This post is part of a weekly series, Fetching Friday, featuring the best posts of the week in blogging, making money online, SEO, and social media on kikolani.com.
The Resources Mashup
Here are some of the best articles I have stumbled upon, retweeted on @kikolani, and read in RSS subscriptions this week.
Blogging / Writing
- 4 Blogger Tools for Breaking Your Writing Block – Writer’s block? Use these keyword research tools for a fresh batch of blog post ideas to engage your readers and bring you good search engine results.
- The Why and How of Blogging Breaks – Since many of you readers are bloggers, you know there’s a general consensus that a blogger should write frequently and consistently. However, you also need to carefully examine your priorities for your life and your business.
- Your “How-To” Post Will Fail If You Don’t Use These Techniques – The secrets to creating these posts so you won’t have to work nearly as hard.
- Experts Speak: “How Do I Come Up With Great Content Ideas For My Blog?” – 16 bloggers tell you how they come up with new content ideas for their blog.
- 113 Things You Can Do to Grow Your Freelance Writing Income — Now – To help you take charge of your writing career, I put together a list of 100+ proactive things you can do right now to build your income.
Business / Career
- 60+ Unexpected Business Lessons – In business, you can learn something new and unexpected at virtually any time or any place. With that in mind, the CarolRoth.com contributor network of entrepreneurs, advisors and experts have shared their most unexpected or unusual business lessons.
- 8 Tips For Creating a Great Case Study – The following are some tips on how to make your case studies a powerful asset in soliciting business.
- 5 Reasons Why You Can’t Make Your Email Marketing Work – Would you like to know how to build a great email newsletter list without making the common mistakes that can ruin your reputation and cost you money? If so, avoid these 5 mistakes.
- The Renaissance Guide to Creating a Wildly Successful Online Business – When ideas from different disciplines come together, magic happens, because sometimes the solution to a problem already exists, but not where you’re looking. Could this be applied to online business? It turns out it can.
- 5 Internet Marketing Trends for SMBs to Watch in 2012 – While you’re putting the finishing touches on your action plan for 2012, let’s dig into some of the hot Internet trends for SMBs to watch over the next 12 months.
Personal Development / Productivity
- How a Shift in Your Vocabulary Can Instantly Change Your Attitude – This past year I have noticed how my vocabulary impacts my attitude. Words have power. They impact others, of course, but they can also have an impact on us. Here’s how.
- 12 Things You Need To Do Before 2012 – It’s time to make a list of the things that you need to complete before the end of the year.
- The 27 Principles to Teaching Yourself Anything – The old-school formal education is broken. It’s time to focus on practical application over theory. Enter the Self-Guided Education Manifesto.
- One Powerful Word 2012: A Simple Approach to New Year’s Resolutions – Is there is a single word or a phrase that captures what you would like to manifest in your self or your life in 2012?
- 35 Reasons You Should Work With a Coach – Coaching can take many forms, from individual sessions to group workshops, in person, on the phone or over the internet.
Search Engines / SEO
- An SEO Playbook For 2012 – Today, SEO means finding an audience you can connect with, become a part of the community, give them insanely awesome content and reciprocate.
- 6 Ways to Recover from Bad Links – Let’s assume you’ve done your homework, though, and you know you’ve got link problems. Here’s what to do.
- 5 Golden Links for Link Building and Beyond – Five golden link finds that can help your link development efforts.
- 20 Future-Facing SEO Blogs for 2012 – Instead of telling you what was hot yesterday, this post tells you what SEO blogs you should pay attention to tomorrow for the betterment of your career.
- The Decline of Organic Links Infographic – Links are still valuable in some areas of course, but where the search results are full of listings from Google.com, pushed below the fold from larger AdWords ads and/or heavily skewed by things like brand bias there is much less value in link building in numerous big money markets.
Social Media / Social Networking
- The Hidden Guide to Using Twitter Effectively – In this post, we are going to unearth some commonly unanswered questions in standard Twitter how to posts when it comes to getting the most out of your Twitter experience.
