The Ruminant: Audio Candy for Farmers, Gardeners and Food Lovers - e.29: Matt Gomez on Online Marketing for your Farm Business

Episode Date: March 14, 2014

This epsisode features a recent presenation by Matt Gomez, founder of Soilmate, a new website that aims to connect eaters with the local farms, wineries, and farmers' markets.  Matt gave this presentation to a group of young farmers at an event in Kelowna, BC in March of 2014. He's got an impressive pedigree as a digital marketer and passes on a lot of practical advice for making the most of your farm's website, social media accounts, and email newsletters.   

This is the Ruminant Podcast. I'm Jordan Marr. The Ruminant is a website dedicated to sharing good ideas for farmers and gardeners. On the website you'll find my podcast, the odd essay, book reviews, tool reviews, and user-submitted photos of their own farming and gardening practices. It's all at ruminantpod.com. I hope you'll check it out. Alright, let's do a podcast. All right, let's do a podcast. found myself and found my now wife and that's how I ended up in Canada. And since arriving in Canada, I've been working for one of Canada's best digital marketing agencies, heading up their strategy and sales. And it was through that job that I discovered that there was no effective online tool for

finding farms, farmers markets, and to a lesser extent, but still one, wineries. So I quit my job, got investment and built out Soilmate.com. So I was asked to give this presentation on online marketing, which includes websites, blogs, social media, the full kind of gambit of options online, based on the fact that I'm in charge of heading up, or I was in charge of heading up strategies for businesses from Fortune 500 companies to mom and pop operations. So I have a lot of experience in different scales of marketing and also, you know, the kind of the big ROI pieces that come from that.

Okay, so that's Matt Gomez. And in a few minutes, he's going to give a presentation on social media and online marketing as applied to promoting your farm business. Matt gave that presentation just last weekend at a young farmer mixer that took place in Kelowna, BC. I was there and Matt was there and a bunch of young farmers were there, mainly to see the main event on the Sunday, which was Jean-Martin Fortier was in town. The author of The Market Gardener and former guest on the Sunday, which was Jean-Martin Fortier was in town, the author of The Market Gardener and former guest on the podcast. He was there to give a five-hour presentation on all of his farm systems, and it was fantastic. But in addition to that, there was a Saturday to the event and a number of different presentations and workshops that happened. One of them was Matt's,

unfortunately for all of you. Another that happened at the of them was Matt's, unfortunately for all of you. Another that happened at the same time was mine. And that's who you can see here in the background of Matt's presentation in this episode today. I couldn't get all of, I was able to reduce the levels for my voice on the other side of the room, but I couldn't eliminate it completely. So with apologies to all of you, although the sound quality is pretty good for what we were dealing with, which is one big echoey open room at this conference. So what else is going on?

Well, it's been extremely busy on the farm here, which, and I'm sure that's the case for many of you, but I'm gonna ask you all to bear with me. I have been relying a little bit on these recordings that I've made at a couple different conferences i've been at recently and uh that's helped me get through a very intense week or two on the farm uh you know the the spring came quickly here and i found myself a little bit behind i'm putting long long hours into uh catching up so i do i do think that's going to level off folks and that I should be able to get back to some live interviews that are kind of the mainstay of the podcast. I have some interesting guests

lined up, certainly. I just need to book those interviews. Another thing that I want to share with you all is that I just kind of had an idea the other day that I want to try out for the podcast here. You know, at heart, the ruminant blog and the ruminant podcast are all about sharing good ideas for farming and gardening. And so what I'd like to try doing is I'd like to invite all of you, anyone listening out there to call in, to call my phone and just share something that is working for you on your farm or in your garden or in the context of farming and gardening. Something you're doing really well or a success you've had. I think, you know, everyone has something that they can share with other people because there's so many different effective ways of doing all the different tasks

on the farm and in the garden. So I would like to invite listeners to phone in and leave a one to two minute message on my voicemail. I don't know how much space each voicemail allows from my phone number. And I'm gonna be working on setting up a proper call-in of some type where people can go online and call and leave a proper message.

