Newest Fad In Farming: The Internet

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Tucked away in the den of his 127-year-old farmhouse, Ed Winkle huddles over his computer. The screen's soft glow lights up his eyeglasses, reflecting messages about tractors, corn hybrids and crop insurance.

Winkle is checking the latest postings on his favorite Internet farm forum. Advice from fellow farmers around the country has enabled him to increase his corn and soybean production, better market his crops, learn how to rebuild engines and get good tires for his tractor.

Online forums, message boards and chat rooms are replacing rural coffee shops and feed mills as places for farmers to talk farming and trade tips as more of rural America goes online.

"You get the best thinkers in agriculture," Winkle said of the forums. "You're mixing such a diverse group of people — from different areas, from different backgrounds, different experiences, different ways of farming."

Fifty-one percent of U.S. farms have Internet access, according to a July 2005 report by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, up from 48 percent in 2003. More than two-thirds of them still use dial-up access.

The popularity of online farm forums has grown as well, said Mack Strickland, an agricultural engineer at Purdue University and farm-computer expert, with some forums claiming to have as many as 30,000 registered users.

The Internet division of Farm Journal Media, www.agweb.com, says user traffic doubled between October 2005 and October 2006, with the forums on the site enjoying similar growth. Traffic on the Des Moines, Iowa-based www.agriculture.com has increased 20 percent to 25 percent over the past year, said editor John Walter. Both sites are funded by ads and free for users.

Enthusiasts say the forums have improved farm production and saved farmers precious dollars by helping them avoid costly mistakes in planting, fertilizing, equipment buys and maintenance. And forums have enabled farmers — many of them miles from their nearest neighbor — to educate each other and build community.

"We all like to talk to folks like ourselves who have the same problems," said Stan Ernst, a marketing instructor at Ohio State University's department of agricultural economics. "We have so much riding on many of our decisions economically that you've got to find people with experience."

A farmer can spend as much as $160,000 on a combine, for example. If it breaks down during a critical harvest time, that could mean the difference between a profit and a loss for some farmers.

Walter said the average visitor to www.agriculture.com spends 11 minutes at a time on the site.

"It's enough time to have a cup of coffee and a conversation and learn something," he said. "It's just rearranged who their neighbors are in a sense. You can't help but think that has changed farming to some degree."

Rural America has lagged behind the cities in Internet usage — especially broadband — because wiring the population-rich cities is more profitable and wiring the countryside more expensive due to long distances and natural barriers such as hills. In addition, rural businesses haven't needed the Internet as much to compete.

However, farmers and existing rural businesses are becoming more reliant on the Internet to be competitive, and rural communities are becoming more aggressive in seeking Internet access. They see it as a way to attract white-collar jobs, and urban dwellers who have moved to the country are demanding it.

Paul Butler, who grows corn and soybeans on 260 acres in Macon, Ill., returned to farming four years ago after 25 years in the computer business. He doubts he would have made it without the Internet and online advice from fellow farmers.

"I would have made a lot of expensive mistakes," said Butler, 39, who logs on using broadband. "Purchasing seed is a pretty complicated decision. It was nice to have 20 unbiased people that weren't selling seed that could give me an opinion on it."

Eric Neer, 24, of Davenport, Iowa, discovered farm forums from fellow students when he was in college.

Although he seldom posts a question, Neer — who works for a farm equipment manufacturer — devours the information he sees on precision farming, using the forums to shop for equipment and information about tractors and combines that are steered by computers linked to global positioning satellites.

Machinery — the universal language of farmers — is a hot topic in farm forums. So is when best to take crops to market to get the best price. Sometimes the talk veers away from pure farming.

In a recent exchange on www.newagtalk.com, a popular farm forum, an Illinois farmer complained that the starter on his pickup truck was acting up. A fellow farmer replied that the electric solenoid atop the starter was probably worn out and the contact sticking in the closed position.

"I would put a whole new starter on it," he wrote. "Fix it now before it ruins the flywheel teeth."

