Marketing Acuity

How long does it take to build an e-commerce website? As little as a few hours! Not kidding! This afternoon, I took an existing website, in 2.5 hours I had installed commerce, set up product with variations and attributes, configured payments, shipping and tweaked the pages of the website it was on. But you’re saying “that’s not a whole e-commerce site!” But I did one of those, too, in under a week, over the summer. Let’s break down the basic…

Ever have an issue with a WordPress site and google something like “advanced payments not showing credit cards”? or the ‘white screen of death?’ Only to be met with dubious answers? This is because AI summaries appearing in search engines are scraping the web. And increasingly they are using what we call AI slop – or AI generated articles that have obliterated real blog posts with real answers (like this one that you are reading!) AI trained on AI slop…

Tired of Etsy fees? Worried about a boycott of Etsy due to problematic products? Here’s how to use your own website with your Etsy store to nurture customers to buy on your website (without getting in trouble with Etsy.) Etsy is an online marketplace for hand crafted goods. It’s great in that it’s a marketplace – but it’s also huge. Being on Etsy has been an easy gateway for sellers to market their business because they own the hand-crafted marketplace…

Launching a new business, a new product, or a new service? Your URL is key to your SEO success. Yes, even in 2025, the URL is key – because a URL built around the thing you do, make or your customers are looking for is the best search result possible. In a world of AI, if you make and sell a product, you still have a better advantage over competitors if you select the best URL possible. In a world…

I just deleted 95% of my marketing email list. What?? I wanted to start with a cleaner list, with emails only from the last 3 years and in my case, only those that I knew who they were. Now, in the business I’m in (marketing and web development) this is pretty easy to do. If you’re a commerce business (and I am, too), I wouldn’t be so callous, but I might delete emails older than 8 years or more. The…

About fifteen years ago, we started a side hustle for our business. I’ve been in the marketing / design / advertising and then web development business since 1987. I’ve had sidehustles to my job for decades. But having a side hustle to your business? Let’s look at why that could be really good, and some examples of pairing side hustles with your primary business. As a web developer and marketer, I am well used to promoting businesses and running e-commerce…

It’s 2025, Meta has just announced AI bots, and removal of content moderation with “expect more harmful content” as an explicit warning from Zuck. WTH! What should businesses do NOW? Meta owns Instagram, Threads, Facebook, Messenger. These are all platforms YOU use for your business. I do too. Linkedin is owned by Microsoft, YouTube by Alphabet, TikTok by the Chinese (and might still be banned because Zuck doesn’t want competitors), and let’s not even talk about X, which you should…