Fetching Friday – Resources Mashup & Cedar Breaks

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

• 4 Powerful WordPress Design Tips – This post is all about how you can use design your WordPress website to invite, entice, and engage your site visitor long enough for him to begin to interact with your words.
• 19 Bad Habits Bloggers Need to STOP – What follows are the 19 most common bad habits I’ve found that bloggers impose on themselves that hold them back from developing a unique and authentic voice.
• 7 Effortless Ways to Find New Ideas for Your Blog – How to find new and interesting content ideas for your business blog that will keep your readers engaged.
• 7 Awesome Blogging Ideas You Should Apply to Your Niche Blog NOW – You’re constantly learning, taking notes, but you never get expected result? Why should you read this tips when you can’t use them? Because you can.
• A Simple Guide to Google Content Experiments – Split testing is the single most neglected discipline within the search industry. The good news is, it isn’t as technical as you might think, and Google offers a way to get started for free. Learn how to set up, manage, and analyze an experiment.

Business / Marketing

• How to Use Rejection to Achieve Your Business Goals – One of the reasons I bring this up is because it’s very important that you understand why you fear rejection…you understand your real fear. Because once you do that you can then actually do something about it…and use that fear to your advantage.
• 20 Stats Every Modern Marketer Should See – Need a stat? Here are 20 modern marketing stats you’ll want to keep close by.
• The Simple Framework For Emails That Get To Yes – The psychology behind why people respond—and say YES—to emails from people they don’t know.
• How to Write 5000 Words a Day: 3 Irrefutable Rules – Build a writing habit to write 5000 words a day with these 3 irrefutable rules.
• Expert Panel Lists Their Favorite Smartphone Apps for Business – n this day and age, we all have our smart phones tied to our hips. I always find it interesting to hear the business applications that others use and felt this would be a beneficial post for the community.

Freelancing

• Top 10 Vital Elements of a Successful New Freelancer’s Website – How can you make your site into a client magnet that has prospects ringing your phone off the hook? Here are the important items your freelancer website needs:
• 14 Online Marketing Wake-Up Calls from @Avinash – Curious to know what makes Avinash Kaushik (Digital Marketing Evangelist, Google) roll out of bed each morning? Surprisingly, it’s not data.
• How to Conquer Your Terror of Screwing Up a Freelance Writing Gig – There are only a few basic ways of overcoming these fears.
• Why You Are So Slow Finishing That Freelance Writing Project – Hey freelancers, why do your writing projects take you all the way up to the deadline to complete? Blame Parkinson’s Law.
• 5 Cheap Methods for Attracting New Clients – Marketing your skills to the proper audience will ensure at least a couple positive results. But persistence is the most important trait when looking to success in the freelance world.

Search Engines / SEO

• How to Rank for a Keyword in 10 Steps – Learn how to rank for a keyword in Google’s organic search results with this 10-step process for creating and optimizing high-ranking content.
• Single Page Websites and SEO — A One Page Site Can Clobber Your SEO – Single Page websites are cool and appropriate for SOME websites, but not for most. When is a One Page site OK and when it can compromise your SEO.
• 23 Tips on How to A/B Test Like a Badass – A/B testing is hitting the mainstream because it is so effective. And with so many tools available it has become very easy and very inexpensive to run. Here are 23 helpful tips on how you can take your A/B tests from basic to the next level.
• Conversion Optimization 101: Perfectly Persuasive PPC Landing Pages – Once you have the proper landing page, decide what ad/email/social campaign would attract people to click through and want to see this page. How will you get their attention? How will you make sure they understand the relevance to their needs? How will you express your value?
• The 16-Step Web Content Audit: Prioritize, Analyze, Refresh, Optimize – Looking for a way to prioritize efforts to refresh and optimize Web content on your site? Check out this Web content audit for tools and tips.

Social Media / Social Networking

• 75 Things I Learned on My Journey to 100,000 Twitter Followers – It was early 2009, and I was still working in the walls of corporate America. I saw the power of the tweet, what it could do for my career, business and life.
• How to Measure Your Social Media Traffic Using Google Analytics – How to track the impact of social media traffic on your site, going beyond clicks, retweets and other vanity metrics.
• 12 Social Thought Leaders Reveal Their #1 Tip For 2013 – I recently surveyed 12 of the top thought leaders in social media in an effort to provide you with the support you need to develop a social strategy that will help make 2013 a breakout year for you and your organization. Before you lock in your plans for 2013, reflect on the tips below and incorporate them into game plan.
• The No Hype Guide To Video Marketing on YouTube – Learn the 5 most important skills to video marketing no YouTube in this comprehensive guest post from social strategist Tommy Walker.
• A Round Up Of Social Sentiment Tools For Every Budget – Social media provides some of the richest customer data around. These social sentiment tools will help you analyze that data to improve your business.

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!

Photo of the Week

This week’s top photo comes from Cedar Breaks in Southern Utah, about 30 minutes from our new hometown!

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

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