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For entrepreneurs and professionals, a reliable tool can make all the difference — even something as simple as a pen. The ForeverPen™ takes simplicity to the next level by offering a writing instrument that’s not only portable and durable but also completely inkless.

If you’ve already heard enough, head straight to checkout and get one for $23.99 (reg. $40).

Designed to last a lifetime, the ForeverPen uses a special silver-based alloy to write without ever needing ink or refills. This means you’ll always have a pen ready to jot down notes, sign contracts, or sketch out ideas — whether you’re in the office, traveling for business, or brainstorming in a café.

At just 1.5 inches long, this pen is small enough to attach to your keychain or fit discreetly in your pocket. Its sleek, minimalist design doesn’t just look professional — it’s built to withstand the demands of daily life. Whether it’s tossed in a bag or clipped to your keys, this pen is as durable as it is functional. Plus, it makes it way harder to misplace it.

For busy professionals, the ForeverPen offers unmatched convenience. You’ll never have to scramble for ink refills or worry about your pen running dry during a critical moment. From quick memos to on-the-spot signatures, this pen is always ready to perform.

Perfect for entrepreneurs on the go, this is one pen that’s worth keeping around for the long haul.

At just $23.99, the ForeverPen™ Tiny Inkless Pen and Multi-Tool is a small but mighty investment in reliability that you can purchase instantly by skipping ahead to checkout now.

StackSocial prices subject to change.

Life moves pretty quickly. And no matter what field you’re in, it’s easy to miss things. This is precisely why this AI-powered recorder can be an incredibly useful tool—and you can skip right to checkout to get it even faster.

When it comes to managing meetings, phone calls, or lectures, the Focais Meet One AI-powered recorder is a game-changer. Designed with business leaders, students, and all types of professionals in mind, this portable device can transform how you handle audio.

Whether you’re taking notes from a lengthy conference or summarizing classroom lectures, the Meet One’s advanced AI ensures you’re always on top of things.

Equipped with translation and transcription capabilities for more than 120 languages, it breaks down language barriers easily. The device goes further with intelligent summarization powered by GPT-4, condensing hours of recordings into concise, actionable insights. Plus, it’s user-friendly. Just one touch to record and up to 20 hours of battery life means it’s always ready when you are.

This device captures crystal-clear audio, filters out background noise, and automatically translates and transcribes your recordings with 98% accuracy. The Focais Meet One does all this while fitting comfortably in your pocket. Sound like a win for your business? Head right to checkout to get it now.

Its magnetic attachment and sleek design mean you can use it anywhere, from boardrooms to classrooms. And with encrypted storage, your files are as secure as they are accessible.

Efficiency is everything, and the Focais Meet One ensures you never miss a word or waste a moment. Whether managing high-stakes meetings or brainstorming your next big idea, this AI-powered recorder is your ultimate productivity partner.

Don’t wait—upgrade your workflow today and turn every conversation into actionable insights.

Skip right over to checkout to get the Focais Meet One Recorder for just $99.99 (reg. $149) with free shipping and slide into the new year with a modern efficiency tool ready to go in your pocket.

StackSocial prices subject to change.

Tired of the endless hustle? Most entrepreneurs are working harder than ever, but their results aren’t keeping up. In 2025, that’s about to change. There’s a free, hidden AI from Google that’s a light year ahead of ChatGPT, and it’s poised to revolutionize how you grow your business.

In this video, I’ll show you how I used Google’s relatively unknown AI to double my sales and triple my leads in just one month. You’ll discover how this powerful tool can analyze your email campaigns and website copy to uncover hidden insights that most marketers miss. I’ll walk you through the exact steps, including the specific prompts I used to prime this experimental AI model to think like a top 1% marketing analyst.

Download the free ‘AI Success Kit’ (limited time only). And you’ll also get a free chapter from Ben’s brand new book, “The Wolf is at The Door – How to Survive and Thrive in an AI-Driven World.”

