Website and Social Media Updates: Do it yourself or hire someone else?

Posted on February 24, 2013 by mbolin

Written by Mark Bolin

A growing problem in our industry is managing a website when it needs to be managed. We’ve shifted from newspaper ads and other forms of media to website marketing. It’s happened so quickly, that most people don’t even understand the dynamics of how drastically things have changed.

While doing trade shows and speaking to people in the nursery industry, I noticed that many of them didn’t see the value of an online presence. It’s similar to selling life insurance to a 20-year-old. They just don’t see the value in it and they don’t get very excited about the concept. For them, it’s intangible, and since most of them don’t use websites very much, they simply cannot fathom others wanting to visit their site.
In a way, we’re kind of ahead our time in trying to get people to understand something they currently don’t feel is important. This probably won’t be a problem fifty years from now, but right now, we’re in an awkward stage with a mixture of Internet savvy business people and the old timers who think the Internet is phooey.
People will sometimes spend thousands of dollars with Yellow Pages, thinking nothing of it, but when it comes to a website and good placement on Google, they don’t understand why it should cost so much and how much time it takes to keep it updated.
Often times, no one is a garden center or landscape company have even two minutes to look at their website, much less update it, and this can go on for 6-8 weeks or longer.
Consider this scenario: Take a person in a garden center who is in a truck. They’re hard-working and know nothing about websites, let alone Facebook. Now, put that person in charge and take a look at what they’re doing. They’ve likely been doing everything, but putting things on Facebook. There aren’t any signs of coupons online during the busiest time of year, which ironically, is the time when you get the most traffic on your website.
Many larger stores are taking care of these things, but what they’re doing might be overkill. How are they doing it? They’re hiring a full-time IT person. The best thing you can do to combat this competition is to hire a company as a subcontractor that understands the industry. Unfortunately, most of the time, this is not an easy task. That’s where a company like The Site Gardener becomes valuable to you.
The Site Gardener is the process of putting together a package that is not outrageously expensive, but it does get the job done. Posting daily is as easy as 1-2-3. Changing out blog entries and coupons is also simple and it can make all the difference in the world with traffic and Google. You really don’t need a full-time IT person to keep up on these things, which could be done in an hour a day. Instead, hire a company, like The Site Gardener to take care of it for you.
When you have a full-time person working for you, you are delegating the management of your website. I’ve observed this with three separate garden centers. Each person in the store is being pulled in a different direction due to the business of spring. They’re unloading trucks, helping customers, loading cars, doing the watering and a thousand other things that need to be done. At the end of their working day, those people are not going to take the time to login to their website to post entries in Facebook.
I cannot stress enough how important this information is. The average site can be managed for $200-300 a month and by purchasing a website maintenance plan, you’ll be getting professional entries, along with monitoring, so that you can see if traffic is really coming to your site. You’ll also be able to find out what your visitors want when they do visit your site.
It can be difficult to see a tangible dollar value sometimes, but a well-managed site should bring a tremendous amount of new and old business. The biggest issue is finding someone that understands your business and what you do, because they can really get off track if they are not as knowledgeable as you are.
Getting garden center and landscape company owners to understand that traffic to their website means traffic to their garden center and money in their cash registers is an uphill battle.

You can try to do this on your own or you can try to hire a full-time IT person, but what it comes down to is that hiring a website and social media management service is going to be the most cost-effective and smart choice and it should bring you the best value.

About the Author

In 1990, M.D. Bolin & Associates, a plant brokerage business selling plants from Oregon, Virginia, and other states into Ohio and Michigan, was born. It’s been responsible for more than $50,000,000.00 in nursery stock that’s been sold in the Midwest.

When it comes to technology, Mark has always tried to stay ahead of the curve. He was one of the first landscapers in New Jersey to use low voltage lighting and drip irrigation back in the early 80s. His first computer was a dinosaur of a desktop with a 40 MB hard drive, which he bought in New York City for $2,000.00 in 1982. Today, most programs are bigger than 40 megs, but with this computer, he ran one of the first estimating programs in the nursery industry.

