Image via Wikipedia

I’ve always been troubled by Earth Day. On the one hand, it’s nice to give Mother Earth a day all her own. A day when we all stop to recognize her beauty, and make a more conscious effort to treat her right. Which leads to my trouble with Earth Day. It’s frightening that she only gets one day. ONE DAY?! Surely she deserves more TLC than one day’s worth. She deserves 365 days of TLC. After all, she’s no spring chicken.

That said, whether you’re an eco-conscious employee or a tree-hugging business owner, every little bit counts. But let’s take it beyond that one bleeding heart office worker who is always fighting the good fight alone. Make it a top-down initiative.

If your entire office is chipping in to reduce the ecological footprint, imagine the difference you can make. Large businesses matter. Small businesses matter. Heck, even solo-operation home office workers matter.

Take a look at the list below to see how you can improve your efforts. I’m not asking you to physically hug a tree or make a decision to “live off the land,” but I am asking you to implement at least five things on this list. You can do that…right?

Paper, Products & Supplies

1. Institute an office recycle program by planting clearly posted bins in high traffic areas of your office for paper, and do the same in your kitchen area for aluminum cans, bottles and cardboard.
2. Purchase green or recycled products. If you’re interested in seeing how far we’ve come in terms of greening, check out this Wall Street Journal “by-the-numbers” overview.
3. Attach a “think twice before printing” line to your email signature and follow suit…avoid the “Command + P” or “Ctrl + P” button.
4. When you DO need to print, set up your printer to print double sided and in draft quality. If you need multiple copies, print one and copy the rest. According to this ZDNet post, it takes about 10 times more energy to manufacture a sheet of paper than to copy an image onto it.
5. Remember note taking? If you’re an old schooler like me who still uses the occasional pad of paper, reuse the blank side of used sheets of (recycled) paper. Waste not, want not.
6. Upload all user guides, employee handbooks, benefits packets and any other forms to shared drives or intranet portals.
7. Use environmentally safe cleaning products. There are loads of brick-and-mortar retailers that carry them, or you can buy online.
8. Institute laser and ink cartridge recycling programs. You can even make a bit of money by taking them to your local Staples store through their Eco Easy Program. (You might even consider donating the proceeds to a local environmental organization.)
9. Ditch the plastic ware and stock the office kitchen with reusable dishes, cups and mugs. While you’re at it, keep your caffeine addicts running with fair trade coffee.

   Equipment

10. Set all office equipment (including computers) to energy save mode. Pretty self-explanatory. Most devices have an energy setting. Find it. Use it.
11. Disconnect all equipment before leaving for the day. Also, if there’s equipment in the office you only use sporadically, only plug it in when you need to use it.
12. Place ads for any outdated furniture on recycle sites such as Freecycle or One Work Place.
13. Be sure to maintain your HVAC systems by replacing outdated equipment and regularly changing ac filters.
14. In the summer, set temperature controls to 75 to 80 degrees during regular office hours and above 80 once employees have left for the day. The same applies for the wintertime with heat settings.

    Lighting

15. Replace incandescent bulbs with compact fluorescent lights. Also replace incandescent EXIT signs with LED signs. According to Salt River Project, they use about one-tenth the wattage and last 50 times longer than incandescent-lamp signs
16. Set your lights to function on a timer so they automatically turn off after regular business hours. Also, turn the lights off when no one is in the room (such as the kitchen, meeting rooms, bathrooms, etc.)
17. Use natural light whenever possible to avoid using unnecessary overhead lights. A little Vitamin D is good for you.

    Transportation

18. Provide incentives for employees who drive hybrid vehicles, vanpool, carpool, bike or take public transportation to work. Gift cards, extra vacation days and raffle entries are all great ways to entice employees to commute smarter.
19. Whenever possible, encourage employees to telecommute. In fact, telecommuting can actually increase productivity and lower costs. The White House even conducted a study to support this notion.

    Miscellaneous

20. Avoid spreading harmful metal contaminants into the environment by recycling batteries. You can even find battery-recycling centers near you.
21. Either get qualified yourself or send a company representative to a LEED certification course. It could save your company a significant amount of money AND benefit the environment. A win-win, yes? Find a U.S. Green Building Council Chapter near you.
22. Enlist your office green thumbs and start an office garden. Not only will you and your employees be eating healthier, but you’ll be able to take comfort in knowing you’re doing something extremely innovative and altruistic.

Granted, some of these are merely common sensical reminders, but hopefully some of the tips listed above get you thinking about changing some of your office habits. And not just on the 22nd of every April but year round.