But for now, aim to leave a one to two minute message where you share with me and eventually all of the listeners of the Ruminant podcast something that you think that they should know about that's working for you in your context. So if you think you'd like to leave me a message that I could share on the podcast, then please call 250-767-6636 and leave a message. And then I will put that onto the computer and clean it up a bit to the extent that it needs it and I'll put it in a future episode. Thanks a lot. Anyway, today's

episode is on online marketing for your farm business. It's presented by Matt. I think he did a great job. He's very knowledgeable on the subject. And actually, I'm very excited for Soilmate.com. That's new tech startup that I think is going to be incredible for local food security and for helping to connect farmers with their customers. So do check that out because I really think it's worth looking at. I've got a profile up there and a number of my colleagues in the Valley now do. I've got a profile up there and a number of my colleagues in the Valley now do. But wherever you are, Matt's planning to build a community around connecting growers and farmers and their customers all over North America. So if you're listening from anywhere in North America, certainly go to Soilmate.com and check it out.

You can set up a profile really, really easily. It's free. And I won't say anything else because Matt talks a little bit about it at the end of his presentation. So anyway, here we go. I hope you enjoy and I will talk to you on the other side.

So hey, everyone. Yeah, I'm Matt. So my business is actually Soilmate and I'll talk about that a little bit later on as one of the avenues you guys can use online. What I'll talk about today mostly is the basic elements that you can have from an online marketing point of view. So things like websites, search marketing, social media, email, all of those sort of pieces.

Talk about what they are, the pros and cons of of them some of the tools you can use some of the cost effective ways to do it how you can see ROI from them so work out whether it's worth doing and I'll be fairly broad but if you have specific questions just ask with online stuff there's always a really a big kind of difference in people's kind of level of knowledge and what they do and don't know so I'm to be fairly broad and kind of high level on this. But if you want to ask a specific question, just bring it up. So one of the things I have done for this is my presentation. I don't usually do too many PowerPoints, so they're really text heavy.

So I've put stupid pictures on them. So because it's an online workshop, they're internet memes related to farming. So I didn't make them, so don't shoot me for them. So what I'm going to cover is websites, blogs, because they're two different things. They're often kind of the same thing, but they are technically two different things. SEM, which is Search Engine Marketing, so where you rank in Google. Google Maps and Places and the importance of that. Email Marketing, Social Media, directories and partnerships.

And then a key bit that everyone forgets, and not just farmers, but all businesses is the metrics and the analytics. So why the hell are you spending time and money doing this stuff? So, websites. Do all of you have a website so far? You do? Brand new one. And do you have Google Analytics on far brand new one and you have Google Analytics on it okay yeah good yeah and it is it's very creepy so most people

most businesses farms not excluded from that need websites nowadays it's just determining what the purpose of the website is in itself so look there are actually lots of businesses that now have just a Facebook page or some even have just an Instagram account. But generally a website is a good thing to have, especially as there's so many free options now. The key thing is to determine what the purpose of it is. So if it's literally just to say, hey, I exist, I'm here and I sell at the farmer's market, you know, you don't need to invest much time or money in doing that.

You just want to have something that looks okay. If you're selling CSAs, if you're, you know, trying to promote products through the site, then maybe you want to have a little bit of an e-commerce engine in there, marketing in a slightly different way. But the key is determining the purpose. So when you're deciding on how you should have your website, just think about what's the point of it, right? And don't think you have to have pages and pages of content and loads of detail and have loads of pictures and all that sort of stuff necessarily now for what you guys do and all the other pieces that you'll use it should be fairly basic so if you don't have one or you want to have a new look insight there's some free platforms so Wix Wix.com Wix.com Weebly W-E-E-B-L-Y.com and

Squarespace are another one that do like a free kind of template build site and then you can upgrade to get one without ads and things that's a good way to get a really good looking or an okay looking site for pretty much nothing, just your time. Some of the other things you can do, and I kind of talked to Jed about it a little bit, is if you have an existing website on a platform such as, this might mean something to some people and not to others, like WordPress, so existing content management systems, sites like ThemeForest, where you can buy really high level looking themes for like 30 bucks and you just plug them into your site and Then you have a really great looking site that works

