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Sustainability Tips and Tricks to Highlight in Your Companys Blog

Relate to Your Reader

Understand your readers’ concerns about how your business interacts with the environment. This will not only provide content for your blog but will optimize the search results that drive customers to your blog.

If your business has a direct impact on the environment, such as a delivery business, readers will want to know the sustainability tips and tricks you use to use to make your delivery vehicles more energy efficient and how you use route planning to reduce fuel consumption.

Even if your business is not directly involved in an industry tied to the environment, such as marketing or accounting, customers may still want to know how your business puts sustainability tips and tricks into effect to reduce its carbon footprint. For these kinds of businesses, you can write about how your business uses a furniture recycling program to eliminate waste or implemented an electronic document management system to go paperless.

Use Specific Examples

If your blog focuses on sustainability tips and tricks that the reader can use, make sure to include specific examples.

Thus, instead of telling readers to “reduce energy consumption,” you can explain how the majority of energy use in a typical home goes to heating and cooling. You can then provide sustainability tips and tricks to make the readers’ heating and cooling system more efficient such as cleaning their ducts and switching to efficient spiral ducts that are less prone to air leaks.

Written in this way, the reader gains knowledge of both the problem — energy waste — and some possible solutions.

Remember to Make Your Pitch

A company blog is intended to drive traffic to the company’s website. Whether you make a soft pitch or a hard pitch, remember to mention your business somewhere in the blog.

A soft pitch is intended to build your brand and define your company’s values. For example, a soft pitch might be to explain how your law firm is committed to environmental protection. This might not serve to directly sell your legal services, but can build up goodwill with potential clients who are also concerned about the environment and believe in patronizing socially conscious businesses.

Polls show that businesses cannot discount this type of brand-building. Two-thirds of customers say they are willing to spend more with companies that have sustainable practices and over 80% of Millennials expect the brands they patronize to be socially responsible.

A hard pitch is intended to get customers to use your goods or services to implement your sustainability tips and tricks. For example, a manufacturer may discuss the natural drop in efficiency as a water heater ages, then specifically pitch the customer on buying an energy saving new water heater made by the manufacturer.

You have to be careful about how “sales-y” your pitch is because consumers are sometimes turned off by infomercials. However, if your blog article setting up the pitch is well researched and presents a logical and compelling case for your company’s products, you can balance both the need to educate the reader and the need to sell your company’s goods and services.

Use Fear Judiciously

Environmentalism is sometimes dismissed as fear-mongering and guilt-tripping. When presenting your sustainability tips and tricks, try to avoid telling readers that they will destroy the world if they do not follow your advice. Instead, explain how a few tips and tricks, practiced widely, can benefit the reader, the environment, and society.

For example, toxic yard chemicals have many detrimental effects such as:

Poisoning people and animals that apply them.
Seeping into ground water and be ingested by local residents.
Robbing the soil of it natural nutrients.
Reducing biodiversity.
Causing undesirable organisms to flourish, like toxic algae.

However, rather than focusing on how detrimental these chemicals are to the environment, a natural lawn care company could quickly explain the dangers of artificial pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers and suggest natural alternatives. With the reader primed for a solution to dangerous chemicals, the blog can then pitch both the idea of natural lawn care and the business’s products and services using natural treatments.

Understand the Science

When providing sustainability tips and tricks, you should do some research into the basis for your blog post. Make sure you do not fall prey to urban legends or viral claims without first verifying them.

Fortunately, the Internet has many resources for fact-checking scientific claims. Search engines can make quick work of most assertions of fact. Moreover, you can often reach out to experts via social media or email to verify claims that you cannot verify using a search engine.

Providing misleading or incorrect advice can expose you and your company to all kinds of different problems, including:

Negative publicity: Your business could be accused of lacking expertise in providing sustainability tips and tricks or, worse yet, misleading readers.
Loss of credibility: You, as a blog writer, and your business may lose the trust of readers.
Lawsuits: In a worst-case scenario, if your sustainability tips and tricks lead to injuries or property damage, your company could be sued.

