The Clean and Green Club

If ever a business created the perfect positive storm around quality, integrity, and product story, it was Newman’s Own. This selection of salad dressings, snack foods, and other goodies has been on my list of businesses to feature in this column for many years. It took Paul Newman’s death to move it to the front of the line.

The biggest qualification for inclusion is the firm’s pledge from Day 1 to give 100 percent of profits to charity. OK, so it helps that his movies made Newman independently wealthy–but still, this is a remarkable platform. And a whole lot of terminally ill children who attended one of Newman’s camps will never forget his generosity (to name one of dozens of examples). In his years in business, he was able to raise and donate $250 million to thousands of different charities, some of which–like those camps–he was directly involved in setting up and running.That’s an average of 410 million a year!

While most of the rest of us will never be in that situation, we could certainly donate five or ten percent of our net revenues to worthy causes. Tithing really does make the world better, and often helps the giver as well (see my friend Paula Langguth Ryan’s work at artofabundance.com.

Bt it’s not just the charity work. It’s a commitment to organics before it was fashionable (now spun off to a separate company, Newman’s Own Organics…a willingness to forge creative partnerships (as I advocate strongly in my award-winning sixth book, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First)high-quality, great-tasting products…and a sense of humor and play that’s present on all the company’s packaging and very much in evidence on the website (consider that the press room page is labeled “hoopla”–or this quote from the “Our Story” page):

We anticipated sales of $1,200 a year and a loss, despite our gambling winnings, of $6,000. But in these twenty-six years we have earned over $250 million, which we’ve given to countless charities. How to account for this massive success? Pure luck? Transcendental meditation? Machiavellian manipulation? Aerodynamics? High colonics? We haven’t the slightest idea.

Shel Horowitz’s Monthly Frugal Marketing Tip, October, 2008

A lot of marketers think direct-mail–the old-fashioned kind that shows up in your physical mailbox–is the most important tool in their arsenal. But others have been badly burned and are reluctant to try again. Which is understandable, when you think about spending a dollar or more per envelope (postage, printing, professional copywriting, etc.), and only converting about 2 percent.

2 percent is considered a very decent return–but at a dollar each, that means each actual sale costs you $50, not counting the cost of product.

So…when does it make economic sense for you to use postal direct mail? Here are few situations; there are others, of course:

• You’re selling high-ticket items. If you’ve got a $500 product that costs little or nothing to produce (let’s say, an information product), and your cost of sale is $50, you’re doing very well.
• You’re mailing to influencers and decision-makers who control large numbers of orders–for example, wholesalers and distributors who might order thousands, or professors who could order 300 copies of your book for use in their courses
• You know that your lifetime customer value is high enough to more than justify the high cost of that first sale; this new customer will go on to spend thousands of dollars with you over the next few years
• You’ve done some things to bring down the cost and/or increase the return, so your numbers work better (we’ll talk about how to do that next month–if you can’t wait, I recommend ordering a copy of my fifth book, Grassroots Marketing: Getting Noticed in a Noisy World, https://www.frugalmarketing.com/cart — we’ve got some very nice specials right now)

Anatomy of a Promotional Offer

This is a real offer (actually two real offers) that I’m making to you–and then I’m going to analyze it and show you my exact thinking in constructing it. I think this may be extremely helpful in your own marketing, especially since I deliberately violate two key marketing rules.

Here are the offers:

With the holidays coming up, this is a great chance to save money on Shel’s books–they make fabulous gifts for the entrepreneurs, authors, marketers, and business managers in your life, or for those who’d like to be authors or marketers.

As a subscriber, you can not only get the usual discounts for ordering the books in combination, but you also get FREE shipping in the U.S. (or a $5 savings on shipping elsewhere) on any order for printed books now through December 1–and that offer is not for the general public. This offer holds for single copies of any of these books, and multiple copies of the two Grassroots books.

To get the free shipping, all you have to do is visit our order page at https://www.frugalmarketing.com/cart/ If you’re in the U.S., enter FREESHIP when you get to the Discounts and Coupons field and the cart will automatically zero out your shipping. If you’re elsewhere, enter FREESHIP in the comment field (NOT the coupons) and I’ll manually take $5 off (I still have to punch every order into a cc terminal so this is not a big deal)

If you want multiple copies of Principled Profit–a very wise decision–I have an even better deal for you a bit farther down the page. (If you want to know more about any particular book, please click the book titles):

This month’s Positive Power Spotlight has a guest author: Cynthia Kersey, from her book, Unstoppable. This profile of Anita Roddick, founder of The Body Shop was written a few years ago. Roddick was given the honor of Dame by Queen Elizabeth, sold The Body Shop to L’Oréal in 2006, and died in September, 2007 at age 64.

