AdAgrA 2015: Restoring the Waste Places

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AdAgrA: Adventist Agriculture Association

Short Course: Online Marketing: Strategies and Techniques

David Sharpe

Online Marketing: Strategies and Techniques- Part 1

Father in heaven, we want to thank you so much for the privilege that we have of coming out here to this wonderful campground and learning more about agriculture and how to live closer to the plan that you originally had in mind for us.

Fathers, we look today at our online marketing course.

We ask that you be with us, guide and direct us, and help us to keep you in mind in everything we do.

Just in case you wanted to be sure, you're in the online marketing class and it's scheduled to last 7 hours and we are going to cover a lot.

You are not by any stretch of the imagination going to be an expert when you leave.

We're barely going to scratch the surface.

I'll give you an overview here in just a minute.

However, I will email my slides and notes with resources and links to you.

And maybe at 1 of the breaks here I'll get a page, piece of paper together and you can write down your email address.

For those of you who are listening on the recording, the audio verse recording, if you would email me at davids at Center for Online Evangelism dot org, davids as in sharp, at Center for Online Evangelism dot org, and I'll be happy to email the the notes and slides to you as well.

This is the spot where I get to brag about myself a little bit.

And really, this is not that I'm such a great person as much as it is I've outlasted most of the people around me.

So I've had the opportunity to learn an awful lot.

All right, I've been in marketing since the early 1990s.

I started working with a direct mail manufacturing firm.

We sold security products all over the world and I was involved in marketing and moved into the copywriting, writing the marketing materials for the company and for the catalog.

In 1995, I quit that job and started my own web development company.

This was about the time that Netscape, for those of you that have been around, if you remember Netscape, it was a, for those of you that weren't even born then, that was a, that was 1 of the early browsers.

So, this is what started the World Wide Web.

The World Wide Web part of the internet got started right about then and I was really excited about web pages, websites.

The problem is, is nobody else even knew what it was.

So my first venture in online marketing and being in business for myself was an absolute failure because I got sick and tired of trying to convince people why you needed a website.

So it was kind of an interesting experience, but I hung in there and was able to go into copywriting.

In case you're not familiar with that term, it does not mean the legal copyright, you know, like copywriting books and so on.

It's writing, marketing, copy, the text for marketing materials, sales letters, web pages and so on.

I got back into website development And ended up getting involved with a lot of WordPress websites, and we'll be talking about WordPress here in a minute, in case it's not familiar.

And I've gotten into email marketing, which is 1 of the most effective forms of marketing online.

And I've owned and operated several businesses in between all of this, some manufacturing, information publishing and other online marketing services.

Currently I'm a licensed HMA business consultant that's hidden marketing assets.

I don't do that a whole lot anymore because my other work takes full time, but it just means that I'm capable of coming in and looking at a business and diagnosing things that need to be fixed, added, changed, and other little things to do to improve the profitability, the bottom line for the business.

I'm a certified search engine optimization copywriter, which means that I have learned and demonstrated some level of competency of the intersection between search engine optimization and copywriting.

And again, some of these terms will go into more depth here in a little bit.

I'm the technical director for the Center for Online Evangelism.

We are an independent ministry that helps Adventist churches and schools and ministries with their online presence.

And we have a variety of services ranging from helping them get better positioning in the search engines, to having more effective websites that engage with their visitors.

You ought to know that I do have a few gardening interests.

I grew up on a 5 acre micro farm in Washington State.

We had 40 fruit trees, about an acre in vegetables, and then about a thousand feet of raspberries.

And I can tell you that by the time I graduated from Academy, I hated raspberries with a passion.

I'm a certified Master Gardener, although the certification has lapsed.

I worked in the extension office in a county in Washington State as their master gardener coordinator and the master gardener, master composter program coordinator.

I've had permaculture training and I've been involved in several school gardening programs, primarily elementary schools.

At 1 time I was a publisher for the Microfarm Journal, it was an online publication and I'm going to be reviving that here in the next 6 months or so because I see a lot of people interested looking online for information about small-scale farming.

