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 / Writing
- 21 Essential Tools for Bloggers (That Don’t Cost a Bean) – These tools will actually help, not hinder you, as you start your blogging journey. They will help take you from blogging newbie to confident, efficient and well-seasoned blogger.
- 25 Non-Financial Benefits of Business Blogging – The business benefits of blogging are well-known but there might be even more intangible rewards that can benefit your business. Here are 25 ideas!
- 14 Tools that Make me Super-Productive as a Writer – Why are some writers so mediocre and some so prolific? Read this article to discover my top 14 productive tools. They are essential if you write online!
- 11 Blogging Lessons From The Daily Mail Traffic Growth – Let’s take a look at the key ingredients for the success of The Daily Mail and what lessons bloggers can learn.
- From Small-time Blogger to Professional Paid Speaker: My Journey – To be a professional speaker, it has to start somewhere. You can’t just say, “I’m a speaker” and then boom!—all of the sudden you’re booked up for months and months.
Business / Career
- The Marketer’s Guide to Quora – Learn how to use Quora’s question and answer network to build your professional brand, demonstrate your expertise, and monitor mentions about your business, products, or services.
- 8 Brands That Benefit From Guest Blogging – Check out how these businesses are using guest blogging to build exposure and grow brand awareness for your business.
- Time for a Check Up: Are You Sending Reminders to Your Customers – In this post the author shows you a few things about getting back in touch with your clients, blog readers and contacts. It’s a great way to develop the relationship and eventually make more money.
- Why User-Generated Content Is More Important Than You Think – Learn how to capture the market share of the largest growing consumer group in the US through user generated content.
- 8 Legal Steps for Starting Your Business – You’re ready to start up your startup? Make sure you follow these tips to avoid legal drama.
Freelancing
- 5 Ways to Earn More from Current Clients – During a work famine, it may be easier to get hired again by people who already paid you before: your former and existing clients. Let’s take a look at ways to get started with earning more from current clients.
- How to Grow Your Freelance Writing Business by Working Less – Freelance writers make lots of mistakes, especially when they’re starting out online. However, if you fail to make the right mistakes — and to learn from them — you may as well just keep your writing as a weekend hobby.
- 6 Reasons You Need to Charge More – While it’s aimed at SEOs, this article still applies to any freelancer, consultant, etc.
- Late Payments to Freelancers and SMEs “Endemic” – The way large businesses delay payments to small and micro-businesses effectively amounts to using us freelancers as a free source of credit.
- Monitoring Your Online Reputation as a Freelance Writer – As a writer, you can collect positive reviews from your satisfied clients. However, many potential clients today, go beyond profile reviews. They have now started to dig for more information about you. Below are the tools you can use to monitor your online reputation as a writer.
Personal Development / Productivity
- 99 Tiny Stories to Make You Think, Smile and Cry – These are simple, powerful, real life stories written by the people who lived them.
- 10 Tips for Increasing Your Self-Esteem From Earl Nightingale – One of the topics that Nightingale spoke of often was self-esteem, and how your opinion of yourself will determine, to a large extent, whether you fail or succeed in life. In this post you’ll discover ten self-esteem tips from Nightingale that will help you to succeed in life.
- Why School Doesn’t Prepare You for Life Unless you’re planning on becoming a doctor, lawyer or something that actually requires professional training, the author thinks the value of formal education is highly questionable.
- Your “Safety Zone” Gives You No Chance for Success – The author didn’t take risks as a kid, and it cost him. Don’t let fear cost you success.
- 6 Steps To A Better Life – If you find yourself waking up every day for months on end thinking that your life sucks, then take 10 minutes to read this post very carefully because it might just completely transform you and help you create a better life.
Search Engines / SEO
- 45 Resources on Google Search Plus Your World – The following resources will help you understand how Google+ is now integrated into search and other products, and how you can start adjusting your online marketing strategy for Search Plus Your World.
- Guide To Finding Link Building Targets With Social Media – Social media offers an ideal way to find and target industry users for specific linkbuilding outreach campaigns, too. Of course, before you can start targeting, you’ve got to identify who you’re trying to reach.