For example, suppose you promote your company’s roof coverings by saying that they are environmentally safe and non-toxic. If it turns out that the chemicals in the roof replacement material give off toxic fumes, your blog post might be used as evidence that your company was misleading consumers about the safety of your products.

Take the Time to Explain Your Sustainability Tips and Tricks

Keep in mind that readers do not have the same level of expertise in your company’s products that you have. Consequently, you should take the time in your blog posts to explain claims to environmental, sustainable, and conservation benefits.

For example, a tree removal company can provide environmental benefits, such as:

Preventing the spread of disease and pests from an infested tree to healthy trees.
Limiting the susceptibility to spreading wildfires if the tree is dead or dying.
Reducing water consumption by removing non-native or water-intensive trees.

However, for a tree removal company to just make the general claim that it is environmentally friendly and sustainable will confuse most readers. They would view tree removal as environmentally unfriendly without further explanation.

However, by taking the time to explain how your services improve the environment without adding a commensurate cost, such as carbon emissions, you might be able to persuade readers to become customers.

Be Creative

Readers searching for sustainability tips and tricks usually want to find something new. Rather than recycling the same claims that can be found all over the web, try to insert something new or, even better, present something that is contrary to the conventional wisdom.

Adding something new to the conversation gives your blog two advantages over the competition.

Your blog post might go viral as readers share your unique take.
You might draw links from other reputable sites.

Both of these benefits will not only give your blog post higher search engine visibility but will also build your company’s brand as forward-thinking and creative.

For example, while writing a blog for an equipment rental company, you might identify the reduction in waste by renting equipment rather than buying. However, you could also get creative and explain how using the newest rental equipment for each job guarantees that the reader conserves energy with the most efficient equipment available.

Give Away Something for Free

People love free stuff. Moreover, they usually do not respond well to bait-and-switch tactics, like a blog that lays out a problem but ends with “to learn my sustainability tips and tricks to solving this problem, buy my book.”

For your sustainability blog, you will likely need to balance free stuff with paid products. After all, the purpose of your company’s blog is to make money, directly or indirectly. However, companies can find many ways to give away something for free including:

Free advice: The easiest way to give something away for free is to give away free advice. To be viewed as truly valuable, however, you may need to give away free advice that is not widely available. For example, insider advice or life “hacks” that your business has developed can be the kind of free advice that goes viral and drives even more traffic to your website. For example, an online retailer might offer sustainability tips and tricks like corrugated cardboard recycling into compost and reusing its packing peanuts as drainage material in large planters.
Free solutions: Even if your products can mitigate or solve the problem identified in your blog, you can also suggest other free solutions that the average consumer can carry out. So, in addition to suggesting your company’s new air conditioner to reduce cooling costs, you might also suggest like opening windows on cool summer nights and closing blinds or curtains during the hot summer days.
Free incentives: Coupons, discounts, and giveaways are always appreciated by consumers.
Free downloads: Content, like infographics, charts, worksheets, and even kids’ activities can reinforce your educational message and build your brand as readers print out the content and hang it on their refrigerators.

Engage with Your Readers

Once you write your content, you should plan to interact with your readers. The level of engagement that readers expect has been set by social media. As a result, readers are accustomed to posting comments and receiving replies from the business, if not the blog author.

This will give you and your company the ability to begin and sustain a conversation about environmentalism and sustainability. You will have the opportunity to add information that might not have fit into the blog post. Your readers can respond with some specific tips and tricks of their own that might even improve your blog post. For example, a blog post for a pawn shop about shopping second hand might start a whole conversation about the kinds of products that a second-hand shopper can find the best deals on.

When posting sustainability tips and tricks, you might receive corrections and legitimate criticism, which is always useful. However, you will also need a policy for moderating comments received on your blog for comments that are abusive or harassing. The keys to developing a policy for moderating comments are to make your standards clear and enforce them fairly. Using automatic filters for certain words can help keep the comments from getting out of control.

