Starting Your Homesteading Business on the Right Foot

If you’ve been thinking about turning your homesteading hobby into a business, it’s a wonderful time to get started. Whether you want to sell farm-fresh fruits and vegetables, animal products, or other goods, you will need to follow the same essential steps to get your business off the ground.

Creating Your Brand

It’s important for companies to develop a brand that is representative of the company and the company’s values. As The Logo Company explains, agricultural marketing comes back to the same concepts as any other business realm: a company’s name, motto and logo should all work together to reinforce the company brand. This helps the customer recognize your brand consistently, which builds respect and trust that comes in handy, particularly when you are building your business.

Determine what your brand will be by considering what is most important to you as the business owner and what customers want most from a business like yours. Think about what brought you to homesteading initially and let that inform your branding. Then work with Wittner Design to create graphics that enhance your brand.

Starting Your Business

Write out a business plan. This should include details about why you are starting your business, your products, your finances and other information important to the running of your business. The kind of business license you will need varies from state to state, so research the laws in your state before applying.

You should also consider how you will handle your accounting. Thankfully, there are tech tools for virtually everything these days. Take payroll for instance. There are full service payroll options that make life far simpler for the small business owner, thanks to features like automated payroll generation, automated tax payments, tax penalty protection, and direct deposit. Some plans even provide HR service, retirement planning, and health benefits. Mull over what your needs are and add the tech that makes running your daily affairs simpler.

Selling Your Products

Farmers markets are a great place to start building your business. Most markets require potential vendors to apply. Once accepted, you will pay a fee in order to sell at the market. Consider this an investment, though, as the farmers market will give you more advertising through their efforts than you could afford as an individual.

You can also consider forming a CSA, or customer-supported agriculture program, for your homestead. In a CSA, the customer pays ahead of time for a share of the farmer’s products as they are harvested or finished. This doesn't have to be limited to fruits and vegetables and can also include eggs, honey and even meat that you raise. Though CSAs typically run through spring and summer, some farmers continue throughout the year with jams, preserves and sauces.

You may also have luck selling to local restaurants, grocery stores and school systems. These kinds of establishments are often happy to be able to advertise locally grown produce and meat.

Marketing Your Business

Even if you will be selling through a farmers’ market and benefiting from their advertising, it is still important to have your own online presence. Create a website for your company that shows off your homestead and advertises your goods.

Set up social media pages on Facebook and Instagram for your business. It is easy to integrate the two to streamline your information and posting. Invite all your friends to like and/or follow your accounts and ask them to share your Facebook business page and invite their friends to like it, too.

Take good-quality photos of your homegrown goods and share them often to your accounts. Marketing Insider Group recommends live streaming from farmers’ markets or food stalls to entice your customers to come down and purchase, or live stream from your homestead to show customers where the food and goods they love are grown with care.

Turning your homesteading hobby into a business is straightforward and manageable, even if it may seem daunting at the outset. Simply follow the steps above and keep doing what you are already doing at home. After all, if you have the will and the strength of character needed to homestead, there’s nothing you can’t do.

Written by Katie Conroy | advicemine.com | May 2021

How to Market Your Business’s Reopening on a Budget

Shutting down temporarily - especially for a pandemic - can land a major blow to your business. Customers often don’t mentally distinguish between “closed for now” and “closed for good.” As a result, you can wind up losing clients who simply assume that your business is shut down for good. How do you avoid this? You create an effective reopening marketing campaign. Once you’ve taken care of all the legal aspects of the business, including filing all that paperwork, you can make the right moves to let customers know you’re back in business. Here’s a look at some of the most cost-effective marketing strategies.

Marketing Mail

It might seem old-fashioned, but mailed marketing can be an extremely effective tool for business. If your target audience is a highly localized market, it makes sense to connect with them via their mail boxes. Focus on low-cost ways to achieve this, such as using Staples coupons to cut down on your materials costs.

You can also use mail to take a targeted, personal approach. This is a great move for small businesses that have developed relationships with clients. A handwritten, individualized letter sends a big message: I remember you, you matter to me, and I’m back in business. Remember, customers are people first. Connecting with them on a personal level will always leave an impact.

Targeted Advertising

More and more of our lives are happening online and, as a result, nearly any company can benefit from targeted digital advertising. The benefit of this kind of advertising is its specificity. You can buy ads through Google, Facebook, and other online platforms that go directly to your target audience.

This means your money is being spent on potential customers only, which saves you money. No more spending a ton on casting a wide net just to hope the right people get caught along the way. Sites that sell these kinds of ads pride themselves on creating effective algorithms that understand their users needs. Take advantage of this research and get your message seen.