- Building a Technical SEO Process – Three things you should consider when trying to create a more streamlined process for making sure the technical foundation of the site is solid.
- 10 Immutable Laws of SEO – 10 immutable laws of search engine optimization. These are timeless laws in the world of SEO that every search marketer should adhere to.
- 9 Free Tools For Link Discovery & Content Creation – Tools that take away the timesuck of the discovery process.
Social Media / Social Networking
- 17 Little Known Social Media Tools You Should Be Using – To help you cut through the clutter, the author shares 17 must-use social media tools that have helped his clients and their businesses.
- 8 Ways Employees Can Improve Your Company’s LinkedIn Presence – Is your company lacking on LinkedIn? Your employees are the secret weapon! These 8 simple tips show how employees can benefit your business on LinkedIn.
- Get Out of Your Own Way: 5 Excuses Marketers Use to Avoid Social Media ROI – Marketers need to separate our ability to measure ROI from our personal views on whether or not we should measure social media ROI to be successful.
- 4 Ways to Increase Your Facebook Page Visibility – New ideas to gain visibility for your business with your Facebook page and by adding your Facebook profile to your marketing strategy.
- MarketMeSuite vs Hootsuite – Solving the Social Media Tools Headache – Which Twitter management tool should you chose to win the social media game?
Photo of the Week
This week’s top photo came from the zoo. It’s not every day that you see an animal that looks like it’s laughing at a funny joke!
Be sure to check out my photography blog for more photos and follow me @kristihines for my photography tweets or become a fan of Photostry on Facebook!
The FitDesk
Here’s the latest addition to my wishlist. If you work from home (or have an understanding boss), then you might want to invest in this so you can work and get a workout! You can get it directly from FitDesk or Amazon (both affiliate links).
Don’t Miss Out on Fetching Fridays!
Be sure to catch the weekly roundups by subscribing to Kikolani’s full feed via RSS or email. Or subscribe directly to Fetching Friday only via RSS or email.
About Fetching Friday
Kikolani covers blog marketing and blogging tips for personal, professional, and business bloggers to succeed in search and social media marketing. Kristi Hines is a 
Love your list Kristi!
Just bookmarked the page as I possibly can’t get through reading so many links at one go and really love to go through them at my own pace. And the camel sure looks like it IS laughing
Cute indeed to be able to capture such a shot.
FitDesk does seem an answer to freelance writers like us, who work from home! Just going to check it out right away.
Thanks so much for this wonderful post
Harleena Singh@Freelance Writer recently posted Simple Ways to be Romantic on Valentine’s Day
FitDesk is perfect for writers and bloggers!
Love the list as usual Kristi. And there are a handful of list posts which I’m very interested in checking out!
Thanks for putting the collection up!
Jane @ Thesis theme SEO recently posted RevResponse RSS To Email Tool Review
Thanks Jane!
Hi Kristi,
Thanks for another great roundup! I always look forward to these, you really do find top quality posts! The first one that I am going to read is the one about school not preparing you for life – that’s right up my alley.
Love that picture of the camel! Animals provide a lot of humor and joy, don’t they?
Stacy
Stacy recently posted How Meditation Improved My Life in About 30 Days
It’s so true… I know people with “marketing” degrees that can’t figure out how to send a simple email.
Thanks for the roundup! Some great quality resources and intelligent thoughts out there!
Thanks Chris!
Kristi
thank you for this awesome list I really enjoyed the seo section
Kenny Fabre recently posted Increase your Website Traffic to your Article Blog Post by Using PowerPoint Presentations
Glad you liked it Kenny!
That exercise bike needs to be in the office of everyone who sits at a computer all day and has the excuse of “no time” to exercise and stay in shape. Love it! Another great mashup!
Chris @ Owner Financed Homes Austin recently posted Mortgage Loan Denied? Try Owner Financed Homes in Austin
That needs to be in my office, although I’m going to be playing tennis more often!
Nice batch o’links!
THANKS for posting these, Kristi!
It never hurts to try more things in efforts to better one’s blog and one’s blogging abilities!
Blog On!
Dave Lucas recently posted Pop Clips » 10 Feb 2012
You’re welcome Dave!
