Successfully Working from Home in a Rural Area
Living in a rural area provides many attractive benefits; clean air, clean water, friendly people, small schools, beautiful scenery, access to outdoor activities and lower cost of living, but living rural also has its challenges, primarily how to make a good living. Several years ago when we moved from a larger population area to a smaller rural farming community we decided to give technology a chance to assist us in diversifying our income and it worked!
Our farm, Stargazer Perennials is a year around working sustainable farm and nursery that grows using only organic methods. On the farm we grow over 400 varieties of cold hardy perennials, hardy roses, over 30 varieties of hardy ornamental grasses, a wide selection of hardy shrubs, herbs, vegetables and much more. As we expanded our product line we also found the need to expand our distribution area to help diversify our revenue. Our expanded distribution channels now includes our online plant nursery and garden store, our retail location at our farm in Summerville, Oregon and our booths at the Walla Walla, Washington farmers' market. Now three years into our farm venture we are finding that our online store has doubled our income and greatly assists in leveling out the peaks and valleys in income that small farmers typically face each year.
While we are definitely plant people, computer people we are not. When we decided to start an online store we first went to numerous computer people, website designers and the like and found that well frankly we couldn't afford to start that way, so necessity being the mother of invention we plunged head first into designing and managing our our websites. Looking back that was one of the best decisions we ever made! While there is work involved, the program that we use through High Mountain Domains is very easy to use with templates and step by step prompts, the cost savings over having hired a firm to not only design our websites but to maintain them has been tens of thousands of dollars. Programs that didn't work for us and were a terrible waste of time included Yahoo website design, which really was a disaster, and a canned software package that we purchased. Not being techno-nerds we needed software that did not require us to write any XHTML or HTML code and that we could still get to work on our rural satellite connection. We also needed good technical support with people who could actually help us when we needed it and who didn't mind answering the most basic of questions. So after trail and error, we found High Mountain Domains and haven't left. Through this one online company we manage our 3 websites, our merchant account ( which allows us to accept credit cards online ), our email marketing software and our blogs for less per month than our satellite company (Hughes) charges us for our satellite connection. Stay tuned for future blog installments of how to start your own online business.
Here's some links to some of our websites if you want to take a look:
Stargazer Perennials
Farm Fresh Living
The Fly Fishing Place
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