Why Technology Isn’t Always a Great Thing in the Garden Industry

Posted on October 16, 2012 by mbolin

By Mark Bolin

When hiring web companies to do any online marketing, there are some important things to consider. Many people in our industry do not have a very strong background in computers. This is mostly due to our being outside and not growing up with computers. Because of this, there are a few traps that can catch us off guard when we hire a company to do our website. Most website companies are made up of younger people. That is perfectly understandable, but sometimes they lack understanding of the customer and how best to present information to them.
Because they have grown up with email, voicemail, texting and instant message, which you lack the basic understanding of; it is hard for them to understand how your basic communication is still done today by telephone. It is also hard for them to fathom someone not knowing their way around a computer.

Here are two examples of how things can get overlooked. It is very hard to believe that this could still happen.
I was trying to get a hold of the friend who had a pond supply company and I was in my car pulled over and looking at his website to get his phone number. I soon came to realize his phone number was not anywhere on the website. I even did a Google search looking for local directories like Mantra Yellow Pages and his phone number would not show up.
I finally just stopped by and was talking to one of the salesmen sitting at his desk and mentioned this to him. He immediately went to the website and found no phone number. I could see the frustration in his face.
We had done work for him previously, but he hired a full-time IT guy from a local college to handle all of the ongoing marketing work for the website. Many of you may be wondering how this happened. How would somebody overlook something so big and not have it mentioned it? One of the biggest reasons is that his full-time IT professional may not use his phone as much as one would think. He uses text email and instant messenger phones.

It wasn’t that he left the number off on purpose. It was just that he never thought of it, because it was not that important in his mind. The reason they never noticed it, is because they delegated everything to him and they never checked their own website to make sure everything was correct. The reason people didn’t call him telling him about the omission is simple; they couldn’t. I don’t know why no one emailed them, but it did not happen. I don’t know how many months this guy had a website with no telephone number.

This is an extreme case, but I have seen much worse on websites. Another nursery that I have an inside track with had another type of problem that is also very common. The owner hired a person to do all the online marketing. He knew that his website was overdue for an overhaul and was excited, because she had ideas of email marketing like “plant of the month” and so on.

Here’s what really happened. Because this person was so computer savvy, she also assumed everyone was or needed to be computer savvy as well. She convinced them that they were going to save all kinds of money by not sending out a catalog. Instead, she recommended they tell people to go online to get what they needed. Their availability was 35 pages long and they were asking people to view their availability online using a unique password, which customers had received in a letter explaining the process. Customers were then supposed to print out the availability on their own printer.

On top of that, for years there was a universal password for all customers to access their availability if they wanted to. They removed this simple, universal password, because they were trying to lead people to the online ordering. When customers called their sales reps to find out why they could not get into their online availability to see if a plant was available, the sales reps could not help them, because every password was unique and private.

The sad part was that the salesman tried to warn the owner that this was a big mistake, but the owner was so convinced that this tech savvy woman’s marketing was ahead of his competition, that he dismissed all of his employee’s concerns. Thank God he started to realize what a disaster it was becoming. As the season progressed, no one was downloading anything and most garden center owners vaguely remembered the letter even existed. Many had probably misplaced or thrown them away.

They could tell you every catalog they had received from competitors, but could not recall anything from this particular nursery. When the salesman told them what the nursery had decided to do, most garden center owners rolled their eyes and many of them were quite put off. One customer said that business must be so good, because of the arrogance of them to assume that he was okay with entering a unique password and clicking 6 to 7 buttons to go online and use his ink and printer to print out the company’s availability just to buy from them.

Many of you might be saying, “This girl really doesn’t know what’s going on”, but actually, she is intelligent. It’s only her generation that has not experienced lack of technology. She could not believe that there were people in the salesman’s territory that did not even have a fax or computer.

