Eco-Friendly

3 Marketing Mistakes to Avoid in 2013

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I recently had the opportunity to sit down with long-time friend and wind powered business owner, Lynn Anne Miller of 4GreenPs. Lynn founded 4GreenPs in 2006 after a successful career in marketing for venture-backed tech start-ups and Fortune 500 firms. 4GreenPs started as a traditional strategic marketing firm. At the same time, Lynn became personally interested in green living and sustainability issues. And so naturally, she combined this passion with her formal marketing expertise and 4GreenPs began working with green businesses. Mom Made Foods in Alexandria became her first green client in 2008. Since then, her clients have included Elysian Energy, FRESHFARM Markets, Seventh Generation, and the Livability Project.

With her wealth of knowledge from across the marketing spectrum, I chatted with Lynn about the most common marketing mistakes she sees growing businesses make.

Overuse of Discounts

Too many times retailers use discounts to attract and retain customers. Lynn cautions that repeated discounts train customers to wait and only purchase when there is a sale. Instead, Lynn suggests that retailers use customer appreciation discounts. This type of approach is high touch and reinforces brand image.

“Who doesn’t love to feel special and appreciated?” asks Lynn. “Consumers become more brand loyal when they feel that the brand appreciates them. Offering discounts across the board does not cultivate brand loyalty, in fact, it does the opposite, while also cutting into profit margins.”

Poor SEO

Websites are no longer about just good aesthetic design. Businesses have to incorporate Search engine optimization, or SEO, from the ground up in their websites. Lynn has found that many businesses are aware of SEO but don’t understand the importance of it and how it relates to a solid lead process. One of the tools that Lynn recommends to clients is HubSpot. 4GreenPs is a certified Value Added Reseller of   Hubspot’s inbound marketing software.

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Gardening

How to Create a Sustainable Garden

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Sustainable Garden

It can be a challenge to work out how to live a life that promotes and encourages sustainability. When you’re surrounded by single-use products and non-environmentally-friendly practises, taking the first step is both frightening and tricky. However, you would be amazed at just how easy it is to create a sustainable garden for your family. Here are a few helpful tips and tricks, used by renovations experts, to start you on the right path.

Get the Right Tools

If you’re not a natural-born gardener, then you may not even know where to start. How about beginning with a few essential tools? Head to your local gardening centre and pick up a compost bin, a rainwater barrel, a shovel and spade, and a soil tiller. These few items can put you on the right path to complete sustainability.

Choose the Garden Location

While you might think you can plant a garden at random and see it produce results, a landscaper will tell you that’s not often the case. You have to factor sunshine, water, and shelter into your decision. If you don’t, then you may be extremely disappointed when the time comes to harvest.

If you’re not sure where the best place might be to plant, then draw an area out and watch how much sunshine it gets during the day. Also, pay attention to moisture levels to be on the safe side.

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Eco-Friendly

Pantry Products You Had No Idea Could Clean Your Home

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Eco-friendly Pantry Products

More and more manufacturers are seeing the value in producing sustainable products to clean our homes. They have even shone a spotlight on Australia’s waste epidemic, with the country’s environment ministers looking to use only 100 percent reusable, recyclable, or compostable packaging by 2025.

So if you ask Commercial Cleaning experts, it’s fair to say we’re on the right track with both what we use to clean our homes and what we put in our rubbish bins within them.

However, you also can’t beat what nature gives us – and it’s a lot. If you’re looking to both cut down your grocery bill and use more sustainable products, then read on. Here are pantry products you may not have known could clean your home.

Vinegar

Vinegar is as versatile a pantry ingredient as they come. While you may not use it a lot for cooking, you will surely find it serves a purpose in the realm of cleaning.

Smudged mirror? Use vinegar. Can’t get that glass perfectly clean? Vinegar comes to the rescue. You can even use it as a rinse aid in your dishwasher. The only thing you can’t use vinegar on is unsealed marble as it can have an adverse reaction.

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Gardening

How Often Should I Be Watering My Lawns?

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Watering My Lawns

It can seem like a bit of a guessing game when it comes to lawn care and when you should mow your lawns. There doesn’t appear to be any “one size fits all” approach, as plenty of variables come into play.

Where you live, your climate, weather patterns, grass type, and current grass health may all factor into the question you’re asking yourself: how often should I be watering my lawns? And have I been doing it wrong all this time?

Don’t Over-water Your Lawns

To keep your lawns thriving, green, and beautiful in what is often a drought-plagued country, you might think that watering more is doing your gardens a favour. It’s not. When you water your lawns a lot, as in, every day, they don’t get a chance to seek out water for themselves and lengthen their roots.

If you over water your lawns, their roots are short, and they are more likely to sulk when you stop watering them as often. What’s more, a damp lawn is an open invitation for moisture-loving pests and disease to move in.

Let Your Lawn Tell You When It Wants Water

Lawns can communicate with you without saying anything, so listen to what they are saying. A lawn that needs water is one that is starting to wilt or change color from green to brown. Read these signs and water when your grass gets to this point. Grass needs time between watering to deliver air to the roots and encourage them to seek water sources deep in the ground.

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Eco-Friendly

Are You Eco-Friendly?

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Eco-Friendly

How would you define your level of sustainability? Do you think you do your part to make the world a better place? Are you trying to leave it in better condition than you found it? Ask yourself these questions, and see if there are improvements you can make, or if you’re already doing more than you first thought.

What Do I Use to Carry My Groceries? 

Single-use plastic bags are slowly being phased out throughout the world, but not quite everywhere. What do you use to carry your groceries? Have you invested in material or cloth bags that you can use over and over again? Or, are you still relying on supermarkets and stores to provide you with packaging? If it’s the latter, consider investing in your own bags for future shopping trips.

