Going Green: Private Sector Must Take Up the Slack by Shel Horowitz

1 Dec, 2010  No Comment

Many observers in the environmental movement were dispirited by the US election results in November, with the election of several prominent climate-change deniers and the power switch in the House of Representatives.

Political reality around sustainability varies a lot with location. Western Europe has been pushing hard on green technology leadership for years, combining business and government to drive the change. From simple innovations like a light/heavy switch for toilet flushes to the complexities of generating significant power from offshore and mountaintop wind farms, Europe has made it clear that carbon reduction and energy and water conservation are priorities. China, using an approach dictated largely by government policy, has become a world leader in solar.

However, both the European and Chinese systems send out mixed messages. Europe relies far too heavily on dangerous and un-green nuclear power; China has made an even larger commitment to dirty, health-killing coal.

In many parts of Africa and Asia, NGOs and nonprofits—often more than government or private industry—are taking the lead, bringing low-cost and highly portable energy technologies in to disadvantaged villages, replacing polluting, unsafe, and carbon-spewing kerosene, wood, and charcoal with clean alternatives—decentralized to the level of a single home.

Turning back to the US: I believe the election shows that Americans can’t rely on the federal government to deal with climate change on our behalf; as business leaders and thought leaders, we have to do it ourselves. Nothing meaningful will come out of Washington for the next two gridlocked years, on climate change, going green, or many other issues.

But this doesn’t mean the work will stop. Not at all.

Individuals within companies will continue to spearhead the movement for change, and those companies will slowly turn to embrace the change. Individuals within households will continue to make better choices for themselves and their families, and the machinery of commerce will continue to make those choices ever more widely available and affordable.

First, of course, is the pioneering work done for the past several decades by companies that were founded with a strong environmental chromosome. When companies like Whole Foods or Ben & Jerry’s take steps to go more green, it’s totally in keeping with the corporate culture—the company DNA—and with the needs and desires of their customer base.

But wider change must be driven by companies considered much more mainstream. “Fringe” businesses—small innovative concerns that will grow to become the Whole Foods and Ben & Jerry’s of the future—may show us how to get there, but to really make a difference, much bigger players have to get involved.

Will this happen without government carrots? Actually, it’s happening already. Let’s take Walmart as an example. The largest retailer in the world—that sounds pretty mainstream. Founded by a conservative, pickup-driving rural American from the South (the most conservative region in the country), Walmart certainly doesn’t kowtow to tree-huggers. In fact, it’s often been criticized by environmentalists for a host of issues ranging from store siting to labor practices.

Yet in the last few years, starting with the appointment of Lee Scott as CEO and continuing past his term, Walmart has taken numerous major steps toward sustainability in both its operations and its product line. Why?

1. Walmart’s always been awesome at slashing the cost and boosting the efficiency of its logistics. So the dozens of green operations initiatives that actually save the company millions of dollars are a no-brainer. Examples range from fitting its long-haul trucks with separate temperature systems so the big diesels don’t have to run just to heat or cool the cab, to switching to LED parking lot lighting in some stores—which slashed energy consumption by 48 percent and maintenance costs by 75 percent—to saving 678,000 barrels of oil and 290,000 metric tons of greenhouse gases a year just by cutting plastic shopping bag waste by a third.

2. The company realized that bringing in green product lines (from energy-efficient lightbulbs to organic food to healthy cleaning and body care lines) opened up enormous revenue and profit potential.

In other words, the company realized it could both save a fortune and make a fortune. So what’s not to like? And this is the future of going green in the US for the next two years: companies stepping forward to do the right thing out of economic self-interest.

Of course, if the Obama administration had engaged in a massive Marshall Plan-style program to create hundreds of thousands of jobs by converting to green power sources, we might not need to ask ourselves how to move forward without the government’s help. But that’s a topic for a different column.


Shel Horowitz, shel at greenandprofitable.com, shows you how to “reach green, socially conscious consumers with marketing that has THEM calling YOU.” He writes the Green And Profitable column and is the primary author of Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green (John Wiley & Sons, 2010).

Current Issue: November 2010

5 Nov, 2010  No Comment

Earn a commission–find me a paid speaking gig in the Bay Area for January 17 or 18. I will be speaking on the 19th at the Sustainable Food Summit. Contact me directly at 413-586-2388, shel at greenandprofitable.com

Shel’s Green And Profitable monthly column has launched. If you know a newspaper, newsletter, website, or blog that would like to run this column, please recommend us. the link is https://greenandprofitable.com/green-and-profitable-column/

In This Issue…

  • Pushing the Green Bar Higher: Report from the Green America/Global Exchange Green Festival
  • Persuading People to Buy, by Marcia Yudkin
  • Hear & Meet Shel
  • Friends Who Help

Pushing the Green Bar Higher: Report from the Green America/Global Exchange Green Festival

Saturday, October 23, I did my Green Marketing talk at the Green Festival: the largest and most well-run event of its kind I’ve been to, and I’ve been to quite a few.

The way the schedule worked, I ended up not being able to connect with a lot of the other great workshops—but that was ok, since it took me pretty much the whole day to go through all the exhibits.

Let me tell you, the Green world is hopping! Two years ago, much of what I saw at the show would not have even been on the drawing boards, and now it’s reality.

