We recently connected with Daniel Sell and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Daniel, thanks for joining us today. Folks often look at a successful business and imagine it was an overnight success, but from what we’ve seen this is often far from the truth. We’d love to hear your scaling up story – walk us through how you grew over time – what were some of the big things you had to do to grow and what was that scaling up journey like?

One of my businesses is paid promotions on social media. Up to just a few years ago I never really thought social media was anything more than something to keep up with my friends.
But now, with over 180,000 followers across to platforms, I find myself working with rather large brands to promote a product that we use on the farm.
But this didn’t just happen overnight, it took hard work to build my following up along with creating a reputable name for myself.
One mistake I made in the earlier part my “career” was promoting a brand I had never used before, it was hard for me to make content that was relatable and it was fairly obvious to my followers that this wasn’t something that I had full trust it. Now days, I vet most companies before I try and make something happen. Agriculture is light years ahead when it comes to technology, but often they are lacking when it comes to advertisements or getting their product out. My generation doesn’t often read the classifieds or farm magazines, but they do spend a lot of time on social media. That’s something that I try to exploit to not only put cash in my pocket, but to help them move forwards in their business as well.
I was blessed with the ability to talk to just about anyone, and I use that to my advantage when I cold call a company. It’s a skill that I use rather regularly, and it has helped me immensely.
Nowadays I have found joy in not only sharing my story of being a 5th generational farmer in the High Plains of Texas and Oklahoma, but being in the forefront of a new frontier for this next generation of farmers. I am blessed to be one of the very few farmers that doesn’t have to have a 2nd job to support my farming career and that’s all because of social media. My advice to the younger generation would be to see social media as a business, be mindful of what you post and above all, be truthful and honest when you post content. Because you never know who may be watching.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

I think I kind of answered this in the first question. But I’ll give a rendition.
I use social media to promote products that we use on our farm. I’m very proud of the fact that I am currently working with Bayer Crops and Sciences to share the farm’s story about how useful glyphosate is and also share the positives when it comes to that herbicide. I also am very proud of how far I’ve come on social media. It’s become increasingly difficult to grab the attention of the viewer along and it’s even harder to gain a follow from them. But with the amount of followers I’ve been able to gain over the past 5-7 years I’ve had great success.

We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?

Being consistent is very important. Between the short attention span and keeping relevant it’s very important to be on your audiences feed. I find that that keeps interest and interactions higher. I won’t lie though, as horrible as it was, Covid-19 was a major way to grow your audience/brand since everyone was staying home and not out and about. I pray we never see something like that again, but I saw a lot of creators (including myself) grow their audience because of it. Bottom line, consistency and honesty is key to a successful social media presence.

What else should we know about how you took your side hustle and scaled it up into what it is today?

Without a doubt, it has become a full time job just like farming. The great thing about it though, is as long as I drag my camera, drone and microphone with me during the day, there’s always content to be made. Sure it slows me down just a hair, but there’s multiplied benefits to videos the farm or myself working. A key milestone for me was reaching 100,000 followers on TikTok. I have yet to reach that on Instagram, but I’m working on it!

Contact Info:

• Instagram: FarmerDan97
• Facebook: FarmerDan97
• Twitter: FarmerDan97
• Youtube: FarmerDan97
• Other: TikTok: FarmerDan97