An Ohio farmer wondered if he should replace his fuel-oil furnace with a geothermal heating system. The idea got high marks from a farmer in Indiana who said a geothermal system leaves no smell or residue, makes less noise and leaves no hot/cold spots. Then he offered tips on insulation and heat distribution.

Farmers have to decide themselves whether the advice they get is sound. Walter said he tries to screen out the hokum, blowhards and occasional shyster. Strickland said some users give opinions not based on fact or research.

And some farmers still rely on the neighbor they know.

"You can get some good ideas from people in other states, but they're dealing with different circumstances," said Jim Meimer, who raises corn, soybeans and wheat on 900 acres.

Meimer, 28, goes online to get market data but prefers to get advice from friends and neighbors. He often sees them at the feed store and fertilizer plant when he goes into nearby Mount Gilead, Ohio, to pay bills.

Glen Feichtner, 48, who raises 300 head of cattle near New Washington, Ohio, prefers to get his tips from fellow farmers at the stockyard and grain elevator because he knows they have been successful.

"I get face-to-face interaction," he said. "I know these people. I know their story."

Winkle, 57, became a believer when a tip from an Iowa farmer prompted him to change his no-till farming technique. Winkle increased his yield by about 30 percent.

During the winter, he spends about two hours a day wading through the forums from his farm, about 40 miles northeast of Cincinnati. Since April, he has posted 1,738 messages on one forum alone.
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An essential element of the success of any Internet Marketing campaign is the ability to analyze the traffic to coming to your Website. A key business mantra is that if you can't measure it, you can't manage it.

The are a number of techniques that the best Internet Marketing Strategies employ to jump-start Website traffic building. These strategies include article marketing, blogging, search engine optimization and email marketing.

Luckily for the Internet offers a wealth of excellent and accessible tools for analyzing the success of each of these strategies.

Understanding what your visitors do on your site is crucial information, not to mention interesting. If your visitors proceed to purchase a product but then a large majority leave the site when they get to a specific page in the order process then you need to know about it. It could be that this page is confusing or hard to use. Fixing it could increase your sales by 200%. This is just an example; there are many reasons why you want a detailed analysis of your site visitors.

Most website hosting services offer a stats package that you can study. If you're not sure where this is, call up your hosting service and ask them. Statistics are a vital part of tracking your marketing progress. If you don't have access to website statistics get a package that can help you in this area. Do not get a counter that just shows how many visitors you've had. You'll be missing out on vital information that can help strengthen weaknesses in your site.

A good website hosting service would offer traffic logs that provide an invaluable insight into the traffic being referred to a web site from various sources such as search engines, directories and other links.

Unfortunately traffic tracking provided by web hosting services is often in the form of raw traffic log files or other difficult to understand cryptic formats. These log files are basically text files that describe actions on the site. It is literally impossible to use the raw log files to understand what your visitors are doing. If you do not have the patience to go through these huge traffic logs, opting for a traffic-logging package would be a good idea.

Basically two options are available to you and these are: using a log analysis package or subscribing to a remotely hosted traffic logging service. A remotely hosted traffic logging service may be easy to use and is generally the cheaper option of the two. WebTrends Live and HitsLink are two good, remotely hosted, traffic-monitoring services worth considering. However, WebTrends Live is a more complicated system and is suitable for larger ecommerce websites. "SuperStats" is another recommended traffic logging service.

These services do not use your log files. Typically a small section of code is placed on any page you want to track. When the page is viewed, information is stored on the remote server and available in real time to view in charts and tables form.

Log analysis packages are typically expensive to buy and complex to set up. Apart from commercial packages there are also some free log analysis packages available, such as Analog.

A good traffic logging service would provide statistics pertaining to the following:

* How many people visit your site?

* Where are they from?

* How are visitors finding your site?

* What traffic is coming from search engines, links from other sites, and other sources?

* What keyword search phrases are they using to find your site?

* What pages are frequented the most - what information are visitors most interested in?

* How do visitors navigate within your web site?

