The Clean and Green Club

Reasonably priced, environmentally responsible, data-secure service for getting rid of techno-junk. I’d try Freecycle.org first, since my junk may be someone else’s treasure–but this looks like a good fallback.

The FAQ page notes,

We refurbish what we can and recycle the rest. Inkjet cartridges get remanufactured and, when possible, cell phones and some computers get refurbished. Material that has no further operating life is broken down to its smallest components (metals, plastics, etc.) and used in the manufacturing of new products. Unlike some recycling companies, all of the material that GreenDisk collects is reused or recycled. No hazardous materials or obsolete components go overseas to be processed or disposed of.

It also discusses the risks of improperly-disposed, insecure data, and the steps it takes to eliminate that risk.

And this is a socially responsible company that chases away business if there’s a more eco-friendly solution available:

You should not use GreenDisk if there is a local drop-off that legitimately recycles your equipment. We believe this service should be offered in your local area to conserve energy and be more cost effective. Unfortunately, businesses in most local areas have not stepped forward. So, we started this service at the request of those who had no local vehicle to recycle their equipment.

I find the information on GreenDisk’s About page very cool: the firm was founded on Earth Day, 1993, originally to help software companies dispose of unsold software. With its commitment to sustainability, GreenDisk went around forming partnerships with existing recyclers–and with nonprofit agencies that employ workers with disabilities–around the country, rather than building new capacity.

Materials that Greendisk recycles are turned into Green office products: Diskettes and CD-RWs, CD packaging, technotrash collection stations (how’s that for a closed loop!). I had to wonder, though–who’s actually still buying diskettes?

In fact, I wondered enough that I picked up the phone. It was answered on the first ring by none other than David Beschen, President and Founder; he says all six employees answer the phone. I asked who buys floppies these days. It turns out the military and other government agencies still buy them–and NASA even still buys 5-1/4 inchers.

For up to 30 pounds of non-computer “technotrash,” e.g., CDs, cords, mice, cell phones, and printer cartridges, just $6.95. Disposal of entire computers, including wiping the data beyond recovery and recycling what components can be recycled, starts at $19.95. The largest job the company handled filled 26 railroad freight cars; the smallest was a single DVD. Rechargeable batteries are acceptable; alkaline, unfortunately, are not–but the company is working on it. “It isn’t that they can’t be recycled, but that it’s extremely expensive,” Beschen told me. “But we’re working on that.”

Since I had him on the phone, I conducted a brief interview:

SH: How do you get people not to just throw electronic parts away.

DB: There’s a huge segment that does want to recycle, and we make it more convenient. They just don’t know what to do with the stuff. We’re not missionary with people who don’t want to recycle, but the general conversations are starting to bring more people to realize [that proper disposal is important]. If you go back in our culture, we didn’t throw stuff away. Planned obsolescence is a relatively recent, and that mentality is changing. We have cars now that don’t need a tune-up for 100,000 miles, instead of rusting hulks in a junkyard.

SH: How are you different?

DB: One of the key rules of environmentalism is don’t make it [if you can use something already in existence]. We use resources already in existence, including postal trucks that would otherwise come back empty. We’ve asked nonprofits that employ people with disabilities [to do the work]; they have 70 percent unemployment: those are two huge resources. Now we’ve integrated FedEx, and less-than-load tactics with all the trucking companies, so we can move stuff without making a special trip. And we can get work done without taking it offshore. To make the diskettes, we bought down-time from people who make the software. And companies will pay a premium for recycled materials.

SH: Is this type of cooperation unusual?

DB: I’m the former head of corporate communications for Microsoft. The software producers were doing all kinds of joint ventures, sharing information that marketing people would have killed each other for disclosing. I said, “do your marketing people know?” It wasn’t a conspiracy, for once. I come from the marketing world. When you create a soluton for people, you’re marketing. Companies that think only of themselves don’t tend to perform well over time.

You might remember fair-trade organic coffee roaster Dean Cycon of Dean’s Beans from my profile of his company in the February, 2006 Positive Power Spotlight.

Dean’s just come out with a fascinating book: Javatrekker: Dispatches from the World of Fair Trade Coffee.

Most Americans and Europeans in the coffee industry have never met a coffee farmer, and certainly haven’t traveled to the remote indigenous communities where coffee is grown. Dean has traveled the world, meeting growers, processors, shamans, government ministers, bouncing his way down rutted goat trails, learning a few phrases of the local language (or what he thinks is the local language), getting stomach-sick on a regular basis–and having a great deal of fun. He often finds that not only is he the first coffee buyer to visit these isolated places, but often the first white man.

