Fetching Friday – Resources Mashup & Flying Kittens

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

• 7 Blogs Designed for Conversion and What You Can Learn From Them – If you have similar goals and need a little inspiration on how to achieve them, in no particular order, here are seven blogs designed for lead generation and conversion and why they work.
• Content Curation: The Ultimate Guide – Content curation can be used as a significant part of your marketing strategy, and can yield a lot of benefits if you do it right. Here’s how.
• Case Study: Attracting More Blog Traffic with Long Tail Keywords – Examples of how blogging helped me get search positions and how I get extra visitors every day.
• How to Write the Perfect Email: The 9-Step Script for Emailing Busy People – Knowing how to email successful people is essential if you want to become successful yourself! Learn how to reach them without being annoying.
• How to Create Video Content that Actually Works – Video’s taking over the (online) world, but not all content lends itself. Here are some great tips and examples of video content that actually works.
• The Best Website Traffic Generation Strategies By 10 Top Bloggers – New eBook featuring traffic generation strategies from Ana Hoffman, Darren Rowse, Derek Halpern, Ileane Smith, Kiesha Easley, Jane Sheeba, and other well-known bloggers.

Business / Career

• How Educating Your Audience Pays Off – The value of educating your audience has never been as important as it is today. Here’s why.
• 8 Secrets to Balancing Your Side-Hustle with A Full-time Job – The good news is that you don’t need to gain expert level now or tomorrow or even in a year. You need to learn the necessary ropes and then stick to some non-negotiable rules when it comes to balancing your day job and side-hustle.
• 8 Core Beliefs of Extraordinary Entrepreneurs – What does it take to be an extraordinary entrepreneur? An entrepreneur who has a vision for a business, rallies support to build it and then grows it into one of the most innovative companies in the world…
• 12 Things I Learned From Starting 3 Successful Lifestyle Businesses – A lifestyle business is a business that you can run on the side to earn extra money so that you don’t feel obligated to work your day job. Find out what you can learn from this entrepreneur about starting three of them.
• 21 Better Ways to Do Blogger Outreach – Find out how to make sure your pitch doesn’t end up in the trash for being too generic.

Freelancing

• 14 Essential Elements of a Good Freelancing Blog – We’ve talked a lot about the importance of blogging for freelancers, but in this post we’ll focus on the elements that your freelancing blog needs to become successful.
• Why Writing for Free is Bad for Writers – Should writers ever write for free? If so, when and why? In general, writing for free is something writers should never do. This article explains why!
• usiness Plans for Freelance Consultants – The wide availability of model business plans leads consultants to waste a lot of effort, so let’s look at the “templates problem” before we get into the core elements of a good business plan.
• The Gangnam Style Guide to Becoming a Freelance Writing Rockstar – How can you go from just another freelance writer to a high-profile, writing phenomenon? Here are 10 tips from Korean rapper Psy’s mega-hit, Gangnam Style.
• How to Be a Healthy Freelancer – It’s simple: The healthier you are, the better you feel and the more you accomplish in all areas of your life, including your freelance writing.

Search Engines / SEO

• 5 Link Building Tactics to Improve Your Local Rankings – If you work with local businesses, you have seen first-hand the impact of the localized universal results that Mike Ramsey covered in his post on the Venice update. If you can build a solid local link profile, you can rank organically for universal search terms with local intent in your vertical.
• What 65 Google Changes May Mean For Your Link Strategies – As a content linking strategist, when I read about changes made to search algorithms I use these technique to determine just what, if anything I need to do about them.
• Google Panda & Penguin: A New Way for SEOs to Measure True Impact – How is the overall impact of a Google Panda or Penguin update/data refresh measured, beyond Google’s own numbers? PM Digital’s Clay Cazier proposes a method of measurement using Google Organic Click Turbulence and invites SEOs to participate.
• Top 50 Google Webmaster Guidelines Pages Monitor – Want to know what changes were made to Google Webmaster Guidelines? Find out here.
• The 70/20/10 Model for SEO & Content Excellence – While data-centric methodologies are imperative to creating “foolproof” content that works, gaming algorithms is a temporary solution to a long-term marketing investment. Learn how to create content people want, rather than content that works.

Social Media / Social Networking

• Beyond the Basics: 30 Fresh Social Media Tips for 2012 – This posts covers significant changes in social networks, as well as provide some additional tips that you can apply to your social media strategy on the top social networks, including Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, and Pinterest.
• How To Take Back Control Of Your Facebook News Feed – It’s getting harder and harder to see the content you really *want* to see in your Facebook News Feed these days. Make good use of the List feature!
• 6 Tips for Using LinkedIn the New Endorsements – Everything you need to know about this new feature. Learn how to endorse skills and areas of expertise for your LinkedIn connections.
• 12 Latest Facebook Page Features You Might Have Missed – Unable to keep up with Facebook Changes? Why not check through the list and see if these new Facebook features can help in your daily page management and marketing strategies.
• Twitter Quietly Launches A User Directory – You may not have noticed the link, but it’s there in the footer of Twitter’s home page if you’re logged out: “Directory.” It’s a link to Twitter’s unannounced user directory, an alphabetical collection of all Twitter account holders from A to Z that also includes profiles with non-Latin character names.

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, I’d like to share a shot from our pregnancy photo shoot by Phoenix Family Photos. You can see a preview of the full album here. If you are in Arizona and need a wedding photographer, be sure to check out The Pic CHick Photography.

Also, just a reminder – this weekend is the live online baby shower. See more details on the Facebook events page!

Cute Kittens Fly in Slow Motion

I love both the slow motion and the music for this one!

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