Garden Center Blogger

I compiled this information for ANLA, and it’s now here in their Social Media Guide.

GOOD EXAMPLES

The most successful corporate blogs avoid marketing language and simply provide a service to their customers – great content being key.  Examples of the best include: Kodak,  Whole Foods, Fiskars’s craft blog ,  and  American Express.

Garden Centers:

Homestead Gardens – has a lively multi-author blog and identifies all its writers clearly.  There are gobs of photos, and the header is changed seasonally.  Note the sidebar shows dozens of regional links – that’s the online community we want to communicate with.  (I contribute three articles each week to this blog; other contributors include their education coordinator , a food blogger, and guest bloggers.)

Mahoney’s Garden launched their blog in July of 2010.   Its frequent posts (at least three per week) are written by professional writers and in-house experts.  Coming soon – special guest bloggers, one each month, and garden-book author guest posts with book giveaways to readers.

The Golden Gecko is written by the Blogging Nurseryman (owner) himself, and he makes us want to shop there!  It works because he loves blogging.  Note the impressive blogroll.

Redenta’s.   It’s  good-looking and well done.

Flora Grubb’s blog is eye-catching and using mostly photos, shows off the owner’s talents.

A  terrific small-business blog is for the Park City Ski Resort

DO’S

• Write titles that convey what the article is about (avoiding the too-clever titles or the vague “Thoughts in the Garden” titles)
• Use lots and lots of photos, and not those tiny dark ones, either.
• Have an About page that answers readers’ questions about the company and the blog’s authors.
• In the sidebar, show links to garden-related groups and bloggers in your region.

DON’TS

• Be a faceless corporation using impersonal language.
• Use the blog to promote the company and its products (except rarely and never in a hard-sell way).
• Create the blog and expect people to find it.  (Blogs need continuous promotion, especially in their first year.)
• Post treatises with tiny or no photos.  (Best advice on length? 200-500 words.  Long pieces are more useful on the website.)
• Make it hard to comment, and when you do get comments, ignore them.

TOPIC IDEAS FOR GARDEN CENTERS

• Super-useful gardening info, and the more local, the better.  Best plants, what to do when, etc. (One of my top-traffic-getting garden-center blog post is:  What I’m really doing in my garden in each month – here’s one.
• Answers to questions of staff on the floor, the timelier the better.
• Meaty write-ups of your in-store seminars.  (Here’s one that got great traffic.)
• Contests and giveaways.
• Profiles of staff.  Staff gardens.  Staff favorite plants
• What plants have recently arrived in the store (customers beg for this!)  Here’s one, though it would have been better with photos.
• Anything of interest to gardeners in your region: profiles of great public gardens within day-trip range, local gardening events, etc.
• Gardening projects of nonprofits or Master Gardener groups in your area. (This one calling for volunteers for a worthy cause was appreciated, and they promoted it widely.)
• Product profiles that aren’t just marketing language.  (Here’s my interview with the botanist who developed FreezePruf).
• Gardening in the news, regionally or nationally, including book and magazine reviews.

by Susan Harris

Comments are closed.