Knowing the answers to these and other fundamental questions is essential for making informed decisions that maximize the return on investment (ROI) of your web site investment.

Did you know?

As with any marketing campaign you may run to assist your business, it is important to track the results of your Internet marketing campaign. This should be done on a continual basis so you can ensure the strategies you are utilizing are working. It can also help you to determine when a strategy is not working so you do not continue to invest time and money on a strategy which is not beneficial to your business.

The most important aspect of tracking visitors to your Website is analyzing all the statistics you get from your tracking software. The three main statistics that will show your overall progress are hits, visitors and page views. Hits are tracked when any picture or page loads from your server on to a visitor?s browser. Hits, however, can be very misleading. It is quite an irrelevant statistic for your Website.

The statistic that is probably the most important for a Website is Page Views/Visitors. This gives you a good indication of two things. First, how many people are coming to your site, and secondly how long are they staying on your site. If you have 250 visitors and 300 page views you can figure that most visitors view one page on your site and then leave. Generally, if you're not getting 2 page views per visitor then you should consider upgrading your site's content so your visitors will stay around longer. If you see the number of visitors you have increasing as well as the number of page views per visitor increasing then keep up the good work!

Always look for this stat as an overall barometer of how your site design is doing and if your marketing campaigns are taking hold. Also, a good stat to look for is unique visitors. Once a person visits your site they will not be added to the unique visitors? category if they visit again. This is a good way to track new visitors to your website. Page views are a good indication of how "sticky" your Website is. A good statistic to keep is Page Views divided by the number of Visitors you have. This statistic will give you a good idea if your content is interesting and if your visitors are staying on your site for a long time and surfing.

Some people are intimidated by web traffic statistics (mostly because of the sheer volume of data available), but they shouldn't be. While there are many highly specialized statistics that can be used for more in-depth web traffic analysis, the above areas alone can provide invaluable information on your visitors and your Website performance.

Remember - this data is available for a reason. It's up to you to use it.

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About the Author: Michael Saunders has an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business. He edits a site on using Tools for Traffic Analysis and maintains a site on Traffic Building Strategies.

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Teri Miller has four kids—three boys and a girl, ages 5 through 13. She is 34, works as a hairdresser in Sarasota, Fla., and recently vacationed in Las Vegas. Most important, she doesn't mind strangers knowing all this—even if they use it to sell her things. Simply by sending a text message to a number she saw on a Las Vegas billboard in February, Miller gave Adidas (ADDDY ) and a marketing outfit, MOVO, all the information they needed to hawk basketball shoes to her over the phone.
They knew Miller was in Vegas, since she responded to the billboard offering information about National Basketball Assn. All-Star game events nearby. Her phone number gave away her hometown, indicating an allegiance to the East Coast All-Star team. The payoff came when Adidas sent Miller a text message about the sale of 200 pairs of limited-edition All-Star basketball shoes. Tipped off, Miller lined up outside an Adidas store in Vegas with hundreds of others. "We got there really early with our big ol' cup of coffee," says Miller, "and of course the line was out the door." She bought two pair for her eldest boys.

Advertising is about to get very personal. Marketers are taking tools that they already use to track your Internet surfing and are preparing to combine that information with cell-phone customer data that include not just the area where you live but also the street you're standing on. The aim is to target the exact person who is most likely to buy a product at the precise moment they're most likely to buy it. It's the ad industry's dream come true: a perfect personalized pitch. For privacy advocates, though, this combination of behavioral and geographic targeting is an Orwellian nightmare.

HUMBLE BEGINNINGS
Campaigns that combine Web data with location information to target ads from nearby businesses to individuals are just a couple of years away, mobile marketers say. Already, mobile services use area codes, Zip Codes, and even Global Positioning System (GPS) data to return results for nearby businesses in response to a search for, say, coffee shops. The next step is to serve an ad for a steaming cup of java on a mobile Web page just as the cell-phone Web surfer is passing a Starbucks (SBUX ). Within five years, online ad networks such as TACODA and Specific Media Inc. plan to apply behavioral techniques—using surfing data—to target ads to broadband-enabled digital television. It's not hard to imagine the day when multiple TVs tuned to the same channel in the same household will serve up different ads. "There is no question behavioral targeting will be a major component of television," says Dave Morgan, TACODA's founder and chairman.

