Web Sites are Green

by Jimm Fowler
www.mywebsource1.com

Living in the United States today, people are acutely aware of the need to “Go Green” in their everyday lives. We are all trying to shrink our carbon footprint. We’ve heard the news. We need to conserve if we want the planet to be inhabitable for our children. This method of thinking would have been unheard of 40 years ago. Today, it is “trendy”.

One way of going about this is to have a web site and be online. “He’s a web site designer”, you are probably saying to yourself, “of course he feels that way.” But it is true. By going online, you are shrinking your carbon footprint everyday. Technology is helping to forge a better tomorrow. Let me explain:

Paperless Society
F.W. Lancaster, the Informational Scientist who coined the term “paperless society” in 1981. With a paperless society, we would stop using print media and find everything online.

Is it a reality?

Not now, but as more and more web sites become interactive and better allow you to access information online, this thought process helps us to conserve our planet.

Online Literature
In the old days (circa 1989 or even yesterday), you hired a graphic designer to create a brochure and you sent it to a printer who would charge you around $400 per thousand to print and fold your brochure so you could hand it to your customer. The ink they used was then discarded and entered our waterways, harming plants and aquatic life. A simple solution to this is to cut back on printed literature and put it on your web site. Not only does this save you money, but it also helps the environment.

Now, think about the cost savings when you apply this same thought process to your hundred page catalog! You are saving money on printing costs and mailing costs. Your catalog is now in the hands of anyone who would like to view it and what is best, you are cutting back on waste for those who don’t want your services. Add a simple form to access your catalog and now you know exactly who was interested enough to look at your wares!

Conserving Gasoline
By putting your goods online, people can find what they are looking for without having to get into their vehicles and drive to different stores. You can join comparison shopping engines, use pay-per-click ads and organic optimization methods to get people to your site and show them what you have to sell. Less people driving on the roads means less energy wasted which helps in lowering gasoline prices.

Other ways of getting people through your front door is to blog, use social networking tools and sending out online newsletters. Most of these are free to use and won’t waste our natural resources.

Casting Out The Clutter
Everyday we are interrupted in our lives with advertisements. We see them on billboards, on television, in the newspaper and we hear them on the radio. We are so bombarded by these interruptions that we tune them out – unless they are really good or that we’ve heard or seen them so many times we can’t help but notice. In today’s world of marketing do these methods even work like they used to in years past?

Direct marketing works ONE PERCENT of the time – if you are lucky. This means that if you send out 1000 direct marketing pieces to customers, you might get 10 responses. If the item you sell is worth $100, you probably broke even. Most likely, 990 people just added to the excess of trash that we throw away each day. How many of those do you think recycled the paper?

Here are some facts:

• 50% of all junk mail (i.e. your advertisements) is thrown away without being opened.
• Junk mail wastes an average of 8 months of every American life.
• 100 MILLION trees are destroyed each year to produce junk mail.
• 28 BILLION gallons of water are used to produce the paper each year that makes junk mail.
• The yearly creation of junk mail equates out to the emissions of 3.7 million cars.
• An estimated $320 million in local tax dollars are used to dispose of junk mail each year.
• About $550 million dollars is used to transport junk mail to your mail box.

Why would you want to contribute to this?

Instead, try online advertising with either a pay-per-click campaign. This is really an ingenious method of advertising. You set up an ad. You decide which keywords will work best for you. You set a geographical location to place your ads and PEOPLE find you by typing in something related to your keywords. The PEOPLE come to YOU. These are people with an interest in something you are selling. You aren’t interrupting them. You aren’t filling up their mailboxes and lives with a deluge of unsolicited garbage to be tossed aside into our landfills. You are letting them come to you.

I do not pretend to believe that all paper advertising and marketing will stop. I don’t even believe that it will decrease to the point where junk mail is an occasional present in our mailboxes. But, if everyone started to move just 5% of their business away from the old, familiar ways of marketing – ways that don’t work anymore – then maybe we can help to reform our planet into a better place to live.

Go online. Sell online. Become a part of the solution for a better world.