Go Primal
a next generation approach to blogging & inbound marketing
Great blogging is more than just SEO. Keywords are like oxygen in the air. Nobody really thinks about it — they just breathe.
But what readers do notice is how breathing fresh air makes you feel — the crisp smell of pine needles, the energetic burst of the lungs from an uphill jog, the freshness of spring soaring through trees like an epiphany. That’s what people remember — why they react and respond to your business with pure stamina.
Great blogging is primal. Elicit instinct, the pure flight of adrenaline — the hairs on the back of your neck — that burn in the legs and in the pit of your stomach — and the reader will follow you just about anywhere you want to run.
My primal approach to blogging raises more than just neckhairs:
- One client achieved a 61% YOY keyword increase, a 76% YOY organic traffic growth, and a +1.5K YOY backlink growth.
- Another client’s blogs experienced 1,000 visitors per year with 240 new qualified leads.
- One client’s blogs increased top keyword rankings 400%.
Want a taste? Try some — it’s delicious…
What is a TPA? The Secret to Getting the Most Value From Your Self-Funded Health Plan
As insurance premiums continue to escalate by double digits year after year, more companies are discovering the value of self-funded health insurance.
Traditionally feasible only for large companies, self-funded insurance has increasingly become an affordable option for small to midsize businesses, thanks to group medical captive solutions like Roundstone’s.
Self-funded insurance plans allow companies to pay only for what they need. They keep what they don’t spend. And as part of the captive, any unspent premium at the end of the year gets reimbursed to the employer. Every year, Roundstone writes checks in the hundreds of thousands of dollars to clients who’ve saved on their health insurance costs thanks to being self-funded in the captive.
MCF 2024 Recap: The Big Easy Approach to Self-Funding and Affordability
Last week, Roundstone’s Medical Captive Forum let the good times roll in the Big Easy. With over 400 guests, we celebrated affordable healthcare New Orleans style with great food, jazzy music, and practical tips to lowering your benefits spend without compromising care quality.
With an educational focus, MCF helps employers understand how to provide better healthcare benefits at an affordable cost through self-funded insurance under a group captive. No matter your experience in the captive, you learn new approaches to self-funding and how to tweak your plan to better optimize savings, care, and custom plan design to meet your employees’ healthcare needs.
The theme of our 9th annual MCF was The Big Easy Approach to Benefits: Quality, Affordable Healthcare Made Simple. Providing your employees great benefits that are also affordable shouldn’t be hard. By self-funding under a group captive, employers can deliver their employees the care they need at a cost they can afford. With Roundstone, they have the tools to succeed and the help they need to implement those tools effectively.
Little Saint Nick & the Healing Power of Giving
In our culture, we baby children and romanticize childhood. We often forget that kids can also inspire and do amazing things.
Such is the case with the Little Saint Nick Foundation, whose motto is “Kids inspiring and helping kids.”
The Little Saint Nick Foundation is a non-profit that strives to put smiles on kids in crisis through the compassionate help of other children. It helps to inspire and comfort children who find themselves in a scary situation such as a children’s hospital, where fear and anxiety are the norm.
With the contributions of kids who are often of similar ages to the children they help, the foundation regularly provides simple, anti-anxiety gift bags that typically include a coloring book, crayons, a stuffed animal, a Pop It toy, and a hand-made get-well card made by a like-minded child. Thanks to these efforts, over 300 children receive gift bags and other gifts every single day. Their work provides inspiration for sick and struggling kids, a positive distraction for parents, and helps teach child volunteers valuable leadership skills that can change their lives and benefit communities.
The Little Saint Nick Foundation empowers children to help other children, one smile at a time. They help make the trauma of a medical experience less scary and remind struggling children of the joys of childhood, especially during extremely trying times.
Why In-House Underwriting is Invaluable to a Self-Funded Insurance Plan
Whether you’re an advisor or employer, there’s something special about having personal, one-on-one access to your insurance policy’s underwriter, keeping them on speed dial, so to speak.
At Roundstone, you always have a close connection to the in-house underwriters of your policy.
You gain personal access, which means you benefit from their wisdom and experience. You can better understand whether a policy is right for you – and you can better custom design that policy so it better meets the unique healthcare needs of your people.
In-house underwriting sets Roundstone apart when it comes to stop-loss captives. It offers both advisors and employers rare access that can be invaluable when it comes to crafting that perfect self-funded health plan to meet their needs.
3 Macrotrends That Drive More Employers to Self-Funded Stop Loss Captives
Looking back, these last few years at Roundstone have been an exciting ride – we’ve managed a consistent nearly 30% growth rate, driven by the steadily increasing demand of the market. Why? What’s causing more employers to make the move to a self-funded stop-loss captive?
Simple. They’re caught between a rock and a hard place. Ask any employer come renewal season. The pain is real. The cost of health insurance keeps getting more expensive, and there are many reasons why.