In the U.S., he spends a lot of time hectoring coffee executives at Starbucks and elsewhere to commit more to fair trade and to fund development projects–which he’s able to accomplish for a tiny fraction of the money a large bureaucracy would need, by using methods initiated and designed by local communities using local resources to meet local needs, in the spirit of E.F. Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful.

He leaves a trail not only of Dean’s Beans t-shirts and “Make Coffee Not War” bumper stickers, but a legacy of vast improvement in the lives of the villages he visits. Clean-water wells, education centers, community-owned coffee processing plants, simple hand-operated depulpers that allow coffee farmers to capture much more of the value of their crop…some of these are projects he funds directly, and others come out of the cooperatives’ share of coffee profits, made possible by the fair-trade price he pays, sometimes three times as much as the “going rate.”

Dean sums up his philosophy in the closing words of the book:

I have never been fully comfortable with what I, when I know in my heart that things can be better, more respectful, more loving, and frankly, more exciting. It pains me deeply to see cultures crumble and blow away under global pressures (or simply for lack of water), or kids’ lives go unfulfilled for want of a pencil or notebook. Javatrekking allows me the vehicle to explore my own relationship to these things and to take responsibility where I can. These may be small contributions in the greater scheme of things, but as an old Indonesian farmer advised me…”Add your light to the sum of lights.”

Dean has clearly taken that advice seriously. His many initiatives include forming the Coffeelands Landmine Victims Trust, which works in Central America and Vietnam, co-founding Cooperative Coffees, an association of 23 local coffee roasters around the U.S. and Canada who offer fair trade organic coffee, and simply funding scholarships for individual children of coffee growers in Ethiopia and Papua New Guinea.

Dean Cycon is living proof that it is more than possible to use business as a force for positive social change, while at the same time see the world and have a terrific time.

Published sustainably on recycled paper by Chelsea Green (publisher of my own book Grassroots Marketing: Getting Noticed in a Noisy World), Javatrekker is full of well-told stories and includes some great color photos. It’s available from Dean’s Beans or from the publisher.

Dean Cycon, who happens to be a signer of the Business Ethics Pledge, has pledged to donate 100% of the profits to coffee farmers.

Concluding our series on pay-per-click advertising–Shel Horowitz’s Frugal Marketing Tip, November 2007.

With any paid strategy, where dollars are flowing–in some cases quite rapidly–out of your pocket for your marketing, you want to be sure you’re tracking and tweaking and tracking again.

Sometimes, changing a single word in the headline or reversing two lines in the body of the ad can shift response enormously. So you measure your results, make changes, test the results again. You do this for any ad medium, but the beauty of pay-per-click is that you can get the data very quickly, make the tweak within minutes, and test again. So you can refine your tactics on the fly, rather than waiting months if your campaign is based on (as an example) print advertising in monthly magazines.

You need to test the ad headline, the ad body copy, the landing page headline, design, body copy, offer, etc. Testing is so critical that if you’re not willing to put in the time for testing, I don’t think you should be doing PPC to begin with. This is the big reason why I haven’t really used it so far; I just don’t have the time to look at how well it’s working.

The traditional way is to test one element at a time–but that takes too long and is far too much work. I’d recommend using “multivariate testing” software that automates the whole process and allows you to test a number of variables at once.

Since I have no experience, I can’t recommend a specific solution–but here’s a link that will connect you with lots of possibilities. Ask questions like:

• How much will it cost–upfront and ongoing?
• How many variables can you track at once?
• Is your solution appropriate for my size business–why or why not, and if not, what would you recommend?
• Please give me a rough idea of the technology you use.
• Please send me a link to objective third-party reviews.
• May I have contact information for some happy customers?
• How long have you been in business?

If money is a factor, this link goes to freeware and shareware possibilities

Awards and recognition help books get sold!

Here’s a chance to be one of the first profiled at my friend Dan Janal’s latest site, Cool Book of the Day:

https://www.coolbookoftheday.com

It’s a blog, so chosen books will be permanently archived. No cost to enter, at the moment. Knowing Dan, that might well change in the future.

If you’d like to be considered, e-mail dan AT prleads dot com, subject line: Cool Book, with your answers to these questions:

What is the title of the book?
Who is the intended audience?
What is the book about (4-6 sentences)
Why are you the best person to write this book?
How is this book different from other books on this topic?
Is there anything else we should know about this book?

