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| Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip,
February 2014
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Two Exciting Green Business Training Opportunities for You |
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| 1. Happy Valentine’s Day. And here’s a Valentine’s Day surprise for you: a series of no-cost teleseminars from mostly NOT the “usual suspects.”
Business and Marketing for a Better World Telesummit
You’ll get to hear from at least ten groundbreaking experts: some who run successful green businesses, some who are pioneers in new marketing techniques–and some who combine both green businesses and creative marketing. Presenters hail from at least four different countries, and one of them–a great speaker and a major influence in making coffee a much more sustainable industry–actually won the Right Livelihood Award (known as the Alternative Nobel Prize).
To name a few: On the marketing side, you’ll learn about cool success stories like building an online community of more than 8000 people, green perspectives on Guerrilla Marketing by the late Jay Conrad Levinson (never before released) and secrets from a wildly successful “blogging goddess.” In the green world, we’ll look at how sticking to your values can change a whole industry, what it’s like to run a green business in a very conservative area, and humor as a tool for global change.
I’m still finalizing the lineup (might be adding a few more speakers) and working out the tech–I’m expecting to start in March. I’ll send an email out to everyone when I have a registration page. If you want to be SURE you get notified, hit reply and change the subject line to “Notify Business and Marketing for a Better World Telesummit,” I’ll also send you a personal email.
2. The first-ever Green Marketing and Social Change Intensive at my beautiful solarized antique farmhouse in Massachusetts is happening Friday, May 16 through Sunday, May 18. Only 12 seats will be sold and the price goes up after March 1 (and again April 1). Registration is now open at https://making-green-sexy.com/come-learn-with-shel-3-day-green-marketing-intensive-in-beatuiful.html.
Oh, and in case you’re wondering, there will be almost no overlap between the telesummit (which has expert instructors from several disciplines and industries) and the intensive (I’ll be doing all the formal teaching, but of course, we’ll all learn from each other).
The intensive will cover (among other things):
• Writing your marketing plan
• Identifying story ideas that will be sexy to the media
• Creating talking points for multiple audiences
• Locating the people who already reach your best prospects, and creating offers that make them eager to help you
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Yes, You Need Goals–But It’s Okay to Shift Them |
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| Two months ago, I shared my goals for 2014 with you and challenged you to turn your own goals into reality.
Now, I’m going to tell you how and why my goals made a radical shift, just a few weeks later.
The goal of signing a contract with a major publisher and a large advance to do a three-book series (my ninth, tenth, and eleventh books) is not likely to happen this year, and I’m totally OK with that. In fact, at the moment, I don’t plan to write a book at all this year.
Instead, I have a much bigger goal: to begin shifting the business culture to address the biggest problems of our time: things like poverty and hunger, war, and catastrophic climate change. And oddly enough, I don’t see a book series as the best path to that goal.
My thought in the summer and fall was that I’d need to lay the groundwork with the first two books in the series: one for green business people, and another for green consumers–to widen the concentric circles of my influence and create enough of a base that the real book I wanted to write could find a market. But by that time, a few more years would have passed. And there was no guarantee that I would even find a publisher who was willing to commit major resources to this project.
But my amazing business coach Oshana Himot has been leading me through a very exciting process of looking at my deepest goals and examining how to turn them into viable parts of a viable business. And with her guidance, I’m convinced that I don’t have to wait several more years to do the work I was put on the planet to do. The work I’ve done for the past 12 years around green and ethical business practices as success principles should be enough of a springboard. And the time is now.
–> The mission: to rethink the interaction of business and natural resources so powerfully that we can address the biggest problems of our time. Issues like hunger and poverty, war, and catastrophic climate change.
I believe we can make significant progress on these issues, and that the business community is the most powerful lever we can have to make those shifts. To this end, I’m creating a new brand around the concept of Business For a Better World. Already, just a couple of weeks into this I’m tremendously energized and full of plans and ideas. At age 57, I think I may have finally figured out what I want to be when I grow up ;-). I’ve always wanted my legacy to be a reduction of these huge problems. And now I think I have actually found a role to play and a way to play it.
I hope each of you will join me on this journey. Together, we can accomplish far more than we can alone. |
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Connect with Shel on Social Media |
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About Shel & This Newsletter
As a marketing consultant and copywriter… award-winning author of eight books… international speaker, blogger, syndicated columnist — Shel Horowitz shows how green and ethical businesses can actually be *more* profitable than your less-green competitors. His most recent book is category bestseller Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green: Winning Strategies to Improve Your Profits and Your Planet. Shel also helps authors/ publishers, small businesses, and organizations to market effectively, and turns unpublished writers into well-published authors.
He was inducted into the National Environmental Hall of Fame in 2011.
Shel Horowitz’s consulting firm, Green And Profitable, is the first business ever to earn Green America’s rigorous Gold Certification as a leading green company
He began publishing his monthly newsletter all the way back in 1997, making it one of the oldest marketing e-zines (it’s changed names a few times along the way).
