Sustainable Business Blog

What Do You Do With All Of Your One Use Plastic Bags

It’s time for BYOB! Yes, bring your own shopping bag!  As we keep on our path through a busy 2010, it’s crazy to think about the amount of shopping we traditionally do here in America and world-wide. Whether it’s numerous trips to the grocery store as we keep our kitchen’s stocked for wonderful meals and tasty goodies or those sometimes dreaded (yet skillful) “6 bags on each arm” walks through the neighborhood mall, it all adds up to a great deal of needless garbage.  One of the most blatant examples of this waste is disposable shopping bags.

An estimated 100 billion plastic shopping bags are used every year within the USA, according to the Wall-Street Journal.  Most plastic bags wind up in landfills and the rest often end up in rivers, ponds, lakes, streams or in the sea, where animals can ingest or become tangled in them.  Bearing in mind the number of shopping bags that are consumed and wasted each year, the time is now to extend the word in regards to the positive benefits of green reusable bags.  After all, most of us desire to give back to our families, friends and communities as often as possible.

Creating a BYOB approach in our individual shopping habits is a straightforward way to do just that.  If we can raise awareness presently, the positive impact for our environment is incalculable for 2010 and well into the future.  Numerous metropolitan areas have already made gradual but significant progress in endorsing the usage of eco friendly bags in recent years.  Motivating consumers with plastic and paper bag bans, discounts at the register for reusable bag usage and tax motivations are a few to speak of.

Right now in America, the San Jose City Council only just passed one of the nation’s strictest bans on plastic and paper shopping bags.   This is a gigantic victory for the Bay Area, that has 1 million plastic bags per year accumulating in and along the San Francisco Bay.  San Jose becomes the most recent bay area city to endorse some sort of ban on disposable shopping bags; some others comprise of San Francisco and Palo Alto. Tracy Seipel of the San Jose Mercury News reported that it was actually ONE gentleman who really jump-started the ban, another impressive instance of the influence of one individual.  Here’s a an excerpt:

“While visiting his sister-in-law in Taipei, (Kansen) Chu (elected to San Jose city council in 2007) went grocery shopping and was surprised to get charged for plastic grocery bags. The next day, he brought his own cloth bags back to the store.  “I guess the question,” said Chu, “was, ‘Why not San Jose?’ ” He began a conversation with the city’s environmental services staff, which later moved to council committee discussions.

Save the Bay’s 4th yearly report on the most garbage-strewn sites in the district further demonstrates the need for BYOB.  The 50-year-old environmental advocacy group focused on 10 particular bay-area sites where almost 15,000 plastic bags were retrieved in one day last year in their statement.   Here’s an passage of an article in the San Francisco Chronicle by Kelly Zito.

According to (Save the Bay’s) research, Californians use about 19 billion plastic bags each year, 3.8 million in the Bay Area. The average use time for the bags - made using about 12 million barrels of oil each year in the United States - is about 12 minutes. In addition to the hundreds of years it can take for a plastic bag to decompose in a landfill, the bags also force downtime when fed into traditional recycling equipment. Typically, the bags get wound into conveyor belts or gears and must be cut out by hand.

Ten US metropolitan areas have banned plastic bags to date, five within the past year. Even Mexico City enacted a ban on plastic shopping bags, which went into effect in August.  The city of 20 million at the moment faces the realities of effective enforcement, which isn’t easy while the Mexico City Chamber of Commerce estimates there are 35,000 vendors in Mexico City’s downtown vicinity alone.

Bans on plastic bags aren’t really the only valuable means to cut back harmful waste the result of disposable bags.  PlasTaxes, which tax consumers at the register for using plastic bags when shopping, were first launched by the Irish.  John Roach of National Geographic reported in 2008 about the worldwide momentum that’s been building from the time when Ireland instituted a PlasTax in 2003.  The Irish confirmed they could diminish plastic bag consumption by 90% or more.   Momentum is growing the world over, predominantly in America.  From Washington, DC to Edmonds, WA to North Pole, AK, communities and governments are spurring an international trend to cut back the unsafe environmental effects of disposable shopping bags.  In the great state of Hawaii, the governing body is at this time taking into account a bill to ban single-use plastic bags (SUP), or to establish a small charge to use SUP bags.

