Country Smart Business News - October 2011 by Country Smart Business Solutions

Smart CountrySmart

Presented by Chantelle Mader National Award Winning Business Advisor And Profit Strategiest

BU S I N E S S N E W S OCTOBER 2011

Creating Financial And Lifestyle Freedom For Country Business Owners In Three To Five Years... Or Less!

Will Farmers Wallets Open After Harvest?

In This Issue Will Farmers Wallets Open After Harvest? Shocking facts reveal that farmers may be handing their harvest income to the bank. (Page 1) Invest In Common Sense Marketing.

With good rains this year, its predicted farmers are going to have a bumper year. Farmers, and those who rely on farmers for their lively hood, are taking a sigh of relief. But, as they say... Don’t count your chickens until they are hatched. Even if the grain gets safely in the bin it’s still going to be harder than you might think to get farmers to open their wallets and spend. I’m predicting many farmers will be handing most of the money they make back to the bank and being conservative with their spending. Last year’s server lack of rain, in WA, has left farmers, in traditionally safe farming areas, reeling, having never seen anything like those conditions in the past. Many farmers will be using this year’s harvest to get themselves back on a sound financial footing and ferreting

away as much money as possible, just in case another disaster year is just around the corner. Here’s an interesting fact, courtesy of the Farm Weekly: The latest Planfarm Bankwest Benchmarks Survey, which surveys 500 broad acre farm businesses in WA, showed the debt per hectare ratio has escalated to about $600 per hectare. In 1998, the survey returned a debt per hectare ratio of about $170 per hectare. In the last two years however, the farm income per hectare ratio has declined steeply, while the debt to income ratio has spiked alarmingly. Farm Weekly: 28th Sept 2011 So what can you do to ensure your, farmer reliant, business gets its fair continued on next page

Revealed: Why newsletters are a marketing weapon so powerful for reaching farmers. (Page 2) How to Pick A Website Developer Worth Their Salt. What you need to know so you don’t get ripped off and left with a website that looks pretty but doesn’t get traffic. (Page 3) How to Get Designers Fighting To Design Your Logo. Discover how you can get your logo done for just $495, and have designs flood in from all around the world in just a few days. (Page 4)

Country Smart Business Solutions | Newsletter | October 2011

Will Farmers Wallets Open After Harvest? (continued) share of the money, after the banks have had their snouts in the feed tough? Invest in common sense marketing. In tough times it’s the smart marketers that win while their competitors are left blaming the season for their lack of sales. Here’s a few ideas to get you going in the right direction... Assuming you understand the power of building relationships with your database of farmers... You do have a database don’t you? (If you don’t, your first job is to build one!) Make sure you spend the quiet time, when they are on their tractors, to implement a monthly newsletter to keep them informed and educate them on the latest ways to improve their farm profits and cash flow using your products and services. Your newsletter needs to be a physical, put in the mail, newsletter. Not an email newsletter (unless they request it in that form) Why? Because farmers, very much live in the physical world and are, in the main, the newspaper reading generation. (With the average age of a farmer now being 55.) In short, they have a bias in the way they buy and that is, they are tactile – they like to touch and feel. (Although most women would argue ALL men like to touch and feel! *grin*) Now, I know you’re thinking that putting together a monthly newsletter is a lot of work! But I can assure you it is worth the effort. Newsletters are probably one of the most powerful marketing tools, yet are often not used

because few know how to make putting one together quick and easy. So I will share that secret with you. Firstly, you should only need to commit to writing one article a week. In fact, you can get your staff to write one a month each to spread the work load and put one of your admin staff in charge of getting all the articles together by deadline. Nothing hard in that, unless you hate writing! And I have a fix for that too. Simply talk into your mobile phone. Most mobile phones have an inbuilt recorder and, as a real time saver, you can do your recording while on the road. Just pick your subject, press the record button and talk as if you had a passenger in the car alongside you. Then all you have to do is post a job on www.fiverr.com and get someone to transcribe your audio file into text and edit it for you for as little as five bucks! How cool is that?! Another great source of articles for your newsletter is your suppliers and partners. They will often have readymade media releases on hand that you can edit to suit your newsletter. In fact, they may even pay you to have an ad in your newsletter helping you to pay the cost in distributing it. I would make that call to them, offering them editorial if they pay for an ad. If newspapers can do it, you can too. Remember, access to your herd of farmers is valuable! Also don’t forget to feature your staff, and you can easily fill a page just with social scene photos from your last function or field day. The hard part is the design and distribution, as few printers offer

a print and post service. I use Ben Wendel, of Newsletter Marketing Systems, to pull the newsletter together for me and distribute it. All I do is provide the articles and photos, and send him the database I need it sent to. He handles the rest. It’s a breeze! By the time the grain is in the bin they should have got a copy of your first newsletter and after a few months will start to look out for it and value it as a great source of information. Never forget, it is the strength of your relationship, and your reputation with your farming customers, that feeds you through the lean times. (As they will continue to choose to buy from you rather than your competition.) A newsletter is a great way to build that relationship and give them great value in the content it provides them to help them in their business. Your newsletter is also a great place to launch your post harvest offer to get them to place an order with you to secure that free fishing trip holiday. More on putting together killer offers in another article soon

Country Smart Business Solutions | Newsletters | October 2011

ONLINE UPDATE: The latest news, websites and social media to get the biggest bang for your buck.

How To Pick a Website Developer Worth Their Salt A good website is vital for your business success and the first step is to know how to pick a good website developer, know what to ask and be clear on what you want them to build for you. Most people who build websites for business owners are very technically good at what they do. They know how to build really cool flash elements, that search engines can’t view, and can build stunningly beautiful websites, that don’t sell. Be warned! If you let them take charge you will get a beautiful website that panders to your ego rather than one that does what every websites job should be…and that is to generate leads, or sales, for your business.

your website yourself without having to pay your website person for every little change then you want to use an

like. However, if your aim is to create a simply one page landing page

Not their fault, as they are not marketers. It’s your job to master this media so you can direct them as to what you need, to get the result you want. A truck load of good quality leads!

open source platform such as Joomla,

as our preferred option, importantly

So now, when selecting your website

For your main website it is important that is appeals to the search engines and the human viewers who will visit. No point building a website that is doomed from the start because the search engines don’t like it or one that the search engines love but the humans that visit it hate.

produces clean code which the search

developer, all you have to ask is if they

engines love. Teamed with the Thesis

know Wordpress, request they use the

theme is even better.

Thesis theme and make sure they set

The first thing you need to consider is the frame work your website is built on… I won’t go into details here as I don’t want to get too technical. But if you want to be able to easily update

Drupal or Wordpress. (I’m sure you can Google those and check them out.)

which you are going to get traffic to by other methods... then these simple website builders are just fine

Apart from allowing you to easily update your own website Wordpress,

Don’t be tempted to build your

for one off promotional pages.

you up as the administrator.

website with a cheap, point and

Also make sure they have a good

click, website builder that is often

knowledge of how to make your

offered to you when you purchase

website secure, with the appropriate

your domain name, if you want to

Wordpress plugins, as you don’t want to

get traffic from the search engines. In order to be that super easy to

leave your website open to hackers.

build they have to create a lot of