This post is part of a series that will tell you how to create your USP by looking at other real, live ittybiz owners who have done it and kicked ass at it.

Rebecca Leigh is a writer. Yeah, her and everybody else. But she’s like, a real writer. The kind that doesn’t do something else for her day job. She just, you know, writes and stuff. If you’re also a writer, that probably sounds like Greek to you. If you’re not a writer and you’ve ever thought about them sitting alone in their garret smoking long French cigarettes, it probably sounds like Greek to you, too.

Anyway, whoever you are, pay attention to how Rebecca has bravely navigated the insanely competitive world of writing for money and made a fantastic name for herself. Read More

I’m really beginning to understand that if you want to be good at marketing, you need to be good at understanding how people think. To successfully market is to understand your customer better than she knows herself. If you really think about it, a good marketer could also be a good psychiatrist — if the marketer were more touchy-feely, or if the psychiatrist knew more about fonts.

So without further ado, here are some of the key reasons, deep in the brain, why people buy.

1. People buy because they’re emotionally invested.
People don’t base significant buying decisions on logic. They buy based on emotion, and only then use logic to justify their emotional decisions. I can’t give Naomi credit for teaching me this one. I learned it from my mother, Marcia Hoeck, who knows this both because she’s been in marketing for most of her life and because she’s married to a man who likes boats. Read More