Even major retail stores like Target and CVS are taking action by enacting special discounts at the register for customers who choose to BYOB or simply carry-out their items without a bag.  For those naysayers, it’s opportune to disregard recent momentum in reducing disposable bag waste.  But to a few, the wide-spread adoption of wholesale recycled bags is inevitable.  Examine just how smoking is becoming taboo in America.  Indoor smoking bans have caught on like wild-fire.  In the same way, who’s to say the usage of disposable bags won’t turn out to be taboo one day in the (hopefully near) future?  The use of eco-friendly recycled grocery bags is certainly picking up steam.  Our personal decisions to carry our recycled shopping bags can go a great deal farther than we believe.  That’s what BYOB is all about.

Obviously, plastic and paper bags ought to be recycled and it’s crucial to bear in mind most large retailers including Albertsons and Wal-Mart will recycle plastic bags for you (just have to bring them your accumulated stash).  That being said, a BYOB shopping strategy can make your life a great deal easier because there isn’t a need to accumulate that cupboard full of plastic bags or determine what and when to do something about it.  Keeping a couple of eco bags inside your car or backpack is a good way to make sure you possess them when required. Thus give back this year by remembering to BYOB!   No matter whether it be at a convenience store, the shopping mall, or while grocery shopping, we could make a change for the environment and help raise consciousness one transaction at a time.  In the fight to eradicate disposable shopping bag waste, 2010 is our moment.

July 23 2010 | Environmental | No Comments »

Suggestions For Utilizing Direct Mail For Internet Marketeers

Here I’m going to share you my strategies on market the K Swiss Sneaker business. It may not have crossed your mind as an Internet marketer to use direct mail to send out word of your online business. However, this is something that you should not wait another second to start. Using direct mail to promote your business is one of the best marketing tools you can use. Regular email often can’t give you the kind of validity that direct mail can. Implementing a direct mail campaign can feel pretty overwhelming if you’ve never done it before. Don’t stress out too much! Here are some of the best ways to approach direct mail marketing when you are an internet marketer.

Direct contact greatly increases the chance a person will purchase something from you. Online services can really benefit from direct mail marketing. If you create a letter that you specifically address to the owner of the business you are targeting and explain how you can help improve their business, you will create much more response than a website ever would. Blanket emails are very vague; your letter, which is addressing a specific person and their business issues, will be far more successful. K Swiss Sneaker.

You always want to put the most important information at the beginning of your direct mail so the reader is sure to see it. This way, even if you are sending out a lengthy sales letter, the recipient will know what it is you want to tell them. You will be amazed at the people who will hire you or buy from you without reading an entire piece of direct mail. Your sale is nearly certain, if you can grab their attention with those first few sentences.

One thing you should do when starting out your campaign is to use real stamps to send the mail to a very small audience. It will be tempting to let the automatic postage machines at the post office do the work for you, but putting real stamps on the envelopes yourself lends a personal touch to your direct mail that other marketers won’t have. People notice small details like that-the details that show a person took the time to do something themselves. Individuals will more likely show an interest in direct mail that is personalized.

Don’t be threatened by direct mail. Soon enough, it’ll be second nature to you. As you continue to do direct mailing, it will become effortless. Direct mail may be better for your business than the online marketing you do. Keep at it! You’ll see sales in no time!  For more information about kswisssneakers, plese visit K Swiss Sneaker.

July 23 2010 | Business: Advertising | No Comments »

How Advertising Agencies Can Offer A Great Ad Placement Service

In the advertising world, competition on a fierce level is what it is all about.Placing advertisements should be a strategic affair, since it is all about creating a positive vibe about a product or service and bringing together the many forms of communication available in planning and placing adverts.The only way the agency can feel that it has done its ad placement job effectively, is when the intended message for the said campaign has reached the right audience in the clearest possible way.

So, how can the ad agency get to grips with such a task For this reason, it is vital to comprehend the basic services offered by agencies for ad placement purposes - and as importantly for the agency to to achieve consistent results with so many modern advertising formats now available to them.

So, the agency needs to establish and work out the best media for each part of the campaign, as well as negotiating a cost effective contract for the best price and placement across many different media. So, if the agency has a scientific client and this customer wants to improve its lab marketing operation, the agency must look at every viable media product for placing ads and PR. The list does include outdoor media, print, tv, radio and internet - even though the choices are vast the number of high quality options is not. The agency has the job of choosing the right media for the client and also to get the very best value it can in terms of reach against cost. 

