The cost for Small Farm Central's solution are as follows:

Basic: one "store" page, only publicly accessible stores, and up to 10 items -- $10/month.
Advanced: up to 10 "store" pages, public and private stores (for CSA extra sales and restaurants), and up to 250 items -- $20/month

Please contact me at info@smallfarmcentral.com if you would like to test drive the product!

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Small Farm Central bridges the gap between technology and agriculture by providing web services to direct marketing small farms across the country. We help farms reach their marketing potential with inexpensive, professional websites that any farmer can use. Come get a free demo today.

Let your customers speak! This is Part 8 of the "Farming the Web" course in farm web design.

Connecting with customers is the reason that you have a farm website; the newest push on the web (in what is often referred to as Web 2.0) is to have that customer connect back with you. And take it a step further and allow customers to connect with each other and you have a self-regulating marketing machine that does not require as much effort and is more effective.

On most sites, this push and pull takes the form of comments. If you have ever visited Amazon.com, you have probably noticed the reviews that people leave for each book, which are in effect comments directed towards a particular media item. I was just reading an article that told the following story about Amazon comments:

In 1988, a British mountain climber named Joe Simpson wrote a book called Touching the Void, a harrowing account of near death in the Peruvian Andes. It got good reviews but, only a modest success, it was soon forgotten. Then, a decade later, a strange thing happened. Jon Krakauer wrote Into Thin Air, another book about a mountain-climbing tragedy, which became a publishing sensation. Suddenly Touching the Void started to sell again.
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What happened? In short, Amazon.com recommendations. The online bookseller's software noted patterns in buying behavior and suggested that readers who liked Into Thin Air would also like Touching the Void. People took the suggestion, agreed wholeheartedly, wrote rhapsodic reviews. More sales, more algorithm-fueled recommendations, and the positive feedback loop kicked in.

Maybe you can't propel a book to the best-seller list, but you can create a feedback loop that generates excitement for your business or at least allows customers to give direct feedback. Comments do take a more advanced web technology system than your most basic HTML website, but most blogging platforms offer comment extensions. Comments are one of the features I have added to Small Farm Central over the past few months.

The most popular place to utilize comments is on blog posts, so that readers can immediately reply to the content they see in the blog. Many of the larger blogs expect 100s of comments on each article they post. I don't expect that on smaller blogs like this one or your farm website, but it shows an openness and willingness to engage with each visitor that is very important on any website. We are no longer in the TV age where we are expected to hollowly except the content coming into our living rooms -- we are in the Internet age, where TV shows allow the public to vote off the cast members. A good idea for a blog post on a busy or tired week is the "question blog" where you simply pose a question with some cursory discussion yourself and let your visitors do the content generation in comments. Maybe something like "What is your favorite way to cook winter squash?" or "How often do you buy non-local produce is the wintertime?"

Your farm website can accept comments on blog posts, staff profiles, photos, and recipes. What about letting your customers add their own recipes to your farm website? Would that encourage participation and make customers feel part of the farm instead of mere consumers? Extend user-generated content to your heart's desire; maybe you want customers to upload a publicly accessible customer profile with a photo or allow users to add their own photos of your farm or the food they cook to your website.

It is a balancing act, of course. With openness comes some unwanted comments; all well-designed platforms that accept comments will have an easy way for you to destroy negative or off-topic comments. In the end, it is your website and people can't post anything they want. There is also the problem of spam infecting your website. An unprotected comment form will, over time, invite spammers to join the party. I use the Recaptcha service which differentiates humans from computers, so automated programs cannot infect Small Farm Central sites with spam comments.

Openness is good. As small farmers we should be open to customers visiting the farm and knowing how we grow the food that goes into their homes. That is one of the competitive advantages we have as small farmers and we must make use of it. Find a way to extend your openness to the web and let your customers in the door with comments and other user-generated content techniques.

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Small Farm Central bridges the gap between technology and agriculture by providing web services to direct marketing small farms across the country. We help farms reach their marketing potential with inexpensive, professional websites that any farmer can use. Come get a free demo today.

Take photos of workers doing the work of growing food.Photography is a key to your successful farm website because websites are simply boring without visuals. You do not need to be professional photographer to take photos for your website -- just record your everyday life working and living on a farm and you will be exceptional to your customers.

