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The Desperate Marketer

Marketing, AI, and what to actually do on Monday
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Everything published so far, newest first. Filter by section, or browse the lot.

29 pieces  ·  since March 2026
Keep / Skip  ·  28 Oct 2026  ·  5 min 5 AI tools for marketers: keep or skip? Five things everyone is shouting about, judged on whether they survive a real working week. Read  → Promptly  ·  21 Oct 2026  ·  5 min Turn one webinar into nine weeks of content The transcript is the asset. Here is the chain of prompts I run on it, in order. Read  → Quick Peek  ·  14 Oct 2026  ·  1 min The subject line test that takes four seconds Read it out loud as if you were leaving a voicemail. If you would not say it, do not send it. Read  → Keep / Skip  ·  14 Oct 2026  ·  4 min 7 Instagram settings worth changing today Most of these are buried three menus deep and each takes under a minute. Read  → Open Tabs  ·  07 Oct 2026  ·  11 min Your buyer is rarely your user, and it breaks everything downstream The person who signs is not the person who benefits. Almost every marketing mistake I have watched a team make traces back to that one fact. Read  → Promptly  ·  30 Sep 2026  ·  3 min The brief generator I actually use Copy it, paste it, fill three blanks. It asks you the questions a good strategist would. Read  → Quick Peek  ·  23 Sep 2026  ·  1 min Why your best post did badly on a Friday It was not the algorithm. Your audience had already mentally left the building. Read  → Open Tabs  ·  16 Sep 2026  ·  8 min Nobody has a budget line for what you sell Before anyone can buy your category, somebody inside their business has to argue it into existence. Read  → Keep / Skip  ·  16 Sep 2026  ·  5 min 6 LinkedIn habits: keep or skip? Six things marketers do on LinkedIn out of habit. Three are worth it. Read  → Promptly  ·  09 Sep 2026  ·  4 min Stop asking AI to "write a blog post" You are outsourcing the thinking and keeping the typing. It should be the other way round. Read  → Quick Peek  ·  02 Sep 2026  ·  1 min Stop putting "solutions" in your headline Nobody has ever searched for a solution. They search for the problem, in their own words. Read  → Open Tabs  ·  26 Aug 2026  ·  7 min The report nobody makes decisions with Most marketing reporting exists to prove effort rather than inform choices. How to tell which one you have. Read  → Promptly  ·  19 Aug 2026  ·  3 min A prompt that finds the holes in your messaging Feed it your homepage. It argues back as a sceptical buyer who has three other options. Read  → Keep / Skip  ·  19 Aug 2026  ·  6 min 4 newsletter platforms, honestly compared Which one to pick depends almost entirely on whether you plan to charge for it. Read  → Quick Peek  ·  12 Aug 2026  ·  1 min Your case study is twice as long as it needs to be The situation section is the bit nobody reads. Start at what changed. Read  → Open Tabs  ·  29 Jul 2026  ·  6 min The word "anyone" is costing you money When a founder says the product is for anyone with the problem, they are describing a market rather than a customer. Read  → Promptly  ·  22 Jul 2026  ·  3 min Twenty subject lines in four minutes Not twenty variations of one idea. Twenty angles, then you pick, which is the part only you can do. Read  → Quick Peek  ·  15 Jul 2026  ·  1 min One question to ask before any rebrand What would still be broken the morning after the new logo goes live? Read  → Keep / Skip  ·  15 Jul 2026  ·  5 min 5 "AI SEO" tactics: keep or skip? A new category with a lot of confident advice and not much evidence behind it. Read  → Open Tabs  ·  08 Jul 2026  ·  9 min What to do when your clients cannot be named Confidentiality breaks the standard case study playbook. What credible proof looks like without logos. Read  → Promptly  ·  24 Jun 2026  ·  3 min The custom instruction that fixed my tone problem Everything I wrote came back sounding like a press release. Two sentences solved it. Read  → Quick Peek  ·  17 Jun 2026  ·  1 min The three words that kill a cold email "I hope this." Delete the sentence and start with the reason you are writing. Read  → Open Tabs  ·  10 Jun 2026  ·  6 min Compliance is not your bottleneck, your process is Sign off takes three weeks and the review takes two hours. The other nineteen days are yours to fix. Read  → Keep / Skip  ·  10 Jun 2026  ·  4 min 3 things to stop doing on Facebook Short edition. Three habits that persist long after they stopped working. Read  → Promptly  ·  27 May 2026  ·  5 min I built a competitor tracker in an afternoon No code, no budget, no permission. What it does, what it cost, and where it falls over. Read  → Quick Peek  ·  20 May 2026  ·  1 min The meeting that should have been a metric If the weekly update never changes a decision, it is not a meeting, it is a ritual. Read  → Open Tabs  ·  13 May 2026  ·  12 min The marketing team of one: a survival guide One of the hardest jobs in the profession and one of the least written about. Read  → Keep / Skip  ·  06 May 2026  ·  6 min 6 free marketing courses: keep or skip? Free courses are mostly lead magnets. Some are genuinely worth the afternoon. Read  → Open Tabs  ·  25 Mar 2026  ·  8 min Why your marketing feels busy and still is not working Busyness is the most convincing substitute for direction ever invented. Read  →
Desk Notes

One email. Monday morning. Four minutes.

What I worked on, what went wrong, and one thing worth stealing. Written for people doing the work rather than reading about it.

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