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| Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip, January, 2016 |
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| Do you have five minutes to help me better understand and serve your green/social change business needs? Please fill out this quick survey: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/9NHHMQ8 |
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| This Month’s Tip Do You Make Yourself Clear, Part 2: 10 Tips to Make Your Writing Clear |
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Welcome to another year! For me, I expect a very exciting 2016, with the new book coming out, a busy speaking calendar, and some consulting clients on building deep yet profitable social change into a business.
Last month, I promised you some tips on writing clearly. Note that most of these are guidelines rather than rules. Skilled writers can often violate them and still get their message across. Unskilled writers, not so much.
- Reread and edit before publishing (even on social media). Catch the dumb mistakes like spelling and punctuation.
- Aim for sentences of 20 words or less, most of the time. You can do an occasional longer one.
- Smash out the jargon. If you’re using a word that only specialists know, get rid of it or clearly define it—unless you’re only writing for those specialists.
- Make sure your sentences have clear subjects and verbs. If you’re discussing an action, you often need an object for the verb, too. Example of subject and verb with no object: “He pulled away.” Example of one with an object: “She pulled the cart.”
- If your sentence is crowded with lots of subjects, objects, and verbs—break it up into more than one sentence.
- If you’re using pronouns (he, she, it, them, his, her, their, etc.), make sure that who or what you’re referring to is totally obvious. If the reference is ambiguous, you’ll have confused readers.
- Active verb forms (like “pulled”) are usually clearer than passive ones (like “pulling” or worse, “the pulling of”)
- Vary the structure, rhythm, and tempo of your sentences. If everything sounds the same, it’ll be boring and you’ll lose readers.
- Only break grammar rules if you know what you’re doing. There are sometimes good reasons, like avoiding the stuffy pompousness of “whom” or the sexism of using “his” to mean “his or her.” But most grammar violations come from ignorance; they lower your credibility with educated readers.
- Let somebody else look it over before you publish. Fresh eyes can catch all sorts of things.
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Preorder your copy of Shel’s newest book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World
Learn how the business world can profit while solving hunger, poverty, war, and catastrophic climate change (hint: they’re all based in resource conflicts). Endorsed by Chicken Soup’s Jack Canfield, business blogger and bestselling author Seth Godin, and many others. Release date is April 19, just in time for Earth Day, and you can now preorder from several major booksellers (or get autographed and inscribed copies from me). Learn all about this powerful book at https://goingbeyondsustainability.com/guerrilla-marketing-to-heal-the-world/
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NEW YORK BOOK LAUNCH EVENT for Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World: Green America’s Green Festival—New York, Saturday, April 16, Javits Center. Mainstage talk followed by book signing. This is a great event; I’ve attended several times and this will be my third time speaking. Not just terrific speakers but also great organic food samples and cool products like the wallet and purse vendor who makes stuff out of old tires (I use one of those wallets that I bought there a couple of years ago). |
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OFFICIAL PUBLICATION DATE FOR Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World is Tuesday, April 19—and Earth Day is Friday, April 22. Expect several more events to be added in April, possibly including a return engagement at Gulf Coast Green in Houston.
WESTERN MASSACHUSETTS BOOK LAUNCH EVENT for Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World, Wednesday, April 20, 7 p.m., Odyssey Bookshop, South Hadley. Come early if you want a seat; I’m expecting to fill the room.
Additional events on the Mount Holyoke College campus mid-day on April 19 and 20, for Tamara Stenn’s class on Social Entrepreneurship. Contact me for details.
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About Shel & This Newsletter
As a green and social change business profitability/marketing consultant and copywriter…award-winning author of ten books…international speaker and trainer, blogger, syndicated columnist – Shel Horowitz shows how green, ethical, and socially conscious businesses can actually be *more* profitable than your less-green, less-socially-aware competitors. His award-winning 8th book Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green: Winning Strategies to Improve Your Profits and Your Planet was a category bestseller for at least 34 months (and is now available exclusively through Shel). Shel also helps authors/ publishers, small businesses, and organizations to market effectively, and turns unpublished writers into well-published authors.
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 was inducted into the National Environmental Hall of Fame in 2011.
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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SLOW LIVING SUMMIT, Brattleboro, VT, April 28-30 (theme: Food and Agriculture Entrepreneurship), https://www.slowlivingsummit.org/ My talk will be on the 30th: “Impossible is a Dare: How Your Food Business Can Make a Difference on Hunger, Poverty, War, and Catastrophic Climate Change”
BOOK EXPO AMERICA, Chicago, May 11-13. Hoping to set up an event either at the show or at a local bookseller. |
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DONNA CUTTING’s new book, 501 Ways to Roll Out the Red Carpet for Your Customers, recently came out (and includes a little contribution from me). If you’re looking for ways to ‘wow!’ your customers, the book gives you 501 easy-to-implement ideas to inspire loyalty, get new customers, and make a lasting impression.