Here’s Cynthia:

No one who has ever followed a dream has taken a direct, unobstructed path and arrived at his or her destination effortlessly and on time. Following a dream is not a direct highway but a bumpy road full of twists and turns and occasional roadblocks. The journey requires modifications and adjustments in both thought and action, not just once, but over and over.

Anita Roddick, the founder of the Body Shop, used creativity to overcome challenges that would have stopped the vast majority of new business owners. She broke just about every rule in the book when she started The Body Shop and she’s still breaking the rules today. Of course, such irreverence has its consequences. In Anita’s case, the consequences read like this: The Body Shop now has more than 1,500 stores throughout the world, is worth over $500 million, and has influenced the products and marketing of all its chief competitors. And those are just the consequences in the business arena. The Body Shop is also a powerfully effective vehicle for social and environmental awareness and change; as far as Anita is concerned, that is the most important consequence of all.

From the moment in 1976 when Anita first conceived the idea of opening a shop to sell naturally based cosmetics, she was thinking in a most unbusinesslike manner. Most entrepreneurs set out to establish a company with growth potential that will make them wealthy someday. Anita was just looking for a way to feed herself and her two children, while her husband, also a maverick, was away on a two-year adventure, riding a horse from Argentina to New York.

Her first challenge was to find a cosmetics manufacturer to produce her products. No one she approached had ever heard of jojoba oil or aloe vera gel, and they all thought that cocoa butter had something to do with chocolate. Although she didn’t realize it at the time, Anita had discovered a market just about to explode: young female consumers who would prefer their cosmetics to be produced in a cruelty-free and environmentally responsible manner. When manufacturers failed to have the same foresight, Anita found a small herbalist who could do the work she required.

Since Anita was not the typical entrepreneur, she saw no drawbacks in starting her company with almost no capital. To save money, she bottled her cosmetics in the same inexpensive plastic containers hospitals use for urine samples, encouraging her customers to bring the containers back for refills. Because Anita couldn’t afford to have labels printed, she and some friends hand printed every one. Her packaging couldn’t have turned out better if she’d planned it that way. With the improvised packaging, her product now had the same natural, earthy image as the cosmetics themselves.

Anita opened the first branch of The Body Shop in her hometown of Brighton, England. When she first opened, neighboring proprietors made bets on how long the store would last. Less amused were the owners of local funeral parlors who insisted she change the shop’s name. No one, they complained, would hire a funeral director located near a place called “The Body Shop.” She stuck to her guns and the name stayed.

The first store was only minimally successful. Nevertheless, Anita decided to move ahead with a second one. The bank questioned the wisdom of her plan and refused a loan. So she found a friend of a friend who was willing to lend her the equivalent of $6,400 in exchange for 50 percent ownership of The Body Shop. Today that person is worth $140 million. Signing over half of her business was the only real mistake Anita ever made. But it wasn’t the only decision that looked like a mistake. Here are three more:

• She has never advertised even when she opened shops in the United States. People told her it was suicide to enter a new market without massive advertising support.
• She doesn’t sell in any outlet other than The Body Shop stores. (Some of her Asian stores are the only exception and are located within department stores.)
• She resolved early on that her shops would be a catalyst for change, not just in the business world, but in the world at large.

These decisions turned out to be some of the most inspired “mistakes” in the history of retailing. Even though Anita has never paid for advertising, her unconventional ideas have inspired hundreds of articles and interviews generating tremendous publicity. Her first shop in New York was packed with customers from the day it opened. At one point, a thirty-five-year-old woman on roller skates threw up her arms and shouted, “Hallelujah! You’re here at last.” So much for advertising.

A new branch of The Body Shop opens somewhere in the world every two and a half days. Occasionally, Anita has had trouble opening stores in shopping malls. But having a past that was filled with challenges, Anita is accustomed to coming up with creative solutions. For instance, when one mall refused to lease her space, she organized every mail-order customer within a 110-mile radius to write letters to the management of that mall. Within a few months, a branch of The Body Shop was open.

Anita also had this nonconformist idea of putting ideals ahead of profit. From the start, Anita wanted not just to change the faces of her customers but to change the entire face of business. She envisioned a company that was socially responsible and compassionate. “I see the human spirit playing a big role in business. The work does not have to be drudgery, and the sole focus does not have to be on making money. It can be a human enterprise that people feel genuinely good about.”

Some of the raw materials for her products are harvested by groups of people in underdeveloped regions, thus generating an income for them. The Body Shop has launched campaigns to save the whales, ban animal testing in the cosmetics industry, help the homeless, and protect the rain forests. All of these campaigns have been eagerly supported by loyal customers.