Pretty good that you can update yourself So they're good ways to do it. One of the things to consider right now as well is mobile So most people or very high percentage of people now search and use their phones exclusively for internet So the technology that's used for that is a thing called responsive design so it means that you don't have to have a separate site that's built for a cell phone. The site literally shifts so if it was three columns on a computer as you go to a tablet it shifts to two columns and one underneath and as you go to a cell phone it shifts to like three in a row. That's deemed really good by Google

so if you want to actually rank in Google for your farm or for some of your produce, having a responsive site is a good thing to do. And then the metric side of it, I'll go into it in a bit more detail, but if you don't have it currently and if you're investing any money in your website, you should put Google Analytics onto your site. So it's a free program from Google. It's one of their products. So to get it, you just create a Google account and you just turn it on. They'll give you a snippet of code

that you just have to then put into your website. But that'll tell you who found your site, where they came from, how long they spent, the stuff they looked at, what they did, all of that sort of stuff. So if you are then investing any time and money in other sources of marketing, you can actually see if they're working or not. So let's say you decided to pay for an ad somewhere, you can see exactly how many people came from that ad. So should I continue with that ad? If you're doing social media work and you want to see how many people actually found your site and found your stuff through social media, you can do that as well. And you can also see the search terms that people came in. So maybe it's for for Claremont maybe it was organic farm Kelowna and you found that

people actually came from that and you got contact forms or you got people ordering and stuff so maybe you should invest time and money and making sure you're always showing for that term right so you can really assess the the value of any sort of marketing you're doing because online everything's trackable if people tell you it isn't it's because they're trying to hide the truth from you basically so so that's kind of the brief overview on a website now a blog, blogs used to be kind of completely separate to websites so you'd have a website and then you have a separate blog

maybe a tumblr blog or something along those lines now what you do is you should typically integrate your blog into your website. That happens with most website platforms anyway, but the reason for doing that is twofold. So a blog is good because it's a place where you can update general content fairly regularly. It shouldn't be all about perfection. It's generally acknowledged to be a fairly informal way of communicating. But where it's really helpful for your site is, A, it's telling your story, and it's fresh, and people are becoming far more aware from a consumer point of view about knowing who their farmer is and wanting to know the story.

So it's a good way to keep people updated on that. But from the other side, from just the pure business side, Google is looking for fresh content on your websites all the time to help rank you. So by having your blog in your website, you're constantly, if you're writing a blog, you're creating new fresh content within your site. If you have Facebook on your website, is that new content for Google? Yeah or no. Facebook helps from a Google perspective.

There'll be some people that say that it doesn't. From all of our hundreds of clients previously, we found that it does. So it does help, but it wouldn't be it in itself. Yeah. In that case, are the apps really slow? Do you feel like it's slow? It might be how it's installed. Do you have on that?

It's Wix. Okay. This is the first one. Yeah. Platforms like Wix and that, they're free, but they, they're free, right?

So it's, yeah. But that's, that's blog. So if you have the time, there are really good ways of doing it. But the blogs

are typically written, right? You can put some images and stuff in there as well. Things like Instagram and stuff like that, which I'll get to are kind of replacing blogs in a way

because they're far more, for you guys especially, they're easier. You're out in the field. It's nothing to really take a photo, put a filter on it so it looks decent and kind of post it. So you can do things where you can feed in things like your Instagram feeds and stuff into your websites as well. But they wouldn't help necessarily from a Google point of view, but they would help from an aesthetics and story and your site kind of point of view. But for Google, it's only the blog. It's not only the blog. It's content, though. So it's written content that's unique to that page. So if the blog is in your site, then that content is associated with your site.

But Google, well, that leads perfectly into Google, I guess, then. So SEM, which is Search Engine Marketing. So when Google's ranking a a site it's ranking about 300 different factors so it's everything from the coding of your site so if you have a really old site with kind of junky coding it only indexes so far they call it indexing when it goes through the site it only indexes so far before it says fuck this like this you know this is terrible and it leaves so even if you had pages and pages and pages of content it wouldn't even reach those page titles and headers the content itself then linking so the

linking out of your site and the linking into your site so if there's other blogs that talk about your site or news articles or other directories and things that link into your site and they have a good ranking themselves, that helps your ranking. So a smart thing might be to do across groups of farmers is find other complementary farms and interlink between them and have a little place on your page that says, hey, you know, we do this, this and this, but if you're looking for this, this farm's great and a little bit of a blurb around that.

