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Is your farm's website reflecting what's happening on your farm right now, or is it stuck in last season? Today we're talking about why your website is like a living storefront and the small seasonal updates that help new customers actually take the first step. Let's get started. Hey there. This is Corinna Bench and welcome to the My Digital Farmer Podcast. In today's market, it's not enough to just grow your product. You've got to know how to sell it too.
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Welcome to the My Digital Farmer Podcast
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where we reveal online marketing strategies and
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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 sales, and build a strong brand for your farm.
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Let's start the show. Well, welcome to episode 362 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 get confident in their marketing and sales strategy so that you can grow a profitable business. How's everyone doing today? Welcome back to all My Digital Farmers. Big shout out to my regular listeners and all of you who binge listen, raise your hand if you have listened to more than one in one sitting. I love it. I can tell from my stats that that is happening and I just love that. If you are new to the podcast, I'm glad you're here today. I hope you get hooked. There's so much good stuff in here. Make sure you subscribe to the show, please. And if you're really new to the marketing lingo, I encourage you to actually start at the beginning and go check out my first 10 episodes because I designed them many, many years ago with you in mind for the future audience so that they could listen to those. They're kind of the timeless foundational pieces and everything sort of builds off of them. So yeah, it's a really good on ramp into the marketing lingo that we talk about here. You can also just look through the archives and see what tickles your fancy. Another great place to get resources and onboarding into the marketing lingo is to join my email list and you can do that@mydigitalfarmer.com subscribe easy to remember. This is a fantastic place to learn the ropes of marketing because when you subscribe, I'm going to send you an email like every five days for about three months and I've put them in a very specific order. They're going to show you the key podcasts you need to listen to. I'm going to share some free trainings, some free resources and templates. Really just walk you through step by step and hold your hand. Give you a strong foundational framework so you can get on that list by going to mydigitalfarmer.com subscribe Today's podcast is
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sponsored by my friends at Localline. If you run a CSA or you sell direct or wholesale, or you manage both, Local Line helps you simplify your operations and scale with confidence. I love this platform. In 2025, farms and food hubs using Local Line grew their sales by 33%, average order values increased by 31% and total order count grew by 9%. That is real results across operations of all sizes. Local Lane brings everything together into one platform. So CSA management, wholesale ordering, access to new wholesale opportunities. They have automated inventory, barcode scanning, a box builder, they even have a pos. And that means you spend less time managing admin and more time growing your business. Switching couldn't be easier. There are no setup fees, no sales commissions, and their onboarding team will even migrate your storefront for free, taking the workload off your plate. As a podcast listener, you'll get one premium feature free for a full year when you use the code MDF2026 at checkout. So head to mydigitalfarmer.com localline all one word. Then use that code MDF2026 and you'll get that discount. Start the season strong with Local Line. It's streamlined, efficient and built for growth. And now back to the show.
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Well, I hope you are having a fantastic May. If you're anything like our farm, things are really crazy right now. We are in the middle of planting. It is all systems go. We're doing a May spring shoe salad share this month and we have our big plant sale pickup. Plus my son is graduating from high school and we're doing all the things associated with that. My family's coming out from Texas and Oregon, flying in to celebrate for a few days and then of course have the Bench family that lives here. Just a lot of love and also I think a little bit of bittersweet sadness as we're saying goodbye to our son and he's heading off to boot camp in a couple of months and really enjoying these final weeks with him. We are definitely in a transition moment and that is actually what sparked today's episode topic. A few weeks ago our farm got featured in the Local Newspaper in the Toledo Blade, and they were doing a big article on asparagus season. They reached out to us because we grow asparagus, and Maddie is the food editor, and she knows us well, and she wanted us to kind of be the expert on this particular article. Well, the article came out, and suddenly we had all of these new eyeballs on our business. People were googling us, looking us up, trying to figure out how to buy asparagus from us, because Maddie did not put that information into the article, even though I gave it to her, which is totally fine. That's her prerogative. But I know people were trying to figure out how to buy asparagus from us because our cousin, who runs the neighboring farm stand in our town, called up Kurt and said, hey, why are all these people calling us asking about your asparagus? And I had kind of this moment where I realized people were discovering our farm, but our website wasn't ready for them. Our website wasn't