For me, Winter is ‘down time’ for our business in the Blue Ridge mountains. Although our webstore is open year round, our brick-and-mortar retail shop is closed until May.
Winter is a time to get caught up on reading, and to work on websites, catalogs and new projects. And I’ve already found one that needs my attention. It’s a new idea that deserves your consideration too.
A new challenge for rural small businesses in 2010, and tourist businesses in particular, is to make their websites and blogs more readable online, or ‘mobile friendly’.
New services like Yelp and Twitter geolocation have come on the scene, joining iPhone and Blackberry, and making mobile search more popular than ever.
In Make Your Site Mobile-Friendly For The New Year, Lisa Barone tells us that the number of people accessing the Web through mobile phones is up 34% from last year alone (56.9 million people), and they aren’t very happy when they have difficulty reading the sites they try to visit, or slow speed as a site loads. Apparently they expect our sites to load as quickly (or more quickly) on their mobile devices.
What should a mobile site contain?
“It should contain only the information that would be most vital to someone looking up your site on the go.
Mobile searchers are typically people on a mission. They’re looking for an address or a phone number because they’re lost. They want a menu. They want hours or need a map to see which points of interest you’re near. Your mobile site should be set up to immediately address these questions so that you can take advantage of these targeted searchers.”
Do you know how your site looks to tourists traveling your area, actively looking for places to visit?
You can get direct links to both paid and free services that will give you a glimpse of how your business is seen by the traveling public using mobile devices by visiting this website.
And lest we think that this is just another passing fad, you might want to take a quick look at some startling statistics in Top 10 Reasons Your Website Should Go Mobile. Apparently 20% of Americans access the mobile web every day, and the mobile web is expected to be more popular than the desktop web within five years.
Google even has a separate index for mobile search content.
As more of our customers engage in ROBO behavior - Research Online and Buying Offline - even our local customers may be using mobile search to double-check our hours before driving our way. Certainly we know the traveling public will be.
I just set up a mobile-friendly site for this Backroads Business blog at mofuse, and installed via the admin dashboard a free Word Press plugin that detects when a visitor is using a mobile device, and redirects them to the mobile version of the blog.
It took me all of five minutes. Creating a mobile version of my website will take a little longer, and apparently a little money ($7.95 a month).
If we want tourists to find us and visit us easily, becoming more ‘mobile friendly’ is obviously a road we must travel down ourselves.
What steps can you take to explore this idea for your own business?
Another New Year’s Eve, this time celebrating the arrival of a new decade.
If you’re like me, you start looking ahead to all the changes and improvements you’d like to make in your life and your business.
And odds are, learning what social media IS and how to use the various sites (or use them more effectively) are probably somewhere on every small business owner’s list of 2010 New Year’s resolutions. If you don’t become familiar with any of them, you really won’t know how they can help you or your business
Over the next few weeks, the Rural Tourism Marketing blog is going to be taking a look at how communication with our customers will continue to change. And the current situation is described quite accurately for those of us with businesses in rural America:
“Our hard earned cash won’t buy us enough advertising to keep our businesses afloat when our customers aren’t paying much attention to ads anymore.
With Facebook, Twitter and all the other social media sites, the meaning of “word of mouth” has been transformed.
Even the old static Internet sites our kids created for us 3 or 5 years ago don’t seem to be sending us much business.”
I’m certainly game to take a look at a revolutionary new approach - how about you?
But before you take those Christmas decorations down and finalize your 2010 plans, take pictures and then also take a look at some suggestions for reviewing 2009 and learning what worked for you.
Here’s to all the best for all of our rural businesses in 2010!
The end of October is the end of the Summer tourist season for our handmade business of soapmaking.
It is also the beginning of holiday madness as we and the temporary elves prepare orders to be shipped out until just a few days before Christmas. We’re not unusual. Many of us with seasonal businesses actually have many ’seasons’ throughout the year, with different markets, customers, products, sales and workload. The end of one ’season’ isn’t the end of the business year. It simply marks the next phase of business activity.
For our friends in the fiber world, their season is full speed ahead. Each October we are a vendor at the Southeastern Animal Fiber Fair outside of Asheville, North Carolina, now the third largest fiber event in the USA. Last weekend was actually our 11th year participating in the festival, which celebrates all the wool bearing animals (llamas, alpacas, cashmere goats, angora rabbits and every breed of sheep), their wool, and the spinners, dyers, and knitters of that wool.
An article I found this week on the seasonal business of knitting focuses on the seasonal aspects of the final product: those beautifully colored skeins of luxurious yarn sold in retail shops. But wool and fiber is not just a Fall and Winter business. It’s the other seasons of the year when fiber farmers continuously care for the animals that provide the wool ultimately shorn and spun. I can’t help but think of all their hard work - all year round - when I read about knitting as a seasonal business.
For farmers and rural business owners, the handmade fiber industry is a twelve-month devotion to duty.
We’ve all heard it, and probably all said it to others too.
Your own town can seem so easy to get around, when it’s what you are accustomed to.
When I moved to the mountains of rural western North Carolina 20 years ago and asked for directions practically every day, the phrase I learned to cringe upon hearing was, “You can’t miss it.”
As soon as they said it, I knew I would. I was doomed.
If something was “a little bit down the road,” that meant it could be 1-5 miles. And a ‘fur piece’ (which means a far piece to those of you non-mountaineers) might even be 5-8 miles.
So when someone would put these phrases together and tell me, “It’s a big red barn a fur piece down the road and you can’t miss it,” well, then -
I knew I was really in trouble!
Seeing your community the way a first time visitor sees it is the key to providing clear directions to tourists. If they feel comfortable and safe, they stay around and invest in your community by purchasing meals, attending events, visiting stores and attractions, and staying a night or two in local hotels. Take a minute and invest in THEM by reading some great suggestions on “Writing Better Directions for Tourists.”
Collaborative Marketing on a seasonal basis can bring success to all rural businesses involved.
The Red Rooster Route is a marketing partnership of six local family farms that have banded together to create a new self-guided farm tour, offering adventures ranging from picking your own summer berries and vegetables, to learning about naturally grown foods. Visitors will even be able to enjoy trolley rides and hay mazes for kids. Tours will be available in both Summer and Fall seasons.