Have a question for ChatGPT but lack a Wi-Fi connection? OpenAI has introduced a new way to connect with its popular AI chatbot for U.S. users: Call 1-800-CHATGPT or 1-800-242-8478.

OpenAI announced the feature on Wednesday and demonstrated how it works through a YouTube livestream. OpenAI researchers called the number with everything from an iPhone to a flip phone to a landline. No matter the medium, the end output was the same: A female voice saying, “Hello again, it’s ChatGPT, an AI assistant. Our conversation may be reviewed for safety. How can I help you?”

In the live demo, ChatGPT helped identify landmarks that a researcher said he saw on a road trip. In another instance, it provided a different researcher with an English-to-Spanish translation so that she could greet a friend’s grandmother in Spanish.

The move to have ChatGPT available via phone call is part of the company’s goal to make AI “as accessible as possible to as many people,” OpenAI product lead Kevin Weil said in the demo video.

Related: After This 26-Year-Old Got Hooked on ChatGPT, He Built a ‘Simple’ Side Hustle Around the Bot That Brings In $4,000 a Month

Right now each phone number is limited to 15 free minutes of call time, with no disclosed plans to monetize the feature.

Only U.S. users get to call ChatGPT, but OpenAI also announced Wednesday that global users can access the chatbot by sending the 1-800-242-8478 number messages via WhatsApp. In the demo, ChatGPT offered a recipe for a pesto pasta dinner via WhatsApp and modified it to be vegan at the user’s request.

Both calling and messaging features involve talking to ChatGPT without creating an account.

The OpenAI team built this capability within a few weeks, according to Weil.

“They hustled really hard to ship it and it’s awesome to see it here,” he said.

The feature is one of many announcements that OpenAI has made as part of its “12 Days of OpenAI” event. Other new features released by the company under the same event include opening up ChatGPT Search for all users, free or paid, and releasing its text-to-video generator Sora to the general public.

Related: Is ChatGPT Search Better Than Google? I Tried the New Search Engine to Find Out.

Federal Reserve officials cut the federal funds rate, or the borrowing rate that banks charge each other, by 25 basis points or 0.25% on Wednesday.

The central bank’s rate-setting committee, the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), announced Wednesday that the target range for the federal funds rate was now 4.25% to 4.5%.

Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell said at a news conference following the decision that the move to cut rates this month was a “closer call” than previous cuts but ultimately the “right call.” He said the FOMC was balancing between two risks: undermining economic activity in the labor market and undercutting progress on inflation.

Related: Here’s What the CPI Report Means for Your Wallet, According to JPMorgan and EY Experts

The rate cut follows two preceding cuts, one of 50 basis points in September and another of 25 basis points in November. The September adjustment was the first time the FOMC lowered rates in four years.

^{Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell. Photographer: Yuki Iwamura/Bloomberg via Getty Images}

Going forward, rate cuts aren’t certain. “In considering the extent and timing of additional adjustments to the target range for the federal funds rate, the Committee will carefully assess incoming data, the evolving outlook, and the balance of risks,” the FOMC wrote in a statement.

Dana Menard, CFP, founder and lead financial planner at Twin Cities Wealth Strategies told CNET that these cuts will affect shorter-term CDs and savings accounts, which “will likely fall by the same amount as the cut, with longer-term CDs and rates also being reduced.”

Will a rate cut affect mortgage rates?

A lower federal funds rate ripples out to lower borrowing costs for consumer-facing loans, like credit cards and personal loans. The purpose of adjusting the rate is to keep prices stable and respond to the labor market.

The 0.25% rate cut “will not have any impact on mortgage rates,” says Melissa Cohn, regional vice president of William Raveis Mortgage and a 40-year veteran of the mortgage industry. Rates as of Wednesday were 7.13% for a 30-year fixed mortgage.

Cohn told Entrepreneur in an emailed statement that “mortgage rates are data-driven, and if you look at the data, it doesn’t support much lower interest rates.”

Rates hovering around 7% is “sort of a new normal,” she said.

