Lightning Labels Blog

Today is Blog Action Day

October 15th has been designated as Blog Action Day. It is an effort by a group of influential bloggers to get the entire blogosphere to blog about one topic on one day. It is going to be an annual event and the topic this year is the environment. So in honor of Blog Action Day, today I am going to be writing about the environment and labels.

The environmental impact of packaging has been in the news a lot lately. Walmart have their packaging scorecard which evaluates suppliers on the sustainability of their packaging. Coke announced last month their plans to recycle or reuse 100% of the plastic bottles they produce. Many companies such as Green Mountain Coffee, Biota bottled water, and the UK company Sainsburys have adopted sustainable packaging materials in their products. But what about labels?

Most people focus on the impact of the product container and not the label, but the label is an important part of the packaging. Here are three things you can do to be more environmentally responsible in your labeling:

1. Choose the smallest label size that will work - you want the label to do its job by promoting your product and providing all the necessary information but do you really need a 4" x 6" label? Maybe a 3.5" x 5" label would work just as well. By choosing a smaller label you are using less label material, and best of all you will pay less for your labels.
2. Print your labels on sustainable materials - there are now new label materials that are environmentally friendly - here at Lightning Labels we are proud to offer EarthFirst PLA material, which is made from corn, an annually renewable resource.
3. Order only what you need - there is no need to buy a year's supply of labels, you don't know what will happen in the coming year and you may be left with labels you cannot use.

If do these things you will be lessening the environmental impact of your label purchases. Happy Blog Action Day.

Writing about Blogs

For a year now I have been writing a column about blogs for the excellent label printing trade publication, Label & Narrow Web. You can read the latest column here. I take a different topic around label printing and I wrote about the blogs that are most relevant to that topic.

Our newsletter, The Lightning Flash, has just been printed and the summer issue is on its way to all current Lightning Labels customers now. In this issue I have also written about blogs, but this time I have a more general focus. I have featured the five blogs I consider most relevant to small business owners, and I have also listed a few blogs that are relevant to specific industries. You can read the complete article here.

A Wealth of Information

I try and spend 15-20 minutes every day reading blogs. The business world is changing fast, and I want to keep as up to date as I can. There is so much useful information out there, and the great thing is in the blogosphere it is all free. I subscribe to around 50 blogs. Now, I don't read every entry from every one of these, but I at least skim the headlines of all of them.

Here is a list of my top 5 favorite blogs - these are the ones that I try and read even when I am busy:

Duct Tape Marketing - hands down the best small business marketing blog out there. If you own a small business you should be reading it.
USAToday's Small Business Connection - a surprisingly active blog with great snippets of information for small business.
Seth Godin's blog - regular updates from one of America's most innovative business thinkers.
Search Engine Watch - I like to keep up to date with what is going on at the search engines and this blog will always summarize the changes for me.
WebPackaging Innovations - a new addition to my reading, this blog details innovative new packaging for consumer products.

I use Bloglines as my news aggregator and all my blogs are neatly organized there. I also get regular feeds from various label printing and other industry magazines. One of the other neat things I do is subscribe to what is called a custom search feed. I subscribe to the string "Lightning Labels", so any blog that mentions us I am notified about this automatically here.

New Blogsmith Column Launched

I am delighted to be a new columnist for Label and Narrow Web magazine, a leading trade publication for the label industry. My new column is titled The Blogsmith, and with a title like that not surprisingly I will be writing about blogs. My main focus will be blogs that are of interest to people in the label industry - from a technical and management perspective.

In my first column I introduce the readers to blogs, featuring a couple of excellent blogs where you can learn about this new media tool. There is also a feature on the excellent RFID Weblog. You can read the first column here.

Lightning Labels Blog Featured

Wendy Maynard, the marketing maven and author of the Kinetic Ideas blog featured us on her blog yesterday. I answer some questions about blogging - why I do it and how it helps business.

Kinetic Ideas is an excellent blog for anyone interested in small business marketing. Wendy provides lots of practical ideas that are often easy to implement and inexpensive, and can take you beyond traditional marketing.

Small Business Blog of the Day

We are delighted to have been featured today on Pajama Market's Small Business Blog of the Day.

Pajama Market is a great resource for small business bloggers, because it not only features a new blog every day, it also provides useful commentary on each blog.

Some Blogging Basics

If you are new to the world of blogs here are five quick tips to help you:

1. You can comment on any blog post by clicking on the Comment link at the bottom of each post. I encourage you to join the conversation and send a comment.
2. You will also see a Permalink link at the bottom of each post. As you might guess, this is the permanent link for this blog post, so you can save this item to your favorites or send the link to someone else.
3. The other link at the bottom of each post is the category. Every blog post will be placed into a category, and you click on this link to see all the items in this category.
4. In the left column you will see different ways to subscribe to this blog. If you are new to blogs the easiest way is to enter your email address and click "Get email updates". This is managed by Feedblitz, and you will receive an email from them every time there is a new post.
5. At the very bottom of the left column you will see my Blogroll. This is a list of blogs that I read on a regular basis. You can learn a lot by exploring the different blogs here.

As I said I encourage you to place comments at any time, and if you have any questions please email me. And welcome to the blogosphere.

Help with Blog Creation

Before I created the Lightning Labels Blog I had been reading and researching blogs for several weeks. One of the blogs I came across that has been most useful is Duct Tape Marketing. I purchased their Blog Lightning product (with a name like that how could I refuse!), and it took only a few hours to get completely set up with our blog. It has been an indispensable guide for me.

I never like to stick with just one person's opinion, so I also purchased the book Blog Wild! by Andy Wibbels. This was an easy to read casually written book, I was able to read it cover to cover on a flight from Denver to Washington DC. The interesting thing is that both resources contained much of the same information so I knew I was on the right track. I will continue to refer to these resources as the Lightning Labels blog evolves.

For anyone new to business blogging, I heartily recommend both resources.

Lightning Labels Blog Launches

This is no April Fools joke - we have launched a blog here at Lightning Labels. We will use this platform to keep you informed about developments in the world of custom labels and digital label printing. We will try and make it interesting and relevant for you, as well as entertaining. We will be sharing a variety of topics with you, as well as changes here at Lightning Labels. Feel free to add comments at any time.