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Ever look at your farm's website homepage and think, what am I even supposed to put here? Your website is the source of truth for your brand and if your homepage is unclear, people leave. So today I'm sharing a simple framework for what to include on your farm's website homepage so that it's clear and helps turn visitors into customers. Lets get started. Hey there, this is Corinna Bench and.

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Welcome to the My Digital Farmer Podcast. In today's market, it's not enough to.

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Just grow your product, you've got to know how to sell it too. Welcome to the My Digital Farmer Podcast where we reveal online marketing strategies and tips to help farmers like you get.

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Better and more confident at marketing, learn.

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How to find more customers, increase your.

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Sales, and build a strong brand for your farm.

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Let's start the show. Well, welcome to episode 349 of the My Digital Farmer Podcast. I'm your host, Corinna Bench, one of the farmers at Shared Legacy Farms out in Elmore, Ohio. I'm also the founder of mydigitalfarmer.com, which is all about trying to help other farmers like you get more confident in your marketing and sales strategy so that you can grow a profitable business. How's everyone doing today? Welcome back to the podcast. A big shout out to all of my digital farmers. If you're new to the show, I'm glad you're here today. I hope you become a super fan too. Make sure you subscribe to the podcast so that you get notified every Wednesday when a new one drops. Go check out my first 10 episodes, especially if you don't know a whole lot about marketing yet because they were designed to be an on ramp into the marketing lingo. You can start there, learn kind of the basics and the ropes, and then jump around throughout the archives of the podcast as suits your fancy. Another great way to learn the ropes of marketing is to get onto my free email list. MyDigitalFarmer.com subscribe is where you do that. When you do, I'm going to send you a email maybe every four or five days for a few months that walks you through the jungle of marketing. I'm going to show you the most important things you need to know. First, I'm going to share some resources that you should be aware of. I give you some free trainings. There's really good stuff in there, so check it out. Subscribe for free@mydigitalfarmer.com subscribe Today's podcast is sponsored by my friends at Localline A new year is the perfect time to streamline your sales and grow more profitably. So if you run a CSA or you sell wholesale or manage both, localline helps you stream streamline your sales and scale with confidence. In 2025, farms and food hubs that used Localline grew their sales by 33%, building on the 23% growth they saw the year before. Average order values increased by 31%. I know mine did. And total order count grew by 9%. Look real results across operations of all size sizes. Localline brings everything together in one platform. They have CSA management, wholesale ordering, automated inventory, barcode scanning, a box builder and POS so that you spend less time managing admin and more time growing your business. And switching couldn't be easier. There are no setup fees, my friends, no sales commissions, and their onboarding team will migrate your storefront for free to taking the workload off your plate. And that usually only takes a few days. As a podcast listener, you'll also get one premium feature for free for a full year when you use the code MDF2026 at checkout. So go to mydigitalfarmer.com localline and then enter that code MDF2026 Start 2026 organized, efficient and ready to grow with Local Line and now back to the show. The off season is usually the time of year when I take some intentional time to look at my website again and tweak it and update it and ask myself, is this still what I want it to say? Are there pictures that are crazy outdated? Do I like this tagline anymore? Are we still selling that product? Are we missing a product here altogether? And so I'm in that mode right now because this is February and so I decided that it would be time for me to talk to you guys about your websites because I think this is a good time of year for you to do a little bit of a website audit as well. And I want this podcast episode to be a helpful resource for you. In case no one's ever said this to you. Your website is the source of truth for your farm brand. Or at least it should be. All the important information should be listed there, should be able to be found by your customers when they get into research mode and they want to go check you out and decide if they want to start working with you. It's where people go when they want to learn more, when they want to double check that you're legit, they want to go and decide if you are for them. If you have Similar values. If your product is the ideal product for solving their problem, and if your home page is confusing or it's missing information and people have to think too hard, they'll leave. And if they leave, well, there's no conversion that time. And you have to work hard to get them to come back and take a look at you again. Whenever I do a presentation about websites, I always talk about this story where my boys, when they were younger, wanted to wear comfy pants everywhere. Actually, they still want to wear comfy pants everywhere. And they're like 15 and 18. Drives me crazy. I was that mom when they were really, really young. I just let them be comfortable and I wouldn't make them wear jeans even when we would go to church. I was just like, no, I just want them to be comfy and be able to play and not worry about feeling stuffy in their clothes. That was a mistake, okay? I'm