Today, Garden Center welcomes guest blogger Susan Harris, one of the voices behind the popular blog Garden Rant. She is also the primary writer of the Homestead Gardens Blog.

Independent garden centers – listen up! Lowes, that big box down the street, has hired reputable garden writers in eight regions of the U.S. to post weekly about their gardens. That’s right, they’re stepping up their online marketing to do what blogs do so well - create community and customer loyalty - despite their being, you know, a big box. (The Lowes blog is called Garden Grow-Along.)

The point is they’re doing what gardeners would rather see YOU doing. Real gardeners would rather get their gardening info from a local store with knowledgeable staff and plants that, you know, live.

Garden centers are blogging, but…
By now you’re all being told you MUST blog to survive, thrive, and win those new, young customers, and it’s true. (If you haven’t seen the reasons, here’s a list.) Garden center owners and staff simply don’t have the time or the blogging and social networking expertise to blog successfully, which requires several new posts a week, every week, plus ongoing promotion. I’ve surveyed all the garden-center blogs I can find, and generally found:

• Blogs full of advertising copy – an instant turn-off for every single reader. Successful corporate blogs avoid ad copy altogether in favor of offering useful and entertaining content.
• Lots of abandoned-looking blogs. To the average reader, if your most recent update was a month ago, the blog’s dormant and not worth checking in on. Successful blogs are updated at least three times a week, and five to seven times a week is ideal.
• Lots of blogs with seriously out-of-date designs.
• Too many deadly treatises about plants, sometimes with no photos.
• Visually, not enough photos and lots of bad ones, too. Too small, too dark, not displayed well.

The list could go on but the bottom line is that most are failing to win traffic or meet any business objective, like attracting customers.

Hire a blogger
Most of those less-than-successful blogs are written by owners or their regular staffers (buyers, marketing staff), and I’m writing to suggest a better alternative – contracting with a successful garden blogger to blog for you. But where do you find them? Open Register asked me to answer that question for their readers and I have three suggestions:

• Consult blog directories, like the Cold Climate Gardening Garden Blog Directory and Blotanical. Narrow your choices by choosing blogs with good traffic, and ones whose voice fits your company. Get to know your top choices by leaving comments and seeing how they respond. And ask for references from your finalists – your blogger will be telling your company’s story, so you want a reliable partner. If you see Facebook and Twitter badges in the sidebar, that’s a good sign that they know how to promote via social networking, and can do that for you – and do it well.
• The Garden Writers Association has a “Find a Writer” feature, but, unfortunately, it doesn’t indicate which writers have blogs.
• Contact me and I’ll find the best candidates to recommend to you. It’s part of the total package of services my partners and I offer at Garden Center Blogger. They include blog design, set-up, management, editing and promotion, plus social networking, e-newsletters – the works.

What your customers want to see on your blog
I asked readers of the popular blog GardenRant to suggest topics for your new or newly charged-up blogs and they had lots of great ideas. Here’s what they want to see on your blog, in a nutshell:

• Super-useful gardening advice for their region, the more timely the better. Answers to questions your staffers are hearing this week. Stories about what gardeners are doing in their garden this week.
• What’s newly arrived at your store
• How plants look in the garden and after they’re full-grown
• The cool events at the store
• Staff profiles, staff picks in their department
• Contests, product giveaways
• Stories about urban greening and gardening in your city
• What local Master Gardeners near you are up to
• And lots of guest posts by interesting writers and experts

These gardeners are ready and willing to offer YOU, not the big boxes, their customer loyalty, both as readers and as buyers, if you’ll only provide the information they’re so eager for.