Some random observations:

Water: Awareness of water as a global resource issue has come a long way in the past few years, and that plays out on several fronts, among them:

•   Products that reduce or eliminate use of bottled water, such as Hydros Bottle: a reusable water and highly portable bottle with a built-in filter

•   Industrial and agricultural processes designed to use much less water

•   Consumer awareness projects such as Corporate Accountability International’s very effective “Think Outside the Bottle” campaign

Community Food Self-Sufficiency: Innovative companies and community organizations are noticing that not only rural people are looking for locally-sourced, healthy food. Urban people want options too. Some of the solutions have been around for years, such as farmers markets bringing their wares to urban centers or Community Supported agriculture farms that sell memberships for a whole growing season. But others could be just as game-changing, such as the offering from Sustainable Garden Supply, Inc. This company does “vertical gardens” and claims that 30 different plants could be grown in a three-foot space. It looks somewhat like an Italian Renaissance fountain and can be used indoors or out.

Fair Trade: No longer just about coffee, cocoa, and tea, the list of fair-trade certified products (and groups certifying them) continues to grow. Sugar, bananas, clothing, and other products are now obtaining certification, and several different certifying bodies are now active. And there were at least four different fair-trade chocolatiers sapling their yummy wares (a far cry from the acute shortage of decent chocolate I encountered when I switched to fair trade several years ago).

Home, Shelter, and Energy: There must have been at least two dozen vendors selling and/or installing solar energy systems, a comparable number selling conservation and retrofit products, plus some geothermal. Attention to wind seemed to be concentrated in the nonprofit organization booths, though. Many contractors were also around to discuss building new green structures or renovating old ones, along with eco-friendly landscaping, gardening, and decorating. And Zero Waste as well as Zero Energy have become popular catchwords.

Fashion and Home Decor: Green has gotten very chic. Say goodbye to the drab monochrome patterns and I-used-to-be-a-burlap-bag look of years past. Today’s eco-fashions are colorful, dramatic, interestingly cut, heavily influenced by world-beat cultures, and look nothing like an old coffee sack. Think of the difference between recycled paper in 1990 and today. Reusability is also big, with, for instance, reusable cloth wraps with Velcro closures to replace sandwich bags—and a portion of the Mother Earth News booth set up as an heirloom seed exchange. And speaking of Zero Waste, many small vendors featured a wide assortment of craft items created from what used to be considered scrap: jewelry made of recycled paper and metal, elegant art papers made of deodorized and sanitized elephant dung (which I actually came across in 2009 and mentioned in Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green), textiles from old soda bottles, furniture from recovered glass…

In short, if your exposure to green products is based on what was out there 20, 10, or even five years ago, it’s time for another look—which you can take by browsing the exhibitor catalog, posted here.

Another Recommended Book: Persauding People to Buy, by Marcia Yudkin

As a long-time subscriber to Marcia Yudkin’s Marketing Minute newsletter, I read most of these essays when they were first published in that format.

Now that she’s organized some of her columns into books, I’m pleasantly shocked by how much more I get out of them. She has clearly given much thought to the order, so that essay builds upon essay to strengthen and hammer home the central messages–such as the importance of knowing your market inside out and backwards, and matching the medium, market, and message.

The articles are short and digestible: 1-1/2 to 2 widely spaced pages apiece (remember—these were first published in a newsletter called the Marketing *Minute*). Normally, I like my content longer, because I like depth. But Marcia wastes no words and achieves that depth in surprisingly little space. Which is why I continue to read her newsletter for more than a decade, even as I’ve unsubscribed from dozens of others after a couple of years, or even a few months.

Icing on the cake: the little aphorism or bit of humor at the end of many of the articles that lets different synapses connect in your brain, and reinforces the article’s message while generating a smile.

As a long-time advocate of these principles, I strongly recommend Marcia’s book, with its easily-digested nuggets, as a complement to my own Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green.

Disclosure: I am personally acquainted with Marcia and we were in a mastermind group together for a while.

—Shel Horowitz

Hear & Meet Shel

November

December

January
February
  • Second Annual Communication on Top Forum, Davos, Switzerland, February 17, 2011. Tentative title: “Social Media, Internal Activism, and Corporate Social Responsibility: How to Build Customer Loyalty AND a Greener Brand”
March
  • Teleseminar on Social Media for Book Authors, Wednesday, March 30, 2 pm ET/11 a.m. PT, with Judy Cullins. Still working out the exact title and (very reasonable) price. We’ll have it for you next month, along with a registration page–but meanwhile, please mark your calendar.
April
  • Saturday, April 23rd, 2011 10 AM-4 PM, my wife and I will exhibit again at Amherst Sustainability Festival in downtown Amherst, MA
Recent Interviews You Can Listen To
Articles By Me

Friends Who Help

Ram Dass (yes, the real one). Forty years ago, Ram Dass sparked a revolution in America with the publication of his first book, Be Here Now. This landmark classic inspired an entire generation to embrace the ancient wisdom of the East, and apply it on a personal level.  Now, four decades later, Ram Dass brings the world his most important teaching in a new book: Be Love Now.  If you order a copy of the new book now, there are free gifts his friends have put together for you,  including tickets to the concert with Krishna Das in New York City where Ram Dass will be live online from Maui. (transportation to the event not included) https://belovenowbook.com

Densie Wakeman of the Blog Squad always has good stuff. Now she has a nice little gift for you: a new, no-charge 7-day minicourse called Visibility Boost! It covers:
  • Exactly what it takes to boost your visibility.
  • A simple way to find your target audience.
  • Where to find potential JV partners.
  • An important blogging tactic that will boost your visibility.
  • How to share your expertise so you dominate your niche.
  • How to get more leverage from your videos.
I’ve signed up for this one myself!