Promote Your Blog

Promotion of a blog will be key to using the blog to drive traffic to your company’s website. An unpromoted blog just sits there waiting to be discovered by search engines. While this can eventually help draw readers to your site, this can be a slow process.

Instead of taking a passive approach, you can take a few active measures to increase your blog’s visibility:

Search engine optimization: Identify keywords that users enter into search engines and include those keywords in your blog. This will help your blog rank among the search results for those keywords. For example, if your used sports equipment business’s website ranks poorly for used boat for sale on search engines, write an article about the environmental benefits of buying used boats and make sure to use that phrase a few times in your blog post.
Social media promotion: Promoting articles on social media can jump start traffic to your blog. Not only can social media cause your blog post to go viral, but search engine rankings are also, in part, dependent on shares and views. As a result, virality feeds virality.
Email promotion: Create an email newsletter using your company’s email list. Existing customers are the most likely to be interested in your content since they have previously purchased your products or signed up for your email promotions.

Writing a blog that highlights your company’s commitment to the environment will draw readers to your site. Environmentalism, conservationism, and sustainability are topics of great interest among all consumers, but particularly among younger consumers. However, you must be careful to provide concrete tips and tricks that are based in fact, rather than urban legends. Moreover, your blog post should show your creativity and provide the reader with something free. Finally, make sure you promote your blog posts. This improves your blog’s visibility and ensures that readers can easily find your content.

Tips and Tricks for Blogging Consistently

Building Your Blogging Habit: How To Start

In many ways, blogging can be treated like any other habit when it comes to doing it consistently. Hopefully you will find this tips helpful in making your blogging a more regular activity.

1. Track Your Consistency

Having a visual gauge of your progress when it comes to working on your blog regularly is an essential step for long term success. If you don’t track what days you do and do not write, there will be less pressure on you to stick to the commitment.

A common approach many people take to tracking daily habits is by using a calendar. If you mark each day that you complete the habit with a symbol, like an X, then at the end of the month you will have a clear and concise visual representation of your degree of success.

Using a bullet journal can also be an effective way to track your habits. Sites such as Pinterest have countless different habit tracker designs showcased so you can find a system that works for you, both aesthetically and practically.

2. Stick to a Space, or Move Around

If this sounds like two completely opposing options, that’s because they are. It’s fully up to you to experiment and determine what yields the best results for you personally.

There are a great many merits to creating a workspace and sticking to it. Maya Angelou famously did all her writing in a hotel room. She never actually stayed in the room and slept there — she came solely to write. She would have all the staff remove all of the decorations from the wall, so she could write with no distractions but her own thoughts, a glass of brandy, a bible, and a notepad.

However, just because this sort of approach worked for Maya Angelou doesn’t mean it will work for you. And with the modern miracle that is cloud computing, your work remains untethered to any specific location no matter what device you wrote it on.

There is no wrong answer here — you should work wherever you feel most comfortable. If you much prefer your home office with your comfortable ergonomic desk chair and air conditioning, then by all means write at home.

But if sticking to one location leaves you feeling trapped and uninspired, try working on your blog in an internet cafe or at a park using a mobile hotspot. If you aren’t posting or working on your website design then your options are even wider, as you probably won’t need an internet connection to work.

The Benefits of Writing Everyday

The steps laid out above are helpful, but they do take a serious commitment. If you need a bit of extra motivation to start laying the foundation for a daily writing habit, let’s go through some of the benefits that you’ll enjoy once you start writing for your blog with this degree of consistency.

1. Your Writing Will Improve

While this may be obvious, it’s still an important factor that deserves mentioning: if you write for your blog every day, your writing will get better. Whatever you do consistently you improve at, whether you’re a chef in a restaurant or you do sales recruitment for a company that offers recruitment services. A chef who cooks every day will make better food, a sales recruiter who keeps at it will have a better sales career, and a blogger who writes every day will put out better content.