Early efforts at such hypertargeting are modest for a good reason: Phone companies are wary of abusing customers' privacy, and major brands are waiting to see if Web-phone ads catch on. Marketers and phone services are also sorting out Federal Communications Commission rules limiting the use and release of customer data, including location information.

On Apr. 2, the FCC released an order requiring mobile marketers to obtain express consent from the customer before carriers release information. Traditionally, permission grants are part of the fine print, often overlooked, for activities such as casting a text message vote, receiving mobile updates such as sports scores, or downloading a GPS map program. FCC rules already require marketers to make it easy to "opt out," usually by replying to a text with "No" or "Stop."

'WALKING TIVOS'
Of course, similar rules apply to e-mail. And one look at the spam-strewn Internet landscape shows how quickly the phone situation could deteriorate, particularly as more services allow unlimited text messaging for a flat rate. A study by M:Metrics, released on Mar. 26, found that most people who receive a phone text message don't think they gave the company permission to contact them, even if they sent an "opt-in" message.

Still, marketers are starting to plumb the potential. Medio Systems Inc., a mobile marketing firm that provides the default search engine for phones served by Verizon (VZ ), T-Mobile, TELUS (TU ), and Amp'd Mobile, is using data from cell-phone Web searches and browsed pages to deliver ads to mobile sites. Carriers such as Sprint Nextel (S ) anticipate delivering ads based on users' near-exact location. "We have not yet gone with a GPS-specific advertisement, but I suspect we will eventually," says Alana Muller, Sprint's director of wireless data marketing.

The objective for advertisers, obviously, is to cut through the cacophony of sales pitches. By some estimates, the average plugged-in individual sees 3,000 to 5,000 ads of all types each day, depending on where he lives. Most of that gets tuned out. "I think people are becoming walking TiVos," says Omar Tawakol, chief advertising officer of Medio Systems. Early research on mobile-phone pitches indicates that about 5% of consumers who see targeted ads respond to them. That sounds small, but fewer than 1% of people click on conventional Web ads.

Phone targeting has one big advantage: Unlike TVs and computers shared by members of the household, most mobile phones have one user. Any mobile Web data that are collected help build a profile of a unique individual. Mobile carriers also can leverage data from service contracts and billing logs.

What's more, cellular networks are able to locate callers to within 50 to 300 meters by triangulating signals, something the fcc requires them to do for 911 calls. Providing the carrier has consumer permission, that could be matched up with, say, a hip fashion boutique that has purchased an ad for women ages 15 to 25 who have surfed the Style.com Web site in the past month.

All told, marketers will spend just $3 billion worldwide on mobile ads this year, according to an Apr. 10 report by ABI Research, an industry research group. But that's expected to grow to $19 billion by 2011 as more users surf the Web via handset. Many marketers eagerly await the day when carriers release location information to them.

Many citizens, of course, are hoping that the vault remains shut. Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, says consumers expect privacy with their cell phone and won't react well to location-based marketing. "Any advertising that causes someone to flip open their cell phone and see an ad won't be a wondrous moment," says Rotenberg. Marketers such as Medio's Tawakol are quick to point out that most ads will appear on mobile Web pages and not as text messages. He also notes that marketers don't have, or even want, customers' names, because brands want to reach highly selective groups of consumers, not just Joe Schmo.

The bigger concern for many mobile users may be that advertisers will simply know their phone number. The industry is ostensibly developing guidelines that keep users from being barraged with messages—restricting, say, how often an advertiser may contact the same consumer in a month. But that cat may be out of the bag: Mobile-phone users who received unwanted messages already have filed lawsuits against marketers.

If you're feeling spammed, of course, the whole appeal of targeting is turned on its head. Now you're angry—and it's personal.
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