Accurate Writing & More, 16 Barstow Lane , Hadley, MA 01035, United States

Some of the above links are affiliate links that earn me commissions if you purchase.

Current Issue: October, 2010

6 Oct, 2010  1 Comment

In This Issue…

  • Lots of Exciting News
  • Deep Sustainability
  • Another Recommended Book: Twelve by Twelve, by William Powers
  • Hear & Meet Shel
  • Friends who Help

Lots of Exciting News

Goodness! So much going on here at Clean and Green World Headquarters—let me fill you in on some of it.

First, this month’s issue has both a bunch of really cool advice on copywriting for the Green market AND a review of a new, important yet not-well-known sustainability book (see the two main articles)

Also some very big deal speeches coming up, starting with my talk for Green America’s GreenFest at the DC Convention Center Saturday, October 23. I think it may be the largest group I’ve addressed so far. (See the Hear & Meet section).

Now, here’s some of what’s going on:

  • My newest site, Green and Profitable, is up and running, although not in final form. This will be the new home of my blog and is also the launching pad for  a self-syndicated column: Green And Profitable. If you or someone you know would like to run my column on Green business success, please visit the site and get in touch. There will be a third sample column posted soon.
  • Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green is now available in Kindle format as well as paperback (click on the link and scroll to the bottom to direct links for several retailers).  And don’t forget, if you register your purchase of any format on the bonus page at https://guerrillamarketinggoesgreen.com, there are about $2000 in extra bonuses coming to you (use the same link to preview the bonuses).
  • New and much more affordable ad rates and options for FrugalMarketing and FrugalFun—and, for the first time, including in-context ads. Prices start at just $9.50 per month.
  • The International Association of Earth-Conscious Marketers continues to move forward. And it really is international, with people expressing interest from Bali, Dubai, Britain, and elsewhere. We hope to accept memberships early next year. Meanwhile, you can ask to be notified by leaving your e-mail or subscribing to the RSS feed at the organization’s website.  If you’d like to be actively involved in shaping the organization, please Tweet the words “IAECM Steering Commitee” and your e-mail address to @ShelHorowitz

Deep Sustainability

The old Green messages are beginning to look a bit pale. Accusations of greenwashing are rife, and often, those charges have more than a little substance—does anyone really believe BP is a Green company anymore?

So does that mean Green marketing is dead? What’s a conscious marketer to do?

First of all, I don’t for a moment believe that Green is dying, let alone dead. But just as parents stop diapering their babies once they’ve been toilet trained and expect them to wipe their own tushes from that point on, so we as Green marketers need to take greater responsibility for our messaging. Like those toddlers who are mastering not only toilet training but walking and talking and table manners and a whole bunch of other stuff all at once, we have to stand on our own feet, even if it feels a bit wobbly at first.

So here are a few marketing guideposts on your own wobble toward sustainable marketing:

  • Be clear and specific. Today’s informed consumer doesn’t just want to hear “we’ve gone Green.” They’ll respond better to something like “by introducing this new, efficient packing machine, we’ve reduced solid waste by 18 percent and cut carbon emissions by 368 tons a year.”
  • Make consumers understand what each of these accomplishments means to them: “That solid waste reduction means we don’t have to bring nearly as much to the landfill, which means lower costs passed on to you, longer landfill life, and fewer non-degradable materials clogging up the landfill. Lower carbon means 68 fewer asthma cases in our county every year, as well as reducing catastrophic global warming.”

(If you’re familiar with the concept of features vs. benefits, you’ll note that the first bullet stresses features—which are by themselves seldom enough to sell successfully—and the second bullet translates those features into direct benefits both to the consumer and to the world. Features provide the gear-heads (who already understand what they mean, and can supply the benefits themselves) something to look at; benefits speak to average consumers through their own emotional needs and wants, and are much more powerful—but you need both, in many cases.)

  • Raise the bar on your industry’s standards for going Green. Have you achieved zero waste in a facet of production? Have you switched to compostable plastics—that you’re actually composting? Have you figured out a way to cut energy or water use by some huge percentage? Are you sourcing a larger percentage of materials from sustainable-practices vendors? Say so! You’ll get the competitive advantage of doing this before others—and once your competitors start imitating, you can still get good marketing mileage out of having been first.
  • Stay away from messaging that won’t be believed. If you’re promoting nuclear power or large-scale biomass, for example, any attempt to portray your company as Green will come back to bite you. Best, of course, is not to promote those products at all, but if you have to promote them, get out of the Green space and find other ways to market (or should I say, defend) these environmentally toxic technologies. Both of these have been promoted as Green alternatives, and neither one passes the sniff test.
  • If the Green content of your practices is questionable or largely unknown, be prepared to document it in your messaging. Thoroughly. I went to a solar festival this summer where a couple of the exhibitors were talking about “biochar.” From their materials, it looked to me like just another variant on burning wood: points for renewability, certainly, but NOT for clean emissions or carbon impact reduction. By failing to convince me that they were truly Green, these companies left me highly skeptical of other claims they (or their competitors) might make.
  • Involve your supply chain. Just as “no man is an island,” neither is a corporation. You have vendors who sell to you, and customers who buy from you. You have ancillary services involved, such as transportation or security. And you have both carrot- and stick-flavored leverage you can exert to help these companies go Green. The carrots: not only will they get more of your business, but you will promote them in your Green marketing campaigns. The stick? If they fail your sustainability criteria, you’ll choose another vendor who is more earth-centered.