Responses should be between 500 and 1,000 words.

Winners will be asked to place the “Cool Book of the Day” icon and link on their websites.

Shel Horowitz’s Book Marketing Tip of the Month, Vol. 1 #4, October 2007

Guest Columnist:  Don McCauley

One of the techniques I teach in my book. . .

Why not give away a free gift? Or better yet, have someone ELSE give
them away. Here is how . . .

Since you have published a book, it might take just an hour or two to
create an e-book using already written excerpts FROM your book. Then
just print up some gift coupons for a FREE E-BOOK. The example I use in
my book is a book of recipes. Approach a local bakery and have the
owner give out YOUR gift coupons as THE BAKERY’s gift to THE BAKERY’s
patrons.

This accomplishes a number of things:

*Your free ebook serves as a ‘taste’ of the book, much the same as a
trailer provides a ‘taste’ of the full movie to come.

*The bakery gives a ‘gift’ to the bakery’s patrons at NO COST to the
bakery.

* The gift coupon has the effect of providing ‘third party’ influence
from the bakery, much the same as a referral FROM the bakery

* As the customer must visit your website to redeem the coupon, you now
have them in YOUR store. This gives you the opportunity to add this
person to YOUR mailing or newsletter list. They will most likely do
this, as they are certainly an INTERESTED prospect.

* The bakery is actually advertising for YOUR BOOK …. for FREE.

The end effect is that you win (getting an interested party to your
site for practically no cash layout) the bakery wins (gives a valuable
gift to the patrons) and the customer wins (gets a free gift). As
compared to using a flyer sent to potentially uninterested parties (1/2
of 1% return is the norm) there is simply no comparison.

The gift certificates will cost pennies to print compared to
potentially hundreds of dollars to print flyers.

Try this simple technique and track the results. Wow! Of course it goes
without saying that you will have to partner with a business in your
genre . . .

Don McCauley ICM, MTC, CH
Author-Top Ten Secrets To Getting Free Publicity
For Your Business Or Organization
Free Publicity Focus Group
www.freepublicitygroup.com

Another Recommended Book: Getting a Grip, by Frances Moore Lappé
Reviewed by Shel Horowitz

Positive Power of Principled Profit, Vol. 5 #2, October 2007

Near the end of Getting a Grip, Lapp’e–whose name may be most familiar as author of the groundbreaking Diet for a Small Planet back in the 1970s–notes that 80 percent of all Americans  “say they’re likely to switch brands to help support a cause when price and quality are equal.”

This book is intended as a manual for social and environmental change activists, and not as a business book. Nonetheless, it’s quite applicable to the world of business, and draws on a number of business principles and ideas, including the recently popular Law of Attraction. Lapp’e doesn’t use that term, but her emphasis is clear: what you pay attention to becomes bigger and more real. Also, what I have for several years called the Abundance Principle: that there is plenty to go around, but a big maldistribution of resources. No one needs to be hungry or lack fuel once this imbalance is addressed.

Lapp’e’s central thesis is that large corporate and government entities have robbed consumers of their citizenship, by substituting what she calls “Thin Democracy”–I’d call it “Pseudo-Democracy” for the involved and active citizen participation that comprises true democracy–and that we, the people, can take back our rightful heritage as citizens–as people who participate in the decisions that affect us–and initiate true change.

The book is full of inspiring examples of individual people with simple actions that turned injustice into justice–most strongly, the story of an African minister whose pro-democracy efforts brought a visit from the goon squad on a mission to torture and kill. His compassion, humor, and lack of fear in the face of the attack won over the attackers, who, after inflicting significant harm, stopped the attack and brought him to a hospital.

A key insight that I’ve long believed but not often seen elsewhere is that there are two concurrent social trends: a concentration in corporate and government power and wealth that is threatening to ordinary citizens as well as the environment—and at the same time, an energizing, a democratization based in the actions of ordinary people. This second trend is the Living Democracy, a powerful antidote to Thin Democracy.

To bring Lapp’e’s points back to a business context: she notes that even the biggest companies respond to pressure from their customers, and that what she calls “entry points” allow those consumers (and other stakeholders, such as neighbors) to address–and effect change in–some pretty big issues. In Sweden, for instance, McDonald’s serves organic milk, because its customers wouldn’t tolerate anything less.

Photo: Jeff Armstrong (left) greets Shel Horowitz following Shel’s keynote address at the Noteworthy USA convention, Las Vegas, October 5, 2007.

