Fetching Friday – Resources Mashup & Baboons in a Car

This post is part of a weekly series, Fetching Friday, featuring the best posts of the week in blogging, business, freelancing, SEO, and social media on kikolani.com.

The Resources Mashup

Here are some of the best articles I have seen on Google+, retweeted on @kikolani, and read in RSS subscriptions this week.

Also, if you’re in the market for a credit card, don’t miss these guides to learn what is the best credit card and see reviews for the best personal credit cards.

Blogging / Content

• 3 Ways to Get Blog Content When You’re Strapped for Time – To make the content acquisition and publishing process a bit easier for folks who are barely getting any sleep as is, I figured I’d share three tried-and-true ways of securing quality content for your company blog without breaking the bank.
• WordPress SEO Hacks: A Cheat Sheet for Getting More Traffic – Learn how you can optimize your WordPress blog to rank higher in search engines and get more traffic.
• A Guide To Developing Your Content Marketing Strategy – From the webinar “Implement These 10 SEO Tips, You Must” comes a guide to developing a comprehensive content marketing strategy.
• How To Write Fast: 8 Secrets To Better, Quicker Content Creation – No-fail secrets to better, quicker content creation. Click play to learn a combination of techniques and mindset shifts that will help you write faster and feel great about it too.
• WordPress Essentials by Industry [Infographic] – A table of the top tweaks that webmasters were applying to their WordPress CMS (by industry), to save you the build time when it comes to seeing what they recommend.

Business / Career

• How to Stalk Your Competitors in 10 Minutes – Learn how to track your competitors and improve your online presence in just 10 minutes a day with this free app.
• 25+ Tools for Real-Time Marketing – We’re about to document the 25+ tools marketers need to know about if they’re serious about real-time marketing.
• Your Unique Selling Proposition: Why It Matters, and How to Find One That Really Works – Your unique selling proposition (USP) is literally the foundation of your business. Today I’ve got a great pair of interviews that will help you find (or strengthen) your USP… and not take forever to do it.
• 7 Enlightening Infographics About Email Deliverability – Take a look at seven of the best infographics about SPAM and email deliverability.
• 5 Ways to Optimize the Business Value of Attending Conferences – If your company is considering whether to send you to events because of uncertain return or benefits, show them the following list.

Freelancing

• 12 Quality Job Boards Every Freelance Writer Should Check Out Today – Are you in need of quality freelance writing jobs? If you’re tired of the junk job offers everywhere online, here are 12 freelance job boards for you.
• 40 Photos of Creative Offices & Freelance Workspaces – Need some office inspiration? Here are 40 offices of regular freelancers.
• Understanding the Design Audit: Getting the Biggest Benefits for You and Your Clients – When a company’s brand fragments, there is an opportunity here for freelance designers to provide a much needed service. Let’s look deeper into this problem.
• Are Freelance Writers Introverts – Are freelance writers introverts? I discuss my introversion and I review Susan Cain’s excellent book Quiet.
• How to Get Tons of Freelance Writing Assignments by Pumping Up the Volume – Too many writers send out a query or LOI here and there, or connect with an editor every once in awhile on Twitter or LinkedIn, and then get upset when they don’t see immediate results. But here’s the thing: If you get a huge volume of stuff out there, you almost can’t not succeed.

Personal Development / Productivity

• The Truth About Piles and Your Productivity – The next time you are looking for something that is buried in your piles, think twice about adding to the problem. Here are just a few tips to help you avoid the piles:
• The 9-5 Guide to Staying Active – As someone steadily entrenched in my chair over these last few months in the office, I’ve had to get creative. I’ve had to try and puzzle out how I can devote my daily 9 to 5, in other words, to the betterment—not the detriment—of my health. Here’s what I’ve come up with.
• 75 Day-Brightening Stories of Generosity – 75 real life stories of everyday giving from our sister site, Makes Me Think, that will put a smile on your face and inspire you to pay it forward.
• 5 Ways To Take Absolute Control Of Business Productivity – More time to spend with your loved ones. More time to try new things. More time to work on a killer project. How valuable would that added time to you? It would be priceless right? This post will go through 5 ways to take control of your productivity.
• How a Relapse Begins: The Key To Removing Bad Habits From Your Life – A common view of relapses is that the start of the relapse is when you fall back into your former state of being. Learn how they happen and how to stop them.

Search Engines / SEO

• Google Launches Knowledge Graph To Provide Answers, Not Just Links – The Knowledge Graph is being used to provide popular facts about people, places and things alongside Google’s traditional results.
• 7 Time-Saving Google Analytics Custom Reports – Instead of spending time digging around for important metrics, you can find what you need separated neatly into columns for some analysis that will lead to some actionable insight.
• 17 Types of Link Spam to Avoid – Going forward, the wise SEO would want to take note of the types of link spam to make sure that what they’re doing doesn’t look like a type of link spam. Google’s response to and attitude towards each type of link spam varies, but every link building method becomes more and more risky as you begin moving towards the danger zone.
• The Worst Kept “Secret” in Local Search: My Thoughts on the Impending Plus-Places Merge – The inevitable integration of Google’s Plus and Places products, obvious since Day One of Plus, finally seems like it might be imminent. We’ve seen several signals from Google in the last couple of months that this integration may be coming sooner rather than later:
• How to Get Rid of Unwanted Backlinks – If you’ve been hit by Google Penguin or an unnatural links penalty, you’re gonna want to drill, baby, drill. The more backlinks you can evaluate the better.

Social Media / Social Networking

• The Top 10 U.S. Cities With Social-Savvy Small Businesses – A look at the top 10 U.S. cities with small businesses using social media.
• 5 Creative Ideas to Spark New Engagement in Facebook Timeline for Fan Pages – Facebook Page Timeline engagement ideas. Cover Photo, Pinned Posts, Highlighted Posts, Milestones, and Tabs and Apps are all covered.
• 6 Ways to Grow YouTube Subscribers and Your Exposure – YouTube Marketing Strategy: How to get subscribers with strategically placed annotations, call-to-actions, your blog and Featured Channels.
• 9 Experts Tell You the Top 3 Things to Do With Your Social Media Accounts – Social media is all the rage nowadays. Everyone is doing it, but it can get noisy and frustrating if you are a business trying to blaze your own path. There are a number of things you can do, but what do the experts recommend?
• 5 Reasons That Twitter’s New Email Matters for Marketers – So what are the big takeaways here? Why did Twitter add this feature? And more importantly, what are the potential benefits for marketers?

Photo of the Week

This week’s top photo comes from Yosemite National Park. It’s one of my favorites from my husband’s recent trip there in April.

Be sure to check out Jason Hines’ photography blog and Arizona wedding photography website for more photos. Also, follow him on Twitter @jasonphines or Google+!

Baboons Testing a Hyundai

What better way to test the durability of a car than to release a lot of “cheeky monkeys” on and in it!

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