There is a particular kind of advertisement becoming increasingly common on social media. It usually begins with a beautiful artificial person staring back at you from a carefully designed screen. The software promises that you can create your own AI influencer almost instantly. No expensive camera. No model. No photography experience. No technical knowledge. No…
“Free Store in 30 Minutes?” The Store Is the Easy Part Spend enough time scrolling through Facebook and eventually the algorithm seems to decide that what every aspiring entrepreneur really needs is a Shopify store. Not customers. Not a product strategy. Not a shipping plan, advertising budget, recognizable brand, return policy, customer-service system or any…
After four episodes of sticking our nose into other companies’ advertisements, pricing, fine print, qualifications, and conveniently understated details, there was an obvious question we eventually had to answer: what happens when the skunk turns around and starts sniffing Valhalla Computers? Fair is fair. If Something Stinks is going to criticize advertisements that make a…
There are certain advertisements that catch your attention because they sound almost too simple. This one caught ours immediately. “Cremation from $13.99 a month or $99.” That is an incredibly powerful message for someone worried about leaving funeral expenses behind for their family. Nobody wants their children or spouse scrambling to find thousands of dollars…
There is probably no word in advertising more powerful than FREE. Free phone. Free case. Free charger. Free shipping. Free monthly service. Stack the word enough times into one Facebook ad and it becomes difficult not to stop scrolling, especially when the advertisement is being shown to people who may already be struggling financially. That…
There is a very specific kind of online ad that never seems to die. It promises a free store, winning products, easy money, and a shortcut to ecommerce success that sounds almost insultingly simple. Click here, sign up now, keep reading before the offer disappears, and suddenly you too can have a fully loaded online…
There is a particular kind of advertisement becoming almost impossible to avoid online. AI will build your business in minutes. AI will replace an entire development team. AI will create your store before your morning coffee gets cold. And apparently, if some of these advertisements are to be believed, you can now build something comparable…
Artificial intelligence can do some remarkable things. Give it a subject and it can suggest ideas. Give it a pile of scattered thoughts and it can help organize them. It can research, outline, draft, reword, brainstorm, compare approaches, and save an enormous amount of time staring at a blank screen wondering where the hell to…
Artificial intelligence has become one of the most useful tools available to small-business owners, website managers, developers, writers, and just about anyone else who spends time online. It can explain unfamiliar terminology, suggest improvements, help organize content, identify possible problems, generate code, rewrite pages, brainstorm marketing ideas, and sometimes point you toward a solution in…
Most small-business owners eventually reach a point where they have to trust someone else with part of their website. Maybe a contact form stops working, an old product keeps appearing in search results, a page looks wrong on mobile, a plugin begins throwing errors, or something left over from an older version of the site…