Front-Burner Problems are the Lifeblood of Your Business

boiling over of milk, ceramic hob, hotplate

All of us in life have plenty to work with, to think about, and plenty of problems to solve. We are always prioritizing — often in an intuitive way. For example, something that might sound fascinating when we are bored might seem utterly irrelevant during a crisis. As a business owner, your trick is to understand…

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Using AI Chat to Turn Your Offer into Customer Dilemmas

woman with blonde hair holding her face

One of the biggest challenges that we all have, with our marketing hats on, is to switch our perspective from “expert” to “customer.” When we know a lot about something, we suffer from The Curse of Knowledge — it’s hard to remember that not everyone knows what we know. From the viewopint of us, we…

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Learning Easiness

waterfalls surrounded mountain under blue and white skies

Niklas Luman was one of the most prolific social science writers of the Twentieth Century. He has become more well known lately because of inventing the Zettelkasten method, popularized in the book Take Smart Notes, by Per Espen Stocknes. But he’s actually known for much more. He wrote 70 books and more than 400 scholarly…

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My Basic Ideas In a Nutshell

At its core, my method is a means of harmonizing the needs of capitalism and the needs of human beings; of maximally harmonizing the requirements of the future with those of the present; the needs of the individual with those of the whole. It reveals itself differently for each individual, but overall, this method should…

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Why did THIS popover work for me?

Given that I just wrote about how annoying it is to get email signup popovers earlier that day, it struck me as odd that this one “worked” for me. When I saw this, I somehow wanted it, and did not feel annoyed by it in the same way. Now, I’m sure this is personal, but…

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Hey there pretty lady, whaddya talk about I call you sometime?

Some years ago, internet marketers decided it would be very clever start pushing large forms in people’s faces that ask them to sign up for an email newsletter. These are called “popovers”, and can be programmed to appear at different moments when someone is visiting your site. The obvious core idea is: You have this…

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I can’t read the ant text of your email on my iPhone.

So much we are crafting our careful email on our full-size computer; we are then reviewing our careful email on the full-size computer; and 75% of our readers are looking at them on a smartphone. Here is the problem: and… I have tried to make the dimensions here comparable to what I see on my…

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Dubsado: The emotional moat can be the essential ingredient for a company

The makers of Drift published a great little book called This Won’t Scale. Play #8 in this was Build an Emotional Moat Around Your Brand. The author goes on to talk about “crafting a consistent story” and every “touchpoint” being part of that—which is all good, but still sounds a little mechanical, if you ask…

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Please don’t jiggle

Dear designer-marketer: You think you are being cute by just making the thing you want me to pay attention to… jiggle a little. I am not stupid. I find it very annoying, and am very tempted to close your page right away. —User Unless you want to be annoying (I can’t figure out why you…

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