Another Recommended Book: Twelve by Twelve, by William Powers

“Enough is the sweet spot between too little and too much.”

—William Powers

Normally, the books I recommend here are quite easy to see as business books. Twelve by Twelve: A One-Room Cabin Off the Grid & Beyond the American Dream, by William Powers (New World Library, 2010) isn’t like that. In fact, it’s kind of a look at what life might be like if we all *stopped* doing business as usual.

Something of a cross between Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and Thoreau’s Walden with more than a dash of wider social visionaries like E.F. Schumacher and Hazel Henderson thrown in, this gorgeously written book chronicles the author’s sojourn of several months in a 12′ x 12′ handmade cabin, without electricity or running water, in the North Carolina backwoods but within an easy drive of Raleigh-Durham. Documenting the journeys toward sustainability that he, his wildly different assortment of “eccentric” neighbors (racist refugees from urban squalor on one side, a Mexican immigrant craftsman on the other) and his urban friend undergo separately and together, he also looks penetratingly at what it means to be sustainable in modern society…how “primitive” cultures such as those he’d lived in as an aid worker in Liberia (Africa) and Bolivia (South America) offer some lessons to the industrialized world, and vice versa…and what happens when government regulators, megacorporations, or even well-meaning, philanthropic land developers stand between homesteaders and their dream. These different dramas play out in both optimistic and pessimistic ways.

Most of all, we look into Powers’ own soul, as he struggles with a whole series of physical and psychological dynamics that weave together his past, his time in the cabin, and his unknown future.

To me, as a Green business activist and consultant, the questions Powers raises are questions we need to address if we want to Green the world. I see Twelve by Twelve as a book to reread every year or two, going a layer or two deeper each time.

As he notes in the final pages, “we decide what gets globalized—consumption or compassion; selfishness or solidarity—by how we cultivate the most valuable place of all, our inner acre. (p. 258)


Hear and Meet Shel

October

  • Tuesday, October 12 at 7 p.m. ET/4 p.m. PT: My third annual presentation to the MUSE Online Writers Conference. This time, Selling a Self-Published Book to a Traditional Publisher
  • Wednesday, October 13, I’ll be interviewed again for the Guerrilla Marketing Association’s weekly calls–this time by Alexandru Israil from Romania, 7 p.m. ET/4 p.m. PT.
  • Saturday, October 23, 2 pm ET, Green America’s Green Fest, Washington Convention Center, Green Business Pavilion, Washington, DC. Live talk: Green and Ethical Messages to Reach Green and Ethical Customers. Contact: Denise Hamler, denisehamler (at) greenamericatoday.org
  • Wednesday Oct. 27th, 1:30p.m. ET/10:30 a.m. PT, Dr. Vitt Argent interviews me for KIVA Talk Radio,

November

December

January
February
  • Second Annual Communication on Top Forum, Davos, Switzerland, February 17, 2011. Tentative title: “Social Media, Internal Activism, and Corporate Social Responsibility: How to Build Customer Loyalty AND a Greener Brand”
April
  • Saturday, April 23rd, 2011 10 AM-4 PM, my wife and I will exhibit again at Amherst Sustainability Festival in downtown Amherst, MA




Permanent Links to Audios and More (partial list)
Articles By Me

Friends Who Help

Wow! Where else can you find a teleseminar series with 30 faculty like this: Kevin Kelly (founder of Wired, part of the legendary Whole Earth Catalog, and author most recently of 1,000 True Fans)…Janet Switzer (coordinator of major marketing campaigns for people like Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen of Chicken Soup fame, and quite possibly the real reason for their success)…Peter Shankman (founder of HARO, the no-cost journalist/source matching service I’m always raving about–you ARE a member, I hope)…Joan Stewart (The Publicity Hound)…Warren Whitlock (co-author of what I believe is the first book on Twitter marketing)…Susan Harrow (expert on getting on Oprah and author of a book I love, Sell Yourself Without Selling Your Soul)…and many others. And it’s put together by David Mathisen of Be The Media (an amazing book). Yes, it costs—but the first three calls are no-charge previews. (Dave recently interviewed me—you can find the link in the Hear and Meet Shel section). https://shelhorowitz.com/go/jcUpEX

My friend Paula Langguth Ryan, author of Bounce Back From Bankruptcy, just released a no-charge 10-page special report called How to Know If It’s Time to File Bankruptcy. Paula wrote this report to give people a sense of peace as they ponder whether or not taking the big step toward bankruptcy is in their best interest. Paula confesses, “If I’d had someone to walk me through this when I was considering bankruptcy, I might have chosen a different path.” In this report, she also offers a paid (but optional) 30-minute Considering Bankruptcy Consultation: She could you see your situation with fresh eyes, so you can make an informed decision about which path you want to take.  Get your copy at https://bit.ly/bfQnT8

Accurate Writing & More, 16 Barstow Lane , Hadley, MA 01035, United States

Some of the above links are affiliate links that earn me commissions if you purchase.

