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Agriculture

Online Marketing

David Sharpe

Laying the Foundation

As you can see from the screen, this is the online marketing class.

I have to tell you that the structure is going to be a little bit different from what you saw on the door as you walked in.

We're dealing with folks from a wide variety of experience levels, I'm sure.

So I'm going to try to adapt to what you guys feel like you need to know.

What kind of agriculture operations do we have represented here?

Where you're selling to restaurants or stores?

Orchards Okay, what am I missing people that are just curious?

Okay, okay, so retail retail business Okay Okay All right Good enough.

I have 4 acres where I raise dairy milk every night and I have a little food bank and help other people, but I'm a writer and I do online writing and math.

All right, so we've got some agriculture, some retail business, and a writer.

I'm here this week for evidence today looking for future stories from me.

But I also write books and stories and articles.

You will fit right in this because things have changed in the last year and content is now 1 of the most important things that can happen on a website, so we'll be talking a lot about that today.

Who's planning on starting a website in the near future?

Does anybody have a website that they would be interested in volunteering for an audit later this afternoon?

You don't have to answer right now, but think about it.

If we have time, I want to pull up the website live here and go through it from not just a technical perspective, but from the marketing perspective, and it'll be kind of like the audit that I do for prospective clients all the time.

So, we know who you guys are, And maybe my clicker will work here.

This is a little bit like, I would say, more like a freewheeling sabbath school lesson than a lecture.

I could stand up here and lecture, but you would be experiencing death by PowerPoint very quickly because this is not something that's easy to make lively and exciting.

I mean I could spend 40 hours going through and picking out slides that would have all bright colors and flashy lights and everything, but you're going to learn more by asking questions.

If I am talking, if I'm using vocabulary that you don't know what I'm saying, raise your hand, interrupt.

The most important thing is I want you guys to understand, have a good clear overview of the entire online marketing process and hopefully we can dive into some of the areas that you're most specifically interested in.

I've been in marketing since the early 1990s, 1 form or another.

I've been in online marketing since 1995.

I quit my job and started a web hosting, web design business and promptly went broke.

Because in 1995, about 2 people out of every hundred knew what a website was.

They didn't know how it applied to having a business or why their business.

I had more people tell me, I don't need that website thing.

It's not ever going to, you know, that's just a thing.

You know, everybody always said that the fax machine was going to be the big thing and nothing happened and this web thing is going to be just like it.

I just happen to be 25 years or so ahead of the curve.

Most of my formal training is as a copywriter, and I have done a lot of work in direct response copywriting.

As I kind of got jaded on the persuasion and some of the hype that goes along with the direct mail, I wrote the stuff that you guys get in the mail and you just toss in the trash can.

Except that the clients that I worked for were actually a little better targeted than that.

They sent you something that you actually wanted, but I wrote sales letters and that type of thing.

I've been involved in most forms of website development except the most absolutely technical coding stuff that goes on underneath the hood.

I do a little bit of that, but I try to stay as far away from that as possible and most people are quite happy that I stay away because that's, if I have a weak spot, it's that under the hood tinkering.

Email marketing, Again, that's some things that I've been involved with.

I've owned and operated a number of businesses from manufacturing, information publishing, and online marketing services.

So, as we talk about woodworking businesses or writing business, these other things.

I have some background that I can speak to in those areas.

Currently I'm the technical director for the Center for Online Evangelism, and although I'm not representing them here today, I figured maybe you'd like to know that I'm not just here making this stuff up.

This is something that I have to do all the time.

I have a team of 7 people that are full-time with us that I lead.

In fact, I've got a guy in the Philippines that contracts.

He's not 1 of my full-timers, but we do a virtual team, so we're spread out all over the country and around the world, and what we do is the stuff that we're going to talk about today.

My specialty now is in strategic planning and content marketing, which we'll get into in much greater detail later.

Gardening, of course this is an agriculture conference, so you might want to know just a little bit about my gardening background.

We had 40 fruit trees, about an acre in garden, 9 rows of raspberries and each row was 110 feet long and I knew every inch of them and hated them.

Plus another 110-foot row of blackberries.

And so this was what put me through boarding academy, working on this little micro farm, selling our produce.

I have been a master gardener in Washington State and worked in the county extension office.

I was the coordinator for their master gardener program and master composting programs.

I've been involved in several school gardens, either continuing or setting up greenhouse operations.

And of course, you might guess from that that I have an interest in school gardening.

