Project Kaisei is a non-profit organization dedicated to understanding, raising awareness of, and developing innovative solutions to the problem of plastic debris in the oceans, especially in the region commonly known as the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch” or the “Plastic Vortex.”
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is an area of concentrated marine debris trapped by the currents of the North Pacific Gyre. The exact size of the patch is unknown, but Project Kaisei estimates it is at least twice the size of Texas. The debris consists both of large pieces of plastic and other debris, and large amounts of suspended plastic particles created from the breakdown of larger pieces.
Remains of a Laysan Albatross chick that died after being fed plastic by its parents.
The Plastic Vortex is a serious environmental and human health issue, because the debris affects marine wildlife, who often mistake it for food. In some parts of the Plastic Vortex, researchers have found concentrations of plastic up to seven times higher than the concentration of zooplankton, the primary source of food for many wildlife in the region. The plastics can harm wildlife directly, by choking them or causing internal damage.
Plastics and other debris from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch may also be entering the human food chain, as humans eat fish that have mistaken particles of debris for food. With concerns already rising over the long-term health effects of exposure to certain chemicals, such as BPA and phthalates, commonly found in plastics, more research needs to be done into the effects of plastic consumption on fish and wildlife, and the people who eat them.
Another concern is the spread of invasive species, since researchers from Project Kaisei and others have found a variety of invertebrate species clinging to larger debris, raising concerns that they might use the debris to travel between islands or even continents.
Project Kaisei’s main initial focus is on research to learn more about the Plastic Vortex. In combination with oceanographers from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, Project Kaisei researchers visited the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in summer 2009 to study the patch, analyze its effects on marine wildlife and human health, and experiment with solutions for cleaning it up. The team plans another trip this summer.
Project Kaisei is working on a number of education and outreach projects to raise awareness of the Plastic Vortex. These projects include a children’s book, university outreach programs, and annual ocean clean-up drives in celebration of World Ocean Day on June 8th. Project Kaisei is also working on a documentary to raise awareness of the Plastic Vortex and Project Kaisei’s efforts to find a solution.
Finally, Project Kaisei is experimenting with a number of innovative solutions to the problem. Ultimately, Project Kaisei hopes to collect and recycle the debris to convert into diesel fuel, clothing (such as these cool recycled polyester swimsuits), and other products. With a growing number of independent fishermen being pushed out of the business by large commercial fleets, Project Kaisei also hopes to create jobs for unemployed fishermen by enlisting their assistance in collecting debris for recycling.
You can support Project Kaisei’s work directly by making a donation on their website and helping to spread the word about its efforts to clean up the Plastic Vortex.
You can also help by practicing the three R’s – Reduce, Reuse, Recycle – and helping reduce the overall amount of debris that makes it into our ocean ecosystems. A few simple ways to start the transition to a plastic-free life include reusable water bottles and reusable shopping bags.
One of the easiest green businesses to start from home is a green niche website. As more and more people become interested in green living, there is a growing number of lucrative green niches available online for forward-thinking webmasters.
By starting a green niche site, you can not only have a successful home business, you can also feel good about helping people make informed and eco-friendly choices!
When creating any green niche website, your first step should be to do keyword research. For beginners, the best tool to use is the Google Adwords Keyword Tool, which is reputable yet free. When you have more experience in niche site development, you may decide to purchase a more professional keyword research tool, but in most cases, this will not be necessary for beginners.
Find a few keywords that interest you (aim for keywords with EPC higher than $1 and global monthly searches of at least a few thousand) and type them into Google to check out the competition.
When you’ve decided on the main keyword you intend to pursue on your site, purchase a domain name. Ideally, your domain name should contain the keyword that you are hoping to dominate. You should also purchase web hosting at this time. As a green niche website, your green “cred” will be improved if you choose one of the growing number of eco-friendly web hosts.
Once your domain is established, the most important thing to do is start creating high quality content. Although it is possible to game the system and create very lucrative sites full of low quality content, Google and other search engines are always striving to improve their algorithms in ways that reward genuine webmasters with good content, rather than spammers with websites slapped together with content that has been spun (and sometimes stolen). Contrary to what some spam gurus may suggest, it is possible to produce high quality, well written, and useful content that is keyword-rich and SEO-friendly without being spammy.
There are three main ways to monetize a green niche website:
The first is by serving ads. Google Adsense is the most popular ad program, but far from the only one. Once your site is established, you may even be able to contact relevant companies directly to offer them advertising spots on your site!
A second group of webmasters runs their websites as a virtual storefront for a business they run from their home or office. In this case, you will need to set up a virtual shopping cart to allow you to take orders online. You will then ship the product yourself.
The third group of webmasters makes money through affiliate programs, which pay a commission on every product you sell for the company. There are hundreds of affiliate programs around the web, including both individual retailers such as ebay and Amazon and large affiliate programs working with many different companies such as Commission Junction or ShareaSale. Be cautious when choosing an affiliate program to join, as some are scams or Ponzi schemes.
The monetization strategy that is best for your green niche site depends a lot on your niche. Some niches, such as eco-friendly cleaning products or eco fashion, are better suited to selling green products, while others do better with ads. Some experimentation may be necessary to discover what works best for your site.
Once you’ve decided how you plan to monetize your site and have a few high quality articles posted, you can start marketing your site. The best way to improve your Page Rank and start getting traffic is through backlinks. Getting low quality backlinks with social bookmarking and link exchanges is a fast, easy way to start, but your ultimate goal should be to create a site so good that other people link to it! These natural, in text, anchored backlinks are given the most value by Google’s algorithm.
Earning a real income online takes hard work and dedication. However, for those willing to put in the time and effort to make a green niche site successful, they offer a great opportunity for anyone interested in a green home business.
Everybody loves free stuff and great deals, right? Ecobunga! is an online guide to green giveaways and deals.
DIY Gadgets is a website dedicated to awesome ways to recycle old junk, from handbags made out of film negatives to chandeliers made from old crystal decanters.
My Green Nappy is an Australian niche site dedicated to eco-friendly diapers!
Social entrepreneurs are people who have creative solutions to some of the world’s most bothersome social problems. These are people who identify problems that ail the society and then develop solutions for them. They simply disseminate ideas, allowing the whole society to work towards a similar goal. A social entrepreneur has to be ambitious, full of ideas, self-driven and have the will to get results.
Social entrepreneurship, therefore, refers to the process of starting and running a socially responsible business that, besides generating profit for the entrepreneur, solves social and environmental problems. Such a business is said to have a triple bottom line, TBL. TBL refers to people, profits, and planet. Businesses running on this model are able to run a financial, social and environmental oriented and responsible business.
CorpWatch notes that 49 countries are among the top 100 economies, meaning that 51 are individual businesses. Granted, businesses with a triple bottom line can really change the world, even as they make money.
It is easy to confuse a social enterprise with a non-profit. Non-profit organizations rely on donations and grants to fund their activities. If, for any reason, the funds do not come through, the non-profit might shut down. Most non-profits do not bring any tangible income to its proprietors, though most people are starting to earn from them.
On the other hand, social enterprises are run the same way a for-profit business is run. They rely on earner income to fund their social; development activities and to expand their business. While a non-profit’s main aim is to help the society, a social enterprise has two or three aims – to earn money, help the society, and benefit the environment.
Social entrepreneurs are gaining favor with a high number of organizations. These organizations offer social entrepreneurs grants and loans or fund their social innovations. They also offer them professional networking, information, business incubation services and much more. Some of the most common social enterprise organizations include:
• Ashoka helps social entrepreneurs come up with projects aimed at transforming the society. The organization offers microfinance loans and also facilitate networking of social entrepreneurs.
• ClearlySo operates as an online marketplace where social entrepreneurs meet. Through the website, social entrepreneurs meet and connect with investors, community members, governmental and non-governmental organizations.
• Echoing Green offers support to starting social entrepreneurs as long as they are able to launch high-impact solutions. The organization offers between 12 and 15 fellowships each year, providing businesses with up to 90K over a period of 2 years.
• Finca supports social entrepreneurship by offering them small loans and other financial services through a simple village banking model. In this banking model, neighbors in a community come together and form a ‘bank village’. The individuals within a group borrow loans with the group being the guarantors of these loans.
• i-Genius operates as a social network where social entrepreneurs meet and share ideas with each other. This enhances communication between social entrepreneurs.
• INSE, which is an acronym for International Network of Social Entrepreneurs, is a communication platform running on Web 2.0. It offers a simple way for social entrepreneurs to link up and promote their different social ventures.
• Grameen Bank offers microfinance loans at low interests to social entrepreneurs in Bangladesh. Usually, the loans are collateral free. This bank was founded by Prof. Mohammad Yunus, a Nobel Peace Prize winner for his generous efforts to reduce poverty in the world. The bank uses a village banking model.
• Kiva is another micro-lending platform that acts as a bridge between social entrepreneurs and investors. It operates as a peer-to-peer lending platform in a bid to end the poverty cycle. Kiva has partnered with microfinance institutions to allow hard-working individuals to access interest-free loans to change the society and change their lives.
• Root Cause operates as a nonprofit organization offering financial help to social entrepreneurs. They also educate social investors. The organization also conducts research to help social investors make the right choices and achieve their social impact goals.
• Skoll Foundation is a platform where social entrepreneurs and innovators meet and combine their efforts to achieve their social impact goals. The organization also gives awards to social entrepreneurs each year, recognizing them for the good work they have done.
• Social Entrepreneur Corps deals with university students and recent graduates, and young professionals a chance to participate in volunteer work, internships and insight travel program in developing countries.
• Stanford Social Innovation and Entrepreneurs Program gives students a chance to become social entrepreneurs. It brings together undergraduates and graduates in Stanford University helping them develop innovative and tech-based solutions with social impact.
Social entrepreneurs have made a huge impact in societies around the world. These entrepreneurs can act as individuals or as groups. Renata Arantes Villella is one of the successful social entrepreneurs in her business, Flor Amarela. The business works with Ashoka to test for developmental disorders on newborns in Brazil to ensure they get early treatment.
Another great social entrepreneurship is in Guatemala, where Centro Explorativo fixes the computers of locals and teaches them basic English allowing them to contribute towards the community. Another organization, Christmas Future, has partnered with HiMaT Grassroots Development Foundation has been able to raise funds to empower women. The organization offers microfinance loans to women and further teaches them how to do organic farming.
You can be a social entrepreneur if you have the passion for helping change the society. You need to be resourceful enough to come up with ideas on how to beat inequalities, enhance sustainability and justice. You will need to work with social entrepreneurship organizations to grab opportunities that others have not been able to grasp.
You can start immediately if your mind is already overflowing with ideas on sustainable and actionable solutions for common problems ailing the society. There are challenges in the society every day in developing as well as developed countries. Poverty, diseases, drugs, educational deficits, and much more challenges need a social entrepreneur.
If you’re an entrepreneur looking for ways to get your idea off the ground, finding social entrepreneur funding is one of the best ways to go. Although identifying social investors and convincing them of the benefits of your concept can be a challenge, the rewards of starting such a campaign and seeing the results are tremendous. To get you started, we’ve got here a great guide to finding social entrepreneur grants and loans so that you can bring your concept to fruition and make the world a better place.
Though we’ve already discussed the general concept of social entrepreneurism on Green Marketing TV, giving a brief reminder will help to set the stage for the remainder of this article. Social entrepreneurs are those people who bring innovative and dynamic concepts to life to solve some of the world’s toughest problems.
Social enterprises spring up to take the place of individuals and governments who have failed to address these issues to fill the gap, clean things up, and make the world safer, healthier, kinder, and more friendly.
Getting money for your social enterprise should start in the area of social grants. These types of funds usually come from specialized organizations, nonprofits, and foundations who are focused in particular social areas such as the environment, education, or health. You usually will be required to fill out a funding application, present a business plan and case statement, and go through an interview process to ensure that your cause is in line with that of the funding organization. To get you started, check out the following resources in the area of social enterprise grants.
In addition to grants given by various foundations and fund agencies, there are also many new social venture investors popping up around the world looking for social enterprises in which to invest through loans. These funders provide financial aid to social entrepreneurs by lending money that is required to be paid back, but usually at very low interest rates.
Here is a list of organizations providing funding opportunities through loans to social entrepreneurs:
One of the best ways to grow your social enterprise is to get involved with a social enterprise incubator. These groups help to accelerate the development social enterprises by providing business support services and resources, expert guidance, and access to a network of contacts. Working with one of these business incubators will significantly increase the chances that your social enterprise will succeed in the long run, and is therefore highly recommended. To find a social enterprise incubator that best fits your mission and goals, check out the following organizations:
There’s a lot to learn about social entrepreneurship ideas and the funding opportunities available beyond working with a social enterprise incubator. For that, there are now numerous organizations who are there to help you find your way through what can often be considered a confusing and complex process. Here you’ll find forums, seminars, events, advisors, consultants, blogs, and other educational tools focused on social enterprise incubation and development:
Tapping into the world of social enterprise funding is extremely important if you want to achieve great things for your cause. Success in this area of social entrepreneurship will bring you great rewards and help you improve the planet, your community, and the health of human beings. Don’t let these funding opportunities pass you by!
Statistics show that the average meal in America travels for about 1500 miles to get to the table from the farm. Granted, farmers are looking for fruits and vegetable varieties that can withstand the long distances, but less emphasis is placed on flavor and nutrition. People, therefore, end up eating food that is less in nutrition and is not so fresh. Besides, moving food for such long distances increases the carbon footprint of the food.
Due to this, a high number of Americans are seeking to reduce carbon footprints on meals and improve their health but eating fresh and highly nutritious food. The best way to enjoy these is to enjoy hearty and nutritious meals by growing your own fruits and vegetables at home.
Seeing that most families have not been growing anything at home, people lack the skills to establish and run a small garden. A professional edible landscaper will have a lot of opportunities helping gardeners grow their own edible gardens. As a landscaper, you can offer advice to gardeners or take care of their garden if they are busy.
Edible landscapers concentrate on landscape design, maintenance, and consultations. However, the landscapers do not limit their businesses to vegetable gardens only. They incorporate other plants such as trees, perennials, annuals and shrubs which are mostly ornamentals and balancing the carbon emissions. This allows garden owners to have functional and beautiful gardens.
Edible landscapers aim at creating gardens that are 100 percent sustainable. This means they will employ water and energy conservation techniques. They also stock habitats for birds and other wildlife.
Modern edible landscapers concentrate more on sharing skills with their clients, unlike traditional landscapers. They will organize workshops to teach gardening skills to individuals. The skills taught usually involve organic gardening which means not using the inorganic fertilizers.
Some edible landscapers run nurseries where they grow vegetables and fruits and harvest seeds. They also manage community gardens and manage CSAs. With some, you can also get traditional landscaping services.
All Edibles – This is a San Francisco based landscaping business that concentrates on making the best out of small gardens. The service applies organic techniques and water-wise strategies such as dripping and composting irrigation to offer sustainable gardening.
Veggiescapes – This is an edible landscaping service based in Boulder, CO. They offer custom landscaping designs, maintenance, and garden-sitting for those who are busy. They also offer special packages for hoteliers and homeowners who need to start home orchards. The business also runs a small pick-your-produce on a farm in Longmont.
Bountiful Backyards – This is a Durham located business that offers a wide range of edible landscaping services. They design and install gardens on any size of land. They offer packages such as Jumpstart special, berry patch and permaculture-style herbs spiral. They offer rainwater catchment installations and follow that with workshops and classes on topics such as beekeeping, rain gardens, fungiculture and worm bins among others.
A considerable number of people buy items with certain degrees of morality in mind; considering environmental or social factors when selecting the items to buy? Whether it is a desire to conserve energy through using efficient products or searching for coffee grown sustainably, you can sway clients with green marketing schemes that will differentiate one product from the other due to its environmental impact.
An Accenture Study that polled respondents in North America, Asia, and Europe showed that nine out of every ten consumers would pay more for a green product that, for example, reduced greenhouse gas emissions. According to evidence from GFK Custom Research’s Green Gauge Report, this number will increase or decrease as circumstances change.
Environmental disasters have a tendency to raise interest and awareness in green products while good economic times tend to dull interest. However, the green product and services market is expanding each year as people increasingly become aware of the impact of individual consumer choices.
Given the challenges, green marketing can be tricky given that most people view green branding claims with relative skepticism. Since numerous enterprises fail to live up to green promises and expectations, consumers have become understandably wary of their dubious branding.
To define green marketing (also known as sustainable marketing, greet advertising, environmental marketing, organic marketing, and eco-marketing), may be a little disconcerting because it may refer to diverse aspects, ranging from green product creation to the advertising campaign process itself.
Green marketing essentially covers the process of branding a marketing message to capture the market for a product by taking advantage of their concerns for the environment. This type of marketing does this by appealing to a desire by people to pick a product or service that is good for the environment.
Production of goods and provision of services comes with numerous environmental issues. Therefore, there are many avenues through which an enterprise can market its eco-friendly offerings.
Green marketing could appeal to several of those issues, for example, a product could save water, cut toxic pollution, curtail emissions of green gas, easily recycle, and clean indoor air.
Green marketing comes in numerous forms, such as:
1. Sustainability in Operations
Manufacturing and service companies may enhance operational sustainability through a reduction in daily water and energy consumption, using greener processes and materials, and proper waste management.
2. Eco-Friendly Products
Enterprises making products can do a number of things to enhance the green factor in their products such as using sustainable materials, making more natural and less toxic products compared to competitors, and designing items that save water and energy.
Greener products should also come in eco-friendly packaging and be easily composted or recycled.
3. Marketing Sustainably
An enterprise should ensure its actual marketing system in application is green and distinct from operational sustainability that focuses on production and manufacturing.
When printing materials for marketing, for instance, the paper should be post-consumer, 100% recycled, chlorine free, and printed with plant-based dyes such as soy ink.
Other areas include investigating green web hosting tools, carbon offsetting for marketing emissions created, recycling whichever materials that remain unused including signage, billboards, and ecological packaging.
4. Causes on the Environment
An enterprise may decide to take up an environmental cause.
Non-Government Organizations and non-profits will often use green marketing to let the world know about what they do, and for-profit entities could support environmental causes through advertising for and making donations to environmental organizations as part of their green marketing campaign.
To have an effective campaign in environmental marketing, an enterprise needs to know its audience. Generally, there are bound to be about three levels of green customers in a given industry.
Serious about their choices, deep green consumers will search for hard proof of eco-friendliness in any claim. This group demands verifiable proof that an enterprise is producing products or services that are actually beneficial to the environment.
A second group consists of people interested genuinely in saving the planet but lack current information regarding big environment issues. People in this group would also not be readily willing to pay premiums for a green offering.
The third category has people with antagonism or apathy towards efforts in green marketing. Irrespective of a target market, a campaign in eco-marketing needs to have a number of important factors that ensure sustainability in the long-term where green space features.
• A green claim must be verifiable and genuine, and above all transparent and explicit regarding any environmental claims made.
• An informed customer becomes a loyal customer, and therefore an enterprise needs to educate its customers regarding the benefits of a product or service on the environment.
• An enterprise needs to empower its customers into giving back to the environment through opting for its product or service.
There are organizations that exist, thankfully, to regulate some of the most prominent green marketing claims in order to provide an avenue for consumers to compare similar products when making a comparison between one product against another.
The Federal Trade Commission exists to stop greenwashing and ensures an environmental benefit claim is not misrepresented or over-stated.
There are other organizations too that test green marketing claims and include the United States National Organic Program, the Certified Vegan Standard, and the Canadian Eco-Logo Certification Program.
There are three awesome examples out there that present customers with a good sense of green marketing and how eco-friendly messages could draw in customers and profitability for enterprises.
Method has a straightforward but clearly green message that has been widely successful in giving it a leading edge in mainstream markets for its entire line of personal care and cleaning products.
This organization invented the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Building Design program centering on energy-efficient renovations and constructions and is currently a leading green building standard. The council has effectively cornered the green standard market against which measurement of all buildings now rests.
This company has achieved a huge boost in sales through brilliant marketing campaigns. However, the highway florascape advertising campaign, in celebration of a 2010 model that needs daytime watering during California drought season, is beautiful and creative but less eco-friendly than the vehicles they make.
The internet is a place where people exchange information. Each day, search engines handle trillions of Terabytes of data, and the number keeps increasing each day. The sharing of information is facilitated by servers. Simply put, servers hold all the information shared online. A collection of these servers form a data center, which is the life of the internet.
The internet is expanding each day, and as that happens, more servers are needed to keep the internet running. This indicates that more electricity is needed to keep the servers operational. In the recent past, servers have been made more energy efficient, but the energy consumption is still rising rapidly. As of 2008, data centers consumed electrical energy equivalent to all the car manufacturers in the country. Note that, the automakers produced 10 million cars that year. According to studies, powering data centers will produce as much carbon emissions as the airline industry by 2020.
To ensure that the internet stays on without destroying the environment that feeds and houses us, green web hosting has come in. This is a simple way for people who are concerned with the environment to host their websites. By hosting their websites the greenway, webmasters will encourage the expansion of renewable energy and more green projects.
Web hosting companies are employing different methods to offer green services to their clients. One of the most common methods is the use of renewable energy such as solar and wind power. This ensures that there is no carbon produced during the power generation process, and during use in the data centers and hosting company offices.
The companies can generate green energy on-site or source for it from power generating companies that use wind turbines or solar panels. The companies can also purchase Renewable Energy Certificates, RECs, also called green tags. Web hosts will buy RECs from renewable energy producers. 1 REC is credited for every 1 MWh produced by these companies.
RECs should not be confused with carbon credits. While RECs ensure there is no carbon emitted completely, carbon credits offset the damage that results from the emission of carbon by investing in green initiative projects such as carbon sequestration projects.
Green web hosting companies employ energy efficient servers besides using green energy. Their green initiatives are also used in different office practices including the use of natural lighting, use of energy efficient electronics, green cleaning and much more.
Every once in a while, a green web hosting service will engage in green initiatives in the community, such as planting trees or donating towards environmental conservation drives.
1. EcoWebHosting.co.uk
The UK-based hosting companies that been aiming at reducing their carbon emissions to zero. The company calculates its carbon emissions and plants trees to offset the emissions. So far, the business has planted more than 100 trees at the Ransom Wood Business Park.
They have a variety of hosting plans to accommodate starting webmasters and those with huge businesses such as e-commerce sites. They also offer reseller plans. Basic packages cost as low as $10, with one free domain, 100MB bandwidth, and 100MB disk space. They offer great customer support, and their hosting plans are ad-free.
2. PowWeb
This is a simple web hosting plan that offers a single package at one price for all your needs. They offer free unlimited domains, unrestricted disk space and bandwidth and much more great features for only $4.48 paid monthly.
The company runs its data centers and offices on wind energy alone. They buy RECs from Community Energy. By doing so, the company prevents the release of 2660 metric tons of carbon.
3. Netfirms
This is a green web hosting service that has employed a number of strategies to cut carbon emissions. To start with, the business discarded Alternating Current, and now uses Direct Current, which is more efficient. This allowed them to cut energy consumption by 25 percent.
Their offices are BOMA BESt certified and stand as Certified Go Green Building thanks to the different green practices they have adopted. The offices are located conveniently near a subway stop allowing employees to use public transportation to and from work.
They offer the basic hosting plan at $4.45 per month with 500GB bandwidth, one free domain, 1 MySQL database and 10GB Disk space. This is made better by 24/7 customer support.
4. Acorn Host
Acorn Host was started to be a socially and environmentally conscious web host. The business offers budget web hosting for non-profit businesses. Their data centers and their offices run on 100 percent green energy. They purchase RECs from 3Degrees.
The business uses energy efficient servers and has adopted green practices in their offices such as using electronic invoices and use of recycled paper. It also encourages its employees to telecommute. Their standard hosting plan for $7.95 a month with 2GB disk space, unlimited MySQL, 50GB Bandwidth. For non-profit plans, the packages start at $3.95.
5. Pair Networks
Pair Networks adopted an eco-friendly culture in all their corporate practices. The business has partnered with Renewable Choice Energy to offset all the carbon they produce from their office and data centers. They capture and destroy methane besides carbon. Pair Networks’ employees have Terrapasses which help them offset emissions by funding wind energy production.
The company has made great strides in their conservation of energy and resources. They recycle paper and other recyclable items, use energy efficient lighting and LCD monitors and have adopted green cleaning. The business has also installed air purifying plants in different locations in the buildings and uses denim insulation, uses Volatile Organic Compound, VOC, free paint and cork flooring. They use sustainable building materials, and all their office practices are geared towards staying green at all times.
On their cafeteria, employees can buy certified organic fruits. They offer free memberships in their local Audubon Society to their employees. Their hosting plans start from $9.95 a month with unlimited domains, 40GB bandwidth, 500MB disk space and 24/7 support.
As far as your online presence goes, developing a blog is nearly a must. Getting the word out about your green business will help drive customers to your website and grow your business, and as part of a comprehensive green marketing strategy, a blog is a powerful tool. Read on to find out why.
Short for web log,” a blog is a regularly updated website (or portion of a website) that serves a variety of purposes – it can be a platform from which to comment on news or developments, provide product information and updates, convey personal stories, post media such as video, photographs, music, or audio files, or communicate about various events. Most blogs also have interactive capabilities allowing readers to comment and participate in the conversation, making a blog much more open-ended than a simple static website.
As you can see, blogs are highly versatile, offering your green business an alternate format for communicating with your clients. If you’re looking for ways to build your business, a green blog will allow you to share updates about your company, including things like product launches, changes in staff, research completed, operational changes, mergers and acquisitions, and so on. A green business blog also gives you the ability to communicate special offers to your customers, such as sales, contests, incentives, and special events. And as an eco-friendly business, you may even want to include green living blog posts as you encourage your customers to live more natural lives.
More than that, a good blog can also be a place where you interact with your customers – a form of two-way communication. By using things like surveys and polls, you have the ability to ascertain what your clientele really wants. And by sharing how your business works from the inside – how you bake your organic cookies or what your eco dry cleaning methods are like – you may also engage customers in a conversation about how you can improve. A blog gives you a voice, but it also provides a way for your customers to have a voice as well and can therefore be a highly effective way to grow customer loyalty.
But your blog isn’t just about communicating with current clients – it can also be a way to gain new ones. Spiders sent by search engines will regularly crawl your website looking for new content. But they are very sophisticated and prefer fresher information over stagnant content. Think of the spiders as living organisms with new content their food – by adding new content with relevant keywords to your website through a blog, they’ll eat it up and keep coming back (more frequently) for more. In many ways, fresh content is the future to obtaining fabulous SEO results so that you move up in the search results.
New content is important for search engine optimization (SEO) purposes, but so are keywords. What are keywords? Imagine you’re online looking for an eco-friendly cleaning company. You may go to Google or Yahoo and type in search terms such as green cleaner” or natural home cleaning” to find a green business in your area. These search terms are keywords. Keywords are used by search engines to return results when someone searches for a particular item. The key is to use the most popular keywords in a strategic fashion, but that’s for another post. The point here is to remember that blogging allows you to increase the quality and quantity of keywords on your website, which makes spiders happy.
Blogging has one more green marketing advantage – it allows you to link from a blog post to relevant pages on your website. This is called interlinking and is also beneficial when it comes to optimizing your website for search engines.
So as you plan your green marketing strategy, don’t leave blog” off of the list of online tools you’ll use to increase customer loyalty, grow your client base, and build a solid online presence. For the newbie blogger the work may seem daunting, but as you work at it, green blogging can be a great deal of fun, and the dividends are tremendous.
Starting a green home-based business offers eco-conscious entrepreneurs the opportunity to turn their passions for the environment and social responsibility into a flexible and lucrative career opportunity.
Green businesses are businesses that place a high value on what is known as the “triple bottom line:” People, Planet, Profit. Coined by John Elkington in 1994, the term exemplifies the commitment green businesses make to social and environmental responsibility, as well as profit.
Green businesses express their commitment to sustainability both with the types of products and services they provide, and the way they run their business. For example, a green business might create products made from recycled or sustainably harvested materials, and use wind energy to power its offices.
Home-based businesses often have a green advantage right off the bat because they do not require transportation to and from an office, potentially saving hundreds of dollars of gasoline and hundreds of hours of commuting time every year. Having a home office also reduces energy consumption by buildings, because just one building must be heated, cooled, and lit, instead of two.
Green home businesses also share the advantages of more conventional home businesses, including independence, flexibility, and peace of mind.
There are many great green business ideas that can be started from home.
One major sector in the green industry is green consulting. Green consultants help homeowners and businesses find ways to conserve resources and save money at the same time. Green consultants can specialize in certain areas, such as energy audits or reducing solid waste, or be generalists capable of advising clients on many aspects of green business and living. Green consulting businesses are easy to run from home, offer flexible hours and low start-up costs, and can be independently owned and run or part of a larger franchise such as the Green Irene Eco-Consultants or Pro Energy Consultants.
Other green service industries suitable for home-based businesses are also growing in popularity, from green catering and organic food delivery services, to green cleaning services and organic lawn services, to green courier services and bicycle repair.
There will always be a market for innovative green products, and a growing number of green entrepreneurs are involved in home-based green manufacturing or retail. For example, some creative green designers are creating beautiful recycled designer handbags out of everything from candy wrappers to pop tops! Other green entrepreneurs use the internet to create successful green boutiques and stores.
With awareness of the health and environmental benefits of locally grown, organic foods on the rise, the sustainable agriculture sector is experiencing exponential growth, and offers many fantastic green home business opportunities, whether your “farm” consists of 100 acres or a tiny apartment balcony in the city!
These are just a few of the many green business ideas that you can use to start a green home business of your own. For more great green home business ideas, be sure to follow GreenMarketing.tv and other great green business blogs!
Once you’ve decided what kind of green business you want to start, contact your local Small Business Administration for tips on how to start your business, handle finances and taxes, and other aspects of business management.
For many green businesses, consumer education plays an important part in marketing plans, because consumers are not always aware of the ways in which green products and services benefit themselves as well as the environment.
Other consumers may be as educated (or more) about the social and environmental issues relating to a specific green product or service as the entrepreneur, so it is also important to start building up your credibility as an eco-friendly business from the start. One way to do this is by seeking green professional certification or licensing, if any is available in your field. Some professional organizations also offer green business directories, which can be a great marketing tool.
With a good business plan and management skills, your green home-based business can become both a lucrative source of income and a way to make a positive difference in the world around you.
Architecture for Humanity is a non-profit design services firm that is dedicated to building a more sustainable future through the power of good design. They offer professional design services to non-profit organizations, including charity organizations, social entrepreneurs, and community groups.
Architecture for Humanity promotes a holistic design philosophy that includes not only the sustainability of the building materials, but also how the building will improve the lives and livelihoods of its occupants and impact the local community. It focuses on several aspects of sustainable design, including disaster mitigation and reconstruction, poverty alleviation, climate change prevention and adaptation, and designing for at-risk populations. As part of these goals, Architecture for Humanity emphasizes community design, which seeks to engage the entire community in the design process. Individuals and organizations from the local community have the opportunity to make decisions and set priorities, resulting in more environmentally and culturally appropriate designs.
Architecture for Humanity: Making the World a Better Place Through DesignArchitecture for Humanity works on a wide variety of design projects around the world, including everything from single family homes to large community centers.
One Architecture for Humanity project currently under construction is the Mahiga Rainwater Court, part of The Nobelity Project‘s Mahiga Hope High School. The Mahiga Rainwater Court will be a full-size basketball court incorporating a rainwater collection and purification system capable of collecting and treating 90,000 gallons of rainwater per year. The court also incorporates a covered performance area for local music, theater, and film performances, an outdoor covered classroom, and a dining area.
Architecture for Humanity has been deeply involved in efforts to rebuild Haiti following the devastating earthquake of January 12, 2010. Their current projects in Haiti include the Haiti Schools Initiative, which seeks to get children back in safe schools as quickly as possible, and training programs in earthquake and hurricane resistant construction and design for local Haitian masons, builders, and architects.
Architecture for Humanity: Making the World a Better Place Through DesignArchitecture for Humanity’s commitment to innovative open source, community based design is especially evident in one of their most well-known projects: the Open Architecture Network. The Open Architecture Network is a online sustainable design social network that allows designers to share plans, elevations, even CAD files, with the goal of creating and open source architecture database to share knowledge and drive innovation in sustainable design.
Architecture for Humanity offers a wide range of ways for for design professionals and interested laymen to get involved. The organization offers both traditional donation opportunities and the ability to sponsor an individual designer. Architecture for Humanity also uses a variety of different events and social networks to raise awareness of its work, from formal fundraisers to casual gatherings and Tweets. You can also become involved in your local chapter of Architecture for Humanity (or found one if there isn’t one) and become involved in improving design in your own local community.
In addition to contributing to the Open Architecture Network, amateur and professional designers might also be interested in offering design services, entering any of Architecture for Humanity’s frequent competitions, or seeking a design fellowship with the organization.