Fetching Friday – Resources Mashup & Baby Elephant Rescue

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.

Blogging / Content

• 33 Ways to Get Help For Your Blog (Without Breaking the Bank) – We’ve got you covered with blogging 411 info to help you efficiently leverage resources in seven of the areas where many bloggers typically need support.
• 9 Little Known Benefits of Having Your Own Blog – Blogging has amazing side-benefits that are not as obvious to the casual observer. So in this post, I’ll lay out 9 little known but killer benefits of having your own blog.
• 3445 Words on How to Promote the Ish out of Your Blog Posts – Promoting your blog content is just as important as writing it to begin with. Discover everything I know about blog promotion that doesn’t include telling your family and friends.
• Top 25 Hosting Companies for Bloggers – Infographic Plus Additional Options – Considering a new hosting company for your blog or website? There are a lot more than just 25 top hosting companies to choose from.
• Content Curation, Republishing, and Theft – What Helps and Hurts Your Brand – Confused about content curation, republishing, and theft? Find out the differences and which can be helpful or harmful to your brand.

Business / Career

• 7 Targeted Social Networks Niche Marketers Should Try – Not sure what kinds of niche social networks have popped up on the web? Here are 7 of some of the more targeted social networks to open your eyes to what’s out there.
• The Ultimate 11-Step Plan to Launching a Successful Business Blog in 6 Months or Less – The following system is one that I’ve been using over the last year with tremendous results and has been further refined with each client, including 3 that I’ve launched over the last 30 days.
• 10 Mission Critical Tools For Every Modern Marketer – Before you go out there and try to accomplish your marketing goals, make sure you check to see if you have the right tools to help you get there. Here are 10 mission critical tools you ought to use.
• How to Find Influential People With Social Media – How to use social media to network with the key influencers in your industry. Here’s how to create the relationships you need for your business.
• 10 Branding Lessons That Every Business Graduate Should Know (But Doesn’t) – These are lessons that will help you create a world-renowned brand that attracts leads, dominates competition and rakes in the cash.

Freelancing

• How to Write More Than You Do Now – How to write more than you do now shows you simple, clever ways to be more productive in your writing. These are tips freelance writers can all use.
• Top 10 Reasons Why First-Time Freelancers Fail – If you are a first-time freelancer and would like to become a seasoned one without having failed—then read on to learn the top ten mistakes first-time freelancers make and how to avoid them. Achieving success doesn’t require you to fall flat on your face first.
• How to Upsell Without Being Obnoxious – In this post, we’ll list eight bad upselling practices to avoid and then we’ll explain how to do it right.
• How to Spot Viable Freelance Writing Opportunities on Job Boards – I want to expose how many opportunities there are available to aspiring writers. All you need to do is look, and that is exactly what I hope I have proven in the video below.
• Freelancing Therapy: How to Make Freelancing Work for Your Personality – In this post, I’ll list some common personality types and explain some of the freelancing challenges that are specific to each type.

Search Engines / SEO

• Are You Still Making These Six Senseless SEO Mistakes – To avoid Google’s wrath in the next algorithm change, you have to do SEO the hard way; the natural way. Don’t pretend to build a natural link profile. Instead: be natural.
• Why Google Disavow Is Bad News For SEO – Find out why the Google Disavow tool is bad news for the SEO world & how you can use the negative SEO prevention tool to launch negative SEO attacks.
• 62 Steps to the Definitive Link Building Campaign – Here we’ll take you through 62 steps of the following eight stages of the definitive link building campaign then give you a link to a spreadsheet containing a checklist you can use for your own link building campaigns.
• 10 Reasons SEO Is Harder for Small Businesses – Why is SEO so much harder for small businesses? Here are ten reasons that bigger companies and well-known brands find it easier to succeed at SEO.
• 12 Internal Linking Best Practices – There’s a few types of internal links including menu, sidebar, footer and contextual or body links. Here’s a quick run through the main categories of internal links with a few new about each category.

Social Media / Social Networking

• 5 Twitter Advertising Options for Small Businesses – Learn more about the official Twitter advertising platform along with 4 great alternatives to help increase your Twitter followers, get retweets, and more.
• 5 Tips for Using Google+ to Boost Your Marketing – Learn how to boost your Google+ profile and increase your business’s online presence.
• 87 More Vital Social Media Marketing Facts and Stats for 2012 – The recent 72 Fascinating Social Media Stats post on JeffBullas.com was one of my post popular guest posts ever, so here is an entirely new set of social media stats, facts and research findings.
• The Ultimate Guide to Linkedin Answers – Linkedin Answers is the best Linkedin feature for marketing. Learn how to use Linkedin Answers to generate leads, sales and traffic for your business.
• What Marketers Need to Know About the New Foursquare Search – By slowly introducing new product features like tips, to-do’s, lists, and most recently likes and local updates with Foursquare Explore, they have built themselves quite the robust engine to serve up point-based recommendations to anyone now. Here’s what you need to know abou the new search.

Baby Shower Thank You List

Last weekend was the live Google+ Hangout for our online baby shower (if you missed it, you can see it here). It was a wonderful experience, getting to share the celebration of our impending arrival this December with our online friends and family. I also can’t even begin to express how thankful my husband and I are for all of the gifts we received off of our registry. We were pretty overwhelmed by all the little things we’d need for our first baby, so every gift we received is a blessing!

I’ll be writing more about the online baby shower experience as a whole (probably after our big move at the end of this month) on my personal blog. But until then, I wanted to say a special thanks to all of those who sent us a little something!

• Mike Stelzner of Social Media Examiner
• Brankica of Online Income Star, Social Media Sharp Shooter, and Fit Chick Cafe
• Bamidele Onibalusi of YoungPrePro
• Adam Riemer of Adam Riemer Marketing LLC
• Farnoosh Brock of Prolific Living
• Annette Matzen of Annette Matzen Digital Marketing
• Ivy Harding of Pic Chick Online and Phoenix Family Photos
• Tess Marshall of The Bold Life
• Amy Schmittauer of Savvy Sexy Social
• Anthony Kirlew of Old School SEO
• Yolande Grill of InfoSol and Essential Chi
• Patricia Redsicker of Patricia Redsicker Content Marketing
• Eren Mckay of Embracing Home
• Michelle Arbore of Virtual Assistance For You and Web Page By Design
• Justin McGill of SEOrchers
• Leah Fink of Charlotte Works the Web
• Mark Thompson of Stay on Search
• Francis Unson of Flower Blossoms
• Angie Schottmuller of Interactive Artisans

Also, thanks to family and friends that aren’t publicly online or wished to not be mentioned. All of you should be receiving thank you cards in the mail too – not sure on the delivery time for those of you outside of the US, but it’s on it’s way.

For those who are still interested in sending us a little something (cloth diapers and Amazon gift cards are especially welcome), we’re still registered at Babies R US and Amazon.

Share Your Best Blog Posts

Every week on Friday, I start a thread on the Social Media Examiner Blogging Club so members can share their favorite blog post of the week. It’s free to join, so sign up, find today’s best blog post thread, and share your proudest blogging achievement of the week!

Baby Elephant Rescue

If the reunion at the end doesn’t tug at your heartstrings, then I’m not sure what will.

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