helping them find us. There was nothing. I'm so embarrassed to admit this because I'm like your marketing teacher. There was nothing on our homepage about asparagus, even though I knew this article was imminently coming out. There was nothing about the newspaper feature or. Or the Toledo Blade, which is a big brand out here. Nothing telling people how to buy from us right now. Nothing directing people into that next step. There was just the regular stuff I always have there about RCSA and how you can join our csa. And so I. I had this moment where I realized I have been treating my website kind of like a static brochure. Do you have a brochure still, by the way? I have a printed brochure. And you know what? I think it's like eight or nine years old. It still has the old, old, old pricing of our csa. And so many things have changed. Our pickup sites have changed. I still have a box of them upstairs. I don't even know why I don't pass them out, because it's not relative or relevant anymore. But I've been treating my website like one of these old static brochures with a lot of outdated information, right? But farms, in reality, are seasonal businesses. Our offers change monthly, weekly, sometimes daily. Some of you guys are changing your offers every day. And our websites should behave seasonally, too. I missed the mark. I missed an opportunity with that whole asparagus thing. And so I wanted to use that as a case study and talk about this a little bit, because there is an opportunity for all of us. A lesson in that, for all of us, as we move into this season, it's about to get a little bit nuts for us, right? We have this big opportunity to really sell in the next few months, and I don't want you to make this same mistake. So I'm going to introduce you to a new way of thinking about your farm website. It's not a brochure. It is a living storefront. And just like a physical retail storefront changes their displays or their signage or their promotions and their featured products throughout the month, throughout the year, your digital storefront, your digital, your website, it should evolve with the current season of your farm business too. I think a lot of us, when we build our website, we kind of build it once and then we mentally check it off the list like done. But that is not actually how websites work for seasonal businesses, which is what we are. Everyone. Okay? Just reminding you that now some of you listening might fall into a slightly different category. Maybe you legitimately just have one offer and it is literally the same 12 months a year. People can buy it anytime. It's evergreen. It never changes. But for most of us, we have a product line that is constantly in flux. Different vegetables coming into season, different products we want to feature different kinds of things. We're bundling together different packages. We might even have different marketing outlets. And so what's relevant in May is completely different than what we're able to. To pitch and sell in July. And what's relevant in July is different than October. And what's relevant during CSA enrollment season is different from peach season or strawberry U pick season or bulk tomatoes or holiday Christmas box season. Right? So I want you to think about a physical storefront, even if you don't have one. No retail store keeps Christmas decorations up in July. They will rotate their displays. I'm just picturing myself walking into Hobby Lobby right now. They do this so well. Like, there's constantly stuff shifting around in there. Their displays are different. Their signs change. The featured products move around. Their little coupon thing that comes in the mail or in the, in the newspaper, like that shifts the. They update their store hours. Sometimes they swap out their. Their promotion, their offer of the week. They merchandise around the current season. Why? Because they want the storefront to reflect what's actually happening right now. And it keeps people's interest, it keeps them coming back because it's always shifting and changing. There's always another item on the ascension ladder of products that a person could buy. And your farm website can operate the exact same way, and it probably should. Your Homepage should feel like the current season of your business. And I failed in this a few weeks ago, My little case study, my asparagus debacle. Like, I missed that opportunity. I missed the mark. And yeah, I know we all do. So I'm just kind of pointing to it. I am not perfect. And I'm trying to just show you, hey, we can learn from this and it doesn't have to be hard. I'm hoping for the rest of this episode. I want to talk about why this matters so much, and I want to kind of talk through some things that I would be commonly rotating on a farm website. Like, if you have a little checklist every month to go down and just make sure you're. You're checking for these things. And I want to give you a routine, I want to give you kind of a workflow of things to be checking so that you know, how often should I be doing this? So you can quickly do a quick tune up if necessary. You know, I think we forget this as farmers and business owners, that new people are constantly entering your sales funnel, constantly through Google search, through newspaper articles, like, in my case, Instagram shares or word of mouth. Maybe you do a lot of Instagram reels, the farmer's market, or you have an event, or you do some kind of a collaboration or partnership, a customer referral, a media mention. I know we got on the television once, interviewed on TV at the news station. That was a huge opportunity. People are discovering you all the time. And those people do not have the same familiarity with you, the same context as your existing customers. Your loyal customers already know that it's asparagus season and that pickup has started, or that strawberries are ready, or your tomato orders are open