There are probably hundreds, maybe even thousands of ways we can all be better environmental citizens and we’ve only touched on 25 of them here. What are some other ways you’ve found to conserve resources in your business operations? Leave them in the comments below and help us grow the list.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Five Green Business Trends For 2010 (smallbiztrends.com)
• 5 Sites to Help Make Your Business Greener (smallbiztrends.com)
• When Earth Day Is Everyday At The Office, Used Office Furniture Recycling (prweb.com)
• How to Engage Employees in Workplace Greening (smallbiztrends.com)

It’s true these days, that you don’t need to know much about back-end coding to have a good website. In fact, there are a lot of really great web tools out there that can help you build a website rather quickly.

But what about SEO (or search engine optimization)? Do you need to know much about that? Well, yes…and no.

SEO can be a tricky, tricky beast, but most builder tools, including Newtek’s SiteCenter, have some pretty nifty components built in to help. And a basic understanding doesn’t hurt either.

Last week I sat in on a Social Media Club Phoenix seminar delivered by Evo Terra, an authority on the subject. Without getting too bogged down in the minutia of it all, he said there are only 5 things that matter for SEO, and as long as you pay attention to them, you’ll be well ahead of most others in the SEO game.

In case you don’t have time to listen to Evo’s presentation (even though I urge you to invest 15 minutes of your time because it will be worth it), here are the 5 things that really matter:

Write great content: According to old school thought, most always believed that there was a tried-and-true formula for achieving keyword density. Ignore this. Just write great content that will truly add value. Key things to keep in mind:

• The more pages on your site the better (Just make sure each and every page is necessary and adds value)
• Roughly 500 words is the sweet spot for amount of content per page. Obviously if the page doesn’t call for it, don’t worry about it.
• Investigate the popularity of your keywords. Find the phrasing that your audience will likely be searching. In addition to Google’s Keyword Tool, try using Google Insights for Search as well. Here’s a screen shot of a search I ran:

Write Smart Titles: This is SO crucial! Keep these tips in mind:

• Put your keywords up front in the title. If you’re writing a blog post on your site about hiking with dogs, title it “Hiking with Dogs: Three Safety Tips to Keep in Mind” RATHER than “Three Safety Tips to Keep in Mind When Hiking with Dogs”
• Don’t try to be pithy, cute or clever. Title your pages and posts in a way that gives away the secret. There are no spoilers in SEO.
• Invest 10 minutes to find the best title that will deliver the best results. Write out three different titles and pick the best.

Use H1 Tags: This is the tag that really tells the reader what the page is about. Revisit the “Write Smart Titles” tip because the same rules apply here as well. Also, make sure you only use one H1 tag per page. Using more than one will only confuse Google.

Link Text Matters: Link text is the text you use to link to various pieces of information both on your site and off of your site. Key tips to keep in mind:

• For better search results, link concepts, not things. Take this sentence for instance:

• Keep the conversation going with additional links, not only to your own content that relates, but outside content as well. It just makes you a better digital citizen. If you have a blog on your page, look into Zemanta.

Clicks Come From Descriptions: Today, description tags play a singular role: to entice visitors seeing you in a search to click to your site. So in other words…write it well, and write it for human beings, not Google crawlers.  Here is what the description looks like in a search:

Like Evo said, pay attention to these five things and you’ll already be ahead of the game. When it comes to the basics of SEO, have you found there are other foundational things to pay attention to when optimizing your website or blog? Leave your helpful nuggets in the comments below and let’s keep the conversation going.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Getting started with SEO (e1evation.com)
• Cooking Up Great SEO: An Analogy in Photos (seomoz.org)
• Few Valuable Tips On Improving Search Engine Ranking (ronmedlin.com)
• Optimize Your Brand for Sharing and Social Search in 11 Steps (briansolis.com)
• 11 Mind-Blowing Reasons Your Company Needs Facebook (convinceandconvert.com)
• SEO Trends to Watch for in 2010 (smallbiztrends.com)

I’ve read a lot of South By Southwest reviews since returning from Austin, and rather than try to talk about the event in general, I thought I would share a few key learnings I took away from the interactive sessions, led by some of the industry’s heaviest hitters and most brilliant minds.

One of my favorite sessions was led by Brian Solis. If you’ve even started to look into social media adoption for your business, you’ve likely heard of Brian Solis. He is globally recognized as one of the most brilliant thought leaders in the new media world.

Soon after Brian kicked things off, I knew we were in for a good session. Here’s proof:

His featured a few surprise guest panelists, including Comcast’s Frank Eliason, Foursquare’s Dennis Crowley and Altimeter Group’s Jeremiah Owyang. All were included in his new book creating lots of genuine buzz called “Engage!” I’d offer to loan you my copy, but it’s so good you’ll want to go back to it over and over again. It just hit the shelves last week.