Related: Barbara Corcoran Says This Is the Interest Rate Magic Number That Will Make the Market ‘Go Ballistic’

Calixto Garcia-Velez, president and CEO at BanescoUSA in Miami told Bankrate that the 30-year mortgage rates are tied to the 10-year Treasury bonds, “and long-term Treasury bonds have been increasing,” which is why “residential loan rates haven’t been falling as much as people have expected.”

In any business’s journey, leaders must make tough calls about what products to keep offering and which to discontinue in order to facilitate long-term profitability and growth.

When Steve Jobs returned to Apple as CEO in 1997, he found a company that was bloated and underperforming. He decided to scrap over 70% of the existing product line, which included over a dozen versions of the MacIntosh computer and focused on four key products: two desktop computers and two “portable” laptops.

Jobs had the company design sleek, eye-catching products that performed as well or better than their competition. He defended the decision to eliminate dozens of existing offerings by saying, “Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do.” It’s hard to imagine that Apple would have ever become the biggest company in the world without Jobs’ bold decision to streamline Apple’s bloated product line and start from scratch.

Related: Advice From the Greats: Deciding When to Retire a Product

Jobs’ scorched earth approach worked for Apple, but your own product assessment doesn’t have to be as drastic. Here are key considerations:

Is the product generating profits?

The profitability of a given product is the simplest way to determine its ongoing viability. If you are continuing to invest in a product that people do not want to buy, sometimes you need to put your ego aside and declare defeat. But it’s not always as simple as the bottom line of sales and profit.

Costco has famously kept the price of its hotdog/soda combo at $1.50 since 1985, and it’s become part of the company’s brand legacy. Adjusted for inflation, the combo should cost around $4.50, but the company knows the loss leader is a draw for its customers and a good way to foster brand loyalty. The combo is as much a part of Costco’s identity as its giant shopping carts and bulk offerings.

But when assessing any product — even a potential loss leader that helps you in the big picture — you have to know the profit margin of the product and understand how it is performing over time.

There are many methods to track product profitability, including calculating operating margin, net profit margin or gross profit margin, which subtracts the cost of goods sold (COGS) from the overall profit. If the overall revenue from a product is $100,000 in a given period and the COGS is $30,000, the product’s gross profit margin is $70,000 or 70%.

The method of calculation isn’t as important as consistently tracking the data with the same metric for a long enough period to account for short-term variations like winter holiday sales increases and seasonal drop-offs. I recommend tracking at least two years of data before making any decisions. That will give you a solid picture of how your product performs in terms of profitability and overall sales trends.

There is no correct answer on what level of profitability is acceptable, given that profit margins can vary significantly from one sector to another, and each business has its own profit goals. But, if your product is consistently losing money and not creating other benefits (e.g., the Costco hot dog combo that created returning customers), it’s time to move on.

Related: Is It Time to Let Go of Your Business? How to Adapt When Your Product Stagnates

Does the product continue to meet a market need?

Technological advancements can make once-profitable products obsolete. It’s important to regularly assess whether your product is currently meeting a market need and if it will continue to do so in the near future.

In the automotive industry, there is a significant shift underway to electric vehicles. Sales of EVs rose in Q3 of 2024 to almost 9% of total vehicle sales in the U.S., compared to 5.3% in Q1 of 2022. Does that mean car companies should abandon their non-EV products? Of course not.

The gas-engine Ford F-15 continues to be the country’s top-selling vehicle, selling over 750,000 units. The best-selling EV was the Tesla-Y, with 403,000 units. So, while there is a clear demand for EVs, it does not mean that Ford should abandon its best-selling product anytime soon.

So, you need to regularly undertake an honest assessment of your product’s viability in the current and future markets.

Bigger businesses can hire market research firms to conduct a thorough analysis of where your product stands against competitors and assess its future viability against predicted market trends.

For smaller businesses, Google Trends is a free tool that lets them do their own market research by assessing customer behavior — even on a regional basis — and overall industry trends and product demand. There are dozens of excellent tutorials online.