The salesman explained it this way:

“It is not our job to bring people into the 21^st century. It is our job to service them in whatever they are. There were times 20 years ago that 1 in 20 people owned a fax. Eventually, everyone owned a fax machine. Then, some moved on to email. All of the years that I have been serving these customers, I meet them where they are. I have never asked them to do something they are not comfortable with.”

Once this company realized what was going on and sent availability lists out, they started to see orders coming in again. As I write this blog entry, the company has only received 10% of its orders through the online ordering system that they were so excited about. And, the majority of those orders are smaller than last years in comparison to orders recorded through sales reps, which are larger. With online ordering, there is no way for the person to get suggestions on other items that might be helpful for their business. Many people don’t like this.

There is a simple solution for all of this. When a company builds a website for you, go to your website and look through it yourself. Have your friends, family and customers check it and ask their opinion about navigation, content and so on. It is amazing how much you will learn from them.

At The Site Gardener, we build a lot of web tools for marketing and online ordering. It can get very complex. I have started showing my customers these tools and asking them for their opinion and thoughts. It is amazing how many great ideas and things that I look at every day. These things need simple tweaking here and there to make them more user-friendly. When we put tools on the websites we build, I am amazed at how many great ideas I get from the users. These are ideas I never thought of and they not only enhance, but simplify the program. We can’t just think of everything and don’t expect your IT person to either.

SEO Tips for Your Garden Center or Landscape Design Site

Posted on September 16, 2012 by mbolin

By Beth Lytle

Each page on your site should have a unique page title. Including your city name to the title is a smart move, because many people search for local services. Keywords can be included in the general text, the h1 tag, and the headline.

Internal linking will also help your SEO ranking. Internal linking will signal the search engines that your page is important. You don’t have to use internal linking for all of your pages. Instead, choose a page or pages that are the most important. A search engine understands the value of an internal link by looking at how many pages in your site are linking to it.

You can gain a clear understanding of your internal linking by creating a sitemap. It doesn’t have to be anything fancy. You can even sketch it out by hand. Your sitemap should show how each page links to the next. From this, you’ll be able to see if your important pages are linking correctly.

You can also use internal linking to help explain a unique aspect of your business. Take The Site Gardener, for example. Our company is somewhat unique. Yes, we have competition, but not a lot. That being said, we often have to give a more detailed explanation of the services we offer to potential customers. In this case, it would be smart to write a blog post on this subject and then to link that specific post to the site’s main navigation. Each time another post is made on an important subject, it should be linked into the site’s main navigation.

It’s also important that every page on your site lists your company address and phone number. This can easily be accomplished by utilizing a running footer.

A video can also be a valuable SEO tool. Create a short video about your green business. Mention your website address throughout the video. Upload the video to YouTube, as well as other free video sites. Use your most important keywords in the video title. Link your website to the videos from your video site profiles. This may seem like a silly idea, but video sites help to rank sites with the search engines.

Finally, the more external sites linking to your site, the better. Some ideas include listing your site with various yellow pages, your local chamber of commerce, local newspaper sites, friends who have sites and blogs, and partners and vendors. You can also gain external links by using question and answer sites, such as Yahoo! Answers. Create a free account and answer questions related to your business. Use your business URL as a reference to your answer.

This isn’t everything you need to know about SEO. If you’re a beginner, you still have a lot to learn, but these tips will help get you started. The best advice is to not do too much at once. Make sure you have a clear understanding of each step you take with SEO, so that it’s done correctly.

Do you have a comment, suggestion or topic you’d like to see us discuss? Please feel free to leave your comments below. Don’t be afraid to tell us how we’re doing!

Beth Lytle works with The Site Gardener as copywriter and editor, project manager, and marketing director. She also works on several other ongoing projects, including Seen It Magazine, Transcription Connection, her Winded Gypsy expat blog and varying small projects. Connect with Beth on Facebook for constant updates to her projects.