That said, I’d like to share a few of the highlights from that particular session:

Best Tips

• There’s been so much talk about scalability and social media. Essentially, we need to start showing some ROI that justifies the time investment demanded by truly engaging social media. There is no golden rule to social media measurement though. Define what it is that you want to measure (whatever makes the most sense for your unique business) and start measuring it. Check out any of these free tools to get started:
  • www.socialmention.com, www.trackur.com, or www.sm2.techrigy.com
• He went on to say that before we can measure, though, we have to listen. Everything starts with listening and research. Take a look at this really cool graph he partnered with JESS3 to create. It’s called the conversation prism and encapsulates most of what’s happening online…socially at least.

Best Soundbites

• “Become the brand you want to inspire” (Said in the context of having a presence online and engaging with others. We earn our reputation based on how we engage and bring value to the community.)

• “When it comes to CRM (Customer Relationship Management), drop the ‘C.’ It’s about Relationships above all else, whether you’re interacting with a customer or not.” (Brought up in a discussion with Frank Eliason dealing with social media as a customer service vehicle)

• “We report to people who don’t care about transparency. Return on Investment is really Return on Ignorance. Figure out what you want to measure and measure it.” (Said when discussing the challenges of getting buy-in from leadership. As mentioned, figure out what you’d like to measure and measure it.)

• “While establishing a presence is elementary, captivating audiences is artful.” (He said this shortly after indicating that brands need to become the CNN’s of their industry. More on this later…)

Given that Solis is an authority on social engagement, he has a lot to say about a lot that happens in the space. I’ve shared the nuggets of wisdom that really stood out to me, but I highly encourage you to pick up a copy of his book. (No, I’m not tied in any way to the success of his book, though I wish I was…) At the very least, add him to your bookmarks bar, if only to get some tips on how to better listen to what people are saying about you in the social sphere, and hopefully you’ll be ready to engage online if you’re not already.

So for those of you already elbow-deep into a social media plan, who are your social media heroes? Who do you follow willingly? Let us know in the comments below. Engage for crying out loud. It’s fun.

Well, this is a little embarrassing… Earlier this week, reports began to surface that the good folks at rollingstone.com—yes, the Rolling Stone—forgot to renew their domain name.

So instead of being greeted with this (their website), they were greeted with this (a parked page that their domain registrar put up in its place).

To be fair, Rolling Stone quickly blamed the incident on a “glitch,” but for the purposes of this blog post, let’s just say they flat-out forgot to renew their domain name.

Why? Because believe it or not this happens all the time. Ordinary people like you and me inadvertently let their registration lapse, and sometimes lose their domain name for good as a result.

So don’t pull a Rolling Stone. Not only is it embarrassing, you could be putting your brand at risk.

A lesson in domain afterlife

Most people aren’t aware of what happens to a domain after it expires. And it’s a little more complicated than you might think.

Let’s go over the typical stages of expiration (in this order):

1. Grace period. Depending on your registrar, this could be anywhere from a week to 30 days. You can renew your domain during the grace period without penalty, but your domain may be routed to a parked page in the meantime, just like the one used for rollingstone.com.

2. Redemption period. This period can also vary at different registrars, but you’re usually looking at 30-40 days. During the redemption period, the domain is still retained for you, but there is often an additional fee to purchase the domain back.

3. Deletion period. This can take anywhere from a couple of days to a week. During the deletion phase, your domain cannot be renewed until it’s completely released to the public, at which point you will have to compete with anyone else who might be making an attempt to pick up your domain. Unfortunately, for this, there are “bots” out there programmed to snatch up domains as soon as they are released to the public for the sole purpose of selling them back to the previous owner for an excessive profit.

What you can do to avoid a “Rolling Stone”

Fortunately, these steps are rather simple:

1. Keep the email address at your registrar up-to-date. A renewal reminder will be sent to the “admin” contact they have listed for you. If you registered your domain through your web hosting/services provider, be sure your email addresses are up-to-date with them (for example, if you registered your domain through us, we’ll send you multiple email reminders before your domain expires).

2. Know what your expiration date is. If you don’t know when it expires, find out and put it on your calendar.

3. Renew now. You can renew your domain in advanced for up to 10 years. If you can swing the cost, you won’t need to worry about your domain for a decade.

4. Check your website regularly. You might be thinking, with a grace period AND a redemption period, how would anyone not realize their domain expired? Well, when was the last time you pulled up your domain on a web browser? If you don’t remember, make it a habit. Not only will you avoid losing your domain, you’ll catch any other issues your website might be experiencing.

So there you have it, a few easy steps to be sure you never let your domain registration lapse.

Last week, I offered three reasons to give a Do-It-Yourself website builder a try. While many of the emerging builders perfectly fit the needs of business owners desiring a hands-on approach to the website design process, it’s not for everyone.

There are many reasons to consider going the custom web design route, especially if you have more complex needs and are willing to invest more resources into the overall process.