I recommend 501 Ways to anyone who wants to ‘roll out the red carpet’ for their customers, but feels strapped for time, money, and energy. Power-packed with proven, ready-to-implement action ideas to enhance your customers’ experience and make your life easier. https://redcarpetlearning.com/store/ |
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OSHANA HIMOT (the business coach who has catapulted me exactly where I want to be in creating a career around healing the world) is again offering no-charge consultations (and her phone number has changed. She writes:
“I am a business and life coach and work with people in many fields, assisting them to expand their work. it is unique for each person – the best programs to create, the groups to work with, how to find customers and clients…
I work with people who would like to help create a better society and can benefit from coaching. For a complimentary consultation, call 602-463-6797 or email oshanaben@yahoo.com. Oshana Himot, MBA, CHT” |
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| Another Recommended Book: Ideaspotting |
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Ideaspotting: How to Find Your Next Great Idea by Sam Harrison
In my file drawer of future writing projects, one folder is labeled “How to Find Your Next 10,000 Ideas.” I may or may not get around to ever writing that book. In the meantime, plenty of idea-generator books exist.
For me, finding ideas has always been easy. My wife and I were walking in the woods one day, and I told her ideas were literally under every rock and tree. She challenged me to prove it, and I brainstormed over a dozen ideas from things I spotted in the next 100 yards or so. I can look at a page of classified ads and find 20 or more ideas. Even as a child, I doodled hundreds of exotic car and house designs and sketched water- and air-powered vehicle engines when I was 10 or 12. For me, the challenge is having so many ideas that I never get around to implementing most of them.
But I recognize that many people get stuck on the idea side. So, after rejecting the first three books I thought I’d review for this month, and needing a quick read so as not to get behind, I plucked this one off the shelf. While it’s 256 pages, many of those pages are filled with illustrations, charts, worksheets, text graphics, and assignments. So it is, indeed, a quick read. I breezed through it less than a week.
And while I found a lot of it obvious, if you’re not in the headspace of constant idea bombardment, this will open up your mind.
The book offers certain key principles: observe, explore, interact, play with the different senses and arts, drill down (keep asking why and how), collaborate, substitute, embrace serendipity…
These obvious steps offer surprising insights. Harrison mentions a CEO who prepared for his new position by working a menial job in the company for a week, observing and interacting. Why doesn‘t every new CEO do this?
What do I mean by substitute? (It’s my term, not Harrison’s.) Change one of the variables, as in these examples: Borrow from different industries; drive-up windows have spread far beyond banks and restaurants. Replace a material; my local university is building a major edifice not out of steel and concrete but from wood. Change a parameter; gardens and even farms can move from the ground to rooftops.
One of my own principles is to work backward from the goal, to reverse-engineer the steps you need to get there. This is how the iPod was created—the goal was never a better Walkman, but 1000 songs in your pocket.
This kind of creativity has major implications in our quest to create environmentally benign businesses that address the most crucial problems of our time. As Amory Lovins often points out, if you work backward from the goal of a net-zero-energy home, you can design it so well that you don’t need a furnace or an air conditioner—and the savings on those capital costs can pay for the improvements.
You can even work backward to achieve multiple goals; several companies make solar-powered LED lanterns to replace kerosene lanterns in much of the Global South. Financed with the monthly payment that had gone for kerosene, they eliminate kerosene’s toxic fumes, carbon emissions, and severe fire hazard, provide cost savings (once the unit is paid for) and greater economic opportunity because the light quality is better, and even at retail costs of $20 or less, make a profit. So one product creates health, safety, environmental, and economic benefits.
Some of my favorites among Harrison’s ideas:
- Let your brain help you see differently. Two among several examples: Take mental point-and-shoot snapshots of your surroundings. But also seeing with soft eyes, letting objects gradually slip into your peripheral vision.
- Ask who your customer’s customers are, and how you can benefit them.
- Dissect a product to see how it works.
- Create a custom card deck of insights.
- Make—and learn from—“good mistakes”
- Learn from nature; “collaborate with a hibiscus.”
- Refuse to accept boredom. If you’re bored, change your environment or add a stimulus.
- Get rid of the thinking that something can’t be done just because it hasn’t been. Harrison quotes Wayne Dyer: “The answer to ‘how’ is ‘yes.’”
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