Employees of The Body Shop are actively involved in these efforts. Each month, employees receive a half day off with pay to volunteer in the community. Some employees, for example, went to Romania to help rebuild orphanages. In the stores, customers are encouraged to register to vote, recycle their plastic cosmetics containers, and bring their own shopping bags to save paper and plastic. Because of all these activities, people have suggested Anita’s company should really be called “The Body and Soul Shop.” Customers emerge not only looking good but also feeling good.

“Business as usual” isn’t part of Anita Roddick’s make up. But as far as she’s concerned, doing what is not usual has made all the difference.

Action:

Anita said that what saved The Body Shop over and over was their willingness to recognize what wasn’t working and quickly identify a new way to approach a problem. This is a crucial strategy because everyone who starts a business is going to face challenges. Things never work out exactly as intended and creativity will play a key role in enabling a new business owner to conquer daily battles. If you don’t come up with alternative solutions, your dreams will die.

The first step to expanding your creativity is to clearly identify the problem you’re experiencing. Maybe you’re struggling in sponsoring people who are interested in working the business and not simply purchasing the product. Or maybe you’re having a hard time finding new prospects period. Write the numbers 1 through 10 vertically down the left side of the sheet of paper. Finally, write ten possible solutions to your problem. Make sure they are viable options, but stretch your imagination.

Remember, the solution to every problem lies within you. You may need a few minutes of quiet time to complete the exercise effectively, or you may need to brainstorm possible solutions with a friend. Feel free to do whatever you think is necessary to connect with your inner knowing. When you’ve completed the exercise, you should find that the solutions you have found will renew your sense of possibility and your commitment to your goal.

About the Author:

Cynthia Kersey is a nationally-known speaker, performance and productivity expert and the author of the bestsellers, Unstoppable, Unstoppable Women and the bestselling audio program, “The Unstoppable 30-Day Challenge!” To receive a free gift worth over $100 in value go to https://www.unstoppable.net/gifts.htm

Another Recommended Book: Zentrepreneurism: A Twenty-First Century Guide to the New World of Business by Allan Holender

Not lot of business books quote Greg Palast, the sharp-witted investigative reporter who exposed the illegal removal of over 90,000 likely Democratic voters from Florida’s voter rolls ahead of the hotly-contested 2000 election. And not a lot devote significant space to the classic social/ethical business book Natural Capitalism by PaulHawken and Amory and Hunter Lovins. Even fewer are written by a self-proclaimed “recovering Tony Robbins franchisee.”

I happen to be a huge fan of both Greg Palast and Amory Lovins, and am thrilled that Holender cites them in his examination of how Buddhist principles can apply to improving the business world.

I’m not a Buddhist, and I disagree with the core Buddhist belief that life is suffering. Yet I found much to agree with in Zentrpreneurism, and a great deal of alignment with the principles of my own award-winning book, Principled Profit: Marketing that Puts People First.

Especially relevant to my conception of principles for ethical business: The Eightfold Path:
• Right View
• Right Intention
• Right Speech
• Right Action
• Right Livelihood
• Right Effort
• Right Mindfulness
• Right Concentration

Pointing out that “engaged Buddhism” works not only on finding inner peace but also on addressing social problems, Holender describes each, briefly, toward the beginning of the book. A strong sense of ethics runs through the book and especially the entire chapter on business ethics. Holender includes many quotes from the Buddha; one I especially like is “The wrong action seems sweet to the fool until the reaction comes and brings pain and the bitter frits of wrong deeds have then to be eaten by the fool.”

But not all his insights come directly from the Buddha. Here’s one of his own: “the fear of discovery [when you tell a lie] is greater than the unknown consequence of the truth.” And he raises the question of how to be compassionate and have a higher purpose when money is involved–and then answers that question with the two chapters that immediately follow, one on social entrepreneurship (he notes that aging Boomers especially are looking to find meaning as they find ways to help the world) and the other on socially responsible investing. Even a small group of investor activists, he says, can have an impact far beyond their numbers.

The book’s website is https://www.zentrepreneurism.com

Copywriter and marketing consultant Shel Horowitz specializes in affordable, ethical, and effective approaches. He is the award-winning author of Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First and six other books

PLEASE VOTE FOR SHEL IN THE WALL STREET JOURNAL-STARTUP NATION BUSINESS CONTEST! I’ve entered in Green and Innovative categories.

A few free search engine optimization tools (out of dozens, if not hundreds) to help you with optimizing for search engines.