telling you right now. But as a result, my boys just lived in comfy pants. They loved comfy pants. They always wanted to wear comfy pants everywhere. And I'm like, I love you, but sometimes you need to wear real pants. Like when we go to church or when we're going to our grandma and grandpa's birthday party. Like, let's just, I don't know, ratchet it up a notch and not wear your sweatpants and maybe just wear jeans at least, right? Because what you wear reflects something about you. And if you're always showing up in casual attire, to me, it says something about how we're kind of looking at life in a casual way all the time, and sometimes we need to show up with a slightly different posture. Well, a lot of farm websites are like comfy pants websites, right? They technically exist. They do the job, they're comfortable for the farmer, but they're not doing the job of representing the business and the offer super well or really professionally. A person doesn't walk away from that site feeling confident and clear and like, wow, I want to work with these people, right? So today I'm sharing a simple framework for what elements belong on a good homepage. Not a comfy pants homepage, but a solid, good khakis, Dockers jeans homepage. Okay, I'm not going to be talking about fonts or. Or the pretty design and colors. I'm talking about the messaging blocks that will move people towards action, the information that should be on your site, specifically your homepage. I know there are lots of other pages on your website. Hopefully you have more than a homepage at each of Those kind of sub pages how. Has its own purpose, but the homepage has a very specific job. And so we're going to talk about what goes on that. Because that's the page that people come to, that's the page they spend the most time on. That's the page where they decide if they want to dive deeper into your website. So what should be on that homepage? Okay, this is going to be a pretty deep dive into the topic. I have an entire project inside of Farm Marketing School, which is the website homepage offer. Excuse me, Makeover. The website homepage makeover project. And its purpose is to literally step by step help you rebuild your homepage in 30 days. And I go into a lot more detail there to help you get this done quickly. But today I want to kind of give you the big picture outline. And for some of you, this is going to be super helpful. As I go through this, I want you to be looking at your own website. I want you to be thinking about, do I have that on my website homepage? Do I want to add it? Do I feel like that might add something or is it just going to clutter it? Because these things that I'm going to share, you don't need to do all of them. But for some of you, there's going to be two or three that are missing that would really add a lot and that won't be that hard to add. So I'm going to help you see what those could be. Okay. Now when I teach about websites and you'll see this in for our marketing school in the class, if you ever join, I talk about your website is kind of like a pancake stack. I want you to imagine a stack of pancakes when you go to ihop. Hopefully you don't go to ihop, but you know what I mean. Your favorite pancake house. Or maybe you stack the pancakes for your kids and there's like four, five, six of them, right? And we put that pad of butter on the top and we pour some maple syrup over it. Are you getting hungry? Yes. Okay. A website is like that. We have different messaging stacks. They're usually like, if you were to go and look at a website right now, you, you'd be able to notice them. They are these horizontal containers of content that sit on top of each other and they are in an intentional order. So you are going to think about how many stacks you need to have on your website. Some farms need four to five, but some might need 10 to 12. But what I want you to remember here before we get started is that you don't need every pancake that I'm going to share with you today. The order of the pancakes does matter, that each pancake has a specific job, usually one job and one job only, before it passes the messaging onto the pancake below. And some of those pancakes can live on other pages, should you decide to do so. So as you're listening to these ideas today and you like the idea, but you're like, man, my homepage seems really long now, then maybe consider taking that information and putting it on a sub page somewhere else. Okay, so let's talk about the core pancakes. This is my recommended stack. What I consider foundational. So when I'm auditing websites for farmers in farm marketing school, because sometimes we'll have a farmer bring their website to the monthly Zoom group coaching call, and we'll take a look at it and we'll give some feedback and say, hey, this is what I would change. This is what's doing really well for you. And when I do this kind of work, I'm looking for these different pancakes that I'm about to talk through. Okay, are you ready? So if you want to get out a pen and paper and write this stuff down, go for it. Let's start out with the first one, the first stack on the top. This is called the header stack, and it is the first thing they see when they come to your website. It should be a header image of some sort. And I want you to remember that pictures are a form of copywriting. They are a form of persuasion and messaging. So we want this header image to visually describe what it is that you sell. It should be very clear from the picture alone what you do. So either it's a product or it's your customer doing something with the product, or it's you passing the product to the customer, or it's that transformation that the customer goes through. You've captured that somehow in the graphic, and it's clear what you sell and what you're delivering. Right. This is sometimes tricky to figure out what this should be, but it should be a beautiful picture that frankly takes their breath away. Okay. And we want this header stack to also include a tagline