Now that Uncle Sam has made his rounds and emptied your pockets, it’s as important a time as any to get back in that marketing saddle. Yet, with a lighter wallet load, most of us don’t have the discretionary business income to spend on hit or miss marketing campaigns.

Huge companies such as Amazon have been deriving significant benefits leveraging their database treasure troves to provide enhanced customer service, but the benefits of “big data” have been slow to trickle down to small online marketers. Up until now, customer information has been seen by smaller marketers as nothing more than a way to upsell, but the true advantages reside in the provision of a level of service that makes the customer think “hey, this company really knows and cares about me!”

If you’re a fan of movies you’ll have noticed all your childhood favorites coming back into circulation. There are a lot of remakes, a lot of chain sequels on something that might have been a bad idea to start with and a lot of completely unoriginal movie plots. Take the new Avengers film, which is based on an old idea and the characters themselves were already introduced independently within a string of prequels. Yet the film has already broken box office records on its rapid ascent to $1 billion in tickets sold worldwide.

I was always a very calculated career driven and self-involved person. But when I abruptly learned of my pregnancy via ultrasound at three months, I was gob smacked and teary eyed – and perhaps speechless for the first time in my life. Here was this little life that had already claimed a place in the world; he was kicking away feverishly as if he was planning on just swimming away. He was here. He was real.

Many years ago I worked as a freelance reporter. I loved the job because it allowed me to be home with my two preschoolers. The only challenge was finding uninterrupted time to perform interviews, so when I had an opportunity to speak with the director of a provincial park about environmental protection of the beach, I thought it was a great idea to let the kids play in the sand while I worked.