now. They already know your hours, that your farm stand closes at 6, or that you're currently enrolling CSE members, because they're probably on your email list. And if you're doing a good job of a weekly or biweekly email, like, they're. They're at least getting like 70, 80% of this information. Okay? But your new people, they know none of that. They. They require an orientation. They need a guide. And so this is where having a stale website, a website that hardly ever changes, it really just kind of showcases your flagship product, but doesn't ever talk about some of the fast, quick, easy ways that a person can enter your business that changes seasonally like that creates friction. If someone discovers your farm today, does your website immediately help them understand what's. What's available and happening now? What are you selling now? How do you buy now? And what do I do next if I want to? Or does your website feel a little generic, maybe outdated, even confusing? I mean, that's the question. And I have to tell you, I think that mine is, I've become aware of this and I've just been like, oh, I don't want to. I don't still want to take the time to like, really think through what I need to change on it. But I think that my website is a little confusing. It has two doorways. It has the door to the CSA and it has the door to the just online store where you can buy whatever you want a la carte, the custom orders. And honestly, the gateway into my business is probably the online store. That's the fastest, easiest entry point all year long to just start buying from us. And then once you're in that rhythm, I can introduce people to the CSA. But because for the first 10, 12 years of my business, the only way in was the csa and that was the stuff I built first on the CSA website. That's my main messaging, that's my flagship, that's my default setting, is to just move people to the csa, when in reality I need to just start embracing the fact that that is not how most people are coming into my business anymore. Many of them graduate to that, but not all of them do. And so I'm sort of in this weird position where I'm not quite ready to let go in the messaging of, you know, coming through, starting with my csa, because that's what I've always known. That's like my security, that's what I believe has always worked. And I'm starting to sense that, no, maybe, Corinna, you just need to only talk about the online store as the starting point now and not give all these options. So I haven't made that adjustment yet. But this whole situation with the asparagus thing really made me take a look at when a person comes to my website, let's just say they saw that whole asparagus thing. They're going to be confused because my website's not really talking about asparagus, it's talking about a box subscription and an online store thing. And I'm not exactly sure which one gets me the asparagus. Right. And so I've just got to figure out a better way to signal that and message that so that as the season now progresses from month to month, you know, next May or every May, I'm going to focus on asparagus and then In June, I'll focus on something else. There's going to be a different crop that everyone's excited about, and I'll need to create some kind of a mechanism or space in that website so that that seasonal element can change. Right. That easy way into the brand can change it. I've got. I've just really got to get behind that, and I want to. I want to just preach that out to the world right now because I think some of you could benefit from that or at least testing that to see if that works, if that greases the wheels and gets people to come in a little bit faster. Okay, your. Your website has to work for both audiences. It has to work for your returning customers and brand new people, because your old customers may need to go there for quick reminders, like, what's the pickup site location, you know, address and time? I can't remember. But your new customers especially need guidance. And I feel like if, if you're struggling between, like, which group should I build this website for? I would almost suggest if you had to pick one audience, let's focus on the new people. Let's focus on the new people and then trust that you have a system behind the scenes for onboarding and connecting with those customers once they're on your list. If you have a weekly email practice, then you can do a lot to just keep them educated about new offers and what's going on on the farm with that mechanism in place. But you need to have a way to pull in the new customers. And I think the website's primary purpose is really to talk to that audience to get them interested in what you're offering, educating them, get them on your email list and hopefully get them to take that gateway offer. Okay. Today's podcast is sponsored by Farm Marketing School, my monthly membership for farmers. Before we dive back into the episode, I want to speak to a very specific kind of farmer for a second. If you're a year or two into your business and things are working, but your marketing still feels kind of scattered, like you're posting, you're sending some emails, you're running promotions, but it all feels disconnected and you're not sure what's actually driving sales, I just want to say that's not a lack of effort, that's just a lack of structure. Because most farmers don't need more ideas. What they need is a system that connects everything together. And that's exactly why I built Farm Marketing School Inside. I teach you how to actually design your marketing so that it works like a machine, a system, not a bunch of random tactics. We map out your full customer journey. We build your email engine. We create intentional promotions and product pathways. So your marketing starts handing off from one piece to the next like a relay race instead of you running every leg yourself. And we do it through 30 day project