Fetching Friday – Resources Mashup & Chinchilla Love

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 Marketing

• 8 Surefire Ways To Increase Engagement On Your Site – Assuming you’ve created great content already, what tactics can you use to increase engagement? There’s a ton of effective ways to do so, and in this post you’ll find out 8 ways to maximize engagement.
• 28 Keys to Successful Blogging – Marko Saric’s 28 keys to successful blogging learned through his blogging experience.
• 21 Seriously Strong Content Marketing Magnets – Content marketing is the process of creating and delivering valuable content to your target customers. While the essential ingredient is, of course, content, the recipe only works when a bond forms between your brand and customer.
• The Real Truth About Blog Comments (When They Matter and When They Don’t) – I’m going to tell you why it’s crazy for some kinds of blogs to care much about the number of comments they receive.
• I Confess, Every Blog Post I’ve Ever Written is Link-Bait – Writers and bloggers are constantly being accused of “Link-Baiting”. But instead of disagreeing with this statement, I’m here to say every post I’ve written is link bait.

Business / Career

• Competitor Research 101: 15 Questions to Unravel Your Competitor’s Online Marketing Strategy – Want to get the scoop on your competitor’s online marketing strategy? Here are 15 questions to ask about their content, SEO, and social media.
• Be Sure You’re Looking At Bounce Rate For The Right Thing – Bounce rate is a great metric of how much your visitors like your site, but it can also be completely misleading when taken out of context.
• Is “Junk Traffic” Destroying Your Conversion Rate And Distorting Your Analytics – Sherice Jacob cites examples of junk traffic destroying website conversion rates and distorting website analytics.
• 17 Ways SMBs Can Survive the Google Penguin Update Effect – How can a business protect itself from the potential crush of Penguin or the next Google algorithm change? There is something to be said for not putting all your SEO eggs in Google’s basket. Read on for advice from veteran online marketers on life beyond Google.
• How To Organize Your Mobile Website To Maximize Usability And Sales – One of the hardest parts of designing a mobile optimized website is that the screen is so tiny. You have as little as one-tenth of the screen real estate compared to that of a desktop or a laptop, yet you still need to convey the same level of information to your potential customers.

Freelancing

• What Freelance Writers Must Know About Inbound Marketing – How freelance writers can use inbound marketing techniques with websites and LinkedIn to get new clients and assignments.
• Should You Create a Free Sample for New Clients – Providing a free sample of your work is not the same thing as working for free. The sample should be specific and to the point. You should have clear direction, and if you don’t have clear direction, be sure to ask for it. You do not want to waste your time creating something that might be close to what the client is looking for.
• 7 Smart Ways to Use Your Writing to Grow Your Freelance Business – This article will be sharing 7 smart ways you can use your writing to grow your freelance business; some of these tactics will only take a few hours, but they can contribute immensely to your freelance business.
• 5 Secrets No One Tells You About How to Write for the Fortune 500 – Ever wondered what it would be like to write for a big company? Hint: The pay is great. Here are five tips from my own experience writing for major corporations.
• What Freelance Writers Need To Know About Ebook Readers & The Environment – Ebook readers like most of our technology are environmentally sound only if we use them for years.

Personal Development / Productivity

• 7 Ways to Leverage Your Time to Increase Your Productivity – Leverage is an awesome force–it allows us to multiply our abilities by applying a little pressure to something. In life, we can leverage our time, and here are seven ways to do just that.
• Your Guide to Daydreaming – Daydreaming puts you in touch with creativity, intuition and play. When you actively imagine, you are able to see things that others do not see. An uncluttered mind also lends you greater clarity. If it’s been a long time since you daydreamed, here are some tips to get you started again.
• 20 Bad Habits Holding Good People Back – Here are twenty bad habits many of us repeatedly struggle with and what to do about them.
• 14 Action Inducing Lessons from Benjamin Franklin – Benjamin Franklin was clearly a man who knew how to get things done. Here are some things you can learn from him.
• How YOU Can Change the World – If you had the power to change the world and to fix any single problem in the world, what would you choose to fix and why?

Search Engines / SEO

• Anti-Penguin Link Building Plan – Everything that I’ll be stating below are just several options that I’ll personally be implementing in case I work on a site that has been hit by this recent Penguin update, wherein most are based on my own understanding of how search works, and everything listed here are theoretical and I’m not saying that they will certainly work.
• 20 Ways to BE Authentic in Your Internet Marketing & SEO, Not Just Look Authentic – There are many different ways that you can approach your SEO efforts to get to the top of search engines, however you must be authentic!
• Your Rank Tracking Reports Are Now Useless – Checking keyword rankings is a regular part of SEO campaigns. With Google’s Venice update, however, the process just got a lot harder. Read on to find out why!
• 12 Timeless Link Building Tips for Business Blogs – Here are a few timeless tips for building natural links that will attract and engage customers to your business blog.
• Google Penguin Update: 5 Types of Link Issues Harming Some Affected Websites – The main purpose of the Penguin update is to put a deep freeze on web spam in Google’s search results. By extension, a big piece of that web spam appears to be links from low-quality networks.

Social Media / Social Networking

• 6 Content Marketing Tips For Google+ – Getting more comfortable on Google+ meant settling in, adjusting to site-specific features, and finding different ways to attract my audience. Below are 6 ways I’ve found success using Google+.
• 13 Ways to Create a Cringeworthy Social Media Presence – this post is going to outline all of the worst offenders we’ve seen in social media. If none of these apply to you, congratulations! Otherwise, consider these cautionary tales to help protect your own social media strategy.
• How to Use Facebook Ads: An Introduction – What you need to know to make smart decisions about how to promote your brand and engage with fans through advertising on Facebook.
• HootSuite Workaround: See (and Respond to) Retweets You May be Missing – A Hootsuite workaround that lets you see and respond to native Twitter web RT without having to leave the Hootsuite dashboard.
• How to Fight For More Social Media Resources In Your Company – Having enough social media resources is an issue in many companies. In this educational post, Jay Baer show how to wage an effective internal fight to get more social media resources.

Chinchilla Love

Definitely not what you would expect to find in a wine glass!

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