POST ROAD MARKETING
The Weekly
Route Planner
A short weekly email for women business owners who are done with vague tips and tactic overload. One clear idea. Every Monday Past issues are all here.
2026
Black Friday for Small Business: Skip the Huge Discount
Most of us treat Black Friday like a last-minute thought. We wait until the week before and throw an offer together. The last-minute Black Friday offer As small business owners, you’re probably already undercharging. Then Black Friday comes along, and you offer a huge discount on top of that. If you do, and think it…
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How Do People Actually Find Out About My Business? Ask AI
We’ve spent years learning to keep sales pages short, and AI agents want the exact opposite. AI is starting to shop for people I was on a call last week about how AI is starting to shop for people. Not just recommend things, but actually buy them. You tell your AI what you need, and…
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Stand Out From Competitors by Naming What You Refuse to Do
Swap the logo on your website for a competitor’s, and there’s a good chance nobody would notice. Swap the logo and nobody would notice That’s not because your businesses are the same. You’re just using the same words. Friendly. Personalized. Client-focused. Those words feel safe and sound professional, which is probably why so many people…
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People Say That’s Nice But Don’t Buy? Try Three More Posts
You’re about to give up on an offer, and the only thing you’re sure of is that nobody bought it. Announced twice, and nobody bought You spent weeks creating it, thought carefully about what to include, worked out the price, and got everything ready. And you were excited because you really thought people would buy.…
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Marketing Advice Overload: The Question That Sorts It Out
You can follow perfectly good marketing advice and still waste months on the wrong thing. Plenty of information, none of the context I was looking at some research this week into what small-business owners are saying about marketing online. They aren’t asking where to find marketing advice. They’re trying to figure out which pieces of…
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ChatGPT for Marketing Changed Shape Again. Your Work Didn’t
The AI tool that finally started saving you time just got a retirement date. The tool that saved you time has a retirement date Maybe it’s a GPT that writes your product descriptions. Or one that drafts replies to customer emails so you’re not starting from scratch at 9 p.m. You might have bought it,…
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How to Stay Consistent With Marketing on Your Busiest Weeks
You have never missed a client deadline. Somehow your own marketing gets skipped every busy week. The week that had no room for marketing Mine gets skipped too. I had no idea what I was going to write to you this week. All I want to do is colour. I found Ohuhu markers and Coco…
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How to Make Your Business Easy to Understand, Not Explained
You get maybe eight words into explaining what you do before you can see she’s stopped following. Eight words in and she’s stopped following So you back up and try again with an example, then another example, and by the end you’ve said it depends twice and given up with “anyway, it’s kind of hard…
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Why Keeping Up With AI Costs More the Longer You Wait
His homework from my workshop might be worth $5.4 million dollars. The workshop homework nobody expected to pay off Let me back up. I was teaching a two-part workshop on building custom GPTs. Those are versions of ChatGPT you train on your own business and documents. They answer like someone who works for you. Week…
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Stop Using AI Like It’s 2022. Now Tell It What to Do
You’re using AI more than ever, and still not working any less. If anything, it feels like things take longer. You asked ChatGPT to write an email, then spent 20 minutes editing what it gave you, and somewhere in the middle of that it handed you a better idea, so you went off and mapped…
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Why Am I Not Getting Clients Even With a Great Feed
You are not losing clients because your Instagram feed isn’t original enough. But you could waste a shocking amount of time trying to fix that anyway. How Much Time Goes Into Looking Right Since you started your business, how many hours have gone into making the outside of your marketing look right? The photos on…
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Why Isn’t My Marketing Working? Check the Number First
The Math You Run Before You Say “Good, Busy” Money is the thing you think about most and say out loud the least. Someone asks how business is going. You say, “Good. Busy.” But you checked your bank balance before you answered. You already know which invoice is late, which payment comes out next, and…
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Customer Retention Small Business Owners Keep Skipping
What if the biggest growth opportunity in your business has nothing to do with marketing? The Growth Opportunity That Has Nothing to Do With Marketing Chances are you’re spending more time and money trying to find new customers than you are taking care of the ones you already have. When I worked at a bank,…
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Marketing Automation Small Business Owners Can Actually Use
