I come from long line of people who love making things grow. Gardening is a long-held family tradition that has cultivated my creativity, inspired my mom and grandma to harvest from the earth, and is ingrained as a way of life that blossomed through necessity for my dad. Growing up, my dad says he always enjoyed the foods they harvested, but “as a teenager, when my parents expected me to work in the garden, I didn’t find it nearly as attractive.” It was a lot of hard, manual labor, but the results were worth it.
In gardening, there are best practices you should follow, but every gardener has a personal flair. My mom and grandma are more intuitive; they enjoy the process and just do what feels right based on experience and instinct. My dad, however, is very results-driven. He enjoys the process, but he makes decisions and takes action based on data. What follows are some of my dad’s gardening tips and strategies that you can implement for stronger cultivation and a better yield in your marketing efforts.
1. Location is everything.
Choose a plot that: is conducive to gardening, won’t interfere with travel or movements around the house or yard, and has rich soil.
Much like when you’re planning a garden, you need to consider the platform when you’re thinking about a site or launching a piece of content. For a garden, a flat area with richer soil is ideal; for a website, you want a platform that can handle your site’s needs and be easy to update in order to add content and grow.
With content pieces, starting with rich groundwork makes all the difference. If you do your due diligence with outreach and launch the content piece on the right social platforms, it has a better chance of returning results. You can be productive with “soil” that is not optimal, but it might have high clay content and need to be turned manually with a shovel, instead of starting off primed for growth.
2. Begin with the end in mind.
If your goal is a stronger yield, you need to amend and balance the soil appropriately over time.
Consider your site as your soil. You start with the basics and add amendments to raise growth potential. There needs to be a balance; amendments have to be introduced slowly so it becomes a native mix.
If you introduce too much too quickly, you may grow too quickly and crash; whether by overloading your host or by a manual penalty from Google. On the other hand, you may introduce so much that your visitors are overloaded and leave. You need to find the balance to increase interest and results without causing an overload.
3. Quality is imperative.
Fresh cow manure will burn your plants and will rob the soil of nutrients as it decomposes.
Quality matters. At the very basics, the search engines are all about quality and relevancy. Low quality content or links do not do you or your site any favors. In gardening, spent mulch comes pre-balanced and won’t rob any nutrients from the soil. But, don’t throw away your lower quality stuff yet! On the gardening side of things, cow manure that has decomposed in a pile and has been incorporated into the soil is useful and helps produce better results.
In marketing, those ideas that seem low quality at first could yield great results. Incorporate those ideas into your content calendar at a later date and spend some time bringing them up to par. There may be several lower quality ideas that have a similar theme; by bringing them together and making them part of the same soil, you give your content a better chance of succeeding.
4. Content curation is great, but creating your own is better.
You can’t beat the taste, flavor, and nutritional value of fresh-grown fruits and vegetables.
Sweet corn, for example, is sweetest within an hour of having picked it. The moment it is pulled off the stalk, the natural sugars start to convert to starch. This is the power of your own content. Content curation is important, but it’s only a part of your strategy. By creating your own content, you gain the experience of producing something awesome that benefits your site immediately and over the long-term.
5. Change is necessary.
It’s imperative to make amendments to the soil in order to obtain & maintain a balanced, native mix.
If you want to be able to cultivate a stronger, more bountiful yield from your ecommerce site, then you need to be open to updates and changes. Search engines like sites that regularly update content to stay fresh & relevant. This could be anything from regularly updating a blog to updating the design to adding new products and more! Identify whatever combination of factors works for you and your business and implement it accordingly.
6. Don’t overwork it.
If you overwork the soil, you reduce your yield. Walking through the garden too much compacts the soil and reduces growth. Good soil has colonies of organisms that help encourage growth; too much rotor tilling interrupts those colonies and can result in poor yield.
Seriously, once your seeds & plants are set, you want to keep the soil light and fluffy. Once your plants are up and established enough to put mulch down, do it and then stay out of the garden as much as possible. With marketing, it’s the same. Once your content piece is out there or you’ve made necessary tweaks on your site, stop messing around and give it a chance to work.
If you do too much, too quickly for too long, you’ll get slapped with a penalty or your visitors will simply get tired of the same thing over and over again. This doesn’t mean you can never update or share it again, but think about your visitors and how often they’ll want to see it and find it useful; otherwise, you’ll end up stomping down and compacting the soil so that nothing grows.
7. Do the research.
Learn what each plant requires from beginning to end.
For pieces of content or custom functionality for your site, you need to consider the requirements from beginning to end for the best results possible. If you’re offering an eBook for download in exchange for contact information, your platform better be set up correctly to gather that information and seamlessly deliver the offer. If not, you’re looking at a poor yield for that season.
8. Keep doing the research.
Gardening is always a learning process.
There is always something new to learn in everything you do. Marketing is an ever-changing field, so the moment you stop learning could be the moment you stop progressing as well. Learn from your own experience and observations, learn by talking to others about their experiences and observations, and learn from the experts in your field.
9. Gather data.
Soil test reports can help identify necessary steps for more balanced soil.
Install Analytics, run A/B tests, send out surveys – do any and everything you need to do in order to gather the data you need. Making decisions without data to back them up is like trying to hit a balloon with a dart by spinning around in the dark – you might get lucky and hit your target, but your chances aren’t that great.
10. Sharing is caring.
My parents grow more than they can consume, so they share with neighbors who share with their guests; everyone is very appreciative.
We live in a digitally social world. Share your content, share other’s content, and interact. By sharing with others in a way that helps them, not only does that reflect positively back on you and your brand, but it also increases the chances of a favor in return. Once you’ve established a relationship with someone, they’re more likely to help you out, whether by guest blogging, granting an interview, or simply sharing content you release.
11. Audit and prune appropriately.
Once they have harvested all a plant is going to yield, they remove it from the garden.
Some plants are susceptible to various blights and pests later in life and some only produce for a certain time. So, to ensure the rest of the garden continues to grow efficiently, plants are removed from the garden once they have been harvested and have stopped producing. No use wasting hard-earned nutrients in the soil on plants that aren’t doing anything or that will introduce harmful effects.
The same can be done for your site. If there is content on your site that produced for you in the past, but perhaps would be considered lower quality under newer guidelines. Don’t be afraid to remove it or update it so that it is higher quality content. Also, part of maintaining a healthy link profile is regularly auditing it and removing bad or broken links.
When it comes down to it, you need to know what you’re going to do and what to do with it. To sum it up, my dad says, “There’s no magical fertilizer that will make the corn grow any faster or tomatoes ripen any sooner; do the necessary research to make sure you have sufficient knowledge to give yourself at least a reasonable chance at success.” Whether marketing or gardening, it’s going to take time, but the more you know and apply lessons learned, the better your chance at a stronger yield.
Don’t forget to check out the Mother’s Day companion piece to see how gardening tips from my mom turned into marketing strategies!