Current Issue: September 2010

6 Sep, 2010  1 Comment

Let Jingles Jangle Your Cash Register: Clean and Green Marketing Tip

Fill in the blanks:
Double your pleasure, double your fun with _____________
You wonder where the yellow went when you _______________
___________ can put good food in your family and chaaaange back in your pocket
Plop, plop, fizz, fizz, ____________

Bonus question for those who grew up in or near New York City and northern New Jersey:
Palisades from coast to coast, ____________
Palisades Amusement Park.

If you’re over 50 or so, chances are you know all the answers:
Double your pleasure, double your fun with Doublemint, Doublemint, Doublemint gum
You wonder where the yellow went when you brush your teeth with Pepsodent
McDonald’s can put good food in your family and chaaaange back in your pocket
Plop, plop, fizz, fizz, oh, what a relief it is
Palisades from coast to coast, where a dime buys the most.
Palisades Amusement Park. (Hear the whole 31-second jingle at https://www.palisadespark.com/sounds_comeonover68.html.)

In July, I mentioned that if you’re doing branding campaigns, you want to engage as many of the senses as possible. Whether it’s about branding or a call to action, engaging more senses makes your message far more memorable.

The fill-ins above are all from ads that haven’t run in decades. Palisades closed in 1971, nearly 40 years ago! What made them memorable? The jingles! While a good slogan can make an ad memorable, a jingle adds the elements of music and rhyme—and a mediocre jingle has much more staying power than a mediocre slogan. As a marketer, I really don’t understand why they’ve largely gone out of fashion.

If you use jingles, be smart and include the brand name right in the jingle. Note that all the above examples except for Alka-Seltzer include the brand.

So if paid advertising is part of your marketing mix, and if those paid ads include radio or TV, think about commissioning a really powerful jingle. Even if you’re not dong paid ads, think about using jingles on your website.

Friends Who Help

Lots of stuff for you this month!

Benefit Gulf Oil Spill Victims

Raise money for those impacted by Deepwater Horizon’s massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, and get a cool song, too. Scott Blum and his group Wilderland are donating *100 percent(* of the proceeds for Scott’s music single, “Fragile Day.” Scott, by the way, has worked with Peter Gabriel, Toby Wright, and other music superstars. He and his associates hope to make this “the biggest viral event ever.” https://www.fragileday.com/

Scot writes, “The Gulf Restoration Network is a charity that has been operating in the Gulf of Mexico for over 16 years and because of their proximity to the disaster, they were first on the scene and has been working around the clock to help the habitat directly affected by the spill. The second charity is the WILD Foundation, which is looking for a long term solution to ensure these tragedies never happen again. Their first initiative is enacting a formal recognition for the Marine Wilderness that can be protected from all development, and eventually ensuring that ‘Nature Needs Half’ to heal herself while we live on the other half.”

Excellent New Book on Customer Service: And the Clients Went Wild! I got to preview a really excellent book on marketing and customer service: And the Clients Went Wild! by Maribeth Kuzmeski. Read a little taste:

“Perfect clients” are those who will pay for the full value of your product or services, rave about what you do, and go wild for anything that you offer. Lots of businesses have good clients; but only an elite few have passionate, loyal, vocal clients. This type of client is one that not only keeps coming back for more, but also finds the need to share you with family, friends and even strangers. Perfect clients are often what drives a firm’s explosive growth. And although the perfect client is found only in a perfect world (which doesn’t exist), there are a lot of businesses that can enjoy the results from the enthusiasm of the nearly perfect passion of their clients…

I have ultimately been searching, as many of us are, for the “secret sauce” that some businesses have mixed together to create incremental success…

People nowadays are far less likely to become loyal, given the overwhelming noise of the countless marketing messages they face. The objective is to get clients into the game — your game. And to accomplish this feat in today’s “new media” world, businesses are being forced to change…

Businesses that have effectively created a loyal following of passionate and vocal clients have followed some, if not all, of five fundamental marketing principles.

And then 19 chapters on the principles and their practical application. I think this is one of the best marketing how-to books I’ve seen in a long time. I’m hoping to get an excerpt posted on my site, down the line. But meanwhile, do yourself a favor and mark your calendar for September 14. I’ll send the link in a special mailing mid-month so you can get yourself a copy and a whole bunch of bonuses, including one from me.

Monetize Your Passion: Powerful E-Book at No Cost

We all want to turn our passion into a good living. Even though it took him two years to write it, Rich German is *giving away* e-copies of his new book, Monetize Your Passion, filled with good advice on doing just that. You’ll have a chance to donate to rich’s favorite charity, Generation Why, helping America’s 1.6 million homeless children–but that’s optional. Rich’s 238-page book is your blueprint for living a life of passion, indescribable abundance, and happiness–not just his own experience, but also those of people like the book Gary Vaynerchuk, David Riklan, Mari Smith, and Marci Shimoff . I highly suggest you click now, https://shelhorowitz.com/go/richgerman2, and collect your free copy of Monetize Your Passion.

Deepak Chopra’s New Book on the Prophet Muhammad

The one and only Deepak Chopra is releasing his third book on great religious teachers (having already done books on Buddha and Jesus). September 21, HarperOne releases Muhammad: A Story of the Last Prophet. I haven’t seen it yet, but I’m betting it will be amazing. You can hear Deepak talk a bit about his motivation and read a brief excerpt on this video https://blog.beliefnet.com/intentchopra/2010/09/muhammad-a-story-of-the-last-p.html. I don’t have the order/bonus link for you yet; look for a special mailing mid-month with that, and possibly some other goodies.