The Job That Doesn’t Stop When You Take Time Off My husband’s taking a week and a half off starting next week. I’ve got two very different feelings about that. One of them isn’t pretty. There’s the little voice that goes, “You can’t go away that long.” And the other one is going, “Honestly? Good.…
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Website Accessibility Small Business Owners Don’t Know About
The Visitors Who Land on Your Site and Just Leave Most people spend a lot of energy making sure their website looks right. Colours, photos, the layout. They get it looking the way they want and call it done. What they don’t realize is that some visitors can’t use their site at all. They land…
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Marketing Strategy for Small Business: The Midyear Gut Check
Why Half the Year Gone Feels Like a Problem Just so you know, it’s June 22nd. Summer’s short in Canada, and we take it seriously. I’ve been juggling travel, end-of-year school events, and the general chaos of kids finishing up. I’ve barely had a chance to look up. But I looked up this week and…
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Why Isn’t My Marketing Working? It’s Not the Price
Why isn’t my low cost offer selling? Charging $27 feels like the safe place to start. It usually turns out to be the most expensive. You’ve watched it happen in real time. A guru posts the screenshot. A $27 offer, hundreds of sales, a number big enough to make your eyes go wide. Sometimes it’s…
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Nobody Knows My Business Exists: What Your Website Lacks
People talk constantly about supporting local businesses. What nobody talks about is how unnecessarily difficult local businesses make it easy to actually hand over your money. For the past few weeks, I’ve been looking for a gift. I started with local boutique websites hoping to find something unique, and I kept hitting the same wall.…
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Why Marketing Isn’t Working When Your Head Is Full
Getting an official ADHD diagnosis last year was a bit of a shock. And also made complete sense of my entire life up to that point. Like, when you have an appointment at 2pm, the whole day is basically a write-off. I never understood that about myself. You have five hours before that appointment, so…
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AI for Small Business Marketing: Stop Waiting to Be Ready
This week I have a hot take. Pointing out that someone used AI to write their content is the new grammar policing. And grammar policing has never once made anyone a better writer. It just makes the person doing it feel superior for about four minutes. Nobody has ever died from a spelling mistake. Nobody’s…
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Brand Messaging Examples That Actually Drove Growth (Not Viral Chasing)
You’ve heard me say “brand messaging” probably a hundred times. And I’d bet half the time you’re hearing it, you’re nodding along but not totally sure what I actually mean. That’s not on you. Nobody talks about it plainly. Everyone’s selling you something else instead. Most of you are chasing followers. Engagement. Going viral. Because…
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Productive AI procrastination is still productive
Three years of watching AI content, and I genuinely could not tell you what I had to show for it. I played with platforms. My feed was full of people calling themselves experts. A lot of noise, not much payoff. Then the CustomGPT suite I built changed that a little. Sales came in. Okay, maybe…
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Q1 is done. Now look at it honestly.
Most small business owners have a general idea of how much money they made last quarter. They couldn’t tell you much beyond that. Which webpage brought in the most visitors? Whether those visitors did anything once they got there. Which part of their marketing actually moved someone toward buying, and which part just kept them…
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You might not own your own website
I am working on a situation right now that reminded me why I keep talking about this stuff. Someone had a website built years ago. She just had it updated by someone new. The newer developer ran into trouble, did not quite know how to fix it, and started going quiet on her. Now her…
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We’re automating loneliness now
I saw something this week that I haven’t been able to shake. A creator announced they’re automating their Instagram DM replies and then teaching a class on how to do it. Not scheduling, not email sequences. The actual back-and-forth with real people who reached out. I keep thinking about that alongside everything I read about…
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Your website is giving your competitor clients
Your website reads like a resume. Credentials, history, awards: everything you have accomplished and why you are the best option. But your customer landed on your page with one question. Can this person fix my problem? If your website does not answer that in the first five seconds, she leaves. After all, she has four…
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I asked 20 women about these tools. Nobody heard of them.
Most small businesses assume they can’t go up against the big players online. No ad budget, no marketing team, no chance. That’s mostly true. Except for one thing. When someone types a question into Google or asks ChatGPT for a recommendation, the algorithm doesn’t care how big your business is. It cares whether your content…
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All you want is for someone to say, “Your business changed my life.”