In fact, according to the National Gardening Association, the vast majority of people who are involved in gardening in the US are in suburbs.

So they're dealing with very small scale gardens, they can fit in their backyard.

And so they're looking for ways that they can improve their, The term now is nutritional independence.

And so they're looking for ways that they can grow their own food even in the suburbs.

And my interests, of course, school gardening, experimental gardening.

I like to learn as much as I can about the intensive yield, high yield methods and forest gardening.

So let me get a sense so that I know what to, how to tweak what I'm going to tell you today.

What type of operations do we have here in the room, people representing here in the room?

Just pop up and tell me how big is, do you have a farm?

Let me know so I know how to tweak what we're talking about.

Richard is, I'll get you his contact information, but Richard is working on, we're part of a kind of a council that he's put together for lifestyle centers and to help lifestyle centers become an outpost for a local community and he has some lifestyle programming available and I believe Darren Greenfield is working with him on some of the agriculture aspects.

We're bringing in the online marketing aspects so that the lifestyle centers that become, that are participating can have a little more effective marketing in the communities they're targeting.

And I think, I'll have to double check, but I think he's at Outpostministry.net, I think.

OCI is part of the Council Coalition, whatever the group, it's kind of a loose-knit group right now, but they are involved Resources are always helpful whether you actually need to use them or not.

You're doing wholesale, you're doing wholesale.

Let's see, what other type of operation would we be?

Anything that's not been covered, I guess I should ask.

He's trying to sell, you know, can't eat everything, you can't agree.

And you've actually got something there and we'll touch on it a little bit later.

You've got the opportunity to do what's called reality blogging, where you can have a website that reflects what you're doing as you're bringing your homestead from the ground up.

People love that stuff, and there are sites of this type that are bringing in a healthy, very healthy income when it's done right.

Just by journaling and documenting and talking about what you're doing and how your project's coming, the ups and the downs because people like to know that you're not perfect for some reason.

It's 1 of the terms, I'm not sure what you would find out there if you are searching for it.

But a little bit later on I've got a resource that you'll want, 2 resources that you'll definitely want to look at that will give you some good information.

Alright, who has websites and what kind of results are you getting from them?

Maybe I should say Who has a website for their operation?

Online Marketing: Strategies and Techniques- Part 2

Completed the key marketing platform, but there are still some questions that I wanted to add in that you should be asking and have the answers to before you actually start building the website.

These are decisions that you, most of these if I recall, are decisions that you're going to make, you should only have to make them 1 time.

Not really something that you're going to be referring back to a lot.

If you don't know who your market is, you're not going to reach anybody.

What's, And another way of putting that is what's the purpose for the site?

Do you want to sell market and information product?

Do you want to market webinars and video conferencing or coaching or you know what is your site about?

You need to be very clear about it and not overload it with goals, with purposes.

There's no rule in the world that says you have to have 1 website.

So, plus another 60 domain names sitting there waiting for some day projects.

You do not have to restrict yourself to 1 website, but each website should have a very clearly defined purpose.

Do you want it to attract people to come to your location?

Are you selling to restaurants and stores and health food stores?

Because if you are selling your subscription gardening services, you got somebody that wants 2 bags of groceries every week, you're writing differently to them than you are if you are selling to a restaurant.

The restaurant guy might not even have time to read a website from, if in, you know, the ones that I've seen over the years, they're so busy that maybe they don't read the website, but you still need to have information targeted to the restaurant owner or the store owner.

The B2B sales cycle is so different than it is for consumers.

And of course, I mentioned there's different things you can do.

You can publish and sell information products.

You can build an audience and provide coaching and consulting and lifestyle classes and that type of thing.

E-commerce, you'll run across this term ever so often, e-commerce is selling directly on the website where somebody places an order, pays for it, provides the shipping information or you tell them when to come pick it up and so on.

E-commerce is probably beyond the scope of what most of you are going to want to deal with, so I'm not going to really spend any time on it.