My recommendation: buy an inexpensive digital camera (good ones can be found for under $200 these days), learn how to take photos and download them to your computer, and then carry your camera around in your truck or wherever is convenient on a daily basis. Consistency is the key to this process because you want to capture the whole life of the farm -- then upload the photos to your website on a regular basis to encourage your customers to come back to your site often.

Take photos of your whole day, but here are some specific subjects to focus on:

• Workers working: How are potatoes dug? What does it look like for someone to use a transplanter? Who drives the tractor? These are questions that can be answered succinctly by photography and constantly reminds your customers how their food is grown.
• Cooking: Take photos of the dishes you make out of the on farm produce -- farmers can cook too!
• Plants or animals in their natural habitat: What does the food look like before it goes on a customer's plate?
• Workers having fun: What do farm workers do in their spare time? Put a smiling face on the work.
Remind your customers of seasonality by taking photos year-round.
• All seasons: What does the farm look like in the winter when there are no customers around and no crops growing. Make sure customers remember you in the wintertime by adding photos all year-round.
  

Photos are also useful for blogging because each blog entry should include at least one relevant photo. As you take photos over a whole season and then multiple seasons, you will have a large library from which to choose photos that augment the topic of your farm blog.

For the photographically disinclined: delegate the task. Find a worker or spouse who likes to take photos and give them ownership of that task including uploading recent photos to your website.

Of course, the Small Farm Central website service makes it very easy to add photos to your website for those without a lot of technical skill. See this description of the process to see how to add a photo to a Small Farm Central site via the control panel.

A rich, informative farm website deserves to be discovered. (This is Part 6 of the "Farming the Web" farm web design course)

Google has become more than a search engine -- it is the gateway to the Internet for most users. In my discussions with farmers and other clients, I realize that it is not exactly clear how Google works and how your farm gets listed on this very important search engine. First off, let me say that this is a topic that has spawned an entire industry called Search Engine Optimization (SEO), but I believe I can relate a few basics that will bring you up-to-speed quickly. For most farms, there is no reason to bog down in the minutia of SEO.

The basics:

• You do not have direct control of what google lists or what results it returns for search terms.
• Google will find you and your content over time, but it is a good idea to submit your site when you first release your site into the wild.
  
• Google's innovation, and one of the reasons that they are able to return very relevant results to searches, is that they value your site higher if other sites link to your site. (Hint: this is the key to ranking in Google.)
• If you return incoming links with outgoing links, Google will value the cross-linked pages even higher.
  

Search engine traffic is probably not an important aspect of most farm's marketing unless you are producing and shipping added-value products through an e-commerce store on your website. But it is worthwhile to take some time to get people to link back to your site. You should always list your site on Localharvest and New Farm Farm Locator and any other local directories that exist in your state or region. I should put together a "directory of directories" to help make the search for regional directories simpler.

A few more ideas for links: local Chamber of Commerce, farmer's market websites, member/customer blogs, farming associations that you belong to, and local farmer friends websites'. Just send a simple email message to the webmaster of the site to ask for a link.

The great thing about links is that they help you in Google search results, but they also get your farm visibility on related websites that people will click through and find out about your farm and what you offer. This implies perhaps the overriding principle in getting search engine traffic: do right by "human" users -- create links on relevant websites and generate solid content on your website -- and you will get right with Google.

I think for the average local farm that is not worried about capturing a national market for value-added goods, there are a few simple real-world marketing suggestions to get your website noticed by the people that matter:

• Create a "web-card" on cheap stock that advertises your farm in a few words and prominently displays your web address. Put this card in every single bag that you give out at the farmer's market or wherever your farm meets the public.
  
• Put out an email mailing list sign-up on your table the market to collect addresses and send regular emails during the season and the off season that highlights what you are doing on your website.
  
• Put your web address in the signature area of your email software so that each time your write an email your web address is sent on to the recipient.
• If you get any exposure through local media, ensure that they list your web address so people can find you.

Of course, all of the suggestions in this post rely on a well-designed website that engages your visitors and customers when they visit. This takes time and commitment that will pay off over months and years. A comfortable balance between content generation on your website and low-tech search engine optimization techniques will lead to a very effective website for your farm. If you can stick with it over the long term, you will have more informed and dedicated customers. For more information on how to engage visitors you may be interested in:

• But I grow food not blogs - starting your farm blog
• What does the customer want from your website - Farm web design part 2
• What I learned during an interview with Steve Sando of Rancho Gordo

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