do this, this and this, but if you're looking for this, this sounds great and a little bit kind of a blurb around that. Do you have a suggestion on a strategy to identifying keywords? Yep. So Google has a tool called the Keyword Tool. It's actually part of AdWords now. So if you create a Google account in general and you have analytics, you can find out from Google traffic volume on search terms. So if you want to see how many people are searching for Kelowna CSA, they might be able to tell you that. When it gets ultra

granular and ultra local, they often don't give the number. But you can get a sense, right? You can get a sense. And sometimes they do in a local market. But like whenever I used to do strategies for companies, it was always looking through those tools to see where the opportunity is, where the search volume is. And then what you can start to do is, if you know that certain people are looking for certain things, you can tailor the messaging on your website to match those search terms. So if someone's looking for, I don't know,

what would be an example? So let's say it's a YouPick term. And YouPick's one part of your operation, but you know that people are coming in through Google Analytics that you rank on you pick and that they're coming in. You make sure that front and center you have a piece of content around you pick. So don't come and then be like, oh, I think I've got the wrong site. Right. And yeah. And so everything, again, is trackable with metrics. So I can't express enough the importance if you're going to do any sort of online marketing is to use something like Google Analytics.

It's free. It's very powerful. It tells you pretty much everything. You don't have to be in it every day. I'm not suggesting that at all. But look at it. Time to time, look at it. And especially if you're investing any money in marketing, look at it.

And then Maps. So Google has Maps now. time look at it and especially if you're investing any money in marketing look at it um and then maps so google has maps now um they're not the greatest for farms because the the pins don't often represent where a farm store is or things like that um but google ranks companies that companies businesses that have a google plus page and a Google Local page very well. So I'll get to that slide actually, it's the next one. But what you should do is, so Google, whether you like them as a company or not, I personally don't, but as a company or not, regardless, they are the search engine that pretty much everyone uses in North America.

Bing has a little bit of market share, Yahoo has a little bit of market share, but it's mostly Google. So unfortunately, if you want to be found in Google, you have to kind of worship at the order of Google a little. So the ways that you do that is by having a Google Plus page for your business. You don't have to really do anything on it. And if you're using some of the other tools for social media, which I'll get to like Hootsuite and stuff, you can just put that into the mix and it's not any extra work. Very few people use Google Plus outside of kind of the tech community. A bunch of tech guys use it, but it's kind of crappy. But what it does do is it helps you rank because it's a Google product.

So, if you make the Google Plus, do you have to consistently update? You should, yeah. But what you can do is you can tie that in with the other social media platforms yeah so yeah so there's a program called HootSuite which is a really famous one started by a guy from Kelowna days yeah oh sorry yes I made a faux pas there from the Okanagan. Sprout Social. Sprout Social is another one. There's a few of them, to be honest. And what they are is they're aggregators for social media.

So you can schedule your posts, which you can do on all those platforms individually. But you can schedule them all in one place. And you can post to all of them at once. So you take a photo. You put it there, you put a comment. You can pre-plan. So if you've written some content, you can schedule it so you can be out in the field and it's happening, but it will send it everywhere. So you get coverage, so you're active in all those platforms. So I would recommend fairly strongly a Google Plus page and a Google Local listing as well so if you go to

google.com forward slash local that's the map listing you have a YouTube channel you have a Google Plus page anyways yeah that's right yeah and YouTube is a really powerful piece as well and it ranks really well as well again a Google product right so there you go a Google product, right? There you go. And one of the things I did mention on the Google ranking side of things is PPC. So PPC is pay-per-click.

You might have heard it referred to as CPC, so cost-per-click as well. It's basically where you, whenever you do a Google search, typically there'll be some sponsored ads at the top. It's usually the top three. And then if there's more than three, they'll go down the side of the page. Google does a better job now of distinguishing them as sponsored. So ads. And the way that they practically work is that you pick the keywords that you want to show ads on. You put, place a bid on them

and Google tells you the sort of bid you should make. And if people are bidding on them then the price is higher and if less people the price is lower and then you pay per click so every time someone clicks on that link you pay Google and it could be five cents it could be five bucks depends on what the term is and then but you know going in what it is but it ranges depending on the term it can be very powerful if it's a term that doesn't have very high bids and your site converts well. So if you're talking about Kelowna CSAs, you make sure that when they come in on that link,

they're coming straight into the CSA offerings and the way to buy and all of that sort of stuff. So it has a cost, and it has a cost per click. So if your site doesn't convert, then it can get pretty pricey. But the beauty of it is that you can set limits. So it's actually a good way to test sometimes to say, okay, you know what, I'll throw $100 at it and I'll try this. And then you can see it either works or it doesn't.