or a headline of some sort. Sometimes it also has an optional sub headline underneath that. And this tagline is communicating the value of your brand. Like, what is it that you do for people? What problem do you solve? Figuring out a tagline is tricky. It's definitely something worth spending some time on. And I have an entire podcast all about how to find your perfect headline or tagline. Excuse me. And I will make sure I put the link in the show notes so that you can go listen to that. I think it was one of the first 20 episodes. The header also includes a primary call to action button, usually right smack in the middle of the picture. Make sure that this entire header element pancake stack fits above the fold. What do I mean by that? Above the fold refers to the days when we all had newspapers and they would put the headline and the lead story above the fold of the newspaper because people would decide whether to take the paper and buy the paper based on what they could read on that top section above the fold. The same principle applies with websites. Many people don't want to even scroll with their thumb. They're making a decision about whether they want to continue to read your website based on what they see in the header image. So we need to get that headline, that sub headline, the call to action button above the fold, above that frame where they then first have to thumb down or use their thumb to keep looking. So ask yourself, can someone tell what I sell from this image and from this heading? And who is this for? So common mistakes that I see in this header stack are pretty landscape shots with no product. So maybe I can tell it's a farm, but I don't know what you're selling. Vague, poetic headlines that are trying to be clever and cute but are not clear. That's another common mistake. And frankly, no button. I see a lot of websites without a call to action button in the header and that is a big no, no. You are missing. You are missing money on the table when you do that. Your call to action button should be simple, should be directional, one or two words. For example, shop online, join CSA, view products. I don't know, go to ChatGPT and throw those examples in and say, give me 10 more like this and see what it comes up with. But it needs to be simple and clear what you want them to do first. Now, I know a lot of you have a lot of things that they could do, a lot of places they could start in terms of buying your products. You need to decide what is your gateway. What is the thing that most people do first? Is it that they shop at your farmer's market? Is it that they buy this specific product? Is it that you want them to buy your csa? What is it? What is the goal of this website? Is it that you want to get them on your availability list? Then that should be your button, right? Decide. And that's the primary call to action. You can always do the rest of the sales job on the other end once they click on that button. Okay, so that's the first pancake stack. It's at the top, the header. The second one is the problem stack, or sometimes I call it the meet the farmer stack. The purpose of this stack is to position yourself as the guide in the customer's journey to connect with them emotionally. To establish like, hey, here's the problem that you have. I know you have this problem and I'm, you know, positioning myself as the guide to help you solve it. Usually it includes a graphic image, a photo of the farmer or the farm family. The copy that goes along with it is all about identifying the problem that you solve for your customer. So you're giving almost like the hint of your about page, like you're introducing yourself, but you're doing it through the lens of why you started this business and how it helps the customer, what you are trying to do for the world, what you're trying to do for the customer, how you're trying to help them. And in the process, you're reflecting your shared values. You are positioning yourself as the guide. Hey, we understand you. I'm here for you. And there's usually also a button in this pancake stack that takes people either to your direct call to action, the one that you had in your header block, or it could be a button that takes them to your about page, where you go into way more detail about your story about who you are and how you're helping the customer. Okay, now remember, this is not an autobiography. Do not go into the weeds here. That's what your about about page is for. It's very customer centered. So make sure that when the customer reads this section, they walk away thinking, oh, my gosh, it's like they're in my head. They understand me, they know what I want and need. And then they want to keep reading and they keep scrolling. Okay, the next stack, number three, is what we call the solution stack or the what we offer section. And the purpose of this pancake stack is to show the main ways that you solve the problem that you just spelled out in the section above. Okay. AKA what is it that you sell? What is your main product line? So this can have many variations. It could be, you know, you're pointing to your csa. It could be you're pointing to your online store and how people can buy from that every week. It could be that you're pointing them to the fact that you go to three farmers Markets. It could be your. Maybe you have an online store that only does shipping. It could be a best sellers grid. And they're clicking and the image and it takes them to the local line store or the shopify store or whatever. Okay, so the goal of this section is to let visitors quickly see what kind of farm business this is. Right. Because they're going to see all these graphics potentially of the different products. And now they're like, oh, that's the product suite. This is what they're all about. It reduces confusion for them. They can quickly decide if they're in the right place or not. It's all about clarity. So don't worry about being complete. Don't worry about putting every single main product in here. No, we're