Creating a Successful Blog

Posted on September 9, 2012 by mbolin

By Beth Lytle

There are several things you need to know in order to make your blog successful. The first thing is consistency. Ask yourself how many hours per week you have to dedicate to blogging. If possible, make a list of potential blog topics that you can refer to as you go. If you make a list, don’t stop searching for new blog topics each week, because you’ll inevitably run out and you want to make sure that you have enough to talk about.

When talking about consistency, it’s important to keep a schedule. Ideally, you’ll want to blog two to three times per week, but if that doesn’t fit into your schedule, try to at least post a blog once per week. Readers was constant updates, so the more often you blog, the better your readership.

All blogs need to be edited for grammar, punctuation and overall wording. If you don’t have it in your budget to hire a professional writer or editor, this can be challenging. One solution is to utilize your word processing program, which has a spellchecker and thesaurus automatically installed. There are also online sites, such as Grammarly, that do a good job of checking documents for spelling, plagiarism, and writing mechanics. Grammarly can be loaded directly into MS Word, so it makes it simple to check over your documents.

SEO is just as important in blogging as it is in your website, so be sure to use plenty of keywords to ensure search engine placement.

Topics to consider include how-to information, environmental articles, and science-based articles. You can also keep up with other things in the community that might be of interest to your customers. You can gain a lot by networking with other businesses and organizations in your community. Other good topics include book reviews, expert talks, and area garden projects.

It may be tempting to try to make additional income with your blog, but it’s an instant turn-off to many blog readers. Occasional promotion is okay, but keep it to the bare minimum. Feel free to promote your products every once in a while and you can also profile employees and in-store events.

Write in a conversational, light tone that is easy to read and appeals to a broad audience. Targeting readers at a 10^th grade level will ensure that most readers can easily understand what you’ve written.

Consider bringing in occasional guest bloggers. Book authors will often contribute a guest blog for free if it can be used to promote their book. You can also accept customer garden photos and feature a photo and a short clip or story.

Creating a strong readership will help you keep steady and consistent traffic to your site and in your physical location. The more you can interact with customers and other businesses and organizations in your blog, the more business you’ll receive.

Do you have a comment, suggestion or topic you’d like to see us discuss? Please feel free to leave your comments below. Don’t be afraid to tell us how we’re doing!

The Dos and Don’ts of Blogging

Posted on September 6, 2012 by mbolin

By Beth Lytle

Bottle Brush

DO post regular

DON’T lose your posting consistency. Readers only follow blogs if they can count on regular posts.

DO make smart money with your blog. It’s okay to do some marketing.

DON’T over market. Stay away from loading your blog up with ads.

DO spread the word that you’re blogging. This is a great way to gain readership.

DON’T be embarrassed or keep your blog a secret.

DO make sure everything is edited and well written before posting.

DON’T post blogs with spelling errors, grammar errors or missing text.

DO incorporate video streams and music into your blog.

DON’T use videos and music that streams automatically. This will be an instant turn-off for your readers.

DO respond to reader comments.

DON’T respond impolitely.

DO comment on other blogs, so that you can leave a link back to your blog in your comment.

DON’T leave a link back to your blog without leaving an intelligent response to someone else’s blog post.

Do you have a comment, suggestion or topic you’d like to see us discuss? Please feel free to leave your comments below. Don’t be afraid to tell us how we’re doing!

Use Your Garden Center Blog to Tell the Important Stories No One Knows About

Posted on August 26, 2012 by mbolin

By Beth Lytle

Many garden centers do a lot for the community and it’s important to let your customers know about it. It will also help you come up with some good ideas for blog posts. If you don’t have anything to add, you might consider participating in more community activities to encourage a positive outlook on your business.

Garden centers often donate plants to schools and other local organizations. If this is something your business does, blog about it. You probably do a lot for your community that your customers don’t know about. These things make excellent blog posts and promote community trust.