Regularly exploring market and sales trends will give you a feel for the market, where it’s going, and where your product fits in. Just like if you’re looking to sell your house, you need to familiarize yourself with the housing market in your area so you can become attuned to its trends, prices, and level of demand so you can price your house for optimal profit.

How do your customers feel about your product?

Before making any changes to your product lines, it’s important to take into account how your customers feel. Consider the example of Research In Motion (RIM), the Canadian company that offered mobile devices with physical keyboards via its BlackBerry line. RIM dominated the market from the late 2000s to 2011 with a loyal customer base who loved the company’s physical keyboards.

When RIM started to lose ground after the launch of the Apple iPhone and Android platforms — with their increasingly popular touchscreens — RIM tried to keep pace by making both a touchscreen and physical keyboard version of the product. To offset the increased production costs, they outsourced manufacturing from Canada to Taiwan and the quality of the devices plummeted.

Eventually, the diminished quality of the new products failed to attract new customers and turned away those previously loyal to Blackberry. The takeaway is that keeping track of consumer trends is important, but it can be more important to consider your own customer’s preferences before undertaking drastic changes.

Online surveys following purchases allow customers to provide direct, immediate feedback on the product, with Survey Monkey and Typeform offering affordable solutions. Social media searches are less representative of the broader market as people typically only post about products they love or hate, but they gauge how customers feel at a given moment. Hootsuite and Brandwatch are both excellent tools to assist your analysis. Focus groups with customers are another tool to dig deeper into how customers view your product, whether they will repurchase it, or how it could be refined for broader appeal.

Conducting a Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey is another useful way to gauge how customers perceive your product and whether they are promoters or detractors when discussing your offering with others. A high NPS indicates a strong product perception, while a low score means there is an issue that you’ll need to dig into.

Ultimately, evaluating a product’s contributions to your company’s bottom line and whether it will deliver significant strategic value in the future can be more art than science. However, the tools above should provide a solid foundation for understanding what is working and what is not in order to sustain and grow a successful business.

Most of us in business know enough about building SEO to get by or at least not embarrass ourselves when the marketing team starts throwing acronyms around the conference room. For most, it’s simply keeping up with keywords, tagging social media and website pages with query terms, paying for some rankings, earning more organically and monitoring search engine results pages to see how close you are to the top and your competitors.

But do you know about the dark and rapidly growing side of SEO?

Despite over 20 years as a marketing executive embracing new technologies as a practitioner and thought leader, I was unprepared for how quickly the marketing tech (MarTech) we use for good became the catalyst for so much bad.

Recently, I was involved in pitching marketing services to an investment fund that wanted to accelerate revenue quickly for acquisitions. As I always do, I looked under the hood to understand the businesses so I could craft highly relevant recommendations for lead generation and sales. Something odd popped up as quickly as popping the hood on my SUV. Every company in this portfolio had the same name and a very similar URL as an established competitor offering the same products to the same verticals, sending me a trigger alert for potential trademark and SEO infringement, both of which can build brands quickly and cheaply stealing hard-earned and costly marketing returns from other companies. While aware of black hat SEO and identity theft aligned with phishing scams, I was not aware of how common dark marketing tactics have become.

Unfortunately, in a world where good technology quickly enables bad deeds, monitoring your brand identity and SEO safety needs to be as common as monitoring traffic, leads and conversions from your marketing programs. Here are just a few actions to take to protect your brand.

Related: ‘We Pulled Off An SEO Heist’: This Entrepreneur Stole 3.6 Million Pageviews From Competitors — And Your Business Could Be Next.

Brandjacking

Brandjacking is more than setting up a fake site for a big brand like Norton or Netflix and then telling customers to update their payment information, which is then stolen by thieves behind the fake sites. It is also about branding a business with a similar identity and URL to another business to confuse customers about who is who with the intent to direct consumers looking for competitors’ websites to your site. Many consumers and algorithms don’t know the difference between URLs that are nearly identical. When this happens, money and effort spent managing keywords, tagging sites, crafting content, paying for Google Ads and more can actually benefit a dark competitor who does nothing but divert others’ heard-earned web traffic to their sites.