- Top 10 Facebook Apps for Fan Engagement and Building Community – Facebook applications for Facebook Pages: the best Facebook apps to enhance and build your community while making your life easier with a little automation.
- How To Get Twitter Followers by the Millions – There is no secret to gaining Twitter followers. Growing a Twitter following includes some of the following choices & habits.
- Facebook Timeline Cover: 40 (Really) Creative Examples – Ready to make your new Facebook Timeline profile rock? Check out these creative adaptations!
- Path: What You Need To Know About It And How It Plays A Role In Your Life – You probably heard something about Path in the last month or so but the truth is, the social network has been getting love from early adopters and media since its launch over a year ago. So how far has it come now?
Photo of the Week
This week’s top photo comes from the snowy Grand Canyon again. It was incredibly foggy, so we were lucky to get beautiful glimpses like this one into the canyon throughout the day.
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 Future
One of my favorite movies is Artificial Intelligence, and this video just goes to show how close we are getting to that.
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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 
Loved the links Kristi!
I always DO bookmark the Friday special and read the links later – during the weekend
There is so much to learn from them!
Awesome picture as well, with so much of depth in it- seems like a wonderful place, though must be so cold as well
Thanks for sharing such a wonderful source of goodies with all of us
Harleena Singh@Freelance Writer recently posted Why Should Charity Begin at Home
It was VERY cold Harleena. Glad you liked the photo & the links.
Kristi, your Grand Canyon shot is a winner! I hope you try to sell that somewhere.
And thanks once again for including one of my posts in FF. I come here every week and I always find several posts that teach me something important.
John Soares @ Freelance Writing recently posted The Why and How of Blogging Breaks
Hadn’t thought about selling it, although it’s not a bad idea.
Kristi,
Thanks as always for your excellent roundup. Gosh, I think I need to change my vocabulary…glad you included that one.
And thanks for including my post on One Powerful Word 2012.
What a stunning photo! May you have a joyous holiday.
Sandra / Always Well Within recently posted One Powerful Word 2012: A Simple Approach to New Year’s Resolutions
Thanks Sandra! I hope you have a great holiday season too!
Hi Kristi,
Thanks for so many good articles to read now in the chilly December.
superb links to update knowledge. These links are useful for both new as well as experinced in the domain. Great way to update knowledge on various topics. Thank you for sharing the useful links.
Jane @ write killer post recently posted Black Friday And Cyber Monday Are For Shopping
Thanks Jane!
Hey Kristi,
Excellent roundup, as always. I really like the post on creating a great case study.
Thanks for sharing this awesome resources.
Have a great weekend & congratulations on getting featured on forbes
!!
Dev @ Real Estate Themes recently posted Interview with Oli Dale from WPLift
Thanks Dev! It was a happy surprise!
Resource Mashup is one you post that have all flavors and I love to read all the article that are you are providing in this post.
Maja@fantastic sams recently posted Choice of Hair Color
The links are great! You just save me days probably to find all this info:)
Anna recently posted inexpensive dentist
Just read ‘Top 10 Facebook Apps for Fan Engagement and Building Community’. Thanks for linking out!
As always, thanks a lot for sharing this list of interesting posts, that’s very nice of you. but special thanks for the photo of the week. This is really something, I like it greatly and it reminds us once again that holidays are coming))
Amanda@BuySellWordPress recently posted WordPress Themes
It’s nice to have snow in AZ to remind us of that!
Thanks for sharing your list of links. Totally loved it.
Ricardus @WordPress Hosting recently posted Christmas and Winter Sales Promotion for WordPress Hosting by WPWebHost
Hey Kristi,
What a beautiful picture! Looks like an amazing place.
I have bookmarked this page as always to go through the links. You always find gems out there so we can learn from other amazing bloggers/marketers.