I also enjoy Experimental gardening, looking for different techniques for intensive gardening and high yield and so on.

And forest gardening, because I live in a little hollow in Tennessee with woods around us.

I've developed an interest in the forest gardening, forest farming, some people call it woodlands homesteading.

So it's dealing with native plants, native trees, tree crops, mushrooms, and so on.

My wife is a former elementary school teacher, taught for 17 years and now we're homeschooling our son on 13 acres in rural Tennessee.

Tools You Should Use

Let's move on, we're gonna be looking at a website here in just a minute.

Again, before you build the site, here's another thing that you need to do.

And that is the thing that people are gonna type in to find your website, if they wanna go straight to your website.

So an example would be like goodnewsadvocates.com, bountifulblessingsfarm.com.

Yes, so you need to choose and the choosing can be very difficult now because There are so many websites out there.

So, you need to choose and register a domain name.

And I would highly recommend that you get the .com, .org, and .net.

The I have yet to see a .info or .biz or .anything else rank well in search engine results.

In theory it could happen, but I haven't seen it personally yet.

So, get.com.org and .net and that way if you have debonair.com, guess what?

If I really don't like you and you haven't registered.org or .net, I can go register them and I can...

I didn't know that you could go to Oregon.net.

See, now I can go register.org and .net and I can put all kinds of nasty stuff up and say...

You're going to find nasty stuff about the world.

Yeah, but I can do it and really make it life difficult for you.

Or a competitor for your woodworking business can take the name that you're using, if you don't control those 3 domains, they can come in and actually steal some of your business.

When you say we need to register 3 names...

So for example, I have davidlsharp.com and if you go look at it, all it's gonna say is content market or limited availability with a contact form on there because I just don't take clients.

But I have davidlsharp.com, davidlsharp.net, and davidlsharp.org.

There's a separate fee for each 1 and it's It's going to run about $10 a year for each name.

I'm from Dixburg, we have a farm, Castle Valley Farms, plural.

I'd get Castle Valley Farm and lock that up too.

And now here, this brings… Well now here's, and here's the thing to be aware of, I've got 2 points, I'm glad you brought this up.

Well, you can get castlevalleyfarm.com, .net and .org.

You can redirect those so that it goes to castlevalleyfarms.com.

You can redirect any domain name to go to another 1.

That way you can say go to CastleValleyFarm.com.

You don't have to make any big changes in the way things are already, or all the things that it's printed on.

It's printed on business cards and everything else.

You can just redirect them and it stays in place.

Make sure that when you choose the name, try telling it to a couple of people first.

I'm interested in hiring you to do some writing or building a website for me.

Okay, I've got a portfolio page on my website, davidlsharp.com.

Oh, by the way, sharp has an E on the end of it.

The very first domain I ever bought was sharpideas.com.

Sharpideas.com, S-H-A-R-P-E hyphen, I-D-E-A-S.com.

All right, Avoid the hyphens as much as you can.

But for most of you, I would say avoid them.

Make sure that it's something that rolls off the tongue easily and isn't confused.

Because if now if I had castlevalleyfarm.com and I'm in Florida here and you're telling somebody, yeah, our website's castlevalleyfarms.com and you can find, you can find out more about what we're growing and see when it's ready and so on.

And they don't write it down or they don't take action right away.

And later on they're saying, oh man, that Sean guy, where was, I went with Castle Valley, CastleValleyFarm.com I think it was.

And so now they say, wait a minute, he wasn't in Florida, was he?

And they don't, you know, try to avoid anything that could be confused easily with your competitors, even if they're on the other side of the country or on the other side of the world.

And that's more for having somebody with this sort of venue to do it?

So they can't do a .org and the same name as .org?

Nobody else can do davidlsharp.com right now because I control that or .org or .net.

Now they could probably do something else and call me all kinds of names but I'm not, everybody calls me names anyway.

Yes, Somebody would look at davidlsharp.info and they're not going to take it as seriously as .com.

Now, would you, you wouldn't go so far as to say, if I have such-and-suchfarm.com or net, I'd say, oh, such-and-suchfarms.org or .net?

I don't think I would, because the default in people's mind is to go singular, I think.

I think they're more likely to go to the singular version than to the plural version.

Unless it's a word that is commonly pluralized, and I'm sure that there are some out there.

Nothing comes to mind at the moment, but I'm sure there are some.

This domain thing is 1 of, I keep saying this is 1 of the more important things, but it really is, because this is how people know you.