And then there are other communication methods via advertisements and these include direct mail marketing, point of purchase incentives, local yellow pages and highly targeted niche advertising within specialist formats. Many clients will have traditional thinking - in this case it is up to the agency to offer their own philosophical view and offer advice based on their own experiences. There are cases, of course when your clients may have some great positive stories about other successfull media plans and campaigns - it is a trait of a good agency planner to listen and take these on board if the current plan requires that you do so.

When they agency has undertaken research based on their own information and that from their client, they can look at the main objectives for the campaign and come up with a focused plan for the associated product or service.The qualititive and quantitive data will be checked for discrepancies until further information is secured more reliabley.  Past experience with the media and the client’s requirements for the job are also top considerations in the development of the media plan for effective advertising placements.

It must be emphasized that the advertising agencies will not carry out any media plans unless the client gives the go ahead. Again, it is the agency’s job to send a clear loud message to the client’s target market. It is up to the agency to determine the best ways to do so with research and experience to back up said methods.

The media plan itself is subject to many factors and very much depends on the purpose of the campaign. Some of the more recent terminology for modern methods of advertising will probably be unheard of by your clients. For example, if an agency finds a very targeted lab website for that client we were talking about, it is better not to try to impress with any complicated terminology if the agency and the client doesn’t have a firm understanding of it - and only use it if it is going to play an active role in the campaign. If agencies include this, then they should educate the client in the basic principles - this will allow the client to make sense of these results at a later stage.

Some of the basic terms in the media industry today are:

Cost per thousand - refers to the cost of an ad placement per one thousand prospective customers reached.This is a straightforward and common way to basically look at the targeted message for various media formats and to compare the efficacy.

For example, if we look at the difference between a newspaper advert and a television version, the newspaper costs less but also has a much smaller reach. This formula is also used extensively online and many leading agencies are booking huge campaigns using this model.

Reach - how many potential households or customers that will be affected by the advertising message, as a percentage.

Frequency - relates to how often the same message will be displayed to businesses and households.Depending on the media used, this will change with different outlets and also the time of year could come into play.

Continuity - The timing of adverts is considered here.It can be a combination of a continuous and seasonal plan or just one of these for a certain amount of time.

Advertising agencies have had to adjust certain areas of their aggressive promotional strategies to fall in line with the ever growing popularity of social media websites.It is worth mentioning that even though social media sites should be a part of the plan, they should not be a standalone component of it. For another thing, it is not just content but well optimized content - this is the key to making the client’s voice heard on the web.

In the example we gave here, the scientific agency can achieve great things for the client but only when the client knows its own message and how it wants to be seen in their specific marketplace.

July 23 2010 | Business: Advertising | No Comments »

How To Use Best Word Plugins To Save You Time

Many thought Best Wordpress Plugins is very consuming but internet marketing has the but consuming part. Trying to find the best keywords for your projects has proven to be one of the most tedious chores related to Internet marketing. The purpose of a keyword is to ensure that your search engine optimization campaigns stay on track. These are what allow people to come across your website. However, determining the correct keywords could prove to be a daunting and laborious task. Enter: Best word plugins: software that is designed to cut your keyword research at least in half (if not a better percentage). There is a lot of hype surrounding this software. It has a good reputation, but does the product actually live up to it? So we gave Best word plugins a try, to see what it was about. Here is what we discovered. Best Wordpress Plugins was created

One of the most powerful features of Best word plugins is that, in addition to finding markets and keywords for you, it can actually give you data on how well your competitors are doing with Clickbank. Best word plugins can tell you exactly how a particular merchant’s profits are allocated among affiliates and information about the ads he or she is running for Clickbank product; all you have to do is plug in that merchant’s ID. Clickbank is a very large and profitable online network where thousands of affiliates help to sell products of every description. Getting the inside scoop on your competition can help you figure out how to beat them at their own game.

One of the most appealing features this program offered was that it is able to check your competitors and see what they are paying for their pay per click campaigns. Setting up an effective pay per click strategy can really prove to be costly, as you know now that you must bid on keywords. With Best word plugins you can find out what the trending prices are for the keywords you want to use the most. In your struggle to get the most exposure for your advertising campaigns, this product will assist you from getting grossly over bidded. You should not have to spend more money than you already do.