just trying to give a smattering. You're curating the content here so they get an idea of what you're known for. And I want you to focus on your primary revenue drivers here. I know you sell a lot of different things and you have a lot of different outlets, but what are the two or three main ways that revenue comes into your, into your business? And I even want to like pause here. Like some of you might have three ways that you make money, but one of them is like 3% or something of your revenue. Like, it's just a small amount. I don't know if you need to have that listed there. Right. We're putting our primary revenue drivers in this section. Okay. All right, that's the third pancake stack. Number four is the how to buy from us stack, also known as the three part plan stack. The purpose of this section is to explain very clearly step one, step two, step three, how to buy from us. Okay, so you've just told them what your product suite is and now they're thinking, I think I want to buy this. And before they click on that picture, product picture above to go to your store, it might be helpful for you to quickly explain what's going to happen next when you do that. Like when you click on that button and it takes you to the local line store, what are they going to ask you to do there? So I'm going to tell you here now first I want you to, you know, shop our inventory, choose your products right, place your order or choose your pickup site. And then maybe step three is pick up and start cooking. Right. So we want to be really clear about what is the first thing you're supposed to do and then what's going to happen in the middle step and then when are we all going to know that you're done and you've successfully done achieved your goal. It's sometimes a little fun to figure out what should go in those, in the wording of those three steps. But it's important that you have this because people will not step into confusion. They want to see what are the stones in the creek that I'm going to have to hop on. And if you just break it down into three steps, that really helps remove friction and uncertainty. So we want to clearly explain in this section, where are they supposed to click? What's going to happen next? How do products get to them if people don't understand what's going to happen next? Or maybe they click on that picture of a product in the section before and it takes them to your store, but they can't figure out from there, like how the buying process works. They're going to click away, they're not going to complete the process. So if they need to know what the pickup locations are before they go there, then you need to make sure that gets communicated before they click onto your website in your store. Right. That's kind of what this plan section is all about. Okay, so that's section four, the how to buy plan stack. And in farm marketing school, like I said, we have this as an entire project and we spend a lot of time helping you figure out what that plan section can look like on your site. For many, many farmers, this is one of the things that's missing. And when they put it in there, it opens the floodgates and people start actually converting on their online store because now they know what they're supposed to know before they get there. I hope you're enjoying this deep dive episode into all things farm website. Have you ever looked at your own farm website and kind of thought, looks kind of meh? Well, if you've been embarrassed to send people to your website or you've wondered why your website isn't converting, I think I can help. I've audited a lot of farm websites over the years, and I see the same issues over and over again that are causing a lot of confusion. These mistakes will stop your potential clients from moving forward. And the good news is that once you know what they are, they're pretty easy to spot and fix. I've decided to organize them all for you into a free PDF called the 10 Most Common Website Mistakes. This PDF walks you through each one, step by step, what to fix first so that you can start tightening things up. You can grab it for free@mydigitalfarmer.com websitemistakes I hope you find it a helpful resource in addition to this week's episode. And now back to the show. Okay, number five, the FAQ stack, also known as the objection handling pancake. The purpose of this pancake is to overcome any hesitations or questions or objections that a customer might have at this point as they're looking at your offer. Sometimes the FAQ is one giant pancake of single grouped FAQs, like an accordion where you can list maybe five or six on top of each other and they click on the question and it expands. Sometimes, though, it's individual pancakes for every single question that you want to address. That's how it is on my website. I have the single question stacks, but that's just because I only have two of them. I have one that's like, what are your pickup sites? And there's a lot of information there. So I just turned it into its own stack. There's a picture of a pickup site and then I spell out what they are and then I have another one that's are you organic? And I use an entire pancake to talk about that. So you can do this a couple of different ways. Some common examples of FAQs are where are the pickup sites? How does shipping work? Do you have order deadlines? When do orders close? Right. Are you organic? So remember, each frequently asked question is actually an objection in disguise. And it's your job in this section as you're writing the copy for it, to make sure that you answer it well enough so they feel confident to move forward. What are your FAQs? Well, the longer you're in business, the quicker you'll figure out what they are. It's usually a list of three to five things that people are always asking you before they decide to buy from you. And you're getting sick of answering them. Okay, that's your cue. Those are the things that you put in this section. Moving on to number six. This is the lead magnet stack. Now, I've talked