Healthcare has become a top business expense, second only to payroll. In the last 10 years, the cost of health insurance has skyrocketed over 150% – and it’s projected to double in the next four years, according to a Mercer Survey. Employers as well as their employees are paying more. Everyone’s frustrated and unhappy when it comes to healthcare.
Want to Protect Your Home from Wildfire? The Secret’s not Luck – It’s Science
It’s no secret – anyone living in Marin and Sonoma Counties fears the Big One now more than ever.
In the last two years, wildfires decimated $11.2 billion worth of damages in the U.S., according to the National Centers for Environmental Information. And California is smack in the middle of Ground Zero.
The top 10 worst wildfires all happened in California. Last year alone in California, 2.6 million acres burned and 3,629 structures were destroyed. Five of the top 20 largest wildfires in California occurred in 2020 – four occurred in 2021. In 2020, California wildfires burned up 4.2 million acres of land and 10,500 structures – killing at least 31 people.
Anyone living out West has a right to feel nervous, especially around fire season but really any time of year – last year’s Marshall Fire struck well into winter and was the costliest fire in Colorado’s history.
Climate change has irrevocably transformed the nature and danger of wildfires. But here’s some good news – by fire hardening your home and preparing for fire season, you may very well save your home from destruction, even if the fire beats a path right outside your door.
How to Make Your New Year’s Resolutions Stick and Manifest Your Dreams: A Step-by-Step Guide
New Year’s is like the world’s birthday – it’s our opportunity to make a different and better world for ourselves, our teams, and our families.
What are going to be your contributions – start working out, consume less, spend more time creating and less time binging? Now’s the perfect time for change. What will yours be?
But before you nose-dive into grandiose ambitions for this next year, I created a fast and simple 10-step plan to make the whole process of renewal more manageable. It’s a great place to start if you want to see actual results, change worlds, and maybe even move a few mountains.
Life After COVID: How to Plan a Fin Tube Project in a New Economy
These are certainly surreal times. After more than a year of adapting to the COVID crisis, we as a nation are finally coming out the other side — for better or worse, ready to meet tomorrow.
One thing’s for sure: It’s not the same world — probably never will be again. And this affects how you should purchase fin tubes.
Masks are coming off, literally and figuratively. The economy’s heating up like a heat exchanger brimming to boil.
Nevertheless, industries continue to face unprecedented challenges. The country is in the midst of a labor crunch — qualified personnel are difficult to find. And in hand with labor shortages come supply chain deficits. It’s not easy to find what you need when you need it — and the cost can be anyone’s guess.
“As the pandemic has hampered factory operations and sown chaos in global shipping, many economies around the world have been bedeviled by shortages of a vast range of goods — from electronics to lumber to clothing,” write Peter S. Goodman and Niraj Chokshi in the New York Times. “In a time of extraordinary upheaval in the global economy, Just In Time is running late.”
In our mission to deliver quality finned tubes to our customers, Energy Transfer is by no means immune to the challenges of the marketplace. Fortunately, we’re well positioned and have an advantage over many of our competitors, but the market for fin tubes has become the proverbial Wild West.
More often than not, you’re shooting from the hip, trying to stay ahead of the stampede.
Martin Luther King’s Perennial Dreams: What’s Happened to Leadership?
Waking up this morning over a steaming cup of coffee, a meme suggesting Trump crapped himself caught me off guard and immediately stole 20 minutes of my soul.
I laughed, as anyone who still can should. And then I Googled “Trump poops pants in public” because, well, that’s the world we live in these days.
You can find an image of the 45th president, post golf swing, with an obvious brown stain down the back of his trousers. Turns out that image was Photoshopped. But it’s totally believable, considering the legal turd hurricane our former president increasingly finds himself in. No matter your take on MAGA, who wouldn’t mess themselves wearing those golf pants?
Maybe not the best way to begin the day that honors the legacy of MLK, I’ll admit.
And then I thought: “What’s happened to our leaders?”
Lights, Camera, Action! A Visit from Amazon’s Film Crew
You know what feels pretty sweet? Partnering with great people.
After all, strong partnerships make the world go around — where the rubber meets the road, so to speak. Your success and theirs is integrated — synchronously beneficial and symbiotic. You work together like distinct parts in the same machine.
That’s why we couldn’t be happier with our partnered collaboration with Amazon. CTM is a major supplier of shipping and printing labelers for Amazon’s Fulfillment Centers. In fact, Amazon ships millions of products that have been labeled by a CTM label applicator. Amazon’s level of trust in our labeling machines is a source of community pride.
An Eco-Friendly Guide to Musty Smells in Crawl Space
It never fails. After a heavy San Francisco rainstorm, your basement smells like old man socks. You’ve got a musty smell in your crawl space. What can you do about it?
Just because your basement or crawl space smells like Neil Young’s Birkenstocks after a night of heavy jamming, don’t take it personally. It happens to the best of us.
You likely have a mold and mildew issue from water seeping through the walls. It could also be a dead animal. Or perhaps live animals turned your basement or crawl space into an Outside Lands porta-potty.