builds. So you're not just learning about marketing, you're actually finishing things. You're actually building the marketing assets in your marketing machine. Your sales funnel, your promotions, your lead magnet, your weekly email rhythm, all your marketing assets. And that's when the shift happens. Marketing starts to feel lighter, the flywheel starts to spin. Sales start to feel more predictable and you finally feel like, okay, I'm on the right track. I know what I'm doing. If that's what you've been longing for and what you've been missing, then I want to invite you to join Farm Marketing School. Just for a month. Come inside and see what it's all about. You can learn more@mydigitalfarmer.com FMS and now back to the show. So your website's job is to guide people. It is to reduce confusion, it is to build trust. So it needs to send authority and trust signals and it needs to tell people what to do next. It needs to point to the next step, the, the next obvious step. That's it. I mean, that is the primary purpose of your website. And when your website isn't matching what your current seasons experience actually is, people are going to be confused. They're going to hesitate. So for example, if your homepage is talking about CSA signup and it's like July, then that's going to feel off. If your strawberry banner is still up in October or your spring plant sale graphic never gets talked about in, in the weeks during your print sale promotion, that's a. Whoops, that's a missed opportunity, right? Or maybe your pickup hours are switching from season to season or quarter to quarter and you're not changing that on your website. Maybe. I've sometimes seen this where our websites will say coming soon or get on. I've done this before where I've said coming soon even though I'm already actively selling. Or I often catch a section saying get on the CSA wait list in, you know, April when I'm actively selling CSA memberships. Like that wait list sign up should only be up for the months of August, September and I forget to go and take it down. Anyway, we want to just be making sure that our website is matching what's actually going on. And I know these things seem Small, but they erode trust. It's a very small, quiet way of eroding trust. Customers start to wonder, wait, is this business active? Am I in the right place? How do I actually buy from you again? Right, and, and if you're confused as a customer, you're not going to convert, you're not going to turn into a customer, you're going to hesitate, you're going to just say, well, let me, I got to look into this more. And, and then you don't. So here's some of the things that I would commonly rotate on a farm website. I was trying to get practical here and come up with just a short list. And I'm not saying that you need to redesign your whole homepage every month. That's not realistic. But I do think that farms farm businesses need to have seasonal grooming little tune ups. So here, here are the things that I would commonly rotate. And hey, if you want a simple tool to help you actually do this website grooming process, I, I created a living storefront website audit checklist. That's what I called it. That is a mouthful. But it's basically a, a website audit checklist. And you can go into the show notes and I'll have it there, you can download it. It's going to walk you through the exact questions to ask yourself as you review your homepage, your promotions, your hours, all the things that I'm about to walk through. And I designed it to be something that you can just print out. You can pull it out once a month or once a quarter whenever your farm shifts into a new season, or maybe it's a new promotion cycle. It's going to be different for all of you. I think we get too close to our business sometimes that we stop seeing our website through the eyes of a brand new customer. And so this checklist is designed to help you kind of step back and do a quick tune up before that confusion starts to cost you. So you can get that checklist in the show notes, which is mydigitalfarmer.com362 that's where you will find it. Okay, so here is the list, the short list of things that I would consider commonly rotating throughout the season. So if you're going to go and do this, this grooming process, let's just say you're going to do it once a month, you're going to put it on your calendar and you're going to spend 15 minutes and just quickly go through this. Um, number one, something to consider. I'm not saying you have to. But something to consider is the homepage Hero image. That is a big easy way to freshen up the look of your site and to help people see what's trending right now on the farm. Does that main Hero image reflect what is happening now or what's, what's the offer? What's the main product that you're really pushing the gateway offer. So if it's asparagus season, maybe the hero page should be asparagus for four weeks. If it's, I don't know, peach season, you got peaches on that hero page. Right? Your homepage should visually reflect the current moment of your farm. Now again, some of you have a product like you sell grass fed beef and you do that all year and that's all you do. Okay, that, that's going to make it a lot simpler. You're just going to have the same kind of basic image blocks going all the time. But maybe you have a certain element within that category that you really pitch. Like at Christmas time it's your, your, your, your boxes, your, your gift boxes or something. And then maybe the, the, the image changes to reflect that actual product itself. Okay, all right. So that's the first item. The second one that I would consider switching around. If you're doing this grooming process is your featured promotion. This could be your featured promotion of the week if you have a weekly special. Maybe you don't do weekly specials, maybe that's too often. Maybe it's a monthly promotion or again a seasonal thing