Monetizing a Homesteading Business
If you’re a homesteader, you likely got started with a goal of living a holistically healthy life, consuming what you grow and produce on your own land. If you’d like to monetize your hobby farm as a way to generate an income while also providing others with healthy organically produced goods, you’re likely to find a wide-open market. The Olive Leaf can serve as a point of inspiration with its holistic, personalized, wellness solutions focused on natural healing.
What Will You Do?
There are a number of different ways to monetize what you do on your hobby farm. You need to think in terms of not only volume production, but costs involved, and the type of piece you need to charge in order to make it a viable venture. For example, if you have a vineyard and you bottle your own wine or make your own jams and jellies, you’ll need to factor in how much it costs to produce, package, transport, and sell your items, and set prices accordingly. Crunching those numbers will be important to understand whether or not what you have can be a viable venture, and, according to Successful Farming, will help you assess your tax obligations. Writing a business plan can help you factor in all of the different elements that go into taking a home-produced product to market.
Where Will You Sell?
If you’re selling freshly butchered homegrown meat, fresh produce, handmade goods, or artesian products like homemade soap, candles, or clothing, you’ll need to think about the best market for your goods. Farmers’ markets, local co-ops, and even selling to small independent restaurants and other service providers and boutiques can be good avenues. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, you can find markets across the nation with this search tool. You may also sell from your own property, or even an online store if your product is something you can transport and still maintain quality and freshness. Either way, developing a marketing strategy will be key to your success.
Website and Social Media Needs
It’s critical that small businesses have an engaging website to promote their products and services. You should also have an active social media presence as a way to reach your target demographic, generate repeat business, and have interactive exchanges with your customers. It could be well worth the investment to hire a social media management professional to help market your products or services. You can find this type of pro through freelance job boards, where you can read reviews, weigh delivery time, experience, and cost before hiring someone. Simply search “social media marketing pricing” to get an idea of appropriate degrees of cost.
Managing Your Business
Once you have your product and inventory established, your market identified, and your online presence front and center, management of your business will be important. In addition to providing quality customer service, you’ll also want to keep good books to ensure you’re taking advantage of deductions for business expenses. As your operation grows, you may need to hire freelancers, independent contractors, or even a staff to help you run your company. The business plan that you create at the beginning of your launch can be regularly revisited to ensure you’re meeting your goals and objectives and pivoting and re-calculating as necessary.
Living off the land is a healthy lifestyle, one that can be shared with others if you decide to monetize your hobby farm. Always stress your ingredients, your organic approach, your freshness, and the quality of your goods when you’re selling them. You’ll likely be pricing things a bit higher than large retail chains, so focus your promotional messaging around the quality of your products and their positive impact on overall health and wellness.
The Olive Leaf offers a wide variety of services, ranging from testing of underlying metabolic and hormonal problems and nutritional imbalances to eating for your blood type and discovering natural weight loss solutions. Visit the site today to learn more or reach out for a consultation.
Content by Tina Martin