Good evening Honorable Judges, Ladies and Gentlemen and fellow 4-H members. Tonight I will be talking about marketing your cattle over the Internet

           Marketing your cattle successfully can often be a costly, and time-consuming process. Printing off posters, sending away catalogs and making phone calls are not the most fun things to do and printing fees and phone bills can really add up.

            Now try putting an advertisement in a cattle magazine, It has to be put together well in advance, you can’t change it once it’s up, and a full page colour add can run at close to $1000 or more. The internet can offer cost effective and easy to use solutions to all these problems.

Building a web site about your cattle is one of the best ways to market them. Websites can range from simple one-page sites that are absolutely free to huge webs including full e-commerce ability, which undoubtedly cost a bit more.

          Although it would be pretty cool to say that your last bull buyer paid you with their credit card and had you ship the bull to their farm in Australia, most of us don’t need a site this fancy, and couldn’t afford to ship ourselves, let alone a bull that far. A middle of the road site is more than most people need and can be obtained for a fairly reasonable cost from many different service providers.

            There are also many free services on the Internet that offer lots of space and have programs to start building your site. These services are a great way to start out with your website but often have limited services and the exchange for it being free is all your pages will have a small banner or advertisement on them that can’t be gotten rid of.

              Whatever service you choose your site can include many sections with just about any information you want to put in. You could have a section with pages on your best cows showing their epds, pictures, and a section on your reference sires could show people what bulls you use and their specs. Each animal in these sections could then have links to their own offspring in your online catalog.

              Your online sale catalog can include all the animals that you have in an upcoming sale or animals you have for sale off your yard. This can be set up just like a printed catalog, but you can get much fancier with full specs on your animals, several colour photos for each animal and links that take you back to the pages about their parents.

               This catalog can be updated (along with the rest of your site) as often as you want. On your website you can also put picture and information about the rest of your farm, your family and anything else you might want to include.

             A fairly major thing to consider when getting your own web site is weather or not you want your own url, or web address. If you choose not to, your address might be something like www.agrinet.com/usersites/Billy Bob’s Brahmas. The service provider’s site is first.

           If you choose to get your own url, which costs around $100 a year to have it registered, you might have a site address like www.gelbviehworld.com. Having your own web address is very handy, it’s easy to remember for customers and for you, it makes your site sound more important, and the customer is more likely to go to your site if they don’t have to type in a web address that’s a mile long.

          Another very useful tool to use over the Internet is E-mail. It allows you to contact customers, and customers to contact you instantly and for no cost other than your monthly connection fee on the Internet, which usually is very reasonable.

             After a customer sees an animal they are interested in on your online catalog, they can click the e-mail link on your page and then contact you about prices, and coming to see this animal. You can also make up mailing lists of all your customers, informing them of upcoming sales or shows, and telling them to check your site for further details.

              The best parts are, you only have to write the message once, you don’t have to print anything, you can send it to as many people as you want and you don’t have to buy stamps!

                Having a website on the internet and using E-mail dramatically increases the number of people who can see and find out about your cattle. If you put up posters and mail catalogs away you can only reach people in your area without the cost getting to high and this limits the amount of people who can see your cattle. Having a website on the internet moves your range of customers from local to basically worldwide.

             Millions of people have access to the internet in Canada alone and this turns anyone who has the internet and wants to buy your breed of cattle into potential customers.

 For example, a breeder in the southern states finds your website and finds out that you are showing some of your bulls at Agribition in a few weeks. This person then checks back a few weeks later and finds the show results you posted on your site.

              Your top bull was Grand champion and another was first in his class. This sparks interest in the breeder and he or she looks through your site and finds epds, bloodlines and information about your bulls. Pleased with the information the breeder e-mails you to arrange a time for him or her to come up and look at your bulls.

             Conversing through e-mail you arrange for the breeder to come up while your bulls are at cattle congress. The breeder comes up and is very pleased with what they see. The breeder decides to buy you top bull and you get a fairly handsome price. Back at home the breeder is very pleased with your bulls performance that breeding season and tells his fellow breeders about you.

          Next year the breeder finds out about your cattle sale from your website and along with 2 other breeders comes up and they leave with 3 bulls. Those customers would never have found out about you if you didn’t have a site on the Internet. Ok, take off the rose coloured glasses you say, but wait, Our farm, Sunny Plain Gelbvieh has already sold a bull and several heifers to buyers who found out about us from our website. It really works!

           As you can see, the Internet can be a cost effective, easy to use and very successful marketing tool for your cattle. By increasing your base of potential customers you can increase your amount of buying customers and this will increase your profit. With extra money around, you could ship that prize bull to Australia and hey, maybe you could go along too!