Getting a good review feels like a performance review you actually want. That little hit of dopamine when someone says, “This was exactly what I needed.” We all know reviews are important. But knowing they’re important and actually getting them are two different things. Most business owners are terrible at asking for them. It feels…
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The worst thing you can do when someone says “too expensive”
A client called me last week in full panic mode. She’d just gotten off a discovery call. The prospect loved her, loved the offer, loved everything. Until she heard the price. “She said it was too expensive. Should I just give her a discount?” No. Hard no. Why Discounting Backfires Here’s the thing about discounting:…
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What moving an online business actually looks like
So I’m moving my entire online business to a new platform right now. Website, shop, emails. All of it. And instead of just popping up on the other side as if nothing happened, I figured I’d pull back the curtain. Because if you ever have to do this (and let’s be honest, you probably will…
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The marketing tactic I refuse to use
Someone asked me at a workshop last week: “What’s your cold outreach strategy?” I said, “I don’t do cold outreach.” You should’ve seen their face. Like I’d just admitted I sacrifice small animals under a full moon or something equally unhinged. The truth is, cold outreach feels spammy to me, and I’m not doing it.…
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The trap I didn’t see coming (and you might not either)
Here’s a question worth 10 minutes of your time today: If you needed to move your website tomorrow, how hard would it be? Not “would you want to”: how hard would it actually be to take everything with you? I’ve been on Kajabi for 6-7 years: an all-in-one platform, convenient, until the recent price increase…
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If your offer isn’t converting, read this
You put an offer out, and it doesn’t quite do what you hoped. It doesn’t crash and burn, it just underperforms. A few people pay attention, someone says, “This looks great,” but the sales don’t match the effort you put into it. And after a while, you start wondering what needs to change. So you…
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They click “About” – then they run.
But did you know it’s usually the second most-visited page on a website? They are usually filled with long stories and big words that do not actually mean anything. You have probably seen them, the ones that use jargon to sound important but leave you feeling more confused than when you started. Let’s be honest:…
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Your site needs an FAQ. Seriously.
You’ve probably had this thought more than once. If more people saw this, it would work. It feels logical: your stuff is good, your offer makes sense, the business has legs. The only thing missing, it seems, is eyeballs, more traffic, more reach, more people at the door. So you keep trying to get louder.…
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How to make your business feel more put together
Most of December, we were talking about your website. And from your replies, I know a lot of you made small changes that created real movement. So let’s keep going. It’s a new year. If we’re going to spend time on anything, let’s pick the work that actually improves your business. And I need to…
2025
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Before you set new goals, read this.
Right now, I feel like I’m behind: there’s too much in motion, too many open loops, and definitely no work-life harmony to be found. I’ve been here before. Every time I start measuring myself against what’s not done, it looks like I’m standing still. That’s when I go back to a simple tool I picked…
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Don’t hate me… but this part of your site needs to change
Last week, I told you there was another small moment on your site that creates more friction than you would ever expect. It is subtle, familiar, and easy to miss because almost everyone does it without thinking. It is the social media icons sitting in your menu bar. Why You Should Remove Social Icons From…
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I’m trying to checkout but something on your site is stopping me
Unfortunately, your customers won’t email you to say this. There is a moment on your website that almost no one pays attention to, and it is where more sales disappear than anywhere else. It happens right after someone enters their email into your pop-up. The Hidden Friction in Your Checkout Process You offer a small…
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If your offer sounds like a tech manual, we need to talk
Let’s be honest. If your product description or sales page starts with “4 modules, 3 calls, handcrafted, ethically sourced, bonus video, unlimited access”… you’ve already lost her. You’re not selling a microwave, you’re offering a turning point. But somewhere along the way, the internet taught us to list features like we’re on QVC. To rattle…
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If farts in jars can sell, your offer can too.
You run a business. Ideas come easy to you. You probably have ten new ones before lunch: half-mapped offers, notes in your phone, folders labelled “someday.” There’s nothing wrong with that. Until the pile of new ideas starts to bury the one that could actually work. That pressure to create something new all the time…
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If effort paid off, you’d be a millionaire.
You’ve done what they told you. You bought the course. Downloaded the workbook. Filled out the template. You answered the three “smart” questions every program swears will fix your marketing: What do you do? Who is it for? Why does it matter? And yet… You’re still watching good posts die in silence. Still wondering why…
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What You’re Giving Is Gold. Here’s Why They’re Not Seeing It.
You’ve got a folder. The one full of free downloads, swipe files, and checklists you swore you’d “circle back to.” You’ve created some, saved a dozen more, and chances are, you’re still not sure what to do with any of them. But hey, you’re adding value, right? Clients Don’t Pay You for Adding Value Here’s…