Starting a farm website is essentially like starting any other website except your niche' needs to be very specific if you are selling a certain kind of livestock for your business. Which will help with SEO tremendously!
That's how buyers find you!
Starting out we did it all wrong! We started a blog.. talked about EVERYTHING we were doing and not enough about what we were selling. We were selling soap, pigs, goats, and handspun yarn all on the same site with no SEO! It was a hot mess and we got NOWHERE with our farm sells!
Now we know better and have separate websites and/or storefronts for the things we want to sell.
I love blogging where I do talk about everything on the farm (this blog!) but it's not meant really meant to sell you any livestock. It's more about informing others who wish to build their dream homestead as we have. Sure I mention meishans and or my Etsy shop for soap but it is not a focus point to sell on this site. That's what the Etsy shop does or the meishan website.
You can look at our Meishan website http://www.godsblessingfarm.com to see what I mean. It's very clear about what is going on. The SEO optimized so the Google bots can find us and we are front page bound with most all 'meishan' searches. Talking about winemaking or gardening (unless it was gardening for pigs ha!) wouldn't make a lot of sense to google bots!
Your SEO Optimized website is how people can find what your selling!
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| An optimized website has helped us sell Meishan pigs all over the country as well as get inquiries from other countries! |
What's the difference between a Blog and a website?
I know what you're thinking.. who has time to run a farm and build a website?
Building a website is not all that hard. In fact its a heck of a lot less time than Facebook, which is just about useless now for business. You build it, that's the majority of the work! All that's left to keep up with is to announce when you have things available, collect emails to notify people and that's it.
Keeping a blog takes more time because it needs fresh content often to stay alive.
In fact not keeping up with a blog and not posting fresh content can make you seem like your out of business! So if you want to have a blog about all your farm happenings that's fine. You can certainly talk about what you raise and sell but link it to your website that is solely about what you sell!
I've built 10 websites/blogs over the last 10 years. My husband has build 4. Between the 2 of us, we run a total of 4 websites or blogs with several more in the works. Many were built wrong in the beginning and I can tell a huge difference in traffic with the way we build the sites now. Here are my most favorite resources for learning to build a blog/website the right way, right from the beginning.
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| A website helped me sell my natural skin care products! |
Start Your farm Website
1. First up you need a domain and hosting for that domain.
We've used free platforms like blogger, and we've used paid platforms. Both have their pros and cons. The free platforms are very limited and do not look professional unless you buy your domain. I love Blogspot because it's so easy to work on. I also see the value in platforms like WordPress
Our business sites are all WordPress and hosted by site ground.
Paid, yet inexpensive platforms, have a huge advantage of being easier to optimize for SEO so if your #1 purpose is to get seen and sell I'd recommend WordPress.
Wordpress can be free or paid but hosting has a cost per month. Different hosting has different prices.
2. Now, a hosting service. Many highly recommend Blue Host which we have used. Right now we are using Site Ground and are very happy with it! Setting up is easy. They will walk you right through.
3. Decide if you want a blog or a website. You can have both on one domain! As stated before it may be harmful to your SEO if you are really trying to zone in on a certain breed you are selling if you want to blog about random farm things.
Also if you decide to put ads on your website for extra money that you are trying to sell specific livestock or products from this may be a huge turn off!
Homesteading blog fans are more forgiving of ads! They are just looking for random info most of the time about different homesteading ventures.
It gets a little overwhelming if you're trying to find info on buying livestock with ads in your face! Also, why would you want an ad to catch their eye and take them away from your site? You want them there reading the info on your stock and why they should buy from you! Not wandering off to look at a cooler ad!
4. Decide on a Mail service so you can collect emails. Collecting emails can put you in touch with all those people who want to buy your farm product or livestock.
If you have a homesteading life blog you may also want to collect emails if you plan to have ebooks about homesteading or other in general homesteading products you'd like to offer. Like I do here!
We have used mail chimp and mailer lite. I like mailer lite, my husband likes mail chimp!
Here is a course that got my husband started on mail chimp Mail Chip Course
5. Picking a theme and learning to customize a site can be overwhelming. Blogspot is super easy! Wordpress may be confusing at first but whatever theme you pick check to see if there are videos to help you understand how to customize that particular theme. That's was really helpful to me when I picked a theme that was more complex than I was used to.
Simple is a good thing when you are selling specific products though. Again don't take attention away from what you are trying to sell! Wordpress Guide
Don't get Overwhelmed!
Take it slow! All this can be overwhelming but it will help your business if you would like to sell products or livestock from your homestead!
We have several other posts on homestead business if you'd like to check them out!
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