Shel Horowitz’s Positive Power of Principled Profit, Vol. 5, #2, October 2007

When you deal in other people’s money, you very quickly butt up against the perception that your company is likely to be crooked. Through his actions in his own business and his education of his peers, Jeff Armstrong of Armstrong Capital is doing what he can to change that. Starting with the very first line of his website: “Straightforward, Honest, Fair….The Way It Should Be.”

Armstrong, based in the Los Angeles area, deals in real estate notes—for example, buying an owner-financed mortgage from a seller who needs an immediate large infusion of cash, and selling it at a profit to a securities company that can convert it into stock and offer it to its investors.

An early supporter of the Business Ethics Pledge, Armstrong came to my attention because he consistently generates new signers of the Pledge through the link on his website. Most of the people who have generated a larger-than-average number of signatures for me have done so through a single newsletter article–but with Armstrong, it’s ongoing, year after year. It turns out he’s been buying my books since the 1990s, starting with Marketing Without Megabucks, and he told me this is because even before I wrote a book about it, he sensed my strong commitment to ethics in marketing from those earlier works.

He also happens to edit the newsletter for NoteworthyUSA, his industry association, and consistently uses this “bully pulpit” to advance an ethics agenda. And when I heard him address the 300 attenders at Noteworthy’s conference, he stressed both the practical and the moral imperatives of being ethical. He’s not ashamed to admit that he has self-interest as well as altruism as his motives; if enough honest people crowd out the crooks, it’s less likely that government regulators will choke off his industry.

If the group I met when I was hired to keynote Noteworthy’s conference is any indication, Armstrong is having a significant impact. I got a lot of thank-yous from people who said I was reinforcing what they already knew was the right way to run their business, and giving the marketing ammunition necessary to help them prosper with it. Others told me my strategies for attracting and keeping clients through ethics are already working well in their business. And I met a few who are in the business specifically to advance a social change agenda: one woman works to provide capital to women fleeing abusive relationships and starting their lives over; a retired professor couple use their note business to fund water development projects in developing countries. All in all, an impressive group.

It does not surprise me in the least that Jeff Armstrong is quite successful in his own business.

Armstrong Capital: https://www.armstrongcapital.com
NoteworthyUSA: https://www.noteworthyusa.com

Shel Horowitz’s Frugal Marketing Tip – October 2007

Mark Twain once apologized to one of his correspondents for writing a very long letter, noting that he didn’t have time to write a short one.. Anyone who’s had to write copy for a very tiny format such as pay-per-click ads can certainly relate.

Pay-per-click offers one of the smallest workspaces of any advertising medium. It’s like a small classified ad. You get a headline, a few words of text, and a web address (which I’ve left out of the examples). Yet fortunes have been made with pay-per-click campaigns.

I went to a random page on one of my own sites to grab the largest and smallest ads I saw. It happened to be the page on the speeches I have available; these are two of the four ads shown at that moment (they will rotate as Google’s inventory and displaying formulas dictate).

Effective Presentations
Learn How To Overcome The Ten Myths Of Public Speaking. 1 Day Seminar.

The body text is just 13 words (the first two words are a headline, in bigger type).

Speeches
Looking for speeches? Find exactly what you want today.

That’s a one-word headline, nine words of body copy.

Is that enough to say *anything* useful?

Yes, actually. This ad showed up on my frugal fun ideas page:

Creative Romantic Ideas
New Romantic Ideas Added Weekly. Easy To Search And Completely Free!

It’s easy to see where someone who was surfing around looking for something different than the usual dinner-and-a-movie might be curious enough to click. And it’s only 11 words.

In my case, I didn’t click because I didn’t want Google to think I was pumping up my commissions (grounds for terminating the program). But Google ads always display the URL, so I simply typed it into my menu bar.

Just as in writing any short-form copy, your goal is to grab the reader’s attention and pull that person to take an action–in this case, the action you want is a click on the link.

Let’s say I wanted to write an ad for my sixth book, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First. The book is about the idea that ethical businesses are well placed on the road to success, if they understand how to harness the marketing advantages that this position opens up.

I might start with a grabber headline like
Ethics Equals Profits
Ethical Biz is Profitable
Ethics Equals Success
Forget Market Share–It’s Profit You Want

The nice thing about PPC is that I could test each of those before settling on one. And some researchers report that something as simple as changing one word, or flipping the position of a word, can make enormous differences in the return. If you authorize enough clicks, you can have meaningful results in hours. Also, nothing prevents you from running several different ads if they all pull well.