Hi Kristi,
I always know I hit the right note when my post makes it onto your Fetching Friday list:)
Mwah! Thank you:)
Annabel Candy, Successful Blogging recently posted 21 Essential Tools for Bloggers (That Don’t Cost a Bean)
You’re welcome Annabel – great post!
Love the pic Kristi and as always, another great list of blogs to read.
Ricardus @WordPress Hosting recently posted Extension of Buy 1 Elegant Themes from WPWebHost & Free 1 WordPress Hosting Deal
Thanks Ricardus!
Thanks for posting this.Found some interesting articles here.Love the picture.
Lakhyajyoti recently posted Does Google Plus Have The Business Advantage
Thanks Lakhyajyoti!
Wow you really like articles that focus on the “# best ______.”
I hate writing that kind of stuff because a few months from now it’ll no longer be valid advice, and it all becomes worthless content. Ugh, I just really don’t like it. It doesn’t draw me.
Techie @ w3techie recently posted 6 Things Windows Users Should Know Before Switching to Linux
How do they lose their validity? Assuming the services listed are still going, they can be just as valid a year from now as they are now. In reality, any post – best of list or not – can lose it’s value based on topic. I wrote a post on organizing Twitter followers using a particular service (not a best of list) and that service shut down a week ago. That’s just how it works when you write about the Internet I guess.
The subject of User generated Content is interesting and almost makes me want to start accepting guest posts
Caleb recently posted Things To Know About Affiliate Marketing
Just watch out for stuff like this if you do – https://plus.google.com/118321989430962111396/posts/GX7Q6rLpJmy
Hi Kristi,
I am a new reader here…
That list of resources is just wonderful – bookmarked it to reference later.
Thanks so much for sharing! Will be looking around your blog – many thanks!
Christine Brady recently posted How to Increase Your Sales for Affiliate Marketing Success
Thanks for visiting Christine! I hope you enjoy your reading!
I always enjoy your finds Kristi and love the way you link out. You said years ago you’d stay do-follow and you were true to your word.
The video is an awesome idea. I have a pretty nice exercise bike here that’s used to hold everyone’s coats. It wouldn’t take much to fasten my laptop to it. If I do it I’ll send you a picture.
Brian D. Hawkins@Blog Tips recently posted Making The Connection Between Guest Blogging And Networking
Thanks Brian! Yeah, the one time this site went nofollow was when I didn’t realize I forgot to re-activate the plugin after an upgrade.
Great links. It is sunday, cold outside, I have a hot cup of tea and lots of good articles to read
Nice photo of the week. I saw a camel in real life. These animals are pretty big (some say they are very stubborn..).
Thanks for sharing!
Daniel Sikorsky recently posted S&P500 stopped at Fibonacci extension lines
Kristi! That thing is LAUGHING FOR SURE! In love. Totally in love with it.
Gonna check out the “safety zone” post, the guide to finding links and why school doesn’t prepare you for life. Super interesting topics for me. Again, thanks for creating this list
Ryan Critchett@Allentown PA iPhone Repair recently posted RMC Tech iGraveyard: The iPhone 3G, Annihilated LCD
Hi Kristi,
The FitDesk does look pretty nifty, though I wonder how tired one’s forearms and shoulders would get from what appears to be a leaning forward position.
Last year my wife and I finally bought a pair of sit/stand desks to use in our work-at-home offices, and we LOVE them! I would really like to get a super-quiet treadmill to slide under it so I could walk in place. On the wish list!
Marshall Davis@Business Service Reviews recently posted Talking Small Biz with State Bicycle Co.
Thank you Kristi! Another great list! You did all the work and now we have a lot of homework to do!!
Funny picture… This really cheered me uP!
Nick@Outdoor Gear Reviews recently posted Sierra Trading Post Coupon and Review
Hi Kristi,
Some great articles. I enjoyed the article on 6 reasons why you should charge more. I have also come to realise that cheap attracts cheap and if you go in with prices that are low people will still try to beat you down lower. I also liked the picture of the camel.
Nice Kristi,
I enjoy all articles, really nice, awesome discussion with interesting topics, please keep it continue,
thanks for sharing with us….