I'm not going to give you examples, but write it out, look at it, does it depend on commas, I mean on apostrophes, or does it depend on capitalization?

What happens when you squish all the words together with no spaces?

Some that, there are some that, like I said, I'm not going to tell you what they are but you can use your imagination and see that if you put 3 or 4 words together you can end up with the last letter of 1 word and the first 3 or 4 letters of the next word and you've got something that you don't want associated with you at all.

Before you spend the money, before you commit to it, look at it.

Is there any way this can be misunderstood?

Is it going to make somebody snicker when they see it squished into like a domain?

Sometimes, for example, 1 of our clients is Grants Pass School.

So you've got 3 S's in a row right there.

It's a little awkward to try to tell somebody or to type it in even.

I have a friend that's a lawyer, his name is Charles, I can't think of his last name at the moment, but his listing, this isn't a website issue, but his listing is last name Charles F.

You have to watch those kinds of things And you don't even think about it until you see it happen to somebody else and then you snicker and move on.

How to Set Up a Website

Somebody had a question and I am going to take a moment to address that 1.

Cuz, you were asking how you get this done when you have no time.

And he was asking about themes and templates.

So, remember I told you that the name of the theme that I use, Divi, D-I-V-I.

So they have all this, the themes that you gave them up there?

Okay, this is the company that makes Divi.

Now, we'll get into the weeds a little bit.

If there's something that doesn't make sense, ask, because this is some...

If you're on WordPress and you're looking for their themes, are those all premium?

Yes, yes, those are all free themes generally.

Unless they're listed, you know, you can get a free 1, but if you buy, if you pay them $97, you can get support.

It's a free theme, but if you want support, you have to pay us something.

I would go to a premium theme developer and again this is the 1 I use just because it has so much functionality that I'll never ever run out of, I don't know that I'll ever be able to find something that I can't do with it.

Looking at that page, if you were to go to plugins, that's where you would get your security?

So you don't use DIVI for any of your plugins?

No, I do use some of their plugins, but you know what?

I'm going to, I was going to do some content stuff, but let's do this first, because this will simplify the process a bit.

Wordpress is the engine, they call it the engine, It's a software engine, it's a package of software that, it does database functions and it does the posting and all of the mechanics of it.

The theme is the look and feel, the colors, how things are displayed on the page.

And then there's gonna be an additional term that I'll throw at you here, but I'm trying to get inside WordPress.

Okay, this is my WordPress dashboard for goodnewsadvocates.org.

This is a digital design agency that we use, a site that we use for non-profit organizations that aren't necessarily church organizations, religious organizations.

Is there a way to make WordPress websites functional like at a farm stand or a farm market?

Instead of like a new commerce site with the idea of like integrating Square or something else into it or like pulling off of something?

Yeah, you could just integrate PayPal into it, and PayPal's got integration set up where you can do it with a tablet and the little square reader.

So, does it make, do you understand WordPress and theme?

WordPress is the frame and the main structure, the database functions, the serving up the page for people to see.

The theme is going to be what it looks like.

So here's where I can overlay Divi onto WordPress.

Right there, everyone goes into the sites right there.

Some have things in the middle, some things in the side.

This is what the site looks like to somebody who's visiting the site.

The theme makes it look like this with the squares, and so on.

And for some reason, This is a different theme.

They're both, well it's a different layout for the theme.

I'm still using Divi for both of these sites.

But what I'm using different is 2 different child themes.

So now there's that new term that I was telling you about.

Child themes and this is where what makes it easier.

You know You can do all of these things with it.

You can make the site look like this, or you can make the site look like this, or like many different other things.

You can do it from scratch, or you can use a child theme.

Now, this other 1 that I was showing you, the farm site that I was showing you, that was a child theme.

So that's why it was no nonsense text in there.

It's easy to read, fast, and I can have a hint for something.

So you get WordPress, that's the, you gotta have WordPress, you gotta have a theme.

You can create everything from scratch in Divi if you want.

But if you want a shortcut, you get the child theme.

So here we're going to look at, okay, these are child themes.

They all use divi, They all use the functions of Divi.

And let's see, let me show you a page here so that you have an idea of what...

Different developers will build the different child themes.

They build them before getting the theme.

So as you're looking inside Divi, this is what it looks like.

No, this one's that's what this page looks.

This page right here looks like this inside the editor.

See, See these right here, these 4 blocks?

And so if I want to edit this non-profit marketing 1, I just open that up and there's my text right there.

I could also say I don't want non-profit marketing there, I want non-profit marketing over here.