9 Affordable Things That Are Essential To Start A Backyard Farm Business Website That Makes Money
You are thinking about setting up a Backyard farm business website but you’re not sure what’s involved and if it’s worth the effort.
I hear ya. A website that looks professional (while it doesn’t have to break the bank) isn’t free and you know it’s going to take you some time to set up if you do it yourself.
You’ve got questions like:
- What do you really need to get started?
- Do you have to have loads of content before you hit publish?
- What tools do you need?
- What should you put where on your website?
- What are the benefits of having a website?
- How long should it take to see results?
All this and more coming up!
This post is all about showing you the benefits of having a website Plus the key components you need to make a website happen.
Country Lifestyle Action Planner
Create your step-by-step plan to build the country lifestyle you’ve dreamed of that is right for you!
What Is a Business Website
A farm business website is the home base of your farm business. It’s where people can find you on google or any other search engine. It is also how you can algorithm-proof your business so that you are not relying on platforms you don’t own to get your business seen.
I will talk about this more later but you want to really think about what the main action you want people to do with your business. If you are selling beef. Then your cattle and meat cuts need to be front and center of every main page on your site.
The Website Advantages And Disadvantages
Website Pros
- It gives you authority in your customer’s eyes.
- You will have a distraction-free space to talk to your customers.
- You own the space so you are not relying on someone else platform ie Facebook or IG to get seen.
- You can build an email list which is another way to not build your business on someone else’s land.
- It gives you other ways to create income streams in your business like ads and affiliate income.
Website Cons
- You do need to be open to learning tech. Your brain might even hurt for a few months while figuring it out. But I promise if a dyslexic teen can figure it out you can to.
- A good website will cost a minimum $50 a year for cheap website hosting (Hosting is where your site lives online) But better hosting will be about $130 – $150 a year. If you want to be found in search and your website is not just an afterthought then I HIGHLY recommend you get better hosting. – Check out my hosting service here!
- It takes time to get organic search traffic. (6 months at minimum for an established website to get search traffic to a web page.) It could take a new site over a year.
What You Need To Know Before YOu set Your Farm Business Website Up
Before you jump into setting your site up, there is some thought work that needs to happen. Let’s get into each aspect of those for your backyard farm website.
#1 – The Key Pages On Your Site
- Home page
- Contact page
- A page for what it is you raise or sell (sales page style)
- A blog page – This is extremely helpful to get google to know what your site is about. It is also a great way to show you know what you are talking about and help your customers learn to trust you.
#2 – Will you have A blog?
First I don’t want you to think of a blog as something like you have to post on it every single week if you hate writing. A blog is simply extra pages on your website that tell google you are publishing content in order to help other people learn about what you do. This also helps google see you as an authority and that you know what you are talking about.
I didn’t have a blog for a while but I did focus on getting the pages on my site to rank for the things I trying to sell on that page.
Even stores have a blog if you look for it. Sure it’s not in plain view but there is value in getting people to find you in search.
On top of that think about what you are going to sell or raise. How many people do you know have nice-looking websites but also create content that helps potential customers? Not many.
Most of the time is the main sight about what they do or offer and that’s it.
Structure Of Your Blog or “Helpful Information” On Your Site
You need your “through line” or main overarching theme to be something you can talk about and never get tired of it.
I want you to write out all the topics you would like to or could write about.
Then chose the top 3 that you like the most and is something you love to talk about. Something that you catch yourself going on and on about if you get asked a question about the topic.
Sometimes there are things that won’t make sense for you to talk about.
If you don’t like something then it does not make sense to write about it. As for me, I don’t care much for cooking. I will because I don’t want to eat trashy food. But I don’t love cooking.
So how are we going to tie all of your ideas together? There are a few key things that will do this for you.
The top three-five topic ideas you came up with will be your post categories or “pillar content categories”. Of those three topics come up with three to five post ideas that fit under each of those categories. You will end up with subcategories as well.
For
- Main dishes
- Desserts
- Sides
- Drinks
Think of your whole blog as a bridge. Your post categories are the pillars of the bridge and the subcategories are the bricks.
Up next is your “throughline” or the pathway you walk on. ( I talk about that in the next section.)
#3 – Write Your First 5 Pieces Of Content To Start A Blog
Before you launch and tell people that your site is up and running I want you to have a minimum of 5 posts published for people to read. You do not want to get people excited and they only find one post. This will leave them disappointed and probably not come back for more.
Pro Tip
#4 – Business Value Proposition – (Your whole point of existence)
Now let’s make your pathway. Your tagline is a sentence that is (hopefully) 10 words or less. And is often displayed at the top of your website header under your blog name.
Use this template to help you figure out your brand value proposition.
But it is also your guide for everything you do. It helps you create products, freebies, social content, blog posts, and all of your marketing materials.