Post pictures of your staff. Pictures should be friendly and real. Don’t get everybody dolled up for the photo, but make sure that the photos look professional. You may want to have a professional photographer do this. People also want to know who is behind the business. A picture of the owner/owners is a good thing. Green thumbs want to see the real you, so take an organic, real photo of yourself.

Incorporate how-to videos and tutorials into your blog. Posting the videos on YouTube will also help spread the word about your blog and bring in more visitors. Focus on organic gardening and make sure that your information is accurate and unique. Make sure your how-to information is doesn’t read like a promotional infomercial.

Internet Garden Blogger Susan Harris recommends that you be honest with your audience about who is writing your garden blogs. She also suggests blogging about local garden walks. For more great information, watch Susan’s video: How Garden Centers can tell their “Green” Story – and Mean It

Do you have a comment, suggestion or topic you’d like to see us discuss? Please feel free to leave your comments below. Don’t be afraid to tell us how we’re doing!

The Value of Social Media Marketing

Posted on August 18, 2012 by mbolin

By Beth Lytle

Public domain image, royalty free stock photo from www.public-domain-image.com

Photo by Jon Sullivan

Social media marketing is a solid advertising tool that is sometimes overlooked, but many garden centers see the value of it. Not only is it extremely inexpensive, but if can be very effective when done correctly.

Social media marketing can help with several things. It can increase your website traffic, create brand awareness and brand identity (along with positive brand association) and it can create communication interaction with key audiences.

The first thing to remember when diving into social media marketing is not to jump in head first. You need to come up with a plan. Your plan must be realistic and viable. Research keywords and brainstorm content ideas beforehand. If you’re going to do this, you need to go in prepared. It’s important that you make sure your content is interesting and fresh. You can create unique content by implementing images, videos, and info graphics, in addition to text.

Consider starting a blog if you don’t already have one. If you do have one, take a close look at it. How much traffic is it getting? Are readers interacting with it? What could be improved?

Social media marketing primarily relies on your business and your ability to share its unique, original content in order to gain followers, fans, and devotees. Network and link outside of your site. The idea is to get backlinks, which will also help boost your search engine ranking.

Take a look into your competitors on a regular basis to find out what media marketing techniques they’re implementing. You find something new that can help boost your visitors.

Use Google Analytics to help measure your social media marketing techniques. It will also help you determine what strategies should be dropped or changed. It’s a good idea to attach tags to your social media marketing campaigns so that you can monitor them.

Create a Facebook fan page. Post website and store updates, as well as blog posts, other site mentions of anything you’re doing and tidbits to keep fans interested. You can also use your personal Facebook page to find fans. Connect with as many people as you can on a daily basis without getting your account locked. You can usually connect with 5000 friends. Facebook will allow you to invite a certain amount of friends to like your fan page each day (you have to access this by logging into your personal page and clicking on your fan page listed on the left-hand side of your main Facebook page). You can also like other pages and invite friends to return the favor. Some Facebook users send private messages. Beware of posting unwanted invites on friend’s pages. You don’t want to be accused of spamming.

Twitter is also another great resource. Many people will automatically begin following you if you follow them first. Always follow your followers. You should be following a minimum of 25 people per day in the beginning. It’s easy to go down the list and click the follow button. Post the same updates on Twitter that you do on Facebook.

Now there are several location-based social media tools that come in handy for brick and mortar businesses. Register with Yelp, FourSquare and Level Up to claim your location spot. You can also look into extra incentives, such as check-in rewards and special discounts.

Do you have a comment, suggestion or topic you’d like to see us discuss? Please feel free to leave your comments below. Don’t be afraid to tell us how we’re doing!

Eight Things Garden Centers Should Blog About

Posted on August 16, 2012 by mbolin

By Beth Lytle, Contributor

Many garden center owners see the value of a company blog, but they don’t know what to blog about. There are many topics that your customers will find interesting. One of the biggest things is to have social networking sites linked to your blog and website. Each time you post a new blog, post it on your social networking sites (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and so forth).