You can often detect potential brandjacking when a competitor pops up with a name and URL that are very similar to yours. Compare ABCtechnologies.com vs. ABCtechnologies1.com. Algorithms may miss tiny differences and serve up imposter URLs to your target customers regardless of how much you spend on SEO.

What you need to do to protect yourself

1. Continuously monitor URLs in your space and note any highly similar ones. You can do this by frequently checking SERPs for your brand and logging into hosting companies’ pages to see what similar URLs are taken. If you find similar URLs, try to identify company executives to whom you can reach out regarding your trademark rights. If there is malicious intent, you likely won’t find the names of executives on the site or social media.
2. Pay attention to branding that reflects yours. There can be more than one company named ABC Technologies, LLC, and that does not necessarily indicate intent to commit wrongdoing. If there is overlap in products and industries served and signs of brand confusion, there are several sites you can use to see where they are registered and who the agents are.
3. If you suspect you are a victim of intentional trademark and/or SEO infringement, you can take legal action against that brand to ensure they do not confuse your target customers and poach your sales in addition to your identity.

Is your SEO at risk of being stolen?

You may have read the story here on Entrepreneur.com last June about the great “SEO Heist” of 2023 and how the agency behind it bragged about stealing more than 3.6 million traffic hits from a competitor over a matter of months. There’s been quite a flurry of reaction to this announcement, some unscrupulously wanting to do it themselves and others disgusted that AI, automation and other tools are being used for outright theft. I will always stand with the latter. SEO heists often involve scraping your website’s site menu and links, duplicating URLs for blogs and landing pages, engaging AI to write keyword-laden articles that support your stolen content, and more. Consumers do not always know the difference and may think they purchased from you when they instead purchased from a hijacker they should not trust.

Thankfully, these threats are being exposed, but that does not mean business managers are prepared to protect their branding and SEO efforts against internet pirates. Here are three ways to determine if your SEO is at risk of being stolen.

1. Monitor your website traffic continuously. If you see unexplained dips despite no change in behavior on your part, you could be the victim of a heist.
2. Go to the content pages of brands with names and URLs similar to yours and see how closely their content, third-party links, and landing page URLs mimic yours. Take note. Report any suspicions to Google, which is committed to identifying black hatters using its platform and shutting down algorithms accordingly.
3. Check with Google to see if they detect any abnormalities in your web traffic and redirections for your backlinks. Report any suspected issues to Google. Here’s a summary of some actions Google takes to ensure a fair and safe SEO environment.

Related: 9 SEO Tips to Help You Rank No. 1 on Google in 2024

Marketing technology makes whitehat, ethical and earned paid and organic SEO easier to achieve, execute and monitor than ever. There are many ways to keep tabs on the impact of your keywords and those used by your competitors in a fair, ethical and legal way. You can read about these affordable tactics in Entrepreneur’s new book, Market Your Business – Your Guide to DIY Marketing, available on amazon.com, bn.com and more. There is never a reason to resort to black hat SEO. In fact, the campaign mentioned in the “SEO Heist” article referenced above crashed — and crashed hard. According to this article on LinkedIn and others, the long-term damage was greater than the gain.

AI provides many powerful tools to make marketing and growth initiatives work better and faster. But it’s also a great example of a failure of success. The failure is that this technology can be used for nefarious activities, and there are many out there who will do so. By following the steps in this article, you can set yourself up to recognize issues and correct them.

Subscription fatigue isn’t just about Netflix and Spotify—it’s your business and work tools, too. Adobe Acrobat’s recurring fees can feel like a necessary evil, but they’re not. An equally powerful alternative lets you ditch the monthly payments for good.

Meet PDF Expert, a Mac app that offers a lifetime subscription. Unlike Adobe Acrobat, just pay once to keep this tool for life. Even if you upgrade Macs, your subscription follows. Head to checkout to get PDF Expert at our unbeatable price: $79.99 (reg. $139.99).