Looking at these topics you will start with what is the over-arching theme that seems to surface? How could you sum up what people will find on your blog in one relatively
This will take time to develop. And as you start to build an audience you might find that you didn’t have it quite right and that’s ok to change your branding or mission statement. Keep tweaking and making it more clear as you go.
Just don’t completely change businesses every other month.
#5 – Branding
A brand is more than colors and fonts.
But the brand is how your person feels when they think of you and your business.
Your colors, fonts, and words you use on your site are what help you get that feeling and vibe across.
Think of the person you are writing to. What attracts them? What makes them feel comfortable and want to stick around? Use that information when you start your blog online.
This is going to be something that changes with time as you find your way in business and your skills grow. Use what you can for free in Canva and grow from there as you learn. Some of the best ways you can get ideas of brand styles are to go to Etsy and type in brand kits to see what professionals put together.
If you see a brand kit you like then import it into Canva and edit it to fit your brand. Otherwise, you can do your best to pull in your favorites into one brand for yourself.
Here is a great bundle with a ton of kit options. See it on Etsy.
Here is a more western style brand kit that would be great for a classy small farm brand. – See On Etsy
If you want to see all of the options available to you check out these branding kits on the main page.
#6 – Themes To Start Your Blog
You can start with a free theme and you will be perfectly fine but you are EXTREMELY limited when it comes to making the theme look the way you want it to.
When you are looking for a theme it might be tempting to go with an elaborate theme that looks different than everything else you see out there. The problem is people don’t want to have to think about what to do on your site. Don’t have confusing navigation.
I am a sucker for a beautiful unique site but the honest truth is it won’t convert the way you want it to.
If you are looking for something a little more fancy, clean, and beautiful these from Restored316 are amazing, They are easy to set up and they give step-by-step instructions on how to make your blog look just like the theme demo once you make the purchase. They also have a very supportive Facebook group where you can ask any questions if you have trouble and you get answers pretty quickly.
As of 2022, I am using their farmhouse theme that uses the Kadence Framework which is free to use.
Full confession. I changed the themes A LOT in the beginning and tried to get my site looking amazing in the beginning and the truth is that’s not going to get people to find you. Getting the word out and creating content to promote yourself is what will do that.
#7 – Know What People Are Searching For
You have to know what people are searching for and HOW they are searching for it.
If you word things differently than your ideal customer then that’s not going to help you get found.
My favorite tool to use is Keywords Everywhere. It is a chrome extension so you can research what is showing up on the first page of Google WHILE getting the data you need.
When you are first getting started you have literally no domain authority. Meaning you haven’t built up trust in googles eyes. So you need to find keywords that have LOW competition but a decent number of searches per month.
#8 – Start Getting Traffic To Your Farm Business Website With Social Media
This is going to be the only way you send people to your site for quite a while. It took me nearly a year before I was getting any search traffic from Google.
If you don’t mind social I want you to create buzz around your business that is coming before you even have your site up. Get people excited.
You need to share things like what is coming. How the creation process is going. Ask them questions about what they wish other businesses would do. OR what other businesses do that they love.
This will give you content ideas, and ways to make your business stand out, and you will have an audience before your site is even live.
There are many options for social platforms so here are some things I want you to consider before you create your account
- What platform do you like most?
- Is your ideal reader on that platform or is it starting to die out?
- What is the goal of that platform? Is it to get people to watch videos or static posts? (NEWSFLASH: None of them want to send you traffic.)
If I had to pick Pinterest is great for the introverted, and Facebook is second best for building a business on the platform. IG is so temperamental it’s hard to know what they want.
#9 – Create an Email List So You Can Reach Your Ideal Customer Off Your Site
This might be disheartening but a huge percentage of your site readers won’t come back to your site after a few weeks. It’s just not in our nature anymore. We tend to check in with the people we follow on social media instead of websites anymore.
But email has been shown to give a 38 – 1 return on your investment. If you do it right you will have direct access to your potential customers.
You need to be able to catch your site visitor and keep them engaged with your brand and business. Email is the best and most affordable way to do that if you find a tool that does its job well and doesn’t charge an arm and a leg on top of that. It’s also one you have a lot more control over than social media.
There are several options out there but Birdsend is a great affordable option that is really focused on getting to the inbox, not just deliverability. Their plans are $9 a month for 1k subscribers and only $14 for up to 2,500k which is more than half the price of places like convert kit. Check out Birdsend here. You will get an extra 500 email subscribers added to your account if you use this link.
Setting up a farm business website takes time and effort. You might feel like you are not getting anywhere but stick with it and keep your main objectives in mind. Don’t lose track of your business goals and follow a promise of a major bullet.
If you need help with something tech-related try searching google or youtube first. there is likely an answer for anything you are struggling with. Put your detective cap on and take it one step at a time.