Superstars of the New Consciousness: No-Charge Audio Series

Here’s an awesome-looking no-cost teleseminar series from Michelle Bersell: The New Consciousness Evolution Audio Series features such experts as Marci Shimoff, Janet Attwood, Arielle Ford, Jo Dunning, David Wolfe, Joan Borysenko and Marcia Wieder–wow!

Kids around the world love The Wild Soccer Bunch!

I’m told the book motivates kids to get involved in team sports and supports values such as diversity, sportsmanship, teamwork, leadership and self-acceptance. The book “exudes passionate storytelling and an equal passion for the game kids love: soccer, as well as a nice root-for-the-underdog adventure,” according to the promoters.

Purchase the book on September 9, and receive dozens of free bonus gifts for yourself and the kids in your life, including a copy of my Painless Green e-book: https://www.wildsoccerbunch.com/launch. Plus, you’ll automatically go into the draw to win 2 tickets to Hollywood, to the filming of The Wild Soccer Bunch Television Ad, featuring Landon Donovan.

David Mathison’s Blockbuster Online Success System Webinars

Mathison, author of the remarkable book Be the media (which I recommend frequently) is a very smart guy who understands how traditional media, self-made media, social networks, and progressive social change all fit together. He’s assembled an awesome group of instructors for this set of webinars, which include both no-charge and for-pay events. The course covers blog and web traffic, mining your content, self-publishing, licensing, even music–to name a few–and the faculty includes such luminaries as Janet Switzer, Katheen Gage, and Joel Comm. https://shelhorowitz.com/go/dmathison

Hear & Meet Shel, September 2010

I’m especially thrilled about partnering with Green America for a webinar on September 28 and a live event in Washington on October 23. (BTW, I’m looking for another gig while I’m in DC. If you find me one, you could earn a very nice commission).

September

  • Tuesday, September 7, 1 pm ET/10 a.m. PT, Lillian Brummet interviews me on Conscious Discussions Radio (646) 478-4758
  • Monday, September 20, 5:30 to 7:30 (program starts at 6:00), at the Media Education Foundation, Northampton, MA: Claudia Gere and I present on Book Publishing in the Digital Age
  • Monday, September 20, live interview for CreateChatter.tv https://getresponse.com/click.html?x=a62b&lc=mi1u&mc=m&s=ANhX&y=j& 9 pm ET/6 pm PT
  • Tuesday, September 21, Ronda Del Boccio (The Story Lady) interviews me about Green marketing (90 minutes). Noon ET/9 a.m. PT. Listen in by calling 646-478-0823 (it will be featured for a week).
  • Monday, September 27, 8 pm ET/5 pm PT: Sandy Lawrence interviews me on the creative book marketing strategies we used for Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green., for the Perceptive Marketing Hour.
  • Tuesday, September 28, 2 pm ET/11am PT: Webinar for Green America, Green and Ethical Messages to Reach Green and Ethical Customers. Preview call for our live event October 23 in Washington, DC. Contact: Denise Hamler, denisehamler (at) greenamericatoday.org
  • Wednesday. September 29 at 5 pm ET/2 pm PT, Dave Mathison from Be The Media interviews me about green guerrilla marketing (postponed from July). https://getresponse.com/click.html?x=a62b&lc=mi1x&mc=m&s=ANhX&y=U&

October

  • Saturday, October 2, I’m speaking at the second annual Self-Publishing Book Expo in New York City
  • Tuesday, October 12 at 7 p.m. ET/4 p.m. PT: My third annual presentation to the MUSE Online Writers Conference. This time, Selling a Self-Published Book to a Traditional Publisher
  • Wednesday, October 13, I’ll be interviewed again for the Guerrilla Marketing Association’s weekly calls–this time by Alexandru Israil from Romania, 7 p.m. ET/4 p.m. PT.
  • Saturday, October 23, 2 pm ET, Green America’s Green Fest, Washington Convention Center, Green Business Pavilion, Washington, DC. Live talk: Green and Ethical Messages to Reach Green and Ethical Customers. Contact: Denise Hamler, denisehamler (at) greenamericatoday.org

November

December

  • Thursday, December 2, 1:00 ET: 90-minute webinar for Association of Strategic Marketing (this one costs money and I believe provides certified continuing education credits) Writing Copy That Sells: Case Studies from the Green Market. Contact: Erica Rokus, 866.226.0828, erokus (at) associationofmarketing.org. Please tell you friends and colleagues about this one.

Shana Tovah! Happy 5771 to all my co-religionists. Happy Ramadan and a blessed Eid to those who celebrate that.

Accurate Writing & More, 16 Barstow Lane , Hadley, MA 01035, United States

Some of the above links are affiliate links that earn me commissions if you purchase.