First, Google’s own tool designed to help you write high-performing Google ads turns out to be also very useful for writing longer copy that performs well. Other services have keyword tools as well, including a freebie tool from the widely used commercial SEO package Wordtracker, Trellian’s Keyword Discovery, and more. There’s a nice roundup of free search engine optimization tools at https://tools.seobook.com/, too.

Second, the use of tags. I’m writing this on a blog platform that actually asks me for keywords. If you use Ken Evoy’s SiteBuildIt, the program pretty much demands these tags from you and lets you optimize on the fly to easily build your ranking in minutes, which is why SBI pages tend to show up very high in the search engines. If you’re writing in a conventional web page, you need to add the tags yourself. Keyword, description, and title tags should all reflect the content of the page and the audience you want to attract.

Third, the use of one key phrase per page, three or four times in the body, but in such a way that it appears natural to human readers (Karon Thackston has written a nice little e-book about how to do this).Can you guess which phrase I’ve targeted for this page?

Further reading: The Search Engine Optimization section of my Down to Business magazine contains 26 articles on SEO strategies, from some of the foremost writers on the subject.

Shel Horowitz’s Book Marketing Tip of the Month, Volume 2, #2, August 2008
Market Your Book with a Postcard, Part 2 of 2
What Should Your Postcard Include

Front side:
Your gorgeous book cover, in full color (Note: companies like Modern Postcard, Tu-Vets, and VistaPrint make this easy and cheap. VistaPrint will even accept back sides done in MS Word.)

Back side, left

• Title and author
• Brief enticements such as endorsements, review quotes, awards, mini-synopsis
• Ordering information for individuals
• Ordering information for bookstores and libraries
• Adequate whitespace and font size for easy, comfortable reading

Back side, right
Blank space for personal or stickered message and address

(Shel Horowitz’s latest book, Grassroots Marketing for Authors and Publishers, is his third in a row to win an award. Order at https://www.grassrootsmarketingforauthors.com/ )

The first words out of Lawrence “Lorenzo” Gottschamer’s mouth were “I’m a guerrilla in the eco-war. Everything we do here is to repair the planet.”

Lorenzo owns the aptly-named Valhalla, an organic macadamia farm a few miles outside of Antigua, Guatemala. In 1976, he came for a three-day visit, and never left. Now he employs about 25 people on three sites, living in a beautiful forest, harvesting nuts from the trees he planted in 1978, and removing a pound of carbon from the atmosphere with every pound of nuts he produces.

The nuts fall to the ground when ripe, and are very easy to harvest. He built a sheller out of a spinning tire and some rebar, and built an equally simple but equally effective size-sorter (it looks kind of like one of those toys where marbles roll downward through a maze) so that processing plants are willing to take his crop.

The trees themselves create hundreds of new varieties, no grafting required. And Lorenzo conducts meticulous research on the properties of the new varieties.

Lorenzo is a giving kind of guy. Visitors are welcomed with a personal tour from him or one of his co-workers (in English or Spanish, as appropriate), free samples of chocolates, nuts, and the macadamia-based cosmetics he sells to companies like Nivea, even free facials. His outdoor restaurant serves macadamia butter laced over fresh
fruit and pancakes, herbal tea, and more, all very reasonably priced.

And the proceeds go to his reforestation and sustainable economic/agricultural development work with indigenous people. He has donated over 200,000 new trees, and is involved in numerous development and reforestation projects. Much information can be found at the Valhalla website, https://www.exvalhalla.net

So many books about the need for change are nothing but doom-and-gloom. Focusing on the successes, Ethical Markets: Growing the Green Economy by Hazel Henderson (with Simran Sethi) (Chelsea Green, 2006) is fundamentally about hope.

Mind, there’s plenty of information in these pages about the world’s problems and the consequences of doing nothing. And lots more about the way government and business collude to skew the system in favor of the traditional model (such as unsubsidized solar and wind energy having to compete against heavily subsidized oil, coal, and nuclear, and lifecycle costs such as disposal transferred from the manufacturer to the consumer). But the book profiles dozens of entrepreneurs in both the business and service sectors who have found a way to help humanity address that raft of problems. If the entire world adopted the solutions modeled and piloted by these visionaries, it would go a very long way toward reversing negative climate change (a/k/a global warming)…reducing poverty…creating economic support systems that lift up not only the middle class but also the very poorest–and do so without government handouts.

Henderson, whose many websites include EthicalMarkets.com, has been taking a leadership role in the environmental/activist/ethical investor sector for decades (I have a book of hers that was published in 1978; this book is based on a PBS TV series she produced.