At this point it may be trite to talk about the
10,000 hour rule, yet there really is something to it. No, there is nothing magic or concrete about that specific number — your abilities do not magically transform the moment you exceed 9,999 hours dedicated to practicing a craft.

Yet the truth is, mastery is always about more than just gifts. Yes, certain predispositions and natural abilities can give anyone a leg up. Someone with genetics that make them more flexible will have an easier time becoming a contortionist than someone who has back problems running in their family. But the majority of the time, it is only when natural inclinations are combined with diligent, consistent practice over a long period of time that mastery can be achieved.

So where does the actual number in the 10,000 rule come from? The answer goes back to the ’70s, when researchers William Chase and Herbert Simon published a paper in American Scientist that drew a lot of attention. The two men were investigating the nature of expertise, with particular reference to grandmaster level chess players such as Bobby Fischer — had the paper come out today, it probably would have used Magnus Carlsen, the Norwegian grandmaster who currently holds the titles for World Chess Champion, World Rapid Chess Champion, and World Blitz Chess Champion.

At nearly 30 years old, Carlsen has likely exceeded the 10,000 hour rule many times over. If you work a job full-time — eight hours a day, five days a week — for a decade, then you will have dedicated just over 20,000 hours to that job. That is the power of committing your time.

2. You’ll Be Less Stressed About Deadlines

Even if you run your own blog and so your deadlines are self-imposed, they are still important. They can also still become a source of stress if they are not met. When we fail to stick to goals we have and promises we make to ourselves, it can take a serious toll on our self-worth.

If you plan to make a certain number of posts each week or each month and you stop hitting that quota, you can start to lose trust in yourself and in your abilities. By writing each day, we can avoid spiraling into a pit of self-doubt. Writing each day keeps our objectives at the forefront of our minds and guarantees that we will take steps toward them.

With a well-established writing routine, deadlines and objectives stop feeling so scary. Instead, they feel much more manageable and within reach. This is because we’re breaking the tasks we have for our blog into more doable daily segments, rather than trying to cram a bunch of writing in at once and burning ourselves out.

3. You’ll Connect With Your Inner Self

In many ways, introspection is the fuel oil of the imagination. Looking within is how we find what our core values and beliefs are. While your blog may be topical or informative rather than purely creative and fictitious, your fundamental values still have an important bearing on what you write.

When we get in the habit of sitting down to write every day, we also end up cultivating the habit of listening to ourselves and tuning into our inner world each day. In some ways, closing the window curtains of our room when we sit down to write for our blog operates on two levels. We are shutting out some of the visual distractions of the world so we can achieve better focus, but we are also symbolically shutting out the noise and information that is external to ourselves so we may bring our inner self into sharper relief.

Avoiding Burnout

With all this talk of consistency, dedication, determination, and hard work, it’s important to take the time to address a very real challenge of honing one’s craft: burnout. Running a popular, high-quality blog is challenging and involved work, but there’s no point to putting all of that work in if you can’t sustain it. It’s essential that any person, regardless of whether they are a blogger, a novelist, a painter, a basketball player, gives themselves the time they need to rest and recover.

In fact, one of the reasons to write every day is specifically to avoid the burnout that can come with having to cram all that work into a short window. However, writing in smaller but more frequent sessions can become draining as well if one does it over a long period of time. It’s important to listen to yourself and to notice when the work is starting to overwhelm you and cause anxiety.

There are two different approaches you can take when it comes to avoiding or mitigating burnout. One option is to try to avoid burnout by remaining mindful of how you’re feeling each day, and taking a break when you’re noticing some extra tension or resistance associated with working on your blog that day. Or you can build breaks into your schedule, so that you don’t write on certain days each week, or you take an extended break once or twice a month. This approach is useful in that it doesn’t require as much thought, although it also means that it can take some adjusting to find the right balance.

