Rugula Appenzeller is owner of the green business Hank&Cheef. Using organic cotton ethically sourced from Turkey, Hank&Cheef has brought back the handkerchief, finally. Kudos to them for reinventing an indispensable but forgotten product. I hope they are successful.
Here is a really cool video that follows Pizza Fusion. This pizza parlor sells only organic pizzas and they are thriving, selling franchises at a rapid rate. In my opinion pizza is one of the most popular foods in America, and Pizza Fusion is doing it right, selling great tasting pizza while thinking about the environment. An amazing concept from an amazing company. Thumbs up from Green Business to Pizza Fusion for taking a saturated pizza market and creating something new, exciting and green!
I just saw the following video by United Natural Foods Inc. This company is a distributor of certified organic foods. Yeah, it is a bit of an infomercial, but it drives the point home that business can maximize profit by being sustainable. Reducing costs and reducing negative impact on the environment is where it’s at for United Natural Foods. An example of how they reduce their environmental impact is the wood used in their offices is sustainably harvested. They have also installed sensors in their offices so when people leave the room the lights automatically shut off. Very cool! A big thumbs up from Green Business to United Natural Foods Inc. for making money with a conscience.
Check out this video. The panel talks about green business and its place in the world, as well as its importance. This is just a clip, but if you like what you see and want to view he entire discussion just click here.
Don’t forget that green and sustainable businesses are changing the world. Consumers are demanding environment friendly alternatives to what has been destroying our planet and business is finally listening - hurray!
The CEO of Stoneyfield Farm, Gary Hirshberg, offers his views on organic farming, specifically how organic farming can not only be profitable but actually reduce production costs. The following is a two minute clip from the talk. If you want to view the entire talk just click here.
I just wanted to thank the guys at Alternative Energy News who published my interview with Gary Thompson, CEO of Sierra Geothermal Power Corp. It was a great experience talking with the head of a company specializing in creating alternative energy. If you want to read the interview in its entirety, please click here. A special thanks goes out to Alex Ramon, webmaster at Alternative Energy News, for getting the ball rolling.
You don’t have to try to be perfect. Just do a few things to start making your life and your business green - common sense things.
One thing that many people forget is that even small changes are important. Reducing green house gases on a large scale, for example, through the use of alternative energy, is very important but one can start by simply being diligent in recycling cans and bottles. Everything is important and everything makes an impact. Being “aware” is much more important than people realize. Always keep in mind how you can reduce your impact on the world and its resources.
Companies are finding out that reducing their impact on the environment can actually lead to a cost savings for their business. But let’s be realistic here, not every energy savings technique will result in a cost savings, but maybe in a few years they will. This is where having a green business becomes interesting.
One of our goals at Green Business is to add value. Here is a list of resources to help green up your life and your business. You might find these sites interesting because being a little more environment friendly isn’t as hard as you may think. Many of you may already know of these websites and many more may not, but these should be bookmarked and always kept on file - they are just that helpful.
1. TreeHugger - Presenting a whole bunch of ways to go green in your life, this site is a great place to start if you want to make your life a little cleaner for the environment. How to green your water and how to green your electricity are just two tips that Tree Hugger’s “go green” area offers its readers.
2. David Suzuki Foundation - Filled with so many different and important resources, from areas focusing on solving global warming to creating a sustainable economy, this is a site that has a more academic approach to fighting global warming.
3. Natural Resource Defense Council - This is one of my favorite sites, and they do have an area of their website devoted to greening a business.
4. Green Markets International - Non-profit organization whose goal is to increase the use of alternative energy. This site seems to be designed for the intellectual in all of us.
5. About.com Sustainable Development - This area of the website About.com presents a number of useful articles about sustainable businesses.
A brand new area of business was born a few short years ago. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has quietly changed the business of marketing web sites on the internet. When someone uses a search engine such as Google to find information about their topic of choice they simply type in the subject they want to find out about. The web sites that the search engine determines to posses the most relevant content are listed in order. This is where SEO comes into play. The search engine could list ten pages of web sites, with ten sites per page. That’s a total of one hundred web sites, and there could very well be many more than ten pages of data. Experts in this field have determined, with some certainty, that most people who search almost never look past page two, while others believe that people don’t look past page one. The importance of being ranked on page one is crucial to gain “people traffic”.
To get into the coveted top ten list one must optimize their web site too meet the strict standards that search engines implement to weed through literally billions of web pages. What SEO companies do is structure a web site’s content in a specific way to give it a fighting chance to have the site rank highly among search engine results. One such company is run by entrepreneur Alex Ramon. His brand new company is named DataPencil and the goal is to get your company’s web site the most traffic as possible. Still in the early stages of development, Data Pencil is different than most Search Engine Optimization companies by the simple fact that Alex’s company has created a free tutorial to help people optimize their web site. Along with this tutorial is a forum dedicated to answering any question that students may have.
Alex begins to open up, “What a lot of people who have web sites forget is that content is key. It’s impossible to optimize a web site if it doesn’t have quality, focused content. You have to have both of those things if you want to make money. I can’t make something out of nothing. Search engines always seem to be tweaking the way they analyze web sites because people keep trying to cheat. They knowingly load their site with key words to try and manipulate search engines to obtain a high page rank. Well, people at Google aren’t dumb. They quickly caught on and shifted the way they analyze sites to the point where web sites that over load key words are now penalized. Content, quality links to and from your site, and having an optimized site are all keys to getting a high page rank today. Just to let you know, it could change next month. It all depends how search engines determine what’s important and what’s not important. Oh yeah, grammar is important too. You might not have thought about it, but things like proper grammar and spelling are both factors in SEO. Search engines are smart.
So much potential profit from the internet is out there, and maximizing this potential is what search engine optimization is all about. You can hire companies to help you or you can do it yourself, but one thing is for certain, it’s all changing right before our eyes. A few years ago who would have thought about structuring their company’s web site to aid in search engine rankings. Now it has become so important that smart, e-business entrepreneurs, like Alex Ramon of Data Pencil, are devoting much of their time and energy to help you add profit to your company’s bottom line.
Sorry, I have kept this page active so there will be no broken links