where this is the product that you really talk a lot about and you sell a lot of for several months. It's going to look different for all of you. So what is the thing you most want people to notice right now? Is it your bulk beef? Is it you pick strawberries? Is it tomato, bulk tomato, pre orders or a holiday box? Or a flower subscription? Because you're really trying to push the flower subscription right now or CSA feature that prominently. Don't make people hunt around for it. Now how do you do this? Well, I mean you could do it by making the homepage Hero section B all about that. Or you could create what I call a pancake stack, an element underneath the homepage Hero section that is just talking about your featured promotion. That's another way you could do it. Or if you have a featured products section, you'll often see this on websites where there's like a, I don't know, maybe three to six images that are pulled from the online store that are common starting points for businesses or for customers, you could have your featured promotion be the first one that's listed with some copy underneath it. Almost like, hey, this is where we want you to start. Okay, so the featured promotion is a really key way. I really want you to consider that one. That is an obvious way to do this. Some of you are doing weekly specials. That means you're coming in every week and switching out this one section. Again, think through the eyes of a brand new person. When they're coming in, you want to get them excited and they see, oh, this is the easy way to start working with you. This is the, the cool new thing that a lot of people love. In the month of June, in the month of July, I'm going to try to get my hands on that. And that becomes their first purchase. All right, the third item on this list is your call to action buttons. So sometimes your CTA needs to change seasonally too. For instance, order asparagus, reserve your you pick spot, get weekly availability emails, join the csa, join the wait list. Right. Depending on where you are in the promotional calendar, the primary CTA button text may change. So for me, in the months of, I would say November through April, my primary CTA button on the homepage of my website is to join the csa because that if I still have spots open and this year I did, that's the thing I really want to fill and that's the season when I'm filling it. We start our CSA in June. So when June hits, I am changing the call to action button on the hero section of my website homepage to be shop our online store because that is now the key easy access way to get into my business. I don't really have an online store open in the off season in the months of November through April. So I'm not going to send people there if there's nothing to buy. I'm now channeling them either to order my CSA or if I have a, a plant sale. Right. I might change the, the call to I did not do this. But next year, now that I'm learning this lesson, next year, the homepage website call to action button for that month in March when we're doing the, the plant sale, I will have that button say pre order plant sale. So we want to be thinking about what is the thing that we're currently doing right now? Where do we want them? What was the ideal first step that we want them to take? And that's up to you. You get to decide that you could have multiple marketing channels like I have a CSA I could ask people to join my 4 week trial membership that's open usually all summer long, or I could say join my online store and buy from there. Those are two options. But I'm going to funnel more people into the online store option. That's going to be my primary call to action most of the year. Because, because I know that's just an easier first step than to take that four week sampler call to action, which is $150. Okay, all right, that's the third idea. Number four, your hours and your pickup information. Oh, this one's really huge. Farm hours often change seasonally, don't they? I recently ran into this as well where I have, oh man. May is just like, May is just a hot mess here because we don't really have, we have sort of a, a default setting. We have a rule and a rhythm and a workflow from June through end of October. And it's very consistent in terms of. Here are our pickup sites. CSA pickup sites are in these three locations from this time to this time. Here's how you buy from our online store. This is the day you have to order by. We close order dates on this, you know, in this window. And you come to these pickup sites. Like that is set in stone. But then when our off season begins, it's just totally different. And then we have, you know, the month of May, asparagus starts to hit. We never really know when that's going to happen. And so I'm starting to talk about it. And then people like, well, how do I buy from you? Because all of your information on your website saying that your pickup sites are, are Perrysburg, Elmore and Sylvania, which is, is the websites for the, you know, June through November. But it's not, it's not our pickup site in the month of May. We only have our, our pickup at the farm on Saturdays. You know, like, it's just a mess right now. Like I, how do you communicate that things change? And so I had several people email me who must have seen my stuff on social media and they're like, I'm really confused. Like, I really want your asparagus. How do I figure out how to buy it? Like, when are you open? Do you have a farm stand? Right? They just, they're just, they don't know how to, how to get, get my stuff. And there's a lot of friction because you have to pre order it. If you decide you want to drive out on Saturday and take your chances that we have extra and just pay cash. You can, but we might not have any. And then you just driven 30 minutes only to get nothing. Right? So we need to make sure that we're communicating our hours, our market schedules, changing