Hear & Meet Shel, August 2010

5 Aug, 2010  No Comment

* Friday, August 6, 1:35 pm ET/10:30 a.m. PT (and Arizona time, which is where Hollis is), Hollis Chapman interviews me over Blog Talk Radio on Green Guerrilla Marketing, 30 minutes. https://getresponse.com/click.html?x=a62b&lc=HYWO&mc=m&s=ANhX&y=F&

* Friday, August 6, 4 pm ET/1 pm PT, Maureen Kedes from Vertex PR interviews me, also on Green marketing. https://www.voiceamerica.com/voiceamerica/vshow.aspx?sid=1409

* Friday, August 20 ,1-1:25 p.m., “Reaching the Green Consumer.” Boston GreenFest  (the entire event  takes place August 19-21, 2010). One of the cool things about this event will be a display of cars that traveled
100 miles (from Greenfield, MA, near me) on a single gallon of gas. https://getresponse.com/click.html?x=a62b&lc=HYWW&mc=m&s=ANhX&y=R&

* Tuesday, September 7, 1 pm ET/10 a.m. PT, Lillian Brummet interviews me on Conscious Discussions Radio, https://www.blogtalkradio.com/consciousdiscussions or (646) 478-4758

* Monday, September 20, live interview for https://createchatter.tv 9 pm ET/6 pm PT

* Tuesday, September 21, Ronda Del Boccio (The Story Lady) interviews me about Green marketing (90 minutes). Noon ET/9 a.m. PT. Listen in by calling 646-478-0823 or visiting https://www.BlogTalkRadio.com/jvqueen (it will be featured for a week).

* Monday, September 27, 8 pm ET/5 pm PT: Sandy Lawrence interviews me on the creating book marketing strategies we used for Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green. Info: gayla@perceptivemarketing.com

* Wednesday. September 29 at 5pm ET/2 pm PT, Dave Mathison from Be The Media interviews me about green guerrilla marketing (postponed from July). https://getresponse.com/click.html?x=a62b&lc=HYW0&mc=m&s=ANhX&y=9&

* October 2, I’m speaking at the second annual Self-Publishing Book Expo in New York City, https://getresponse.com/click.html?x=a62b&lc=HYWi&mc=m&s=ANhX&y=r&

* October 12 at 7 p.m. ET/4 p.m. PT: My third annual presentation to the MUSE Online Writers Conference. This time, Selling a Self-Published Book to a Traditional Publisher

* October 13, I’ll be interviewed again for the Guerrilla Marketing Association’s weekly calls–this time by Alexandru Israil from Romania, 7 p.m. ET/4 p.m. PT. Contact: alexandru.israil (at) gmail.com

Great Resources: Friends Who Want to Help

4 Aug, 2010  No Comment

Market Me Tweet
If you follow me on Twitter, you might notice that for the last couple of weeks, most of my Tweets don’t come from TweetDeck anymore. Instead, they’re from an application called “ShelHorowitzGreen&EthicalMarketing.” What magic strings did I pull to set that up? None whatsoever, and I can’t program anything more complicated than a QuicKeys macro so you can bet I didn’t write the code for this.

The secret is Market Me Tweet, a nifty little program that lets you create an application, in Twitter’s eyes, just by copying a few lines of code once. It takes maybe ten minutes to set up, and after that, all your Tweets carry your own brand. You just post them, using an implication interface for both Twitter and Facebook very similar to TweetDeck (though, I confess, not quite as elegant). In my case, with my goal of becoming nationally and internationally known as a go-to commentator for green business issues, the ability to reinforce that with every Tweet is very powerful—especially now that Google is indexing Tweets. If you figure you might use Twitter for the next ten years,a lifetime membership will cost you twelve bucks a year. If you purchase any advertising at all, you’ know how ridiculously cheap that is. But if that’s too much to convince you, go get the first month for $15 and see how you like it. Tammy Fennel, head of the company, offers a 30-day money-back guarantee anyhow, so you have nothing to lose.

GoShort URL

You might also notice that some of the URLs I use in this newsletter and on my various social media sites point back to one of my own domains, ShelHorowitz.com. As an example, if you hover your cursor over the link for Market Me Tweet, you’ll see that the actual link is https://shelhorowitz.com/go/MktMTweet. This has a number of advantages: First of all, it provides “link juice” to me instead of some other site, and makes my site a good deal more important in Google’s eyes. Especially if my posts get retweeted or copied to a resource blog, or one of my social media pages—but probably even if they get harvested by a yucky spammy splogger site.

Second, it’s a built in URL shortener, much more convenient to use than monstrosities like blog post URLs. As an example, my most recent blog post as I write this has this lovely and convenient URL (NOT!): https://principledprofit.com/good-business-blog/faked-photos-no-end-to-bps-stupidity/2010/08/02/

And third, it makes it much harder for anyone to hijack any affiliate URLs I happen to use (and yes, both of these resources are affiliate links). Yes, it’s a common practice for unscrupulous marketers to knock out someone else’s affiliate code and substitute their own. (Can you say Eeeeeew?)

Finally, it’s written by Will Bontrager, whom I’ve known online for about 15 years and always found to be a person of great integrity as well as a skilled programmer. He’s done a ton of great utilities over the years.

Want to get your own? Conveniently enough, it’s at https://shelhorowitz.com/go/GoShort

Help Dr. Mani Help Child Heart Patients in India

My Indian friend Dr. Mani is not only a successful Internet marketer, but also a famous pediatric heart surgeon. A large percentage of his Internet income goes to fund surgery for kids who wouldn’t otherwise be able to get this life-saving surgery. He’s just released a new version of his Think, Write, Retire, a very nice guide to infoproduct marketing online. His official launch starts August 15, but I’m jumping the gun since I won’t have an issue then–and you don’t have to wait to get the $123.85in incentives.

