Morning Walk, Marketing

Morning Walks, Market-Musing
August 3, 2021

I walked the farm, briskly, this morning to The Ventures playing on my earphones, (yesterday to a stirring Jeff Durbin sermon), and I toyed with an utterly ridiculous idea:  what about taking up electric guitar at age 61, and then go recruit a bunch of other old dudes to be a really bad beginner garage band?  Hey, why not encourage this as a general trend and have a whole festival of old dudes trying out their version of “Brown Eyed Girl” or “Brandy” or “The Safety Dance” or “Come on Eileen?”  This idea lasted for only about 40 paces of my 8,044 step, 4.5 mile walk, but it speaks, in a kind of forlorn way, to something the farm does to just about everyone who takes an interest in it.  It feels like a big, beautiful BLANK canvas.  People propose apple brandy distilleries, micro-dairies, Monet painting workshops, zip-line attractions, bobsled runs, western towns, primitive-skills vacations, movie back lots, competitive walk-races, country inns, cottages, time shares, ice skating ponds, waterfalls, drone competitions, and, yes, outdoor music festivals.

The sad thing is that a LOT of this could be done in a state that didn’t place such ridiculous obstacles in the way of development.  Our great grandfathers would have raised the money for the lumber, cut the foundation, and started right in, with hammers swinging, but development in California, these days, means a 10-15 year planning process, environmental studies, and encouraging one of your children to run for office.  It’s absurd.  It’s un-American is what it is.

And it means the old guy guitar band concept is remotely possible, since it doesn’t really require much besides a party tent and a generator. (Don’t worry.  Not in the works.)

Marketing & Facebook

My decision to leave Facebook, personally and professionally, worried me a tad in that I was under the mistaken impression that social media shares drove traffic to our site.   It turns out, it’s not that a big a deal.  During April and May we were even paying for Facebook boosts, and it still only accounted for 11 % of our traffic.  When we went off Facebook our users per day increased dramatically, and our site apparently generates a lot of direct traffic anyway.  One marketing source indicated that a small business site is doing well if it gets 10-20% direct traffic.  It appears you folks are doing what we hoped — making rileysfarm.com a regular stop in your internet travels.

Thank you — and poopy on you Facebook.  You don’t get our excellent content anymore.

Categorised in: News

This post was written by Jim Riley