our storefront hours, changing our holiday hours, changing our pickup schedules or pickup sites. If that stuff is in flux, change it on your source of truth. Your website needs to change there first. And then you can also obviously advertise it on your social media. You should. But I think a lot of us do it the other way around where we go and we just assume everyone's seeing our stuff on social and that's where they're all finding out about us. And we don't remember to go fix it on our website. It's got to be in both places. Otherwise people just get really confused. They should not have to DM you or email you. I'm raising my hand here to figure this stuff out. Right? They don't. If they don't know when you're open or how or where pickup happens or what time they're supposed to arrive, that that information should be really easy to find and current. So please just make sure you're checking that. Okay, Number five, seasonal messaging and headlines is how I wrote this one down. So this is that homepage headline, that tagline that sits in the middle there that doesn't have to stay static forever. I spent a lot of time, like parsing that phrase out and trying to make it SEO friendly and all the things. But you can rotate it, right? It doesn't have to, like in my case, it doesn't have to always be talking about our produce. I have a month where our spring plant sale, for instance, is a huge promotion for us. It generates a lot of revenue. It sells out in 24 hours. And I can switch the homepage tagline for a few weeks to be something else that is pointing to that promotion or pointing to the fact that we sell transplants, because no one would know that right now if they went to my website. There is nothing on there anywhere about how we sell transplants. And so next year I'm going to make sure that I have an element that talks about that. And I'll probably even create a page, a permanent page about our transplants that will just live there all year long in case somebody wants to find out about that and when that's even offered. But you can rotate that homepage headline, you can rotate seasonal crops, you can rotate current events, you can rotate offers on there. And I just want to pause here and make sure I point out that there's a difference between a product and an offer around that product. Okay. You can create a homepage headline for either one, but I just want to make sure you know that an offer is different than a product. The offer is like the marketing and the messaging and the, the packaging and then the unique positioning and way you're trying to get people to buy the product. So either one could be a part of that seasonal messaging. So for example, fresh organic asparagus is here. Summer CSA enrollment now open. Bulk tomato orders available. Fall flower subscriptions are back. I am just making this up off the fly, so don't take those necessarily. I'm just trying to, to give you examples. Right. Your website just needs to feel. It needs to feel present, alive, current. Okay. All right. The last thing that I want to suggest you take a look at when you're doing this checklist is email signup messaging. So even your email opt in could become more seasonal. So instead of just join our newsletter, which I hope you don't use that like you can have just basically that's what it is. But I hope you would doctor it up and change the wording of it a little bit. But you could say be the first to know. When our peaches arrive, get on our weekly produce availability list. Find out what's fresh this week. Get tomato pre order alerts. You know, I actually, I think I've shared this before. Maybe I talked about this in farm marketing school in one of our coaching calls. But I have now moved. I have a lot of lead magnets for csa especially that I occasionally promote on social media. But I have found that one that works really well. And it's just, I think it works well because it's easy for me to implement and I like easy. I have a generic produce availability email subscribe form on kit.com so I use kit. A lot of people ask me what's your recommended email subscription service and or email service provider. And I really like Kit. I am a an affiliate for them. So if you decide to use them go to mydigitalfarmer.com forward/kit k I t. Another one is active campaign. Those are two that I really like. They are robust. They are awesome. But I have a form inside of Kit that is my produce availability list. And what I've started doing is going and customizing the language on the landing page of that form when the seasons change. So and it's roughly about every month or every six weeks. So I recently went in there when I knew asparagus was coming as soon as I started feeling myself talking about asparagus on Instagram stories because I, I would, you know, I would just be teasing it like, hey, asparagus is coming really soon, guys. And if you want to know and be one of the people that gets access to the produce availability list, to find out when it's available, you need to get on my list. Here's the link. Okay, But I would talk about the asparagus, but then I would point to this generic list. So I, I go to the, the landing page of that list, of that produce availability list form, and I'll just add some language in there about asparagus so that if they, you know, actually go and do the work of subscribing after they've heard me talk about asparagus and they show up on this list and they see the word asparagus, they're like, okay, this is the right place. There's like a confirmation that this is speaking to them. I also did that before my spring plant sale. In the weeks before I promoted that, I started talking about how we were going to have a spring plant sale. You needed to be on my list because I only told the list about the offer and only told the list about the catalog in advance. And so they needed to get on the list. So before I started advertising that, I