The Immediate Upsell: Why the Best Time to Offer More Is Right After They Say Yes
A customer who's just said yes to one purchase is, for a brief window, in a fundamentally different mindset than they were five minutes earlier — they've already made the harder decision to trust…
The Set-Up Mailing: Why a Heads-Up Before Your Call Beats Calling Cold
A phone call from a complete stranger starts at a real disadvantage — the recipient has no context, no warning, and every reason to treat the call as an interruption. A brief piece of advance…
Always Explain Why: The Persuasive Power of Giving Customers a Reason for Your Price
A price with no explanation invites suspicion, whether it's surprisingly low or surprisingly high. A customer left to guess why something costs what it does tends to assume the least flattering…
The Hidden Asset in Your Business: Licensing What You've Already Figured Out
A business balance sheet lists the obvious assets — equipment, inventory, cash, receivables. It rarely lists the genuinely valuable things a business has quietly figured out over years of trial and…
The Moving Parade: Why Customer Follow-Up Should Never Really End
A customer who wasn't ready to buy more from you six months ago might be ready today, simply because their own circumstances changed — a new budget, a new need, a problem that finally became…
Getting Better Results From Vendors: Paying for Performance Instead of Just a Fee
A vendor or agency paid a flat fee, regardless of results, has limited incentive to go beyond what's strictly required to justify that fee. A vendor whose compensation is directly tied to the results…
Strategic Bartering: Trading What You Make for What You Need
A business that manufactures or sells a product often has real, usable leverage sitting unused: the gap between what that product costs them to produce and what it sells for at retail. Trading that…
Structuring an Endorsement Partnership: Who Gets Paid, and When
Most partnership advice stops at "find a complementary business and cross-promote." The harder, more valuable question is how to actually structure the deal — who pays for the promotion, who gets…
Does RSS Help SEO? Separating the Myth From What Actually Works
"Submit your RSS feed for instant backlinks and higher rankings" was a genuinely common piece of SEO advice for years. It was never quite true in the way it was sold, and it's even less true today…
Podcast RSS Feeds: The Technical Backbone Every Podcaster Still Needs
Of everywhere RSS got hyped in the mid-2000s, podcasting is the one place the hype turned out to be completely justified. Every major podcast app — regardless of platform — still pulls episodes…
RSS Automation: Connecting Feeds to Zapier, Email, and Other Tools
The most genuinely useful modern job for RSS isn't feeding a human reader at all — it's feeding automation. Nearly every automation platform can trigger an action the moment a new item appears in a…
RSS in 2026: What It's Actually Still Used For
RSS was pitched for years as a general-purpose traffic and marketing tool — something every website needed to "explode visitors" or "boost search rankings." Almost none of that framing held up. RSS…
RSS Product Feeds for E-commerce: Powering Shopping Listings and Affiliate Networks
While general-purpose RSS mostly faded from consumer use, a specific variant quietly became essential infrastructure for online retail: the structured product feed. Shopping platforms, comparison…
Using RSS for Competitive and Content Monitoring
While RSS mostly disappeared as a consumer reading tool, it remains a genuinely useful, low-profile way to keep tabs on a lot of sources at once — competitor blogs, industry news, or brand mentions…
Author and Book Publicity: Building Credibility Through Publishing
Publishing a book still functions as one of the more effective credibility signals a business owner or professional can build, even in a world of infinite free content. A book implies depth,…
Customer Surveys: Getting Feedback That Actually Leads to Change
Most customer surveys get sent, get a low response rate, and get filed away without changing a single decision. The problem usually isn't that customers have nothing to say — it's that the survey…
Great Customer Service: The Marketing Channel Most Businesses Underrate
Marketing budgets get spent chasing new customers while the experience existing customers have with support often gets treated as a cost center to minimize rather than a channel that actively…
Negotiation Tactics for Sales Conversations
A lot of sales negotiation advice boils down to psychological tricks — anchoring high, fake deadlines, manufactured scarcity. Some of that works short-term, but it tends to erode trust in exactly…
Nonprofit and Fundraising Marketing: Asking Well Without Sounding Desperate
Fundraising communication has a narrow line to walk: create genuine urgency around a real need without tipping into language that reads as desperate, guilt-driven, or exhausting to a donor who's…
Seasonal Marketing Planning: Why Timing Beats Generic Campaigns
Running the same generic promotion year-round misses one of the easiest levers available in marketing: customer intent shifts predictably with the calendar, and campaigns timed to match that shift…