Beyond scheduling breaks, everyone has different methods for disengaging from work and taking time to relax and recharge. Going outside can be a highly effective way to manage stress and promote psychological well-being. Research from Cornell University has found that as few as ten minutes spent in nature can have a measurable impact on mitigating stress and anxiety. While the study was specifically conducted with younger participants aged 15-30, there is no reason to believe these effects would not extend to people of any age.

Other people use natural medicines to promote relaxation. There are a whole host of teas that are helpful for anxiety out there. For folks who live where it is legal,
medical marijuana products can also be a helpful option. It’s worth it to take the time to experiment and find tools that work for you.

Keeping your blog’s output strong and consistent will never be a walk in the park. It takes hard work and dedication, as well as sufficient pacing and mindfulness to avoid burnout. However, once you have taken the time to experiment and find the right habits, everything should fall into place.

Hopefully these methods help make the process a bit easier. Through building blogging into your daily routine and using proven strategies to stay focused, you can ensure that your blog reaches its potential.

5 Tips On Starting Your Law Firm Blog

1. SEO

What is search engine optimization anyway, and how does it apply to starting a law firm blog? SEO is the practice of essentially making your blog more prevalent in search engine results through the use of keywords, links, and other strategies that will make your blog pull in those results. It may sound easy at first, but content marketing is actually fairly complex, and it’s easy to mess it up. The appeal of SEO lies in the fact that it’s much more organic than typical pay per click ads. People will find your blog because they were actually seeking out a specific topic or keyword, rather than because an ad was thrown at them out of nowhere. This actually makes SEO much more successful than typical traditional advertising. You will focus more on people who actually want or need your services, which leads to a higher lead closure rate. It’s a matter of targeting the right potential clients, rather than casting a wide net and “catching” the entire audience, which will inevitably contain a lot of people who never would have pursued your services in the first place. This means that ultimately, you’ll be getting a higher value out of SEO than you would out of alternate advertising services.

With that being said, it’s not enough to add SEO to your website when starting a law firm blog. You’ll also need to understand what kinds of keywords will appeal most to your potential clients, and what will fold properly into your blog. Therefore, you should consider working with an SEO company. An SEO content company will be able to provide blog posts, articles, lists, and sometimes even videos that will better furnish your blog and make it easier for you to educate your client base. Law firms could attempt to come up with their own content, but the fact is that they lack the ability to properly strategize. You may be able to come up with a winning article, but is it going to incorporate keywords and phrases in an appealing, organic way? For that matter, coming up with blog content takes more time and energy than you might think. This is why, when starting a blog firm, you’ll likely find more success with digital marketing company than you would when attempting to create content on your own.

2. Understand Explaining Versus Info-Dumping

Whether or not you’re working with a professional SEO content provider, you need to think about how much your potential client base needs to know about your law firm, versus how much will overwhelm them. The fact is that law firm blogs do need to educate people in some way or the other. A lot of people don’t fully understand the differences between different legal specialties. It can be all too easy to “info-dump” on your clients rather than fully educating them. A firm may very well be intending to educate its audience on what their personal injury attorneys have to offer professionally. However, the average person doesn’t understand the minutiae of an attorney’s job. If they’re reading and understand nothing, they may very well end up losing interest and moving on to another website within a matter of seconds. At the same time, these people shouldn’t be left in the cold without the information they need.

Fortunately, there are ways that you can both focus on starting a law firm blog and educate your clients at the same time. Your blog posts can be framed in the manner of offering helpful tips, or perhaps a “guide” to the services that the law firm offers. If your law firm has a lot of criminal defense attorneys available, for example, a blog post that offers a “crash course” on choosing the right attorney for your case might be useful. A major benefit of these types of blogs is that they teach people, and therefore make them feel more trusting of the firm that specializes in these types of blog posts. If you feel as if a blog has already offered you a number of beneficial resources, you may find that you’re more likely to work with the firm that hosts the blog itself. The point of a blog is to be somewhat personal and to give a touch that can’t easily be found through a typical article written in a more formal style. The last thing you want is to lose those qualities by bogging your blog down in heavy language.