Its updating routinely is an added benefit of the Best word plugins program. Getting out-of-date trending numbers from say, the last month or so, is not an issue when you use Best word plugins. The numbers this program provides you with were live within the past twenty four hours, because Best word plugins runs updates every single day. Because of the way the Internet marketing is, what is considered popular today might not be at all considered popular tomorrow, thus making Best word plugins an invaluable tool. Or the popularity of something may skyrocket within one day. Unfortunately, however, Internet marketing is a highly volatile industry that cannot be easily predicted. This software can help keep you up to date.

Internet marketing is already a very time consuming task in itself, and you don’t need to add to it by researching keywords for a long time. Before launching a single product/service it is common for people to spend dozens of hours, or even hundreds, researching keywords. Your products are at risk of falling behind in popularity if you do not keep up with this every single day. The KeywordSpy’s buildup gives people the incentive that it will do all of the hard work on your behalf. This is only partially correct. You still have to do some work yourself, but Best word plugins does help you quite a bit. in Best Word Plugins.

July 23 2010 | Business: Marketing Direct | No Comments »

Twitter: An Up-To-The-Second Direct Marketing Tool

This article talks about how I use twitter to promote Best Wordpress Plugins Social marketing has grown long legs in recent years. Social media optimization is one of the hottest buzzwords around. Both are growing in popularity in light of the current economic climate. Advertising costs have increased and the spending limits have gone down. In such times, using free and powerful mediums such as Twitter for your marketing needs is a good idea. The advantages you have working with a social marketing platform such as Twitter are immense. If you go about it the right way, you will have instant access to millions to advertise to with a simple click of a mouse. You can increase your brand awareness and get the word out there about your products and services quickly and simply. Although in its relative infancy still, Twitter has begun demonstrating huge possibilities for marketing your online company. The returns on time invested can be significant and invaluable, when you wisely make your Best word plugins plans. With this article, we will consider the numerous sundry advantages that Twitter offers you for promoting and marketing your products. Best Wordpress Plugins Review is an example for you to follow.

You want to develop relationships with potential customers at all different levels in order to most effectively market your products. Simply because of the fact that lots of people are there on Twitter, a good chance is that your existing customers are already on it. Here is your great chance to use Twitter to connect with them. Twitter is becoming the most addictive online web application out there, with people checking their Twitter account every now and then; it’s turning into an integral part of their lives. The first thing many people do as they wake up is check what their friends and followings are doing. If someone is unhappy about a product or service, you’d better believe they will tweet about their discontent. You want to expand your business? You want to make customers happy and hope they tweet about their interactions with your company. Your business needs to be current, relevant and in-touch with its customer base in a world where communication is king, and Twitter is the perfect tool to help you do that effectively.

You can also use Twitter to better brand your business or products online. It is true; a number of huge firms like Starbucks, CNN, Nike, etc are branding themselves on Twitter and building up a loyal following. But you don’t have to be a massive company to make Twitter work for you. You can build brand awareness for your small company too. Although it may prove to be a smaller company, your business can certainly build up a brand via Twitter.

Some users believe that it is important to first brand yourself as an individual and then add a page for your business to tie in with that initial follower base. The reasoning behind this is that most individuals wish to get to know actual people on Twitter and not a faceless corporate presence. Most individuals wish to interact with actual, breathing people, especially because Twitter has demonstrated that it is an efficient way to build up brand for an individual. You need to adjust your marketing skills accordingly and remember to consistently post a mix of personal and business-related tweets asking your followers to visit your site. If you want to utilize Twitter to your advantage, then you first need start building relationships with other tweeters today. That’s the key is having devoted followers hanging on your every tweet. The more targeted they are the better, of course, because this increases your potential for increase sales and interest in your business as consumers. So don’t wait – leverage Twitter now for its marketing value and enjoy the results.

Even though many doesn’t like twitter, but twitter seems to be social for everybody to read more about twitter and Best word plugins now.  That’s how powerful Twitter is.~Utilizing Twitter as a marketing tool is a great way to watch the competition and expand your business at the same time.

July 23 2010 | Business: Marketing Direct | No Comments »