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| “As always, some of the links in this newsletter earn commissions—because I believe in the products and services enough to promote them (I get asked to endorse lots of other programs I don’t share with you, because I don’t find them worthy).” |
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Creating Joy in My Life and Society is a 6-week teleseminar which assists you to create joy in your life and to achieve your goals. Joy enables us to use our creativity more fully, communicate in ways which empower ourselves and others, and accomplish our goals. To hear more this class, which begins March 18th, email Oshana Himot, at oshanaben@yahoo.com. |
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| –> Also, if you want to open yourself up to the kind of amazing transformation I’ve experienced, I heartily recommend Oshana as a business and clarity coach who can help you find paths to your true goals, develop products and services (and revenues) in line with them, identify needs and opportunities from within your community. She does have a few openings in her schedule; contact her at oshanaben@yahoo.com, 480-353-7312 (9 a.m. to 5 p.m. US Pacific Time). NOTE: She did not ask me to do this, and I am not an affiliate for her. I am doing this because I’ve experienced the power of her work and I know what it can mean to you.
Cut your trash bill in half–pay only a portion of your savings
Reminder: If you run a business big enough to have employees and a location outside your home, you can cut your trash bill–often by 50 percent or more–and it doesn’t cost you a thing. Visit https://greenandprofitable.com/slash-your-solid-wastetrash-bill-50-or-more-at-no-cost/ to get the scoop on how Brendan can save you some big bucks.
COMING NEXT MONTH:
The Coolest Mobile Marketing Platform I’ve Ever Seen
Fund Your Favorite Charity with Every Merchant Card Transaction You Process
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FEBRUARY 24: I’ll be Jim Glover and Dave Hayduk’s guest on Ask Those Branding Guys radio, 1 p.m. ET/11 a.m. MT/10 a.m. PT. Live stream: https://www.santafe.com/stream/?station=thevoice Podcast: https://www.santafe.com/podcasts/ask-those-branding-guys
Santa Fe-area listeners: KVSF, 101.5 FM
MAY 10, Hartford, CT: I will once again be presenting at CAPA University, a one-day book publishing program in Hartford. More info: gaffney AT kanineknits.com
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Replay of Corey Pinkney’s interview with me on Self Reliant Radio https://www.blogtalkradio.com/selfreliant-now/2014/01/29/self-reliant-now———-green-and-profitable |
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| Another Recommended Book—Farm City |
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Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer, by Novella Carpenter (Penguin, 2009)
“And so I became a pusher. A chicken pusher. Everyone in our neighborhood had a hustle, and this became mine. Chickens are, after all, the gateway urban farm animal. I wanted others to join in the fun. ‘You’ll get tons of eggs,’ I would whisper to my coworkers, ‘lots of fertilizer.'”
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Urban food self-sufficiency has been an interest of mine for decades. I had my first garden in my tiny yard in Brooklyn, in the 1970s. And I remember that I was talking about New York City’s rooftops as sources of both food and solar energy even before I moved away in 1980.
So when I saw this book on the bargain table at Denver’s fabled Tattered Cover Books during a recent visit to parts west, I grabbed it.
This is a memoir, not a how-to. It’s about life in a dangerous ghetto neighborhood in Oakland, California, raising animals and vegetables as a squatter on a vacant lot adjoining her apartment, in a place where many people think nothing could grow. And it’s about building community with a wonderful and very diverse cast of characters from homeless Bobby to the Vietnamese former farmer Mr. Nguyen to colorful Lana who runs a nightclub/speakeasy in her apartment.
She even spends a month on a “100-yard diet,” eating only what she can grow, raise, or scrounge on her own block.
And she has some fascinating trivia thrown in: Epicurus was urban farming in ancient Greece, before the time of Christ. Densely populated Shanghai, China grows an astonishing 85 percent of the vegetables consumed by its 14.35 million inhabitants.
Carpenter writes with a sweet, light touch about everything from chasing escaped poultry down the street to Dumpster diving to feed her voracious pigs. But be warned—she’s not shy about the gory details of turning her animals into meat.
Yet, even though I became a vegetarian 40 years ago precisely because I didn’t want to kill my own food and didn’t think I should have others do it for me, I was not offended by the intimate details of her adventures as a chicken, turkey, and rabbit slaughterer (the pigs, weighing more than the author, were taken to a slaughterhouse). I don’t miss meat and don’t ever want to kill animals for food, but I recognize that if you’re going to eat meat, raising and killing your own and processing it all is a way of eating meat with integrity.
Maybe I wasn’t turned off because she’s just such a good storyteller. The book, the humans in the neighborhood, and her animals are brimming with personality, and she has a wonderful eye for the humor and irony of what she’s doing. She also has a social conscience. As the daughter of 1960s hippie back-to-the-landers, she knows she could do a more typical back-to-the-land lifestyle in the country, but she chooses the heart of the city, and has sharp observations about how society keeps the downtrodden down.
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