3. Consider Your Website’s Structure

When starting a law firm blog, you’ll probably be initially focused on its content. And of course, content is remarkably important. But you also need to think about what your website looks like, and how functional it is. After all, there’s no point in starting a law firm blog if it’s not reasonably easy to navigate and aesthetically pleasing. One major reason why a lot of law firms hire web design companies to help them launch their blogs is that they either need help in starting a blog in the first place or because they need to revamp the websites that they already have.

There are several different factors to consider when plotting out your blog’s overall design. You’ll want to consider, firstly, the blog’s ease of access and whether or not it’s difficult to use. Say your client becomes interested in a post on family law. If they then want to find more posts about family law, they may find themselves sifting through hundreds or even thousands of posts, before eventually giving up and leaving your blog behind. If your blog posts are grouped together by tags, this makes it much easier for clients to read up more and learn through your blog, thus validating your blog’s purpose in the first place. If you really want readers to trust you and the content you’re posting about, you should also make sure that the blog website in question doesn’t strain the eyes or create an uncomfortable, difficult to read experience. This may involve changing the color of your text against the colors of the backdrop, and creating a gentle experience that isn’t hard on the eyes. You may also want to consider how to embed content without potentially slowing down your blog. These are all factors that a professional web design company will be able to help you with, regardless of your own skill level.

4. Don’t Forget The Personal Touch

As previously mentioned, one of the major reasons why some considering starting a law firm blog is that they need a way to personally connect with clients. Of course, you’ll want to be professional and project a confident, responsible image to the web at large. But you should also think about the possibility that it may be easier to connect with people if you let them have at least an idea of who you and the others working at your law firm are, outside of simply being lawyers.

This can be accomplished in a number of different ways. You could post a quick addition to your blog about you and the rest of the law firm attending a company picnic. Alternatively, your attorneys could pick specific topics to blog about. Clients like it in particular when these posts are somewhat revealing, and therefore don’t shy away from actual stories. This shouldn’t be difficult for you and your fellow attorneys to provide, but it’s understandable that you might feel uncomfortable with this at first. You should consult with your digital marketing agency before providing the type of content that they can turn into an interesting post. You should also consider adding guest contributors. Not only will this occasional disruption of routine potentially make the blog more exciting; but guest bloggers, no matter what their background, can offer a perspective that would potentially be far less accessible than any of the alternatives. You can always review whatever your guest blogger added, to ensure that it’s well-written. But if it’s the content you were looking for already, you may very well find that your initial guest blog posts may become more permanent stints on the way to starting your law firm blog.

5. Stay Consistent

In so many ways, starting a law firm blog is all about consistency; however, this can be easier said than done. All too often, the heads of different law firms order that a blog is started, only to find that there’s more to do, and the blog isn’t an instant success. Too many law firm blogs have been shut down because their founders were impatient and acted before properly prioritizing what their readers want

If your blog stops posting for months at a time, people will likely forget that it existed in the first place and move on to the next blog. At the same time, if you bombard readers with too many posts in too short a time, they’ll probably become embarrassed and overwhelmed. For that reason, you should consider having a set schedule for your blog to know when and what is posted. If you’re better able to remember your blog’s schedule, you’ll probably be able to focus on running your law firm, without worrying about the annoying alerts you’ll get regard confused readers who carry questions that you simply can’t answer.

So much of starting a law firm blog is reliant on appearance. What does your website look like? What will people think about the opinions that you reflect? A major reason why the heads of law firms sometimes hesitate over starting blogs in the first place is that they’re worried that they’ll be a waste of time. Yet we know, due to the traffic generated by these types of blogs, that they aren’t. Therefore, you should invest not only in the blog itself but on optimizing it for search engines. Ultimately, this will help you attract more clients than you thought possible!

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