And then you turn it off or you turn it on, right? So it's a fairly low risk. You can kind of manage your risk on it. But it does take a bit of management and you have to pick your terms and all that sort of stuff so it's helpful if you have some really specific offering that you want to show for um or that no one's marketing well for some of the generic things that you do as well you see you see borrowers doing that with css potentially yeah potentially my my business hopes to solve that for farmers, but yeah, for sure in the short term,

I think it's a smart thing to do for CSAs. And again, it's a test, right? Especially for a CSA, you're not running that, you're not trying to subscribe people all year. So for a very limited window, from a spend point of view, it's maybe a more effective spend than, because you're instantly top of Google.

That's the thing, right? You're paying to be top of Google and if no one clicks then you don't pay anything so the risk is yeah you set your graphical limits you can set all sorts of limits you know demographic style limits yeah yeah you can have it narrowed to an area or you could just have it that it's always Okanagan, CSA or Colonus. Like there's a few ways you can do it. Correct, yeah. So when you sign up for a lot of this stuff, you'll get a hundred.

Yeah, that's a really good point. There's a hundred dollar gift card. That's right. Yeah. So Google gives you a hundred dollar intro. So so when you sign up usually they'll send you a gift card for a hundred bucks and it and I would just say yeah I would do I would just Google it Google the Google credit and yeah hundred bucks100 is usually the top whack they do. So, and am I going too fast here?

Or is this okay? It's just a, okay. So, email marketing. So, email marketing was really popular for a while. And then it became really annoying for everyone and didn't work for the longest time. And now it actually works again. So, we see that across email marketing yeah sorry I'm mumble really bad so yeah so it's actually really popular again so one of

the things that you should all be doing is trying to build up email lists of your customers it's easier if you're doing things like CSAs because you're getting signups online and bits and pieces like that but in general try and capture that data and then you can start to blast out to them so you know if something's in season boom let them know and give them a recipe around it if you're trying to promote something like let them know email marketing is again really popular and for content ideas if you're writing things like blogs do you know what put your latest blog article in the email or a snippet of it like an intro and then if you want to read the

rest click here and it sends you through to the site and then you got them on your site again maybe that way I'm so practically the way to do emails is through this this programs like MailChimp is a is a really popular and easy one to use constant contacts kinda old so K it's okay they can get generally like MailChimp's not too bad if you if you're I think it's actually free up to a certain number yeah and I'd be surprised if you guys reach that number you're doing it's worth paying if you

get to that but they're good because they have some standardized kind of templates and bits and pieces like that and some of the other things you can do is because they allow you to put HTML templates, so HTML is just the code of the design, you can use sites like Fiverr, which I don't know if you've ever heard of. So Fiverr.com. So Fiverr.com is a site where people across the world will sell something for five bucks. But it's usually a digital product, so you'll have people that would say, hey, I'll get you a thousand likes on Facebook for five bucks. They'll all come from Turkey, and they'll disappear within a digital product. So you'll have people that would say, hey, I'll get you 1,000 likes on Facebook for $5.

They'll all come from Turkey, and they'll disappear within a few weeks. But they can maybe give you a bit of reputability for a very short window. They're not looked on too well by Facebook. But you can do all sorts of things. You can get women in Russia to pose with a bikini and a sign with your logo on.

Like, it's terrible. It's really exploiting the site but but but these people are promoting their push putting their products up so there I say they're being exploited there they're choosing to offer this right but through that you can get things like email templates you can even get people to kind of build your website for you and and if you visit me so there are some fairly cost-effective ways of doing that but yeah email marketing is really really powerful now MailChimp better? I want to learn how to do drip feeds and stuff so when somebody signs up, they get immediately signed up for drip and everybody's on their own timeline. How do I learn to do that shit?