Similarly, I’d test variations on the body copy. But you want to measure not only clicks but also conversions: people who take the next desired action once they get to your landing page. An ad that pulls a lot of clicks but few conversions will waste vast sums of your money very quickly, whereas an ad that gets clicked enough to stay prominent in Google’s rotation but attracts a much greater percentage of actual prospects could be one of the most effective forms of paid advertising you can create.

In my case, the first thing I want to do is discourage non-readers. So I say right in the body copy that it’s a book. So these are some variations I might test:

Award-winning 160-page book, Principled Profit, shows how. (seven words)

Chicken Soup Co-Creator Jack Canfield praises Principled Profit book. (nine words)

Chicken Soup Co-Creator Jack Canfield praises Principled Profit book. Find out why. (twelve words)

Jack Canfield, Jay Levinson, Mark Joyner, 76 others all say, read this book. (fourteen words–but at 76 characters, it might be over Google’s character limit. If it is, I could change “all say,” to a colon.)

The last headline above is going for a different market segment than the others, so for that variation, my copy might read:

Profit when customers just have to tell friends. Award-winning book explains. (11 words)

As you might guess from a careful reading of this article, I haven’t actually tried PPC ads for this book. In fact, I’m kind of a greenhorn at the whole thing. I did a PPC campaign many years ago on GoTo, now known as Yahoo–before Google even took ads.

But it’s something I’ve wanted to try for PrinProfit for a while, and writing this series will move me closer to it. It takes time that I don’t have at the moment–to write the ads and landing pages, test, track the results, and analyze what’s working, and then repeat the cycle as you refine your campaign–but when I get caught up, I’ll experiment–and I’ll let you know the results. I’m planning to redesign the Principled Profit website, and as I do this, I’ll be looking at how to set it up so it’s friendly to PPC campaigns.

Of course, you do have the option to pay an expert to run your PPC campaign for you–but that’s more than I want to invest.

Shel Horowitz’s Book Marketing Tip of the Month – Volume 1, #3, September 2007

Publicity is getting the word out about your product, service, and/or ideas. It brings visibility, credibility, opportunity, and sales.

Publicity provides the seal of approval of a trusted outside source: a journalist. Like testimonials and awards, this third-party validation helps the buyer choose your book in the crowded marketplace. It also means that a lot more people hear about your book.

When you get free publicity rather than pay for advertising, you give up control over the content. But you have the added legitimacy of being chosen to represent your field. Because news coverage at least pretends to be unbiased, it is more valuable than advertising; you get, in a sense, a testimonial—a disinterested, credible party who thinks you’re worthy of positive attention. Many people take news coverage more seriously than advertising—and may be more likely to be influenced by it than by a paid ad.

And sometimes, publicity leads to more contacts that advance your career: a meeting planner contacts you to see about doing a speech, a different journalist sees the story and wants to cover you as well, a company president sees the article and decides you’re the perfect consultant to get that company out of a rut. In short, the book becomes a doorway to ar more lucrative ventures.

Oh yes, and don’t forget that sometimes, an article or a TV or radio interview can actually motivate people to go out and buy that book! Especially if you make it easy by including your website, your phone number (toll-free is ideal), and some kind of special offer.

(Portions of this tip were taken from Grassroots Marketing for Authors and Publishers, and other portions from Grassroots Marketing: Getting Noticed in a Noisy World–and some is original, just for you.)

Failure as compost–I think that may be the best business metaphor I’ve ever come across! If you’re a non-gardener–compost is all the rotting bits of old food scraps, spoiled vegetables, and so forth. It’s not very appealing in its early stages, but as it ages, it turns into the most fertile soil imaginable. It also works well with her philosophy of reaching for the truth, even when it’s not pleasant.

While that’s my favorite metaphor in The Organic Entrepreneur, there’s plenty more: the entrepreneur as alchemist, the business as a habitat.

Other gardening principles Hyndman incorporates into her business philosophy–the book is organized into psychological business “seasons”–include patience, integrity, and a Green sensibility. Plus seven principles for “spirits seeking human experiences”–a nifty reversal–along with more principles for understanding business as Tao, and for finding abundance in your core principles.

This book is very much in tune with the philosophy I express in Principled Profit: Marketing that Puts People First–though it’s more about the overall business concept and less hands-on. A very nice complement to Principled Profit, and recommended for anyone struggling to find and express their values within business.

Click here to get your copy.

The Organic Entrepreneur: Cultivating the Conscious Capitalist

by Maxine Hyndman

Insomniac Press, 2007