SEO Marketing

Another tool you can use to enhance your reopening campaign is focusing on SEO best practices. When you have good SEO, your website is more likely to come up when people search for your product or services. A high SEO rank is crucial for both online-only and in-person businesses.

This is achieved through a combination of inbound and outbound links, online content, and SEO-friendly web design. Search engines value high-quality, useful content, so establishing your company as an industry voice is extremely effective. Think about what kind of content you can produce that relates to your company’s mission and position in the industry, and use that to guide your online voice.

The great thing about this is that you can really tailor it to any budget. If you don’t have a ton to spend, you can hire consultants to help you come up with a game plan, then do the work yourself. If you have more budget to work with, a marketing company can handle everything from keyword generation to content and ROI evaluation.

Safety Messaging

No matter what method of marketing you decide to use, you need to think about what message you’re sending clients. “We’re open!” is the first and most basic part of your message, but you must go deeper. Address the pandemic, and specifically address what you’re doing to keep customers safe. Social distancing, mask usage, and virtual services are all great things to emphasize right now. Clients want to know you’re thinking about their health and safety, so incorporate that into your advertising.

Focus on using the advertising routes that will be most cost-effective for your market, audience, and business model. With the right marketing moves, your business reopening can be a major success!

Written by Naomi Johnson | October 2020

"Naomi Johnson created lifebasedbusiness.net for small business owners, creatives, solopreneurs, boss babes and bros, and side hustlers who are committed to designing their careers to accomodate how they want to live, instead of the other way around. Through her site, Naomi offers practical advice and inspiration to help others adopt the life-based business mentality and change their lives in immensely positive, fulfilling ways."

Photo Credit: Unsplash

Should You Become an Entrepreneur? Tips for Making the Leap

Are you bored with your ho hum career and dreaming of becoming an entrepreneur? Starting a small business means being your own boss and following your dreams, but along with opportunity comes a lot of challenges. Do you have what it takes? Here’s what to know about starting a business before you make the leap.

What does it take to start a business?

Running a business requires more than technical prowess. These are just a few of the responsibilities on a small business owner’s plate:

Applying for business licenses and permits.

Paying income, sales, and payroll taxes.

Invoicing and bookkeeping.

Ordering and managing supplies.

Monitoring inventory.

Responding to customers.

Marketing your business.

Many of these jobs can be outsourced. In fact, many of them should. Whether it’s hiring a web developer to build a custom website, an illustrator like Wittner Design to create print and digital designs, or a Certified Public Accountant to manage your taxes, some jobs are best left to the professionals. Not only will you get better results, you’ll avoid spending all your time on tasks that don’t generate revenue.

How to brush up on business skills

Delegating makes a business owner’s workload more manageable, but it doesn’t eliminate it. As the head of a company, you’re still in charge of making strategic decisions for your business.

With so much at stake, you want to be confident the decisions you make are smart ones. But how? If you’re uncomfortable with learning through trial and error — and losing money in the process — invest in education before starting your first business.

As Business Insider notes, informal learning through podcasts is a great place for prospective entrepreneurs to test the waters. Here, you can get introduced to a variety of business concepts without investing a lot of money or time. However, when you’re serious about starting a business, consider a formal degree program. 

Going back to school for a master’s in business administration takes time, but your efforts pay off with the knowledge you need to build a thriving business. You could even complete your MBA online while working a full-time job as you prepare to become an entrepreneur.

How to reduce financial risk when starting a business

Learning before you leap is one way to prepare yourself for the rigors of starting a business, but lack of knowledge isn’t the only reason small businesses fail. Many small businesses succumb to financial problems when they can’t access capital, fail to manage cash flow, or encounter unforeseen expenses.

The best thing any entrepreneur can do to minimize financial risk is develop a business plan. A business plan is more than a rough framework; it’s a step-by-step guide that lays out what your business will do and how it will do it. In addition to writing a solid business plan, first-time entrepreneurs should improve their personal finances before taking the plunge. By saving up to start your business, you limit the loans you need to take on so you can focus on building profits instead of paying debts.

Grow notes some entrepreneurs opt to start their business on the side of a full-time job. While building a side business means slower growth, it offers the benefit of cash flow and financial security in a small business’s early years. This is an especially good choice for entrepreneurs building a service-based business, where all it takes is a website and marketing to start building a customer base.

Starting your own business can be incredibly fulfilling. However, don’t let your passion for entrepreneurship cause you to rush in unprepared. By spending time learning, saving, and planning before putting your entrepreneurial skills to the test, you can start a business that’s built to last.

Written by Derek Goodman | September 2020 Inbizability.com

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