Money & marketing Recipes
Bite-size ideas to take your money or your marketing from ugh to aha!

Two Ways To Make More Money (Using Something You Don’t Own)
Rinse & Repeat. It’s on the back of every shampoo bottle. And it turns out, if you ask any hair stylist, they’ll tell you the magic of good hair is in the repeat. I was skeptical, but I decided to follow the directions a few years back. Wash. Rinse. Wash and...

When Visitors Don’t Read: A Double Check in Typography
Remember the dreaded group work while you were in school? Ugh. Me too. But after moonlighting as a Marketing Professor, I figured out why instructors use it. Students don’t read. They skim. And they don’t even skim well. Put them in a group together and they’ll...

How to Create a Facebook Lookalike Audience in 5 Minutes (or Less)
Use these Screenshots to Build Custom and Lookalike Audiences One of the most-targeted, low-risk marketing activities out there these days, is Facebook Lookalike Audiences. But if you’re like most people, hearing about social media advertising leaves you with...

Win Customers With These Exact Images On Your Website (& Social Media)
Want to know where your competitors drop the marketing ball? As humans, we like lots of things. Clothes, sports, cars, jewelry, food, toys and vacations. But nothing gets our attention the way a happy, fulfilled person (or groups) of people do. So yes, for starters I...

16 Social Media Posts You Can Repeat Next Month
Like a deer in the hi-beams of an 18-wheeler, there you are frozen with a blinking cursor. You've been here before. You need to make a social media post, but your mind goes blank. What am I supposed to post? What do my followers want to hear? How can my post be...

How To Rank Higher in Google So Local People Can Find You
Looking for a few solid, must-do steps to build traffic, attract customers, and rank higher in Google? Something with concrete examples (hello, screenshots!) so you know how to do it yourself? Well, friend. You found it. Your business can earn standout status with...

The 5 TED Talks for Everyone in Small Business
Some bite-sized audio inspiration. Running a business can often make you feel like you’re on top of the world or buried under it. If only you could carry that on-top-of-the-world feeling of motivation in your pocket. You could pull it out anytime you’re feeling stuck....

3 Old School Tools That Save Time on Social Media
3 Old-School Tools to Save Time on Social Media There's a good chance these social media hacks are gonna age me like wrinkle cream in my bathroom vanity. But I'm gonna go for it anyway because they legit work for me! I love gadgets (and pushing a few buttons),...

4 Ways Your Website Is Broken (and How To Fix Them in Minutes)
Get 30 & 60-Minute Fixes to Your Website Woes Working on your website? Take a break and picture your filing cabinet. There are drawers and files. Maybe you have a lock and a key. Your files (or most of them) have a label or title on it with documents crammed...

Looking for the back story?
(Here’s my bio. It’s written in 3rd person – because that’s how all the cool kids write them.)
Meet Nicole Schmied, digital marketer, podcaster, and four-time entrepreneur. For almost two decades, Nicole has provided web, email, social media marketing, & event strategies for Fortune 500 companies, nonprofits and small businesses. She’s a FRIENDS sitcom fan and she’s even moonlighted as a marketing professor with a private university. Founder of SmartCookie Media and co-founder of Events That Don’t Suck, she approaches business with humor, persuasiveness, and an eagle eye on profitability.
Raised by a single dad running his own business, Nicole found herself playing office manager, soaking up marketing lessons, (and getting countless paper cuts.) She realized her biggest job was to help dad navigate marketing and new technologies. Years later, she figured if she could help her not-so-techy dad in the 80’s, then helping you, a user of Facebook and a smartphone will feel easy breezy.
Don’t let her fool you, Nicole’s not limited to marketing and quotable 90’s sitcoms; she was the accidental, first place winner at a Lake County Fair Tractor Pull at age 9. (And to her knowledge she remains the only accidental winner since.)
When you can find her sitting still (almost never), she’s found listening to a Crime Junkie podcast while folding a mountain of kiddo laundry or she’s with husband, Kyle and their two boys, Luke (5yrs) and Will (1yr) attempting a new house project.