Say goodbye to PDF woes and fees for life

Multiple reviewers compare PDF Expert to Adobe Acrobat, one saying, “All the utility and none of the hassles of Acrobat Pro,” while the other writes how it works the same, “for substantially less money.”

It has all the PDF tools you need and no confusing interface to get in your way when it’s time to get work done. Buy and download PDF Expert now to unlock all of these features for life:

• Edit: Fix typos, add paragraphs, insert images, and link to external pages directly in your PDFs.
• Annotate: Highlight key points, add comments, and use custom stamps for efficient reviews.
• Organize: Merge multiple files, rearrange or delete pages, and split PDFs into separate documents.
• Convert: Turn PDFs into Word, Excel, or image files—or create PDFs from various file types.
• Fill out: Complete interactive forms, sign documents electronically, and redact sensitive information.
• Recognize text: Use OCR to make scans searchable, enhance quality, and crop pages as needed.

Check out now to get a PDF Expert lifetime subscription for $79.99 (reg. $139.99). You won’t find a better price anywhere else.

StackSocial prices subject to change.

Managing projects is no small feat. Whether you’re juggling tasks, budgets, or timelines, you need tools that work as hard as you do. That’s where Microsoft Project 2021 Professional comes in—a powerful project management solution designed to help business leaders and project managers stay on track.

And at just $17.97 (reg. $249.99) through December 22, it’s a deal you can’t afford to miss. You can even head straight to checkout to get it ASAP.

With Microsoft Project Pro 2021, you can take control of your workflows and deliver faster results. Use pre-built templates to kickstart your projects, create detailed timelines for tracking progress, and leverage auto-scheduling tools to reduce inefficiencies. Whether managing a small team or overseeing a large-scale initiative, this tool provides everything you need to stay organized and informed.

Easily assign tasks, set dependencies, and automatically calculate start and end dates. It also helps with resource allocation. Track your team’s workloads and allocate resources where they’re needed most.

You’ll also be able to utilize data-driven decision-making. For example, you can run what-if scenarios to optimize task assignments and make informed decisions.

Does this sound like a game-changer for you? Head right to checkout to get it faster.

No matter how full your plate is, Project can help make things easier. Working with multiple timelines? You can visualize complex schedules and stay ahead of deadlines with built-in timelines. You can even sync with Project Online and Project Server for real-time updates and collaboration.

Microsoft Project Pro 2021 isn’t just for large-scale organizations—it’s perfect for small businesses, startups, and freelancers, too. Its flexibility means it can handle projects of all sizes and complexities, from event planning to enterprise-level operations.

Because this is a lifetime license, there are no recurring subscription fees—making it an incredible long-term investment. Plus, since it’s a digital download, it makes a useful gift that doesn’t require shipping time.

Head to checkout to get this lifetime license to MS Project while it’s on sale for the holidays for just $17.97 (reg. $249.99) through December 22.

StackSocial prices subject to change.

The Future of Mornings: 5 AI Hacks You Can’t Ignore

By 2025, AI-powered tools will optimize workflows in ways we never thought possible, potentially slashing costs and streamlining operations at levels many businesses aren’t ready for. With companies like Anthropic, Microsoft, Google, and OpenAI racing to lead this AI evolution, “Phase 3” of AI—where tools act as productivity-boosting digital assistants—is closer than you think. It’s here now!

In this video, we’ll dive deep into 5 rule-breaking AI hacks that will transform your mornings from sluggish to supercharged. Discover how these AI assistants work, and why they’re set to redefine productivity, profitability, and your daily routine. I’ll break down strategies to integrate these hacks into your own mornings and show you what’s needed to stay ahead of this game-changing technology.

Download the free ‘AI Success Kit’ (limited time only). And you’ll also get a free chapter from Ben’s brand new book, ‘The Wolf is at The Door – How to Survive and Thrive in an AI-Driven World.’