1. Expert Talks

If you have experts coming into your garden center to give talks, use it to your advantage. Post an announcement before a speaker is scheduled to give customers plenty of time to plan for attendance. Take notes during the talk so that you can post highlights in a second blog post afterwards.

2. Featured Employees

It’s good for customers to have the opportunity to get to know the employees they deal with on a regular basis. It creates a family-type of atmosphere that makes customers feel like they know everyone who works there.

3. Garden How-To

Readers may be interested in reading about featured employees and expert speakers, but they’ll likely continue reading something that is useful to them. You should offer at least one blog a week that has some useful tips or how-to information in it.

4. Guest Bloggers

Guest bloggers can bring a lot to the table, because it’s a chance for you to network and get your name out there. It also adds a different element to your blog. If possible, try to get at least one guest blogger per month.

5. Book Reviews

There are many good books out there and your customers will be grateful to read your reviews. This is something you can do once a month or even once a week, depending on how much you read.

6. Customer Photos

Ask customers to take photos of their outdoor masterpieces and write a short piece about it. This is a great way to connect with the community. You can also accept customer tips.

7. Community Events

Stay up-to-date about community green events. Again, this is a great way to network and will provide you with excellent posts (even if it’s a short post). This will also give your readers a reason to follow your blog and to share it.

8. Contests and Giveaways

Sometimes local area businesses will run contests. You’ll also find green-related contests online and in related magazines. Customers love contests. They also love anything that will save them time. If your blog provides regular contest updates, your readership will quickly grow.

Do you have comments, suggestions or questions? please feel free to comment below. Don’t forget to visit The Site Gardener!

If I had a nickle for every time someone said ” If I had a nickle”

Posted on August 8, 2012 by mbolin

I wouldn’t be rich if I had a nickel for every unreturned phone call this spring from garden centers and landscapers, but I might be $5 richer.

Hardly anything gets done in the spring. Garden centers and landscapers are too busy putting out fires and dealing with the people standing in front of them to get back to me. In spring, it doesn’t matter what I offer them, they’re always too busy.

In the off-season, I build as many tools as I can and I’m automatically scheduled to work during the spring season. In this century, you have to spend spring working in a garden center and landscaping companies in order to get a grasp on what I’m talking about.

We started with a tool to add products to websites, but ended with a coupon creator that be scheduled in any season, even the off-season. We’ve implemented a calendar in the admin section for each entry. What does this mean for your business? It’s simple. You can use our coupon application in January to schedule all of your yearly specials and coupons at once and they’ll automatically be displayed when and where you tell them to.

We’ve always geared our tools for convenience and ease, but building a website for a garden center this spring really showed me that no matter what you offer or what the consequences, no one is going to do anything that you ask for.

Here’s a great example. We were designing and building a website and waiting for company information from a garden center. They forget to bring the information into the store three different times. In this particular story, I’ve now followed her to her home on a Saturday morning, so she could actually get the brochure for me. I know this person very well. She’s a hard worker and responsible, but she was burning the candle on both ends and simply couldn’t add anything else to her to-do list.

After that experience I realized that we have to build every tool and feature that can be modified, planned, and executed automatically during the times that they needed to be updated the most.

We call our availability tool the Growers Smart List™. It’s set up so that it can read a simple Excel spreadsheet (typically used to list availability). It does all the work of linking the image descriptions and other things to help sell your plants. It’s customizable and specific to your business.

Our mulch calculator was originally meant for customers to use, but it’s also handy for garden center employees and saves them time when talking to customers. Nothing makes me happier than watching things change in the industry. With our tool, I’m watching garden center habits, specials and coupons change as things need to be changed.

One feature on the availability list was really important to me and this was to have the pictures lead into each plant cultivar and size. I know what it’s like when someone calls in the middle of a parole[BL1] and he wants you to go out and take a picture of your October Glory Maples at 2 inch caliber. That’s why we built the tool, so you can put your pictures on each plant size.

