Build a Blog, and Build Your Customer Base

By Jane Eckert

Marketing is sometimes a little hard to define.  It’s easy to know when to put up the billboards and to plaster the media with the announcement of your “Fabulous Fall Festival.”  But if you remember the Eckert Marketing Pie™, you know that an important part of marketing is also the ongoing building of customer relations.  So this month, we are going to talk about building customer relations using blogs on the Internet.

I’ve talked frequently in this column about the Internet.  It gives you an entrance to people’s homes and offices 24 hours a day, seven days a week—and more people have online access than ever before.  They use the Internet to choose their destinations, plan their schedules, and to obtain your prices, hours and directions.  Most of us have “got that” now and have a web site—or, if you don’t have one, you are surely intending to get around to it. (Surely you are?!)

But now, there’s a new world coming around the pike—practically a new way of using the Internet.  I’ve heard it referred to as Web 2.0, or the other common term is “Social Media.”  This term does, in a way, explain what’s going on.  People are using the Internet to be more “social.”  I know you’ve seen the names in the media:  Facebook, MySpace, Plato, Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn. They are chatting it up, sharing thoughts, sharing photos, and even sharing videos.  Most are using these tools to entice you to come read their blog.

Don’t stop reading now.  If you’re a farmer, you just thought out loud, “Whose got time for all that stuff?”  Yeah, I know.  But a lot of businesses used to say the same thing, until they learned that social networking and blogging now account for nearly 10% of all time spent on the Internet (Nielsen Online).   That’s a significant audience and one worth your time.  So let’s talk about the entry point to social media.  It’s called a “blog.”

Don’t Let a Blog Stump You

The word “blog” is a contraction of the term, “weblog”, and the original blogs resembled a journal available to the public, documenting someone’s travels or personal thoughts and perspectives.  The blog is a web site or web page that is usually maintained by one individual, offering regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, general information or other material such as photo’s or video. 

So if you did a blog, “who would read it?” you ask. Our customers today are becoming increasing more curious about our farms, how the food is grown, our farming practices and our families.   People are actually interested in learning how you keep the pond from leaking, how you go about planting 10 acres one plant at a time, and “what do you do with all that manure?”

Imagine your audience to be a small group of friends, some of them from the city, just chatting about how you keep a farm going, what you’re doing this week, and what your dreams are for tomorrow.  Readers will love it.  Especially if you throw in a few tips about how to prune plants, grow vegetables, or store that bushel of apples they bought last week.

The content of the blog is not quite the same as what you might put in an electronic newsletter.  An e-newsletter is typically a marketing piece to drive traffic to your business for a specific product or weekend event.  A blog, to the contrary, is about you. It’s about farm life, and “your approach to farming.”  It is your opportunity to tell and show people what it takes to be a farmer.  A blog is written to share yourself and your information with an interested listener.

Starting Your Blog
There are several ways you can start a blog, but I must admit that I have a bias against the easiest methods:  The easiest thing you can do is to search the Internet for something like “start a blog”, and you’ll find a few hundred companies ready to help you (Blogger, Blogspot, and Wordpress.com, to name a few).  Most will host your blog for free, and all you need to do is register your name and perhaps the categories that you might be blogging about, such as agriculture, gardening, or orchards.  These blog sites have a quick tutorial to guide you through the setup, and soon you’ll be ready to write down your thoughts, preview the blog to see that looks okay, and then post it on the Internet. You’ll have a blog address in no time—something like www.blogger.com/YourFarmName.

There are some problems with this approach though, to my way of thinking, and most of them have to do why you are blogging in the first place.  First and foremost, you are wanting to build more traffic to the farm.  And to do that, you want to build more traffic to your web site, where people can learn about the fun and all the different products and activities you have to offer them. The blog set up approach above doesn’t really do that.  Why not?

Search engines count traffic (number of people looking at a web page), they count links to your web site, and they analyze the content on your web site.  Based on these and other factors, the search engines decide which farm or business goes at the top of the list for a particular keyword search.  That’s one of the main reasons a farm would bother with doing a blog—to move up on the search engine rankings.

So here’s the point:  In the above configuration, you are using a blog host, not your own web site to host the blog.  This means, simply, that the web traffic to your blog page is credited to the blog host (i.e. blogger.com), and not to your web site.

The alternative
The alternative is to install your blog on your own web site.  For example, there is also a web site called Wordpress.org (this is .org, the other was .com). At Wordpress.org, you learn that you or your webmaster can download the very same software for your blog, free of charge, to your own server.  The difference is that now, you become the web host for the blog.   Your blog name now is going to be on your web site, something like www.yourfarmname.com/blog.  Now, all that web traffic, all those links, and all those bonus points for keywords found by the search engines—all of that is now credited to your web site.  You have a much better chance of improving your search engine rankings.

There are consideration, to be sure, in setting up the new blog.  You and your webmaster have the opportunity to customize the look of the blog so it continues the brand that you’ve created on the rest of your web site.  And you also have to provide your own tech support, manually update the software, and arrange to regularly backup your files.  For most webmasters, this shouldn’t pose a significant problem.

To read more about the pros and cons of hosting your own blog versus using a hosting company, I suggest you start with http://support.wordpress.com/com-vs-org/, a straight forward discussion presented by the programmers themselves.  If you are just starting to think about adding a blog, give your webmaster a call and see what she or he recommends.

Frankly, six months ago, I would not have strongly recommend blogs for my agriculture friends unless they just felt the need to chat.  But times continue to change, and now that the search engines, like Google and Yahoo like the blogs, so do I. 

For more ideas on marketing on the Internet, please visit my blog at http://www.eckertagrimarketing.com/blog.

Jane Eckert, a national speaker, author and agritourism expert, is principal of Eckert AgriMarketing (www.eckertagrimarketing.com), a firm that helps farmers sell products directly to consumers and develop their operations into tourist destinations. Jane can be reached by phone 314-862-6288 or at jane@eckertagrimarketing.com