If Any of you are interested in it, check with me during 1 of the breaks or afterwards and I can point you to some resources.

It's complicated and expensive to do well.

And I touched on this a little earlier, do you want your site to be content oriented that's educating and informing people?

Do you want it to be set up as the authority, the local authority?

This is something that when I'm writing a webpage, writing a sales letter, writing a brochure, when I'm doing any kind of marketing information, this is 1 of the things that I have to know.

What is the thing that you most want to happen when somebody reads this this web page, hits this website, reads this brochure, what's the most desired action?

Because without that I can't write effectively.

There's no focus, there's no target to try to hit.

So know what that most desired action is for the entire website, and you may have several.

For the website, it may not be just 1 most desired action.

There may be 15 or 20 and those you'd want to split off into separate pages, but overall, know what's that most desired action.

Again, back to the USP, what makes you different?

Don't be shy about looking at your competition and look at their websites, because I can guarantee you that your market is looking at their websites.

And if you look at your competitors' websites, you'll see places that they aren't doing so good.

Please don't run and tell them that they're not doing so good.

Just fill in the gap yourself because, you know, this is what you're looking for is, what are they not doing so good?

Maybe they're doing really good with video marketing.

Maybe you want to try video marketing, but maybe you look at it and say, you know what, they're doing such a good job that anything I would do would make me look second rate instead, so I'm gonna do something else.

Plus, given what you know, what you will know by the time we're done with with all of this.

And again, you're not going to be an expert, but you will have enough of an overview that you're going to be able to look at, you're going to look at a website and you're going to say, aha, that's what he was talking about.

Oh, looky there, they're not doing that, I can do this.

And the more you expose yourself to it, the more you're going to see.

And pretty soon you're going to look at a, you're going to end up looking at a website and you're going to think, doesn't anybody in the world know how to do this except me?

Because you have an advantage, even though I'm talking about how time consuming it is and it can be expensive and so on, but you are very fortunate that a great number of your competitors don't have a clue.

You're going to walk out today knowing 10 times more than most of them.

And so it gives you an advantage, especially in the local marketing space, where you're trying to reach a local area.

You're going to be able to say, this is what I can do to stand out.

And if you only do 10% of what I'm talking about today to your website, you will stand out in your marketplace.

Why should someone come to you rather than to someone else?

1 option that we've, I've talked about briefly was content marketing that positions you as the expert, as the authority.

And you might think, well, you know, there's only so much that I can write about artichokes.

There's a concept that I don't have a slide for but you need to know about, it's called curated content.

Curated content, and this works really well for blogs.

Okay, see this is why I said make sure you ask.

There are people out there who have written tons of information.

On your blog, you can put a link to that information with a few comments of your own.

And now you have curated content on your blog.

Yes, some of them will go to that other website.

So you might not want to link to somebody who's in your physical market space.

But somebody that's on the other side of the country, if you're selling, if you have a CSA, or you're selling artichokes to the local restaurants, they're not going to go to somebody that's on the opposite coast.

So, and it also, you can include information from scholarly journals, nutritional analysis, you know, all kinds of interesting little things that you can take from other websites, link back to it so that they're getting credit for it.

This is 1 way to have regular fresh content.

It's not going to help you with your position in the search engines that much because it's from somebody else's website.

And you are just linking back to it with your comments.

But it helps with engaging your visitors.

They're gonna wanna come back and say, oh, what did Dave read about this week?

Last week was so interesting, I wonder what he's got this week.

Or, you know, if you want to do some every day.

This works really well for people who have a local market.

So what kind of instructional content might you have?

Online Marketing: Strategies and Techniques- Part 3

You're doing the research to identify those long tail keywords.

You create pages that are designed to attract traffic based on those keywords.

Then on that page that you're creating, you're going to have some type of action that will move people in further into your website and convert them into customers.

