How to Turn Your Garden Into a Business Online

Gardening is a hobby that’s starting to get a lot of popularity online. If you have the passion and skills and want to venture more in this area, then this is the right article for you. In this week’s niche tips, I am going to show you how to turn your garden into a business without the need for a huge investment.  

The Advantage of The Online Business Model

In the past, starting a garden business is a lot more difficult. You need to own a brick-and-mortar store before you can sell anything. This creates high overhead expenses and it might take years to break even.

By bringing the business online, you can merge products, knowledge, and property and promote garden-related stuff through a website. This enables you to diversify your income and reach out to a wider audience.

Now let’s see what are some of the easy ways that you can get started.

How to Turn Your Garden Into a Business Opportunity

# 1 – Affiliate Marketing

Gardening involves a lot of tools and most of them can be found at online retailers such as Amazon and Home Depot. Lucky for you, these companies also offer affiliate programs whereby you are rewarded a sales commission whenever you recommend a certain product to a new customer.

Here are some range of products that you might be interested in;

• Hand Tools
• Soils, Fertilizers, and Mulches
• Composting and Yard Waste Bins
• Garden Sculptures and Statues
• Glove and Protective Gears
• Greenhouses and Accessories
• Indoor Gardening and Hydroponics
• Plant, Seed, and Bulbs
• Pest Control
• Water Gardens and Ponds

And here are the commission rates from various online retailers that you can choose from;

• Amazon Associates – 4%
• Wayside Gardens – 4.5%
• Home Depot – 3-5%
• Wayfair – 5-6%
• Gardeners Supply – up to 8%

Besides tools, you can also promote digital products such as eBooks or online courses to those who want to improve their knowledge about gardening. Some of these topics can be quite specific, but the advantage is that their commission rates are usually higher than physical products.

Here are some interesting affiliate programs related to digital products that I’ve researched for you.

• The Shoestring Gardener eBook – 50% in commission
• Smiling Gardener Academy – 50%
• The Living Farm (online course) – 50%
• The Organic Gardening Secrets eBook – 75%
• How to Grow Juicy Tasty Tomatoes eBook – 30%

Whether it’s physical or digital, you need to make sure that you are promoting a product because it offers value to your readers and not for the sake of commission earnings. A good quality product will help you write good product reviews with ease and improve your traffic for conversion (visitors becoming buyers).

The best way to find out is to try the products and share your experience OR if this is not feasible, at the very least, research reviews from other customers and offer constructive opinions. If your information is helpful, people will still follow through with your recommendation.

# 2 – Event Hosting

Remember when I said that with a website, you can do a lot of creative things? Here it is. When you have a garden, you actually own a beautiful property. Granted the land is spacious, you can consider hosting for events such as parties or weddings. If you are really committed to offering this service, you can fetch from hundreds to thousands of dollars per event.

Besides a website, it’s important to list your venue to get the attention of the local community and a great way to do this is by listing your business on Google. The process only takes a few simple steps and your garden will be listed online, just like the venues below.

# 3 – Vacation Homes

Ok, so maybe your garden is not big enough for a party. That’s okay. A small beautiful garden is still a great getaway for people who want something simple, but with a view. If you have an empty room that faces the garden, then you should consider renting the space for budget travelers.

In Airbnb for example, hosts love to feature their garden as part of the property viewing because it will usually attract more bookings. While it wouldn’t yield as much as hosting events, you can still fetch a couple of hundred additional cash every month.

Wouldn’t that be nice for your household income?   

How To Drive Audience To Your Website

Whether you are doing affiliate marketing or property renting, you need people (a lot of people) to see your website so that you can be in business. As it is, there is already a ton of people searching for gardening or garden related information online.

By offering the information that you know in the form of blogs, videos, and images on the search engine, you will increase the chances of people viewing your website.

And if you want to be on the top of the information list, you need to understand how to do proper keyword research. Let me show you what I mean.

Say, for example, you want to recommend a sprinkler system from Amazon that you’ve personally used before. Do you know what type of keywords that people are using to search for this product online?

Here’s what Google suggested to me;

Taking an idea from this list, I am going to run a quick search using my favorite keyword tool, Jaaxy. The term “how to install a sprinkler system” has 814 searches per month (AVG) and 122 competing websites (QSR). Based on the high QSR count (more than 100), this would be a tough keyword to rank for if you are a newbie.

But the second keyphrase on the list – “how to install a lawn sprinkler system” – is still a very relevant topic and the QSR value is very low (only 28). Hence this would be a better keyword to use for a blog.

Now if you look to the right-hand side, in the brainstorming column, you will discover more keyword variations. “How to install underground sprinkler” is something I never thought about before. It turns out, this keyphrase has only 7 competing websites. We found another great keyword idea.

So you see, from one keyword research, you can actually generate multiple topic ideas to interlink and point towards your product review for conversion. All you need is some observation and thinking outside of the box.

Likewise, if you want to promote an eBook, you would use key phrases that are relevant to the topic of the digital product. If I am recommending the Shoestring Gardener eBook, here are some ideas that I would choose from.

Then I would go into Jaaxy and rinse/repeat the steps that I’ve shown earlier. There’s really no limit to how many keywords you’ll discover within a niche because people are always searching for new information online.

A Beautiful Land With Hidden Potential

Look at your garden. What do you see? How do you enrich the soil, grow more plants/flowers and turn it into a business opportunity? Do experiment with the ideas that I’ve listed above and let me know how it goes in the comment below.