via GreenLAGirl.com: Eco-friendly business cards don’t come cheap, she discovered a while back. But just in time for the BlogHer conference later this month, eco-cards have gotten a lot more affordable, with Moo.com entering the eco business card business!
Archive for the 'business' Category
Here’s some SEO resources Ryan and I found today:
Keyword Suggestions:
http://www.webconfs.com/website-keyword-suggestions.php
Keyword Density Checker:
http://www.webconfs.com/keyword-density-checker.php
13 Fantastic tools for analyzing the competition:
http://www.noupe.com/tools/13-fantastic-tools-for-knowing-how-they-are-doing-it.html
More than 100,000,000,000 pieces of junk mail are delivered each year (that’s more than 800 pieces per household). The greenhouse gas emissions resulting from the manufacturing of the 6.5 million tons of paper required for junk mail annually is equivalent to the greenhouse gas emissions of 3.7 million cars.
What can you do to stop it? In the United States, sign up for a service like Green Dimes or 41 pounds, or the free Mail Preference Service. If you know of international services, let us know in the comments.
Why is junk mail just bad marketing? It’s all about trust and time. To market to LOHAS, you must be trustworthy and not waste people’s time. LOHAS customers are resistant to some direct marketing techniques because they see traditional methods as intrusive. Traditional marketing relies on interruption marketing instead of permission marketing. These interruptions include Advertising and Direct Mail. Direct mail is also a waste of resources - who on earth looks forward to junk mail? Billboards and banner ads are visual pollution. In contrast, LOHAS customers respond well to recommendations from their peers, so word of mouth (WOM) marketing is very successful. For the same reason, public relations is effective because usually if someone else is writing about your product, it is newsworthy. Internet marketing is also highly effective, because of two reasons. One, it is essentially word of mouth marketing at the speed of light (email, blogs, and social networks), and two, it provides a large amount of information to prospective customers, so that they can research your marketing claims, read online reviews, and see who else is linking to you and trusting your company.
The Times UK reports on its top 50 eco blogs. It is a must-read (and bookmark) for an aspiring green social marketers. It would be nice to know what criteria (PageRank, Unique visitors, Editorial quality) they used. Congrats to all that made the list, and boos to the climate change skeptics!
There are so many options available to photographers to create a professional looking portfolio site. Here are just a few I’ve run across in the past couple of months.
SmugMug.com offers template based sites and includes a way to sell your photos, printing, and custom watermarks.
Satellite powered by a flickr professional account. You also need a web hosting account that supports the php programming language to install Satellite on. You don’t have to know any php - but knowing some basic HTML helps. Despite all these steps, this is my current favorite because it’s customizable, can be hosted on many website accounts, and gives you a real web hosting account to play with, which gives you additional benefits of having you@yourdomainname.com email, and the ability to install a WordPress blog like the one you are reading now. To see an example of a Satellite powered site I recently created for a friend, check out Colleen Todd’s. portfolio.
Worried about copying of your images? Consider using steganography (like DigiMarc in Adobe Photoshop) to digitally watermark your photos, although it has been said it reduces quality. An alternative is to put a “bug” in a corner of the image with your name. This can be done in batch mode with a program like iWatermark. Personally, I prefer the bug method, for reasons Ken Rockwell explains.
Want to include a slideshow widget on your site? Check out the Google AJAX Feed Slideshow widget.
Do it yourself portfolios: (free) http://start.uber.com/design can be used for photography or any artwork.
If you have a mac, you may already have the the Apple iLife suite, including iPhoto and iWeb and a dotMac account which can help you make a decent looking portfolio site.
If any of the above methods doesn’t give you a professional web address (URL) of your own, like www.mynamephotos.com - you can use domain masking at a registrar (like SustainableDomains.com) to point to the computer generated URL.
Know of any others, or had experience with the above that you can share? Please let us know in the comments below!
I organized a panel for the Business of Organics Conference Conference in San Francisco a couple of weeks ago. Here are the slides. Some really interesting stuff in there! Many thanks to Michael Straus, Gene Ruda, and Ed Zimmerman for participating on the panel and making it a success, and the team at SRI for inviting me for the second year in a row!
Technorati Tags: green marketing, organic, organicmarketing, food
This was back in June, but I was so busy on a consulting project (details soon) that I haven’t been blogging very much.
Thanks so much to Ryanne and Jay for taking the time to interview me and edit and produce the video! I recommend that any bay area (and beyond) green companies with interesting stories check out their blog Ryan is Hungry.
This is really just a domain forwarding and masking hack, but I think it could be useful. I’ve been entering in any event I find in the green and sustainability area to Yahoo’s upcoming event calendar service, and tagging them with “sustainability”. I also had the domain name SustainabilityCalendar.com sitting around, doing nothing, after various aborted PHP projects. So, I just used the SustainableDomains.com (a reseller program with GoDaddy) domain forwarding and masking service to point to the tag page for sustainability, and voilà , SustainabilityCalendar.com (or SustainabilityCalendar.org ) is born.
Enjoy it, and please contribute by adding your own events to Upcoming.yahoo.com, and tagging them with the tag “sustainability”. Don’t forget, if your event is related to marketing, submit it to the “Sustainable Marketing” group, and after it is approved, will end up on the home page of SustainableMarketing.com, which gets over 15,000 unique visitors a month.
Technorati Tags: sustainability, sustainablemarketing, upcoming.org
Another quote, this time in a BrandWeek article on Green marketing of organics and clothing:
As Ivan Storck, owner of SustainableMarketing.com, put it, there is a triple bottom line: people, planet, and profit, and the people part of the equation must come first. “Sustainability means more than being eco-friendly,” he said. “Sustainability also means you’re in it for the long haul.”
Congrats also to Jerry Savage, and his new company Research-Sight - lots of great quotes from him in there. Thanks to Sandra O’Loughlin for interviewing us.
Technorati Tags: green marketing, brandweek, sustainablemarketing
I’m excited about finally being in town for this event! My friend Oren Jaffe is the co-host of EcoTuesday, which is a forum to network, collaborate, and engage with environmental and socially responsible business leaders. Each month they create an interactive dialogue and feature a visionary speaker from the sustainable business world. This month, Jeff Slye (Business Evolution Consulting) and Michael Pace (Serrano Hotel) will talk with us about the Kimpton Hotel’s ‘Earthcare’ Program, greening the hotel industry, along with the interworkings between a company’s green efforts and the benefits/challenges that come with outside support from a consultant. Don’t forget to RSVP!
Technorati Tags: ecotuesday
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