In this industry, my goal is to help people get information to their customers when they need it with the least amount of sacrifice on the things that are need to get done during their busiest time. I also want to save them time and effort, so they can focus on what needs to be done.

And I’m always open to new ideas from anyone who wants something new and unique on their website. My greatest challenge is always to find a way to make it happen.

[BL1]Is this plant lingo?

Nursery stock prices going up and availability going down

Posted on May 20, 2012 by mbolin

The times are changing very quickly for the nursery industry! If you’re a garden center or landscaper starting to see some upswing in business, you need to know that this is happening everywhere. I’m not really sure why, since not much has really changed, except maybe people’s attitudes are better.

But there is one thing that is coming along with this upswing in business, and that is a shortage of plants that we’ve been talking about for a while.

Everyone laughed at a letter put out last year by a nursery telling people that they better not be producing bids without putting a time limit on their prices. It’s amazing how people are looking for plans that they’d never thought would run out and this craze has happened overnight!

Our sister company, MD Bolin and Associates, is nursery rep for some of the biggest companies in the country. Because of this, I do have the opportunity to talk to some of the top nurseries in the country and I have had a pulse on this for quite awhile. It’s really hard to go take out a block of trees that are 3 ½ inch caliper and plant tree liners, or throw away 500 Hydrangeas and Barberries and pot up more.

This is not a gradual thing that is happening right now. It is across the board and it’s happening with many items. We’re getting calls from people who have never heard of or seen from all over the country asking for things that they’ve quoted prices on and now the only thing they can find aren’t priced anywhere near the price they started with.

To many, this would sound like bad news, but it’s actually good news, because if we’d kept on going the way we had been going, there wouldn’t be any nurseries left in the next 2 to 3 years. The one I find to be most amazing is arborvitaes, which are above 5 feet tall and are going to be non-existent. You can expect more shortages, including blue spruce, viburnum, and pygmy barberries. In fact, all spruces above 5 feet in Oregon, excluding Bizon and a few others, are non-existent right now.

You may be surprised to know that even 2-inch trees and under are going to be hard to find and will be at catalog price. It’s hard to imagine that the very same tree that would normally be delivered to you for $25 will be at catalog price. [BL1] The ironic thing is that there hasn’t been a rise in demand in answering to this plant shortage. It will get very interesting if we start to see any kind of housing upswing.

To some, this may sound like bad news, but it’s not. If you’re a legitimate landscaping company or a garden center, you’ve been getting under-bid by smaller landscaping companies, who operate out of a pickup truck with a few shovels. These guys are getting the same deals that you’re getting from the nurseries.

These guys most likely don’t have the knowledge or experience to know what to do with these good deals. [BL2] This industry has done nothing but beat itself up over the past three years. The consumers really didn’t know the good from the bad. A lot of money has been left behind throughout this country and with prices finally getting solid; this is the one way we can actually force our industry back into a position of profit.

Cars are another great example of how the economy has been changing. Some have gone from $10,000 to $30,000 and all the way up to $60,000 over the last 20 years.

As odd as it may sound, sometimes the only way you’re going to get more money in your pocket is to pay more for a product, because we have a tendency to work by percentages in our industry.

I know this sounds kind of ridiculous, but in some ways raising prices on the wholesale level is like giving you a raise. The bottom line is that everyone is going to be paying more. Not just you! And you need to prepare yourself for things to get worse before they get better. It’s important that you plan ahead. Don’t give any guarantees on quotes, because any plant, no matter how popular or plentiful, is going to be hard to find right now.

The Site Gardener Blog

The Site Gardener Community

Why Technology Isn’t Always a Great Thing in the Garden Industry

SEO Tips for Your Garden Center or Landscape Design Site

The Dos and Don’ts of Blogging

If I had a nickle for every time someone said ” If I had a nickle”

Nursery stock prices going up and availability going down