went and I changed the language on the form. Instead of talking about asparagus and produce and stuff, it was talking about, you know, if you want to get information about our spring plant sale and other future produce stuff, like, you're in this. You're in the right place. Like, this is the form you want to fill out. So I just want to offer that to you as a little tip that this is a way that you can customize or change that email signup messaging. Right? The, the email opt in can be more seasonal. And it doesn't mean that you have to have a lead magnet form for every single season. You can just have one that's sort of generic and then just go in and every month or every six weeks, when the offer changes or when the seasonal thing changes, you just go and flip out that information in the form itself. I hope that made sense. That took a long time to explain, but I hope you got the gist. Okay, so let's talk about creating a, a rhythm, a workflow, because I want to, I want to help you make this actionable. This does not need to be some giant, complicated marketing. I want to release that pressure from you. I think what you probably really need is just a simple website grooming rhythm. I would say start with once a month. If you are one of those businesses listening to this podcast regularly that, yeah, like you've just got a lot of customers, you got a lot of product moving, you are making weekly offers, then maybe I would be switching it more frequently that than that. But once a month is, I think, a good starting point. Another way you could think about this is like the trigger moment that makes you think about doing this would be anytime you have a new big promotion or anytime a new major crop comes into season, like when the watermelons come in, like, that's a big, a lot of excitement around that. That might be when I come in and I'm like, I'm going to change the picture to a giant watermelon. Okay, so just block off whenever, whatever the trigger moment is. Those are some suggestions. Either it's monthly or it's a promotion or it's a very specific crop change. What I want you to do is block off no more than 15 minutes and I want you to go look at your website for 15 minutes and just do a quick check in, quick tune up and ask yourself, does my homepage reflect what's currently happening right now or imminently in the next, you know, seven days? Are my hours current and my pickups? Is my featured promotion the right one? Is it still relevant? Does a stranger know what to do next? Is there like a recommended start here moment? And I don't know, maybe like just if someone to ask yourself, if someone discovered me for the first time today, would this website guide them? Would they? Well, I think those are some good questions to ask yourself. And you'll probably see one or two of those that'll be a no. And then you're going to quick change it. And it doesn't have to be like super hard. In fact, this year, one of the things I'm working on, I have, I'm creating a system. I love it. As I'm building out my promotions, I've been doing this actually for the last six months. So I'm, I'm almost at a full year where I'll be able to just rinse and repeat. But as I've been building out my promotions, I've been building Google folders and Google Docs for each of the main promotions. And I've been putting in like, here are the emails that I used to promote this launch. Here are the social media images that went along with it. Here are the stats, here's how the sales and the revenue turned out. Here's the language that was on the online store that I had to switch out. Right. I'm, I'm. Here are the fulfillment emails that I use. Like I'm putting all of the assets into one giant Google Doc so that next year when the same thing comes rolls around again and I do the fish promo again, I can just go back and find the last version and reuse it. And so I'm going to be doing something similar now. As I'm updating the website homepage, I'm going to be keeping track like month of May, here's the language that went into the paragraph section about the asparagus, here's the headline, here was the picture, here was the language, here was the call to action button so that I don't have to make it up again next year. I just can go and copy and paste it. And that gets its own Google Doc. Like this is the stuff that goes on the website for the month of May. And that way Next May, in 2027, when I'm going to face the same dilemma, I will be prepared. And as I go this next year, I'll be building this slowly. So next month I'm going to be making decisions. When I prompt myself to look at my website, I'm going to see what came up for me, what did I switch out, what was, what were, what were the words on the homepage tagline in the month of June versus May versus April. Right. And I'll just be able to see it all in one spot. So that's one way that you could maybe start to turn this into a system and a structure. It will be a little bit of work the first time you do it, but then eventually you've, you just rinse and repeat it all. Now I want you to remember to do this monthly tune up or audit on your phone, not on your desktop because most of your customers are finding you on their phones. So open up your website like a customer would experience it through those eyes because it just looks different on the phone than it does on your desktop. All right. If this episode is making you realize that your website might need a little seasonal grooming, I want to make sure you know about a free PDF guide that I put together last year. It's called the 10 most common farm Website mistakes. It's really good, guys. It's kind of a another checklist that you're going to walk through that and quickly be like, yep, got that, Yep, I've got that element. That one's missing. And I'll just kind of help you see how you're doing. It's, it's a really practical checklist of the things that I see farms doing over