Garden Centers Shouldn’t Blog
If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
You run a small retail greenhouse or nursery and you want to know if you should blog.
Blogging has to be seen in the context of marketing and sales. So there are two aspects you have to consider.
1)Your costs.
Take the time you spend writing and uploading a post (conservatively 20 minutes if it’s a decent post but if you aren’t a speed typist and a fast writer - you can easily hit 45 minutes). Understand you have to post regularly to make a blog worthwhile. And the main blogging time is spring when your target market is looking for information. Let’s say an hour/week.
Multiply your wage rate times 52 hours (one hour week). Let’s say that you make $20/hour for the purposes of this. That means your upfront cost is $1040 to produce this blog. But that’s not the way I used to budget my time in the nursery. You want me in November - I come for $20/hour. You want me in May - my time was over $200/hour and I’d still say no. I just didn’t have the time in May to do anything but eat, sleep, and run the nursery. So do figure out your real cost.
2) The Response.
Then take a look at subscription rates. If you get 200 subscribers to a commercial retail garden blog you’re doing well (and that’s assuming you’re a good writer so that folks will read you). Assume that at least half of those are non-local. Now you’re down to 100. Then evaluate response rates by posting a coupon. Typically, response rates approaching 5% are considered downright miraculous on the Net but let’s say you get 10%.
Bottom Line
Congratulations! You’ve just spent at least $1040 to get 10 customers into your garden business and your sales are discounted.
Your cost of acquisition is about $100 per customer and this isn’t likely a good deal when compared to something as simple as direct mail or other advertising options.
Blogging Garden Centers
But I know garden centers that blog! Sure you do - but they aren’t making money at it. They’re doing it for the heck of it - because somebody told them it was “cool” to blog. Or because that individual wants to create a national role within the trade for some other reason.
They surely haven’t thought out the consequences of spending an entire week of the year (one hour a week for 52 weeks=52 hours) on an advertising activity that’s going to create a customer acquisition cost of over $100.
In short, nobody at that garden center has run the numbers.
Does the same thing apply to websites?
No!
You need a website and you need it optimized for local searches. You need to have something up there that that speaks to local folks so when they search for a garden center in “anytown” - you’re going to pop up. Clear directions to your place (include coordinates for gps units) telephone contact points (not email - you don’t have time to answer email in your busy season) - the stuff you need to get these people into your store where you can make money.
You can write a few articles about gardening in your region - dealing with the specific problems of your climate and soils - to establish yourself as an expert resource. Write a new one every month or two to keep the site fresh. But don’t go overboard on it - you’re in the nursery business - not the information-business.
Does this apply to nationally known nurseries?
Short answer - it depends. The same kinds of numbers hold true - same kinds of costs, same kinds of response rates BUT the target audience is different. You’re not writing for consumers, you’re writing for the media. The garden media writes and reads blogs and those are the folks you want to have for your pull marketing efforts.
But you have to do it in a way that answers the classic copywriting question from the reader’s point of view “What’s in it for me?” If your commercial blog is about you - the media won’t read it and there’s quite a few out there that treat their commercial blog as a personal one. If your commercial nursery blog is about your reader - helping them in a some way, then you’re going to have readers in the trade. Tim Wood does a great job of this. He provides useful plant information, new plant info, and ties it all up in a story that just, ever so casually, happens to mention his company every now and then. 
But to return to my main point - there are other, far more cost-effective ways to publicize and make use of resources than blogging. It’s a long way down the list of marketing and sales efforts for local garden centers with no national objectives.
I’m moving online
It’s a long story but the bottom line is that I had to totally rebuild my operating system on my Mac this weekend. This meant that that in one jaw-dropping moment, I realized my entire writing life - all my articles, books, e-books, pictures, videos, columns, radio shows and memories were sitting on one single, solitary hard drive.
If Mac’s Time-Machine backup system didn’t work - I was somewhere very, very far down an incredibly deep hole.
And it was a heart stopping moment when I hit the “restore” button and watched to see if it was really going to do as promised.
It did. My system is up and running nicely but that’s the last time I’m going to have that happen (with all respect to Time-Machine and Steve Jobs).
I’m going to server storage. My working notes will now be collected and kept at Evernote. I really like this system of tagging and holding information and it sits on my desktop and syncs regularly with the online storage system.
I have a new dedicated server on my desk. This is two 500 gig hard drives tied together so that one mirrors the other. I put something on one - and the other instantly copies it. When I outgrow 500 gigs, I can simply plug another one into a slot in the back and I instantly have more storage. Expandable for as long as I need it.
Videos that are produced are going to Amazon’s S3 server farms. I’m not going to take the chance of losing these guys and this allows me to produce higher quality videos than I’m doing now. But they won’t sit on my own servers anymore - and they’ll be regularly backed up over there.
My contacts and calendars (things that organize my life and connect me to the outside world) are now duplicated and synced at MobileMe. No writer can survive losing that contact list unless they have a far better memory than I do.
And Time Machine hums away on the hour producing backups of the day to day stuff of the writer’s life.
But the important stuff is going to be duplicated online so I’ll never have to watch my entire working life on a single hard drive again.
Showing my age I point out that when I first started hammering out articles on my typewriter, carbon paper was all you needed and all you got.
The point of all this? If you’re a writer with all your info on one computer - then you’re taking your virtual life and words and placing your faith in a working bit of machinery that sits and spins for a living.
I’m moving online and duplicating (automatically) wherever possible. No more jaw-dropping moments for me.
photo credit: richardmasoner
Useful Tools for Writers
OK - let’s admit it, if you’re not a full time writer - you want to be.
So here’s a website with 100 tools for writers. Writers of all kinds (you don’t have to be a garden writer to play here).
Here’s 100 Tools for Writers via a link at Performancing.
Writer’s are not revolutionaries
“To think your self into somewhere strange and someone new, and then to live it, takes the nerve of a revolutionary or bride.
If writers had that kind of nerve, they wouldn’t be writers. They would be starting revolutions and getting married, like everyone else.
As it is, we tend to cultivate our gardens and mull a lot.”
Alexei Panshin
-
Join Us
Stumble It!