Do I Recycle? 

We live in a country that actively encourages recycling, so do you partake? Do you separate your paper, plastic, glass, metals, and waste? Do you make a special effort to make sure all trash and recyclables leave your property in the correct bins? And, if you don’t have a recycling service to your home, do you go out of your way to deliver your recyclables to a centre?

A considerable number of products you use every day can be used again, so think of this every time you throw your plastic or glass in your waste bin.

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Eco-Friendly

5 Reasons To Include Glass Fencing In Your Sustainable Landscaping Plan

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Glass Fencing

Sustainable landscaping is becoming an increasingly popular trend throughout Australia and the world. A lot of landscape designs in Australia, according to Clear Az Glass, include swimming pools and some pool fencing, which means that you need to consider your fencing options carefully.

Although there are a variety of different fencing options out there for your pool fence, glass pool fencing is famous as one of the most sustainable choices. Glass is an environmentally friendly alternative to things like plastic or cheap metal fencing, and here are five reasons why you should include it in your landscape design plan:

  1. Glass Is An Environmentally Friendly Choice

When it comes to pool fences, Glass is one of the most sustainable building materials that you can use. It is relatively simple and energy-efficient, and its core components can be sourced easily through relatively non-destructive mining practices.

Glass also has a very long lifespan, which means that your pool fence will need to be fixed or replaced much less often. Glass is often the best pool design for fences and looks great with modern landscaping, when your glass pool fence does eventually need to be replaced, the old panels and metal fixings can be recycled.

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Eco-Friendly

What Does a Muffler Do?

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First and foremost, a car muffler does exactly what it sounds like. It’s the part of your exhaust that muffles the noise from the engine and creates a quieter driving experience. But it also does so much more. They are used primarily with combustion engines, which are the most popular type of engine in the world.

Just like the muffler, the combustion engine does exactly what it sounds like. It combusts, creating literal mini-explosions within the vehicle. But fret not, these explosions are of course carefully contained, and the muffler conceals the noise created from the combustion.

On top of this, there are a few more specific things they do for your engine. Read on to find out in more detail the many uses of the muffler.

Conceal Noisy Explosions

Again, the muffler’s most notable effect is concealing noise from the combustion engine. It specifically is able to do this through re-directing the emitted sound waves through sets of internal tubes and chambers. The muffler is a cylindrical device attached to the exhaust pipe, from where it filters out the noises.

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Gardening

Getting The Most Out Of Your Irrigation System

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Irrigation System

Experts in everything landscaping, Landscapers Network, have found that one of the most difficult things for landscapers, such as Northpark Woodworks, when designing new garden areas is setting up a decent irrigation system. Water restrictions are common throughout Australia, and it’s therefore extremely important to make sure that you’re irrigation system is efficient, effective and installed properly.

If you fancy yourself as a bit of a handyman, you might decide to install your own irrigation system. While this can save you a bit of money on landscaping costs, it’s important to do some research before you begin. If you don’t, you might find that you’re simply wasting water and that you’re plants aren’t benefiting as much as they should.

With this in mind, Sydney Landscapers Divine Landscapes put together a few tips to help you get the most out of your irrigation system. Consider the following:

Make Sure You’re Not Irrigating The Road

Nothing annoys me more than driving down a quiet street in the middle of the day and seeing water flowing down the road from poorly placed sprinklers. To put it simply, this is a terrible water of water – water that you’re paying for with your hard earned dollars!

The whole point of setting up an automatic irrigation system is to make things easier for yourself. Make sure that you’re sprinklers are well placed (if you have to use sprinklers) and that they’re only watering the areas you want watered. Make sure that they aren’t spraying the street, paths or any other irrelevant area.

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Maintenance

5 Tips For Reducing The Fire Risk In Your Building

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Fire Protection

Depending on your workplace, fire protection may be a major consideration. While the fire risk is low in many small businesses, workshops and industrial plants are often at severe risk of fire. Despite this, they don’t always do everything that they can to reduce the fire risk, and fires often break out due to this.

Fortunately for you, there are a lot of things that you can do to reduce the fire risk in your building. Some of these things are very simple, and wouldn’t take more than a couple of minutes to implement. Our top 5 tips for reducing the fire risk in your commercial building include:

  1. Make sure your fire extinguishers are serviced regularly

Fire extinguishers need to be tested at least once every six months, and they need to be pressure tested and refilled at least once every five years. If you fail to do this, your extinguishers could degrade, potentially becoming useless. This will reduce your ability to control a small fire when it occurs, significantly increasing your fire risk.

  1. Remove fuel sources

General clutter around the workshop or other parts of your building can provide fuel for a fire if one breaks out. Clean up clutter and remove potential fuel sources to reduce your fire risk. Make sure that things like flammable liquids and gases are isolated in appropriate storage containers, and make sure that they aren’t near any potential ignition sources.

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Sustainability

Eco Friendly Cleaning

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Eco Friendly Cleaning

The job is finished! The plumbing company you hired have done a terrific job on the complete bathroom renovations. From here on in, you have decided to make a conscious effort to change your bathroom cleaning system. Is there anyone out there that just loves cleaning the bathroom, apart from people with a compulsive disorder? The chemicals you use make the whole job a bit of an ordeal. Apart from the smells, things like ammonia can make you dizzy, some chemicals affect your respiration, and others give you skin allergies. The hazards of cleaning. How to stop all these health problems from starting? Switch to green cleaning.

Why would you want to do that?

  • Better for the environment
  • Better for your health
  • Better for your wallet.
  • Green cleaning tips

1.The toilet

Baking soda and vinegar. Vinegar – half a cup. Baking soda – 1 tablespoon. After you pour it inside your toilet bowl let i sit there and soak for 20 minutes. Scrub the toilet and repeat every week.

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