I would just Google it to be honest. And you couldn't find it? I would imagine that they would have it like Hootsuite does a really good job with their university of teaching you how to do bits and pieces. I would imagine MailChimp has the same thing um yeah I honestly like I don't dig in that deep like I'm the guy that says okay this is what you should be doing and then I have my team of developers do it right um so but yeah I would imagine they would have in their resources

and that's one thing with Hootsuite is Hoots has HootSuite University so if you want to just do some research on social media tactics and stuff it's a good thing to look at as well you pay a monthly subscription but you can watch all of them in a month and then you cancel your subscription so yeah and I think they have a free trial as well when you buy it as well but if you believe in if you don't buy I think you can get a free trial for 30 days or so when you get really advanced like you have a decent list you ask them so you give your your list actually the option to say how often would you like to be mailed would it be monthly twice weekly Is it on specific products? So you can start to get really sophisticated with it.

In general, I would say if you have something to tell them, every two weeks is probably okay. If you don't have much, maybe monthly. But again, you're seasonal, right? So you could do it every two weeks during the summer. And outside of that, you can just kind of send them maybe a monthly or you know every couple of months through the winter just to remind them that you exist and that you were their guy and all of that sort of stuff so yeah I would say at least monthly because you're trying to keep top of mind without being annoying but if you've got stuff of value to share I would do it quicker than that. What would the names again of the tools you mentioned?

For email? Yeah. So MailChimp and Constant Contact. Yeah. But I mean, there's most web technology, there's hundreds of different options out there. They're two of the kind of the bigger ones. MailChimp is a pretty good product. So social media.

good a pretty good product so social media so social media is can be really really good it can be really powerful really helpful there's lots of platforms so most of you will know Facebook most of you will have heard of Twitter maybe you use it I personally don't like it but it has value. Instagram, Pinterest now, depending on what you're selling. LinkedIn doesn't really apply to you guys. They're kind of the, and YouTube, they're really kind of the main ones. There's a lot of kind of more obscure ones and I don't mention Google Plus in that list because you should have a Google Plus page but I don't think it's going to generate you any business other than getting you ranked in Google. Now, there's platforms that help you manage all of those. So we keep talking about Hootsuite. I mentioned Sprout Social. They're great systems

for plugging in lots of different accounts and just sharing the same content. Some of those platforms, though, will also do that for you. So Instagram, when you take a picture with Instagram, you can share it to your other platforms as well. So you don't have to necessarily have this third-party tool that does it. The benefit of that is that you can schedule stuff. It's a really powerful thing. The biggest recommendation I can make around social media, though, is you have to use it. If you're going to do it, you have to do it.

So if you have a profile and you never update it or you occasionally do something with it it's better to not have anything because it looks really kind of crappy and then your competitors or the other farms that are also looking for the same sort of business that do update it will look infinitely better than you know than if you have nothing so i have to kind of really hammer that home and that applies across all businesses but like you have to do it if you're going to do it so it's a commitment but there's certain platforms that make it really freaking easy so instagram is the big one and you tie that with your facebook account and you only ever post pictures and it's fine and that happens out in the field. You take the picture, you write a caption, you post it, you share it on Facebook in that same action.

And Twitter. And Twitter, yeah. And LinkedIn. Like it's... You're basically hitting all sorts of... Is LinkedIn really that relevant? For you guys... It has its purpose, honestly. I think it has a purpose.

Yeah, I'll leave that one up to you guys. I personally wouldn't bother with LinkedIn. But again, it's that whole thing. If you're already just posting it, it's another place you can post it. I won't make a judgment for you guys on LinkedIn. I don't know enough from a farmer's perspective if it would be effective.

It would depend on your business. If you were doing a permaculture consultancy and you finished working on a big job, and you took one photo on Instagram, put in a 140 character caption for Twitter, and you wanted to show it as part of your professional portfolio for the service that you're offering, then you can also stick it up on LinkedIn at the same time,

and you can throw it up on Flickr. It's like you've got all of these different platforms. You just take one photo, you write one caption and you're spreading it out over all that surface area. So it's just about using it for CDNs. Like okay, this is a LinkedIn update on this professional project that I've done. I'm gonna put it out there, but maybe not for your regular CSA or it might be if you're also offering line-stating services or whatever.

Okay. Thanks, Eric. Okay, so directories and partnerships. So what exists right now, and this is where I'll talk a little bit about what I'm doing as well. So right now there's a bunch of regional directories across North America. So there's a few within the Okanagan Valley. So Buy Local, Buy Fresh I think is the name of one of them.