Best,
Mavis
Mavis Nong recently posted 5 Steps to Successful Blogging Without Breaking the Bank
Thanks Mavis!
Fantastic links and resources as always Kristi. By the way, the picture is just amazing. It gives you a sense of the beauty and the size of GC. Thank you Kristi.
Satrap@ Online Earning recently posted Online Surveys for Money
Thanks Satrap! Really though, no picture comes close to the actual experience of walking up to it for the first time.
As an organic search engine optimizer, I really, really disagree with that SEObook article. It’s super biased.
I understand that of course blogging comes with bias, but this article looks like it was made by someone who was pissed about their loss in traffic or someone desperate to get social media attention.
1) Of course the Google Japan page will gain pagerank over a three year period. The bad links were nullified, but of course they’re still gaining more and more valuable links. How is this a “decline”?
2) The nofollow tag gave rise to content farms? How? The rise of eHow doesn’t have anything to do with nofollow because the tag can’t be used to “hoard” pagerank. Ex: http://goo.gl/WmQwU And from Matt Cutts himself (says the same thing but takes longer to do so) http://goo.gl/SaS2
3) The directories claim? Give one example. If a directory wants to charge, that’s up to them. Google hasn’t prevented anyone from being crawled.
4) “Selectively Devaluing Links” –> Yes, and I believe that this is a good thing. When links are reported to the webspam team, they modify their algorithms to better detect paid [affiliate] links like this and minimize or stop the link juice that flows through them, because these links aren’t merit-based. The whole idea behind links providing trust to a page is that they would be based on the merit of the page they point to, and affiliate links DO NOT do that. They’re based on someone’s desire to earn money (just like paid links).
5) Brands and “site authority” being bad? Why? I like how Joe the Average Blogger doesn’t outrank CNN when I’m looking for a news article. Brand trust is EARNED, and it’s what searchers want. Searchers want the most relevant results, and these are the pages that the ‘brand’ sites serve.
Infact Aaron, I feel like you contradict yourself there. If the value of links is declining, then why do these big “brand” sites, which have a lot of *links* pointing to them, continue to rank so high? It’s because they’re passing so much pagerank around their internal pages.
6) Cross Linking –> Again, this just reinforces the idea that links are still natural.
That’s the reason a site ranks high when another high-quality site links to it. And which large publisher hosts content on different domains on different servers? I haven’t seen even one…
Sorry about my rant
I just disagree with that post. A lot .:) Not to be rude or anything – sorry if it comes across as that.
Techie @ w3techie recently posted Full Guide to Breadcrumbs for SEO
No need to be sorry Techie. I just hope you left this same comment on their blog to and get a response!
Hi Kristi,
I really enjoy the friday fetches. When I don’t get my dose, it’s like a hotdog with no ketchup. These are great resources that I’m going to definitely have to check out! SEO and the Social Media guides seem like a good read!
Ryan recently posted The Price of Being a Musical Genius-Derek Amato
All the ‘End-of-the-year’ posts are coming up! Seeing a lot of ‘em in this roundup. Thanks again for the compilation Kristi!
Sean@SEO Philippines recently posted Why Mobile Search tells you to have a Mobile Site
Useful links Kristi, especially the article “The 27 Principles to Teaching Yourself Anything”, it was very useful to me.
That Grand Canyon shot was super
Rojish @ wordpress management service recently posted 10 Must Have Plugins for Every WordPress Blog
Hey Kristi,
First of all, the picture with Grand Canyon is wonderful..I bet it was an amazing experience to see this natural masterpiece in the winter.
Certainly your post deserves a bookmark. There are so many useful resources here.
Thanks for taking the time to share these gold nuggets with us.
Have a blessed day,
Radu
Radu recently posted 3 blogging lessons I got from the Legend of Bagger Vance
Nice robot movie. That, and the other viral piece on the thing that looks like a girl, makes my head spin.
Ari Herzog @ New Media Explorer recently posted What Facebook Likes Really Mean