Or it could be Crazy Horse moved into the cellar and haven’t done laundry in a long time.
Either way, you’ve got problems. Your crawl space smells bad – like old man feet when the socks come off.
But you don’t need to just accept it like a heavily scripted rock opera taking over the entire first set. Get rid of that musty smell in the crawl space with a concerted renovation program that’s bio-safe and eco-friendly.
Here’s how to get started to rid of that musty smell in the crawl space without the use of poisonous chemicals. With a little rehabilitation and eco-friendly cleaning, your space can practically smell like roses, or perhaps even like Daryl Hannah in the days of “Splash.”
3 Common Mistakes To Avoid When Transitioning Out Of The Military
Your ETS date is on the calendar. You’ve served your country, and your time is almost complete. What’s next?
As you move forward into civilian life, it’s best to make the transition out of the military as stress-free as possible.
Adjusting to civilian life can be challenging. According to data from the University of Southern California, two of three military veterans reported they struggled to adjust to life after the military. Three out of four did not have a job lined up after getting out, and roughly a third ran into financial trouble.
It’s easy to make mistakes, which can cost you years and lost wages. To set yourself up for success and ensure a smooth transition, avoid these three common errors. Your family will thank you.
Is Your Fin Tube Manufacturer Selling You Useless Snake Oil?
Want in on a secret?
The finned tube industry suffers from a lack of quality standards. It’s really a small market with many unqualified manufacturers slinging snake oil. Much like Dr. Comfort’s Candy-Covered Cathartic Compounds, their “solutions” are little more than ground up zinc, mercury, a pinch of arsenic. In many cases, they can actually do you more harm than good.
When built right, a fin tube is a sleek cylinder of efficient thermodynamics. Essentially, a DuraFin tube creates a barrier between two fluids or gases to enable the exchange of heat energy. It prudently spreads and increases the cooling surface area within a confined space to achieve superior efficiency.
Yet many manufacturers use very poor standards: They cut costs that affect quality, do little to no testing for quality control. Many are practically building tubes out of a dirt floor barn – that’s the Wild West reality of the finned tube market.
By the time you realize the difference, it’s too late: The fin tube doesn’t work effectively or breaks down; you’re left holding the bag.
It’s kind of like the Oregon Trail all over again: Do you start all over or die of dysentery?
Prototype This! 3 Things You Need to Deliver Custom Enhanced Fin Tubes
Nobody wants to reinvent the wheel. But then again, how did the wheel ever become a wheel in the first place?
Some caveman prototyped it — hashed out a design and tested it ‘til it rolled like a stone. And to do that, he had to experiment — play around — until he found something that worked. It’s the same way with custom enhanced finned tube fabrication.
In order to build a fin tube made to order, you need to work with a manufacturer who has the capacity — the experience, capabilities, and infrastructure — to be able to experiment.
You’ve got an idea — a modification, an improvement, an invention to make life easier — but you need to find somebody to build it.
3 Ways to Shop for Fine Jewelry You Absolutely Love on the Cheap
Want in on a secret that only jewelers who aren’t paid on commission are willing to share?
When it comes to jewelry, affordable and quality are not necessarily exclusive. You really can find high-quality jewelry and still save money, if you know how.
You don’t need to spend a fortune on a piece of jewelry you’ve fallen in love with. There are plenty of ways to find quality jewelry for cheap and save money. A beloved piece speaks to the heart in ways an appraisal cannot measure.
How to Quit Smoking Cigarettes Using Organic Herbal Blends
Seen this ad?
“I’m Henry Hill, and I quit smoking with a pharmaceutical — side effects may include farting, seizures, and heart attacks….”
You don’t need to be a Hollywood movie star or a Wiseguy to wonder if there’s a better way to quit smoking than a freaking heart-fart attack.
Can you effectively quit smoking cigarettes with a tobacco alternative like an herbal smoking blend?
Blind Man’s Bluff: Ignoring Product Labeling Samples Gets Expensive
As a kid, ever play blind man’s bluff?
It’s a lot like tag, but you can’t see a thing. You’re blindfolded in a field, scrambling like crazy as every kid on the block screams your name, taunting you to tag them out. Blindly waving your arms like a madman, you fumble, trip over a lawn chair, fall flat on your face.
Sound fun? In many ways, it can be a lot like buying a labeling system without first providing a proper product sample. It hurts right in the pocketbook.
When you don’t furnish your labeling manufacturer a correct and accurate sample of what’s to be labeled…
…you’re going down, hard
The Wrong Labeling Machine: A Large Elephant, a Narrow Window
Buying the wrong labeling machine is like asking for a puppy on your birthday and getting an elephant instead. “What the world am I going to do with this?”
Many of our customers come to us in this very predicament. They need a labeling solution to solve a particular labeling dilemma, one that’s unique to their core product. But their previous labeling provider delivered them a setup suited for entirely different packaging.
Like an elephant parked next to the Prius in your garage, it doesn’t exactly fit.