They all have very similar names with regards to local food and stuff. So they exist. They're either free or very low cost to be in. So I would recommend getting them especially if they're free because it's just another place for exposure and it's also another link pointing to your site so they have value one of the good ways to do this as well is to search your product so search for okay Kelowna farm and see what actually comes up and if there's directories that are listed within that

search result get in that directory like it's's just looking, thinking from the consumer point, okay, well, if I was trying to find what I'm selling, how would I find it and trying it and seeing who's there? So there may well be directories that you can leverage from that. From a partnership point of view, it's that cross-promotion. So if you do the veggies and this guy does all the fruit, put each other together, or there's meat, or whatever those things are,

you can start to cross-promote across each other. So you're leveraging all the work that each other have done and you're providing links as well between, from a Google point of view, building a little network. So that's helpful as well. The one I'll mention as well is Soilmate. So that's what I've built. And what that is is taking the idea of a local directory

but applying it across North America. So right now, if you want to find who grew what, how they grow it, where they are, when it's available, and how you can buy it, and even buy it through the site direct from the farmer, there's not really an effective way to do that right now. So I've built a system that does that. So the intention is that it will be the TripAd or the urban spoon but for local food so the directory is free for farms um so you can have a profile it's there it's going to be marketed across north america um so the the premise is that locally people will buy their groceries by sourcing them from local farms because they'll

now know what they can get and when they can get it and how they can buy it. But the intention is that also then when you go and rent a cottage in Ontario or you go down to California or the island and you want to find what's available locally, you can do that as well through the same site. So I would implore you all to join Sewermade.com next week. Do you think that with all, so you think that they are partnerships, partnerships from the directors of each of the areas? Honestly, my opinion is that if they're free and they have some coverage,

then for the sake of just sending over a blurb to them, you should probably go in them. If you have to pay for it, then you should really look at what the return is. So how much traffic would you get? What's the average readership? All of those sort of of things so whether that's a print or an online piece um i would say that if they're free and they have visibility then because like separate my platform from this for a second most of them are literally just a blurb you kind of talk a little bit about what you're doing and you put a website address like that it's nothing for you to get on them so yeah I'm not here saying don't go on anything else and go online I would I would do it to the other directions the so mate is intended to be the the directory yeah

but what you can do in it is the way that the system practically works is it goes in so as a farm you create profile. You specify the crops that you grow or sell. So if you sell crops you didn't grow, you can put them in as well. You just have to state that you didn't grow them. And then you associate the harvest dates with them. So it's not a daily availability. It's just a period in which they're available. You can then do other things.

You can feed your blogs in there. You can feed your social media into there. You can sell your CSAs through the site. And there's a back end for you to manage your CSAs. You can sell individual products for pick up, for delivery, for drop off at the farmers market. So you can say on there like, I'm going to have a bunch of beets at this day and you come to the farmers market to get them? The way it would work is that you would have a profile and you would say, okay, I grow

beets and they're available between these dates. But if you want to buy my beets in advance, you can buy a bunch and they're $3 and you select the fulfillment. And you as a farmer specify how they're fulfilled. So you can say, you know what, I'll deliver for $20 with a neoconoggin. But if you want to pick them up at the farmer's market from me, you order by Thursday, you've got two weeks to get them. If you don't pick them up, they go to the food bank. You can specify exactly how you'll fulfill so the

intention is from a consumer point of view is for me I would like to exclusively buy my produce from farms but I'm busy I have two young kids and if I'm going to the farmers market by say 9 I don't get eggs let alone some of the other things right so the ability for me to be able to order that by Thursday and be like okay and then I literally just run in and grab it it's actually easier for me than the grocery store. So you prepaid? I prepaid so the farmer has no risk. So is that why you take a cut of that? 3.5% so if you were to process that yourself it would be about 3 if you use in square root 2.75 but it's the monetization doesn't come from farmers

doesn't come from markets doesn't come from wineries even you can buy wine through the site right now if you if you produce it in your farm yeah yes but we don't have artisan crafts or any of that sort of stuff within the system but if it's part of your farm the intention is that you sell your story, and we sell to the customers that if you want to find who your local guys are, you come here, and they're all here, and you can filter by. And the way that it works is as a consumer, you come in, it knows where you are through your IP address, through your browser,