Without Further ado, take a look at three reasons to go the custom website design route:

1.) You don’t even want to entertain the thought of doing it yourself

Let’s face it. When the lawn needs mowing, you’d rather make a call to a landscaping company than head out there to start yanking on the mower chain. (I’m right there with you on this one…no judgment.) Just because you can do it yourself doesn’t mean you should.

More importantly, as a small business owner, spare time is likely something you don’t often encounter. I was talking with my hairdresser about the builder vs. custom route the other day and she said, “I have no idea where I would find the time in my day to do it. Besides, I’d rather be doing what I love…cutting hair.” Therefore, if you’re a person already pressed for time, custom is definitely your solution.

2.) You have some specific needs for your web design

Don’t get me wrong…website builder tools can meet the needs of many, but for those with specific needs, a custom design is the right choice.  Here are a few reasons why:

• You have a WordPress blog (or perhaps a Drupal or Joomla CMS) that you’d like to integrate into your website design
• You already have a shopping cart application, and want to carry it over to your new website design
• You’ve envisioned a website that has lots of advanced Flash applications
• You’d like to integrate a Pay-Per-Click campaign and need the help of a web design professional
• You need a custom database, or segmented log-in pages

3.) You’re not quite sure what you want…

If you know you need a website, but you’re having trouble envisioning the look and feel, tapping the creative mind of a professional is a very enticing choice. Or maybe you have a loose idea of what you want, but would like to see and hear some different options from a well-established web design professional. This is probably one of the biggest benefits when it comes to going the custom route, not to mention the SEO advantages that come along with seeking the expertise of a professional. P.S. If you’re looking for some inspiration to get your own creative juices in motion, this is a great place to start: www.smashingmagazine.com

Whether you go with a website builder tool like  Newtek SiteCenter, or opt for a custom solution, the fact is, there is a solution for everyone, and we’d be happy to help you.

We’d love to hear from you. If you just completed, or are in the process of completing a new website using a builder tool, do you have any tips to share? Same question goes out to those of you currently working with a custom web designer.

If you’re a loyal NPR listener, are married to your New York Times subscription or even a casual CNN viewer, you already know that small businesses are expected to be the underdog champions of the economic recovery.

As every small business owner knows, selecting the right merchant processing plan will weigh heavily on 2010 growth.

There are many merchant processing providers available to you, which is why it’s important to cut through the clutter quickly. In the interest of narrowing your options efficiently, we’ve identified five questions you need to prospective processing providers before making a decision:

1. How satisfied are your customers?
   If you’re looking for a long-term solution, this one is important. Don’t be afraid to ask for references from current customers, and search the potential provider’s website for testimonials. Your best advocates in this search are your fellow customers. And if you are handling the back-end aspect of your site yourself, or have a consultant doing it for you, these additional bonuses would be incredibly nice to have: a comprehensive developer library for quick troubleshooting and constant access to customer support (see #2 for more).

2. Will you be there for me 24/7/365?
   Many times, when things go wrong, they don’t happen between the hours of 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. Monday through Friday. If you operate a 24-hour business and you experience a glitch at 3 a.m. on a Sunday morning, it’s essential that your provider be available 24/7/365 to you to help you through the issue promptly.

3. Are your rates competitive with other solutions?
   This is a tricky one as you need to search for the right balance when it comes to rates and fees. If fees seem excessively low, and it looks too good to be true, trust your gut because it probably is. On the flip side, for businesses traditionally viewed as “high risk” (those like travel and tourism businesses that rely almost exclusively on advanced booking), you’ll want to ensure you receive a fair assessment all the way down the line, from gateway fees to transaction fees. Look for a provider that will provide rates that can easily compete with most popular gateways, and ask if they’ll provide a complimentary cost analysis if you provide your statement. And above all, be leery of any provider that locks you into a contract or charges a cancellation fee, both of which are non-existent with Newtek.

4. Will your payment solution integrate easily with my website?
   Again, whether you’re handling the back-end yourself or have hired a consultant to do it for you, this one is incredibly important. If I had to guess, you (or your technical consultant) don’t have time to go looking around for documentation on integrating the payment solution into your custom shopping cart. Sign on with a provider that will readily provide access to web service support in .NET, PHP and more. (If any of these terms are foreign to you, you’re not alone. Click here.)

5. How quickly will I (or my client) have access to transaction funds?
   The goal of any ecommerce plan is to make the sale and see the funds hit your bank account, right? Before committing to working with any merchant processing provider, be sure to inquire about the speed of the process. With some providers it may take 4 to 5 days to see the funds hit, whereas many other programs (like NewtPay) deliver funds in as few as 48 hours. Cash flow is vital to any growth plan, so fund availability is an important factor to include in the decision-making process.

These five questions will help you find a solution that will inevitable become an integral piece of your growth plan in 2010. This list is in no way complete, but rather provides a baseline for early research. In your opinion, what other factors should be considered in identifying and implementing a merchant processing plan? Help us add to the list in the comments below…