a lot about lead magnets over the last 340 episodes, so hopefully I don't need to explain too much what a lead magnet is, but sometimes people aren't ready to buy your product right away. And so we need to have a plan B. We need to have a way to get them on our email list so that we can deliver value to them through the email inbox over the next few weeks and coach them and coax them into becoming a a paying customer. Hopefully you have an email nurture sequence Or a weekly email rhythm to support that. So once a person actually gets on your email list, you have a way of making that conversion. So a lead magnet and like an email nurture sequence or a weekly email discipline kind of go hand in hand. You need to have both or it doesn't really work. But the lead magnet stack is where you're giving away some kind of value in advance, some kind of resource in exchange for their email address. For example, maybe you tease them with a recipe guide if you're a meat producer, maybe you tease them with a download of the cut list and the guide for how to actually read it and use it. Maybe it's a vegetable storage guide that. That's one of the ones on my website. Maybe it's just get onto our farm availability list. Okay, so just remember not everyone is going to be ready to buy and your email list is your long term asset. This is the way that you get people warm leads onto it. And then you've got this practice of emailing them every week or a nurture email sequence or a promotional email sequence that you send to them based on whatever lead magnet they got that does the work of actually selling them and getting them to buy. So I definitely encourage you to have a lead magnet on your homepage. It's usually closer to the bottom and it's positioned as kind of like the. The plan B. Okay, number seven. This one I think is kind of optional. I have included it in my website. But if you don't have room for all of these pancakes, then this might be one that you take away. It's the primary value proposition stack. This is where you are answering the question, what sets us apart? Why us as a brand? Right? What are our commitments to you? What are the values that we stand for? So this is where you're differentiating your brand, your farm from your competition or from the other options that are out there to solve this problem. So for example, you might want to use this pancake stack to focus on your regenerative practice. Or maybe you want to talk all about how your family run or how you're a longtime local farm or you're incredibly convenient or flavor first varieties or that your varieties are rare and hard to find, right? So this is not where you're teaching your whole life story or your incredibly long certifications list. This is where you're mostly focusing on your values. It's one clear paragraph or it has some bullet points. The way it looks on my website is we call the headline of this section our promise to you and then we have sort of like three blocks underneath it that talk about our commitments, the things that were promising to provide for them. And a lot of them are just, you know, beautiful values language. And I'm trying to connect with them and, and position myself as their guide. If these are the same values they have, they'll have alignment with me. And they may be like, yeah, I want to stand behind this farmer. Okay, number eight. I think this one is an absolute must. It's the testimonials or reviews. Pancake stack. And the purpose of this is social proof. Listen, if you haven't heard this from me enough, I'm going to say it again. People are looking for testimonials before they buy, and a lot of times they don't even realize that they are. So if you were to ask them, what do you need to know before you purchase my product? They're not going to tell you, oh, I need to know that it works for someone else. I need to see two or three testimonials. No, but they're instinctively looking for it. And when they see the testimonials, something unlocks in their brain and they're ready to move forward. So they will not take action until they see that your product is working for other people too. You don't need to have a lot of testimonials. I would say three. Like, if you can create a pancake stack that has three right next to each other, that should be good enough. But we also sometimes see, like, these rotating sliders where it's, I don't know, maybe four or five testimonials that just keep sliding. But you can only read one at a time. Sometimes I see it as a Google review embedded thing. So we use a tool called Embed Social. I pay a monthly fee for that. And it's a widget that goes right into my, into my website homepage and it updates in real time as people continue to leave reviews. That's not a good thing to do, by the way. Like, don't do Embed Social if you're not getting a lot of reviews on a regular basis. But if you are, for instance, a business that does a lot of online orders and you're getting a fair number of reviews from people every few days or every day, then that looks really impressive to have that constantly be populating. Because not only are they going to see, I don't know, like eight reviews that they can read right there in the block, but they're going to see the latest time and day that it was posted and they'll be like, dang, there's like a lot of super fans that are, they must be doing a lot of business. And that sends a signal too on the headline to be. You can be highlighting like over 2000 happy customers or whatever. Like, you can use language like that too to further reiterate that lots of people like you. So, so using the copy of the headlines is really important too. As you're, as you're putting these pancakes into position, we're not just thinking about what am I writing in the paragraph and what's the order of these pancakes, but we're really thinking about the power of the wording that goes in the headline because you can definitely influence someone through the word choice. And we'll talk more about that at the very end.