The ultimate message is that we, not only as consumers but as citizens (yes, there is a difference!) can impact the world of business and shape it away from the rigid single-bottom-line, profit-at-all-costs model popularized by economists like Milton Friedman, in favor of a more humanistic triple-bottom-line approach that is shaped to benefit all stakeholders, not just those who happen to own stock.

Ironically, but perhaps not surprisingly, socially responsible companies tend to perform better. As I discuss in my own award-winning sixth book, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First, and as Henderson points out over and over again, these companies are better managed, they’re not embroiled in costly lawsuits, and they’ve made strides to reduce their own environmental footprint in ways that actually lower costs.

And Henderson tracks probably hundreds of ways that this attitude has filtered from the hippie pioneers of the 60s and 70s into the mainstream business world–not only through the successes of companies that were built from their founding on social and environmental responsibility (e.g., Greyston Bakery, Grameen Bank), but also in how this ethic is slowly spreading into even the largest of traditional businesses, even to the likes of auto companies, oil companies, General Electric, Wal-Mart, and so forth.

The book is wide-ranging, with chapters covering not only the obvious (energy, environmental impact, fair trade) but also the pervasive areas of society that need to–and are starting to–shift (health and wellness, joy at work, investing). Henderson identifies four pillars of socially responsible investing (a field where she has had major influence through her work with Calvert and other organizations): social and environmental screens, community investing, shareholder activism, and socially responsible venture capital. She also wants us to place economic value on “the love economy” (work done for free, in the home or as volunteers).

In short, despite the mess we’re in, many, many trends are positive. She even finds support in the writings of those two writers whose works have often been used to justify the worst aspects of the corporate oligarchy: Adam Smith, 18th-century author of The Wealth of Nations, and Charles Darwin, 19th-century author of The Origin of Species.
A few specific examples of positive change among the many she cites:

• Socially responsible investments in the U.S. and worldwide now total $2.3 and $5 trillion, respectively
• Socially screened companies outperform the S&P 500 and similar indices around the world–and that may have something to do with why socially responsible mutual funds grew 156% in five years (to $32 billion) while that market as a whole grew only 22%

• In Brazil, about 1/3 of the nation’s GDP is accounted for by companies that have joined an ethical-principles umbrella organization–and the country’s celulosic (i.e., not from diverted food sources such as corn) ethanol production has made it energy self-sufficient
• Fair-trade coffee consumption in the UK multiplied 400% from 1998 to 2005
• Green venture capital is growing at 36% per year; wind power is growing at 29% per year; solar grew by 63% from 2004 to 2005, and countries such as China are becoming major players (very hopeful for those of us who worry about the environmental disaster that would happen if China adopted traditional, polluting, resource-hogging technologies to achieve Western living standards)
• At least some clothing companies have rejected sweatshops in favor of production that is certified under the Social Accountability 8000 standard (mentioned in a profile of one of those companies, Eileen Fisher)
• Technology exists to supply all the power California currently generates with traditional powerplants, just by switching four percent of the state’s vehicles to fuel cell power
• Shareholder activists have achieved numerous victories, from switching McDonald’s off polystyrene containers to getting Home Depot to carry sustainably-forested wood

SEO Copywriting: Shel Horowitz’s Monthly Frugal Marketing Tip, Volume 11, #4, August 2008

What’s the biggest difference in writing copy for the Web versus writing for direct mail, printed ads, or other media? Simple–when writing for the Web, you have two very different audiences: the reader, of course, but also the robots that spider your site for Google and other search engines.

And these two audiences have very different needs. Human beings want copy that flows, that leads the reader through, engaging both emotions and logic until that reader is ready to purchase.

But search engines look for things like keyword density, exactness of match with a search query, and other robotish attributes.

It’s a delicate line. If you want to get the search engines to return your page in a results page, you have to have a page that appears to conform very closely with the search string–but keeping that page readable and comfortable for human beings can be a challenge! And we’ve all seen those dreadful web pages that are written so much for the search engines that they’re really awkward to read.

Here’s how you can learn to create pages that work both for search engines and for human beings. Karon Thackston is a copywriter who has built her whole career on writing SEO-friendly pages that are also human-friendly. Her stuff is a whole lot less stiff and more flowing than most SEO-optimized pages. It was Karon who taught me years ago that you could break up search engine phrases with punctuation.

And that’s the first of many tips in her newly-revised and updated e-book, Writing With Keywords. If you want to bring traffic to your web pages, and you want that traffic to stick around and read what you wrote, you’ll want to get your hands on this.

Price is usually $39, but if you use my affiliate link, and do it before 5 p.m. Eastern this Friday, August 8, it’ll only cost you $29. Do it. Satisfaction guaranteed.