or through GPS if you're on your phone and stuff, and then it pulls all the farms, markets, and wineries within a 100-mile radius of you, and then what you can do is you can start to filter down by things so it then pulls all of the crops that are available and meat and dairy within 100 mile radius so as a consumer if you're looking for something specific you can find out who has it and also if you're just looking to see what the hell is available in my area you can find all that out and then if you're a farm that does farm gate sales you can specify that so you can have your opening times and all of that within the system and then consumers can build routes so they can add the farms that they like to a route builder along with wineries

so if you're a farm that sells direct to the public you can actually start to leverage wine tours in this region and then it will give you an itinerary map directions for walking cycling driving all on your cell phone and your computer so it's it's pretty is it user updated so like people just like an ebay if somebody if some farm some farmer flakes out somebody pays to come and pick up 30 pounds of beans from a farmer flakes out so the consumers can write reviews on farms markets. We have a procedure in place, though, that they will come through Soilmate first. So what we do is we actually, if we get a bad review, we contact the farmer, tell them what it is, help them form a response, and post them together. So Integrity will post it, but we won't just have a bad review floating out there. And what we do is we actually act as the payment gateway for the farmers.

So we take the payment, the order goes through, two weeks later we cut you a check, as the payment gateway for the farmers. So we take the payment. The order goes through. Two weeks later, we cut your check, do a balance transfer, whatever that, you know, whatever your preferred payment method is. So potentially if the farmer flaked out, they wouldn't get paid. Correct. But we would go through the process with them to figure out if that really happened. So if you charge 3.5, how much do you make, considering that you need to process this credit card? About 0.3 to start. For real?

To start. The intention isn't to make money off of farmers. What you have to remember, though, is... But for you, about in queues for you, because I'm trying to figure out... So we have advertising on the side. And so there's two things that come into play here. First, there's volume, right? So we're not an Okanagan directory.

We're a North American directory. The intention is to be up to hundreds of thousands of farms. Even in Tibet? If they want to. French? Yeah, it's already multilingual, yeah. And we're adding in Spanish as well. What do you mean, if they want to?

If they want to sell through the site. You mean the people, the farmers? Yeah, if the farmers want to. Because we don't scrape data. We don't just pull in farms' data. Farms have to sell through the site. You mean the people, the farmers? Yeah, if the farmers want to. Because we don't scrape data. We don't just pull in farms' data. Farms have to opt into the system. And there's also an accountability thing for farms. So it's a new system for them in that during the season,

if they don't log in once a month to verify their dates are correct, then their profile gets hidden. So there's actually a requirement as well. So it's free for you guys. Like the only point in which you would ever pay anything is if you sell something. But at the same time, you have to be accountable to the data in there, because we'll be sending people too.

So that's the system. But yeah, we have advertising, but the advertising doesn't feed in from an ad network. We actually find companies that match our values, so they have to have some sort of community engagement, some sort of sustainability and environmental peace okay so that's that's the end of today's episode i hope you enjoyed that folks and i want to recommend you go and check out soilmate.com and see what matt's got going on Okay, so that's the end of today's episode. I hope you enjoyed that, folks.

And I want to recommend you go and check out SoilMate.com and see what Matt's got going on over there. If you need something to look at while you're there, why don't you look up my farm's profile? You can email me at editor at TheRuminant.ca and let me know what you think. The Homestead Farm, you should be able to find it there somewhere. And I have nothing else to say except that after spending a few episodes goofing around

with some of my lady gals songs at the end of the episode here i thought of a song she wrote a couple years ago that's kind of about farming and i thought that would be a nice permanent outro for this podcast at least for now so thanks lot, Vanessa. Thanks for recording it with me. And, uh, I hope all of you enjoy it. Okay. Until next time. See you. See you later. Because why would we live in a place that don't want us A place that is trying to bleed us dry We could be happy with life in the country With salt on our skin and the dirt on our hands I've been doing a lot of thinking Some real soul searching

And here's my final resolve I don't need a big old house or some fancy car to keep my love going strong. So we'll run right out into the wilds and graces. We'll keep close quarters with gentle faces and live next door to the birds and the bees and live life like it was meant to be