and over again that are creating confusion and points of friction and missed opportunities. And some of them are really tiny fixes, but they can make a really big difference in helping smooth grease the wheels and smooth the customers onboarding into the next step. So if you're interested in seeing that, just go to mydigitalfarmer.com websitemistakes I'll link that up in the show notes as well. And remember, this kind of tune up checklist, you'll be able to get that in the show notes, which is mydigitalfarmer.com362 okay, so here is my homework for you this week. This is my challenge. Should you choose to accept it, I want you to go open your website on your phone and ask yourself, does this homepage currently reflect what's actually happening on my farm business right now? Is it reflecting the offer that I want people to know about what I'm selling right now, or is it stuck in a previous season? Because your website is not one of those outdated static brochures. It is a living storefront. And the farms that grow faster are often the farms that are reducing friction, that are creating clarity and helping new people enter the funnel easily. The farms that grow are the ones that are pitching more offers regularly and are getting customers to come back and buy again. Right. And so if we're not making it obvious what we're selling on our website, that's not going to happen. So I hope today was a little bit convicting. If it stung a little bit, that's okay, man. I got stung this past week. I was like, wow, I have some work to do. I have gotten lazy over here. And so I am creating a workflow now to make sure that I'm checking on this. So I'm going to be doing the monthly audit, the monthly tune up. Just a quick perusal of my site. I've got it set for the first of the month and I'm at least going to do like a cast my eye into the future and see what's coming on the first of the month. Maybe I won't actually need to update the website until middle of the month, but I'm at least going to look and see what does the forecast say so that I can be prepared. That's what I'm doing. That's going to be my trigger moment. So I'm going to be doing this work with you. Hold me accountable, man. Come Check my website out sharedlegacyfarms.com and watch it change this year. If you see it, stay the same every month. You need to email me and like say, hey, walk the talk, girl. So I put that out there in the space that's going to make me do it. Now you watch. All right, thank you guys for joining me today on the My Digital Farmer podcast. Remember, your homepage should feel like what's happening on your farm right now. All right, go groom those living storefronts. Today's show notes can be found@mydigitalfarmer.com 362 if you like today's episode, please leave me a rating or a review or send me an email. Some of you are doing that and I love it. I love getting notes in the mail. I pin them on my cork board and hang them on my wall. That's so awesome. And you can send me an email@mydigitalfarmersmail.com if you want to get onto my email list. I have some free stuff to send you to make your marketing better. Just go subscribe at mydigitalfarmer.com/subscribe. You'll at least get the email that tells you about the podcast every week, but you'll also get some onboarding training into the marketing lingo in those first few months. If you are on Instagram, you can start following me at mydigitalfarmer. I show up there with a marketing tip or some mindset coaching throughout the week. I'd love to connect with you there. Thank you for joining me today. I love hanging out with you. Have an amazing week and remember, I believe in you. Bye. Bye.
Host: Corinna Bench
Date: May 20, 2026
In this insightful episode, Corinna Bench addresses a challenge most seasonal farm businesses face: keeping their websites current and reflective of what’s happening right now. Drawing on her own recent “asparagus debacle,” Corinna reframes your farm website as a “living storefront”—a dynamic tool that must evolve throughout the season to guide both new and returning customers with clarity, reduce confusion, and drive sales. The episode is packed with practical tips and a checklist for regular website “grooming,” ensuring your digital home reflects the real-time activity on your farm.
Corinna outlines the 6 key items to regularly review and rotate:
Homepage Hero Image
Featured Promotion
Call-to-Action Buttons
Hours & Pickup Info
Seasonal Messaging & Headlines
Email Signup Messaging
([58:20])
Block off 15 minutes once a month, or whenever a major crop/promotion starts.
Review your website on your phone (not desktop) as most customers are mobile.
Keep track of language, images, and offers in a Google Doc for each season so it’s easy to copy/paste and reuse in future years.
([01:06:12])
“Your website is not one of those outdated static brochures. It is a living storefront.”
— Corinna Bench ([01:07:08])
“If it stung a little bit, that's okay, man. I got stung this past week… I have gotten lazy over here.”
— ([01:08:25])
“Open up your website on your phone and ask yourself, does this homepage currently reflect what’s actually happening on my farm business right now? Or is it stuck in a previous season?”
— ([01:07:08])
“Go open your website on your phone and ask yourself: Does this homepage currently reflect what’s actually happening on my farm business right now? Is it reflecting the offer that I want people to know about what I’m selling right now, or is it stuck in a previous season?”
Transform your website from a static, outdated brochure into a vibrant, living storefront that seamlessly reflects the seasonal pulse of your farm. Small, regular updates—hero images, offers, CTAs, headlines, hours, email messaging—will create clarity, build trust, and make it easier for both new and returning customers to buy from you again and again.
Show Notes and Downloads:
[mydigitalfarmer.com/362]
Connect with Corinna: