Author: Shel Horowitz—Green/Ethical Business Expert

A lifelong activist, profitability and marketing specialist Shel Horowitz’s mission is to fix crises like hunger, poverty, racism, war, and catastrophic climate change—by showing the business world how fixing them can make a profit. An author, international speaker, and TEDx Talker, his award-winning 10th book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World, lays out a blueprint for creating and MARKETING those profitable change-making products and services. He is happy to help you craft your messaging and develop profit strategies. Learn more (and download excerpts from the book) at http://goingbeyondsustainability.com

By Posted on Posted in Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Networking, People Helping People Tagged with , , , ,

Proving yet again that you can network pretty much anywhere…I was listening to a teleclass and 37 minutes into the call, the presenter fell off. He didn’t come back on, but someone else asked if anyone was there, and I responded.

Fifteen minutes later, I had been booked as a guest on his radio show, he asked me if I would collaborate on a joint venture involving a pitch to National Public Radio, and another person who’d been quietly listening joined the call to invite me to consider a project he’s involved with.

All because I took 30 seconds to explain what had happened and introduce myself.

What networking opportunity can you seize? (Need idea starters? I suggest my award-wining sixth book, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First.

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By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability, Frugality/Frugal Fun

I’m always looking for ways to keep stuff out of the trash, and I’ve been saying for years that we ought to collect and recycle the prodigious offerings of fur that our dog and cat leave around the house–that someone could spin it into yarn or stuff pillows out of them. But actually doing it was more than I wanted to bite off, so I either deposit the pet hair in the compost, put small quantities outside for birds to line their nests with, or (gasp!) throw it out.

Today, I discovered someone has actually been running a business making yarn out of pet hair, since 2001, and has a long waiting list for the product.. Yee-haw!

But VIP Fibers‘ market isn’t me; it’s people who want quality yarn from their own pet and are willing to pay to get the yarn made. Since I would never actually use the yarn, I’ll have to keep on searching.

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By Posted on Posted in Advertising, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies Tagged with , ,

Actual submission from my contact form today:

subject = Resume Services
realname = REMOVED TO PROTECT THE GUILTY
position =
Company = SEO Company
Add1Street = 224 Lawrence Road
Add2City = New York
Add2State = New York
Add2Zip = 11111
Add2Country = USA
phone = 000-000-0000
email = REMOVED TO PROTECT THE GUILTY
comments =
Internet Marketing Services

We would like to get your website on first page of Google.

All of our processes use the most ethical “white hat” Search Engine Optimization techniques that will not get your website banned or penalized.

Please reply and I would be happy to send you a proposal.

Excuse me, but just how is spamming my contact form (and with fake contact info, no less) a white-hat approach?

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Energy & Sustainability, Frugality/Frugal Fun Tagged with , , ,

While you’re reading this, I’m on my way back from the California desert. I’m actually writing it before I depart, from my home in Massachusetts where there’s plenty of water. But going to the desert, where water is taken for granted, always makes me reflect on how profligate we are with water, and how sorry we’ll be about that a couple of decades down the road.

Yes, I believe that within my children’s lifetime, the price of water will soar, its availability will decrease, and we’ll have a serious resource crisis. Actually more serious than the oil crisis. There are plenty of energy substitutes for oil; we can easily generate the power we need from clean, renewable sources: sun, wind, water, and especially a complete rethinking of what is possible in the way of energy conservation. Reading people like Amory Lovins makes me aware that as a society, we could easily reduce our energy consumption by 80 percent or so, without any negative impact on quality of life.

Water is not nearly as replaceable as oil. Human beings, other animals, and all the plants we rely on directly or indirectly for food need sources of clean water, and the supply is not infinite. So it’s incumbent on us not to squander the good water we have, through waste or pollution.

The good news: like oil, water use could be sharply curtailed without any negative impact on lifestyle. I estimate that I probably use no more than 1/10 as much water as the average American–and I’ve met people who use 1/10 as much as I do. I’m not suggesting you collect buckets of rainwater and use them to flush your toilet, as one woman I talked to recently is doing. But I do suggest you look at the obvious places where you’re running water harder and longer than you need to.

Here’s one simple, totally painless example: if you’re like most Americans, when you brush your teeth, you turn the water on (often full-force) and let it run for three minutes or so while you brush. When I brush my teeth, I do it like this: Wet the toothbrush with a small trickle of water, and then turn the water off! Turn it back on to rinse the toothpaste off the brush at the end. So instead of several gallons each time, I consume a couple of ounces of water.

Want to know more? 28 of the 111 conservation tips (yeah, I snuck in a bonus tip) in my e-book, Painless Green: 110 Tips to Help the Environment, Lower Your Carbon Footprint, Cut Your Budget, and Improve Your Quality of Life-With No Negative Impact on Your Lifestyle, are about saving water.

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By Posted on Posted in Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Marketing Trends/News

By Angelique Rewers

Site sees 513% growth in 55+ user bracket
Number of college and high school users drops 20%

Using Facebook to reach your target audience? If so, be aware that the popular social media site’s demographics are changing rapidly and significantly.

An analysis of data from Facebook’s Social Ad platform conducted by iStrategyLabs reveals that the site’s users are getting much older in a short period of time. The study found:

* A staggering increase in the 55+ age group from 950,000 to 5.9 million in just the last six months
* A 70.8% increase in the number of total U.S. users over the last six months (71,901,400 total)
* That 54.6% of users are female
* That 16.5% fewer high schoolers and 21.7% fewer college students are using the site (iStrategyLabs reports this could be due in part to the fact that younger users are being alienated by their parents joining the service)
* That the majority of users (28.2%) fall into the 35 to 54 age group

Examined another way, between January and July 2009, the overall number of users…

* Ages 18 to 24 has grown only 4.8%
* Ages 25 to 34 has grown 60.8%
* Ages 35 to 54 has grown 190.2%
* Age 55 and older has grown 513.7%

What’s this mean for you?

First, the number of Facebook users overall continues to grow, making this popular social media site an increasingly important communications channel. Even if your organization is not on Facebook, you can guarantee that at least a fraction of your target audience is.

Second, if this data is correct — and it may not be as Facebook doesn’t guarantee the data it provides to advertisers is 100% accurate — then Facebook is not a young site anymore. With such significant changes happening at an increasingly rapid pace, it’s critical that you continue to monitor trends and adjust your advertising and communication strategy accordingly.

You can see a complete breakdown of iStrategyLabs’ data here.

Reprinted from The Corporate Communicator, a free e-zine dedicated to helping professionals communicate more effectively with employees, customers and the media. To get the latest industry news, research and best practices at your fingertips, register for a FREE subscription at www.thecorporatecommunicator.net.

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Marketing Trends/News, People Helping People Tagged with , , , ,

Readers of my various books will know I’m a fan of alternative locally-based currencies. Here’s a twist: A shopping center in Reno is sending street teams out all over Reno to spot acts of kindness, and reward them with “Karma Cards,” redeemable at the shopping center.

Two extra things worth noting:

  • The retail complex is partnering with at least seven nonprofits
  • Anyone receiving the card not only gets store credit but is entered in a drawing for a $3000 grand prize

    • Sweet! The campaign is only six weeks long. Maybe it’ll be so successful, they’ll continue it.

    Thanks to Reno resident Jacqueline Church Simonds for sharing this.

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    By Posted on Posted in Shel's Personal Life, Uncategorized, Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with , ,

    One of the fun things about social media marketing is that you rub shoulders with other social media marketers, and there a bunch of smart folks with lots of good ideas. I’m always in learning mode, and a lot of my consulting practices synthesizes a gazillion bits I’ve picked up from a book, blog, teleseminar, lecture, or even a Tweet.

    During my rather frequent travels, I’ve often put in one or two blog posts, but usually from some Internet cafe or library on the road. Watching Chris Brogan continue to keep his blog active during vacation with a bunch of preloaded posts, I decided to do that as well. After all, why spend my travel time looking for WiFi? Chris is posting pretty much daily. I’m not as ambitious as he is–but this is one of three posts that will appear over the next ten days while I’m off on the West Coast.

    Hopefully it’ll work. The last time I preloaded a post, which was not for a vacation but to coincide with a blogosphere event, I had to go in manually and publish it.

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    By Posted on Posted in Ethics: General, Marketing Trends/News, Transparency vs. Secrecy, Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with , , , , , , ,

    Perry Marshall has a really good article about online privacy concerns, the Google experience yay and nay, and Google’s first real competitor in general search–Bing. It’s getting a lot of comments, including this one from me. I discuss not only transparency vs. secrecy, but also the Google user experience, talk about the USP (Unique Selling Proposition) I think Google might operate under, and point out the business opportunity that grows out of our society’s lack of privacy.

    One point I didn’t make is that in dystopian-totalitarian novels like 1984 and Fahrenheit 451, the very tools that provide information and entertainment also eliminate our privacy. While at least in the US, this information gathering has been used primarily for commerce rather than social control, the potential is very real.

    The rest of this post is what I posted to Perry’s site:

    You write, “Google has done a glorious job of doing what I encourage all my customers to do: Create offers that are so sensationally irresistible that you can’t help but use their search engine. They’ve beat all comers fair and square.”

    This is sooo true. If ever there was an example of a huge USP, it would be Google’s. I don’t know how they phrase it, but it may as well be “we let you actually FIND what you’re looking for…in nanoseconds.”

    And because they honor and deliver this USP, and because they were smart enough to make ads user-friendly, they have a vast revenue stream. But remember that search was there before ads, a couple of years before, in fact.

    As pointed out above, we haven’t had privacy for decades anyway.

    –>I feel the lack of privacy is actually an *opportunity* for entrepreneurs. Since we have no privacy anyway, why not run your business with a high degree of transparency and turn it into a marketing advantage? Why not do the right thing and be thoroughly ethical, and then demonstrate this to the world so they beat a path to your door? (This is something I advocate heavily in my award-winning sixth book, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First )

    Back to Google: my concern is not *privacy*, but *piracy.* Google’s respect for others’ copyrights is often in conflict with its desire to index the world’s knowledge. As someone who creates a lot of intellectual property (including eight books), it concerns me deeply that Google assumes the right to index first and ask permission later. I could definitely see circumstances where work created (say, for a high-paying corporate client) should not be placed in the public stream. Google claims to be and for the most part acts as a highly ethical company, but on the issue of intellectual property control, I disagree with their approach.

    Still, I’ve been an avid Google user, because it does deliver that USP, and that’s something I need.

    I wasn’t familiar with Bing prior to reading this article. Did a search for “shel horowitz” and saw very different results than Google. 1,100,000 hits versus about 23,400 on Google (a number that shifts daily between 14,000 and 54,000). Bing’s results heavily skewed toward big portal sites like Facebook (very first result) and Amazon Subsequent pages (I looked through page 3) include a lot of the blogosphere/podcast interviews I’ve done for others, and some of my major media hits. Only three of the top ten were my own sites. Google’s results skew heavily toward my own sites. I love the popup feature on Bing, and expect that Google will implement something similar; this may be Google’s first real competitor for generalized search. (For specialized search, I’ve often turned to Clusty, Ask, and portal-specific search tools.)

    By contrast, on Google, I have 7 of the 12 results on page 1. Google itself has positions 4 (Google book search) and 12, and my twitter and Facebook profiles, along with a book review on an outside blog that was published this week, fill out the page.

    GMail is still the best web-based e-mail client I’ve used, but that ain’t saying much. I vastly prefer download-based email such as Eudora. Surprisingly, my biggest gripe with GMail is that its search function is just plain horrible. Something you’d think they of all companies could have figured out better. My other gripe is that you can’t do much in the way of batch processing, and dealing with one e-mail at a time, especially over the web, for anything except delete is frustratingly slow.

    Shel Horowitz, ethical/effective marketing specialist
    https://shelhorowitz.com

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    By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Ethics-International, General Commentary, Politics, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , , ,

    Pope Benedict XVI’s third encyclical is a sweeping, 144-page document addressing and interlocking a wide range of social issues. He calls on the financial industry to tame its greed and turn to ethics, asks the United Nations and individual governments to address deep-rooted poverty issues–not only from economic development perspectives but also making sure these countries have a voice and a seat at the table of power–a political shift, in other words.

    Good coverage in the Washington Post (see above link). And a shoutout to Allan Holender of the World Wide Association of Zentrepreneurs, for bringing this important document to my attention.

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    By Posted on Posted in Blog Tour, Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with ,

    Note from Shel Horowitz: As a blogger, I feel some responsibility to participate in the wider blogging community. And thus, if someone with an appropriate book for my audience (ethics, marketing, sustainability, etc.) asks me to be a stop on a blog tour, I’ll say yes if it makes sense.

    Today, I’m the blog tour host for MaAnna Stephenson, author of Just the FAQs eBooks Series. Here we go:

    Q: You’ve written a bunch of little e-books about the Internet, covering blogs, RSS, articles, and websites. What led you to write these, and what’s your background?

    A: Each of the four books is about forty pages and I decided to split them up that way so folks could pick and choose books covering a topic in which they needed help. The books are small because they are to the point and don’t have a lot of fluff. They guide folks step-by-step through the process of fully customizing and optimizing their online presence.

    I’m an electronics engineer and have decades of experience writing technical documentation and training manuals. I also designed sites for non-profits and small businesses for over a decade. I took a break from that while I did an intense research project for over four years that resulted in the material published in The Sage Age – Blending Science with Intuitive Wisdom, which was featured in Publishers Weekly shortly after its debut.

    When I began creating an online presence for that book, Web 2.0 had become all the rage. I wanted to make use of blogs and RSS feeds in addition to a website. I was shocked at how little documentation there was on how to make the most of these tools. I simply documented the process as I went through creating my own resources. When my editor had questions about optimizing her blog, I sent her the documentation. She was so excited about having such a great resource that she encouraged me to publish. That’s how the blogs, feeds, and articles books came to be. I wrote the websites book from my experience working with clients. It has the same three worksheets that I gave folks to help them organize the material for their site. It also advises folks on the expensive pitfalls some of my clients experienced on their first site.

    Q: Why should the average non-techie entrepreneur care about something like RSS?

    A: RSS feeds are one of the most powerful companion tools you can add to your blog. Most folks follow more than one blog. Instead of having to go to each blog to see if there is a new post, they can simply subscribe to any blog that has feeds. Every post is then delivered to their feed reader and they can view them all in one place. Think of a feed reader as a personalized virtual newspaper. Feed readers are becoming very popular, not only for convenience, but to cut down on spam as well. Folks no longer have to give out their email address to each newsletter owner just to find out what’s happening with them.

    Feeds can also be delivered via email or to mobile devices. Podcasters can use feeds to list on iTunes. Even if you run an opt-in email list, you should still offer an RSS feed subscription to your blog. You don’t want to miss out on the growing trend by not making it available. They are easy to install and no maintenance is required. They also allow you to collect statistics, or metrics, on your subscribers.

    Q: How does RSS compare with e-mail, and with social media like Twitter and Facebook–what are the advantages of each?

    A: All of these broadcast tools are slightly different in scope. Each allows you to deliver current information, but each has different advantages and limitations. RSS feeds allow you to deliver your entire blog post, including graphics via email, or in plain text sans graphics to a reader or a mobile device. The safest way to deliver email, such as a newsletter, is in plain text and it cannot be reformatted to be read well on a mobile device. Both of these delivery systems allow you to include far more information than you can on social media sites like FaceBook, and especially on Twitter, which has a 140 character limitation. However, Twitter and FaceBook are both very useful to announce that you have a new blog post and that will drive more traffic to your site. That is another reason why blog posts are becoming more popular than a newsletter. FaceBook and Twitter are also great tools for acquiring more followers.

    Q: Your blogging book recommends using and hosting with Blogger.com. I’ve been recommending to my clients that they set up a blog on their own server, where they have control and where no one can pull the plug. And while I started my own blog (in 2004) on Blogger, I found that I had a lot more flexibility when I switched to WordPress, and that Google found my posts just as quickly. True, I had to have someone else set it up, but once installed, it’s been completely self-maintaining. Why Blogger? What happens to your blog if Blogger changes its business model or decides to censor?

    A: There are literally millions of people already on Blogger, although WordPress type sites are gaining in popularity and will continue to do so for the next couple of years. There are also millions of folks who have never blogged and own static websites that they paid big bucks to have designed. Blogger is free and extremely easy to use for folks new to blogging. It’s also very simple to incorporate posts from Blogger into an existing static site without having to do a complete site redesign. That’s very advantageous because many of these site owners are with hosting services that include their shopping cart or storefront. It would cost them thousands of dollars to revamp to another format on another host. The JTF books are also designed to help folks who are only selling products through affiliate links and do not need file storage. A good example would be someone who reviews books. They really don’t need static pages or ways to sell their own product. Blogger blogs can also be made private so they are only viewable by those the administrator allows. This is great for small groups. In fact, I’ll be conducting JTF classes on a private Blogger blog.

    I’ve heard a lot of talk about the fear that Blogger may change something or censor a site, however, I’ve known folks who’ve had Blogger sites since they started years ago and they’ve yet to have any issues. You would have to post some pretty derogatory or inflammatory material before Blogger would ever consider censoring you. And, since Google purchased both Blogger and FeedBurner, all of the changes have been for the positive. I’m sure they are already working on upgrades that will give WordPress even more competition. It’s simply not in Blogger’s best interest to make the service difficult or pull the plug on any of its millions of happy users.

    For an author just starting out, a WordPress site may be a better fit than Blogger. But, keep in mind that there are two different types of WordPress sites. WordPress.com is very much like Blogger in that it is free and uses template designs that you can customize up to a point. It is hosted by WordPress. But, it does have a couple of important limitations. You cannot include third-party widgets, like Google Analytics. You must use only the ones provided by WordPress.com. And, you cannot monetize the site with things like AdSense ads. You can monetize Blogger.

    WordPress.org is the generic blogging software that you can download for free and host anywhere you like. You can fully customize and monetize the blog as you see fit. However, it requires connecting to a database and working in the coding language PHP as well as designing the Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). This initial part of it will likely require you to hire a WordPress designer. You will also pay for hosting and a domain name. Once those things are all set up, it’s very easy to use and maintain.

    If you are already using formats such as Blogger or WordPress.com, your posts and archives can easily be imported to a WordPress.org site if you want to upgrade at some point in the future.

    Q: Your article-marketing book offers detailed instructions on submitting to a number of different article portal sites. For the busy entrepreneur, is it worth posting articles if you don’t have time to do all the sites?

    A: Yes, even if you only have time to post to one directory, article marketing is still a great way to drive traffic to your site, gain expert author status on a particular topic, and increase your ranking in search engines because you have more links on your name, your product title, and your keywords.

    Q: With limited time, which one or two article portals would you recommend?

    A: E-zine Articles is still one of the top article directories, however, they are not yet allowing videos to be embedded in the article. New directories are popping up that do allow videos, which is an emerging hot trend. Because of this, these directories are gaining in popularity. Article Bins is one directory that allows videos.

    Q: Tell us about the giveaway contest you’re doing?

    A: I’ll have a random drawing after the tour offering two free classes based on the blogs and RSS feeds books to folks who leave comments during the tour. The classes guide folks step-by-step while offering additional support for their unique needs. It also covers advanced tips and tricks not found in the books.

    Q: Where can people learn more about your books?
    You can find more information about Just the FAQs books, classes, and podcast at the main site, which is https://www.JustTheFAQs.net

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