Another Recommended Book: Growing America by David A. Kidd

3 Aug, 2010  No Comment

Growing America: The Story of a Grassroots Activist, A Call for Renewed Civic Action, by David A. Kidd, “The Tree Man”

If you think one person can’t make a difference in the world read this book. David A. Kidd is personally responsible for reforesting his Ohio county; he organized a massive community effort that planted three million trees over a ten-year period, involving thousands of people in the process.

Kidd is an unlikely activist: a very ordinary guy with mainstream tastes and interests who served in Vietnam and had a spiritual transformation there. Kidd’s decision to renounce violence in all forms and devote his life to a higher purpose began there with a conversion to vegetarianism. Over his next several decades, he first brought an Eastern spiritual movement to his Ohio community. Later, he started the county-wide tree movement, then was hired to oversee Ohio’s state reforestation program. Eventually, he moved to animal rights activism, putting his own body on the line to stop a particularly brutal hunting event, several years in a row.

Because he doesn’t come out of an activist background, Kidd’s organizing methods are creative and unorthodox; he gets the tree project moving through schools, churches, and especially Rotary clubs, and understands intuitively how to get buy-in from all the key players so the projects are adopted and followed through, and how to successfully motivate both aid and volunteer helpers. His formal study of organizing came later, after he was already up and running with the tree project.

Essentially, he has created a blueprint for organizing around any issue where there’s pretty much a community-wide consensus supporting the project goals.

It would never have occurred to me to do a community organizing project through Rotary, so perhaps my biggest takeaway is to think about different audiences and how to reach them. Environmental work crosses many demographics, as I learned with my own most successful organizing project, Save The Mountain–the only time I’ve ever been involved in a movement with a near-complete community consensus.

This is a timely book for me to read, as I contemplate creating the<a href=”https://earthconsciousmarketers.com/”>International Association of Earth-Conscious Marketers</a>. an international trade association for Green marketers

Available directly from the publisher, Lantern Books, at <a href=”https://lanternbooks.com/detail.html?id=1590560302″>https://lanternbooks.com/detail.html?id=1590560302</a>. Not showing up on Amazon (and his davidakidd.org website seems to be gone), but well worth tracking down.

We Beat the Mountain: Clean & Green Spotlight, August 2010

3 Aug, 2010  1 Comment

Some companies are just discovering that taking sustainability measures actually increases profits, and therefore they may as well join the gang. Other companies have sustainability as a core value; it’s built into their DNA. And some, like this moth’s Spotlight business, are designed from the ground up to move us toward sustainability; it’s the reason they’re in business in the first place..

We Beat the Mountain is a company formed specifically to create markets for recycled products and thus reduce the “mountain” of trash piling up at landfills. Thus, the rather odd-sounding name actually does make sense.

Visiting the site, you don’t even feel like you’re looking at a catalog; you’re joining a movement! Consider the copy on We Beat the Mountain’s home page:

We Beat The Mountain – Join The Movement Now!

Think about the items you have bought over the last few days… Go on, take a minute… How many of those items are made of recycled materials? And how many of those items could be made of recycled materials?

We Beat The Mountain is an organization that aims to reduce the trash mountains all over the world. Products that are no longer in use, such as Read the rest of this entry »

No-Cost Newsletters Return: Shel Horowitz’s August 2010 Newsletter

3 Aug, 2010  No Comment

Big news: I am reintroducing a no-cost newsletter. I had up to four per month from May 1997 until the end of last year, and I realized a few things in these months of not doing it:

1. I missed it.
2. Not enough of you wanted to pay, and the amount of work I was doing to support the members and subscribers was just as much as it had been before I went to a paid model, but the revenue that would have compensated me wasn’t there.
3. Doing a newsletter offers benefits not only to you, but also to me–and I was not receiving those benefits.
4. There is no way I’m going back to four newsletters a month. If I am going to make a newsletter work, it has to be simple to do and not nearly as time-consuming.

So…instead of having three marketing and business newsletters every month plus one for the consumer market, I’m simplifying and consolidating. I will do a single marketing newsletter every month, called Clean and Green Marketing. If you subscribed to Frugal Marketing Tips, Positive Power of Principled Profit, or Book Marketing Tip of the Month, your subscription is automatically transferred over (that’s why you’re receiving this). Frugal Fun Tips, my consumer publication, will not be brought back–but you can find a lifetime’s worth of frugal fun ideas in my $8.50 e-book, The Penny-Pinching Hedonist.

The articles will be shorter, and there will be fewer of them. Each regular issue (published between the 5th and 10th of every month) will have at least one of the following:

A practical, hands-on marketing tip
Profile of a Green/ethical company
“Think piece” on trends in business and marketing
Review of a book or other resource worth knowing about

My guess is that most issues will have one, maybe two main articles. I’m starting this incarnation with two.

You’ll also get the usual side features: my upcoming speeches (both live and virtual), new content on the website, and offers from friends and colleagues who want to help you. Once in a while, I’ll probably update you on what media have covered me or on new special projects I’m working on.

Going down to one regular issue a month does mean that you may get additional mailings from me when there’s a time-sensitive opportunity I don’t want you to miss. It shouldn’t be more than a couple of extra times a month, and many months there won’t be any at all. But if there’s something that could help you but would be stale by the next issue, I want you to know about it.

Marcia Yudkin, Expert Interview

5 Jul, 2010  No Comment

Marcia Yudkin, 20+-year marketing veteran and widely published author who proves you can be an introvert, be extremely ethical, and still be a major marketing guru.

Read the rest of this entry »

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