And depending on what you do, and we'll talk a little bit about landing pages later on and probably be this afternoon before we get to it, but the landing pages will be stripped of all navigational elements where they only have 1 choice, to do the action you've asked them to do or to leave.

So these pages are not just sitting there doing nothing.

There's a specific strategy behind having them.

So that, because it doesn't do any good if somebody just comes and reads the page and goes away.

And all these pages are part of this space that you're talking about.

So the reason for the ominous music thing there was keyword research is when you are doing it professionally, It's time consuming.

I have a person on our staff that this is all she does, is keyword research.

And she spends 20 hours a week doing keyword research and she's able to manage about 1 client per week for me.

And we're talking about churches and school clients.

So you would think that it's short and easy to do for something like a school.

But when we do the research, we're researching what's happening in your local area.

We're looking for local geographical nicknames for areas.

There's a place where we had the little micro farm in Washington, little town in Idaho across the river, and everybody just called it orchards.

There were a lot of orchards up in there but that's where what everybody called it.

It's not on the map or of course it may be by now that was 30 years ago but it was it was just orchards.

So if I were doing keyword research for something in that area, I would definitely include the term orchards in as a geographic term.

Keywords and that's what she's been doing primarily keywords but because this AdWords planning tool is what she's been using primarily, although I'm about to pick up a tool for her called spyfu.com.

And we're going to pick that up just because I get too much work coming in and I can't afford for her to spend 20 hours on every client when they're coming in so quickly.

If you want to see, here's another 1 that if you want to see what your competitors are doing, you know you can look at your competitors and figure out what keywords their strategy is built around.

And they, with that tool, I don't think they have a free option on that 1, but it's got a 30-day free trial, I believe.

But you can actually look at your competitors' websites and track their online marketing strategy.

And the benefit to you to doing that is you can see if there's any gaps.

So, you know, there's and there's all kinds of tools out there, but those are the, those are the top ones.

Unfortunately, they're not necessarily cheap either, but which is why Kim was spending so many hours using the keyword planning tool because you go back and you they have the section for getting the trends and numbers, but then you have to go back and look for more ideas.

And you put in a bunch of keywords and look for ideas.

And then you get those ideas and you put them into the box again and get even more ideas.

And so pretty soon you can have a hundred pages of keyword ideas that you're using to build out your website planning strategy.

Okay, let's move off of this 1 and get into actual websites.

By now, you should have your strategy figured out and you should be about ready to build your website.

The first thing you're going to need to do is you're going to need to choose a domain name.

Now, there are some considerations to choosing your domain name.

The first consideration is that it's really hard to get the domain name you want because chances are somebody else has already got it.

So it takes creativity and time to do this.

If you have designed your, developed your strategy already, you have your marketing strategy all figured out, you have your brand figured out, if you have a name for your farm that's probably your best bet.

Of course, there are 500 hillsidefarms.com, hillside farms in the US.

You're going to have to find something else to add to the domain name somehow.

And I would suggest that you don't call it hillsidefarms123.com.

You know like you see so often with email addresses.

You've got something like, I think it's still 64 characters.

I wouldn't unless it was, if I were trying to position myself as the expert, I might use my name.

Let's say if I'm, for a while I mentioned, earlier I mentioned that I was a business consultant, that I wasn't doing it much anymore, but when I was active with it, I used my personal website, my domain name, David L.

There's, I don't know, there's hundreds of David Sharps out there and half of them are in copywriting or marketing of some kind so it's it's really a weird thing I don't know what it is but but I used David L Sharp dot-com.

If I were selling artichokes I wouldn't do that because my name doesn't have anything to do with artichokes.

Unless I have developed my own hybrid called the David L.

Sharp hybrid artichoke, then I might do it.

But this is where it takes a lot of creativity, a lot of thinking, a lot of brainstorming.

You may have to ask some other folks to get involved with helping you come up with names.

If you already have a name for your farm, start with that and maybe add a geographical term to it.

So maybe it's Hillside Farms, California.

It's going to be tricky, And I wish that there was a way to tell you how to make it simple, but it's not.

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