Fetching Friday – Resources Mashup & The Subway

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

• 21 Reasons You Should Write Guest Posts – As Penguin and Panda (the latest Google updates) have shown us – times are changing in SEO. Fortunately, there is an easy way to bridge the gap between great people-pleasing content and the necessary elements of SEO: Guest posts.
• 10 Characteristics of a Spectacular Blog – Take a step back from your blog for five minutes. We are going to try our best to evaluate your blog and pinpoint a few areas you can improve. Specifically, we’ll race through 10 specific characteristics that define a spectacular blog.
• KISS: A Showcase of Beautifully Simple Blog Design – Blogs that are more than just text slapped on a plain background.
• 7 Ways to Organize Your Content for Curation – How you organize your content plays a key role in your marketing success. Here are a few examples of how content marketers manage the organization process.
• 10 Steps to a Secure WordPress Website – It’s worth your time to look over this list of security tips, and to take the few simple actions to implement them. How secure is your website?

Business / Career

• 7 Reasons Agile Marketers Are Better at Their Jobs Than You – Learn why agile inbound marketing will help you get more done, faster, and better than other marketers.
• 10 SlideShare Strategies that Will Boost Your Content’s Value – Here are 10 specific strategies for getting the best return from the content you post on SlideShare. It’s a tool that can offer amazing results.
• The Definitive Guide to Starting a Profitable Email Newsletter – If you want to build a profitable online business, you need an email newsletter. It’s that simple. And in this article you’ll learn exactly how to start one.
• How to Be Productive – Over the years I have taught myself to be more productive, and these days, I would like to think that I’m not too shabby on the productivity front. With that in mind, I thought that it would be useful to share what I have learned.
• 10 Ways To Increase The ROI Of Your Thank You Page – Easy tips you can implement today to increase the ROI of your Thank You page.

Freelancing

• Get Paid to Write – The Ultimate Resource List of Blogs That Pay for Content – This list of almost 40 blogs currently accept guest posts AND pay for them. Stop writing for content mills and start getting anywhere from $25 – $450 a post!
• A Step-by-Step Guide to Determining Your Target Market as a Freelancer Writer – This article is a freelance writer walk-through on determining your target market and the research you’ll need to go through. The end goal is to give you a specific set of tasks you can work through that will leave you with at clear picture of your target audience.
• How to Attract Quality Freelance Writing Clients With Your Blog – How can your blog bring you good-paying freelance writing gigs? Here are three tips from YoungPrePro’s Bamidele Onibalusi on how he does it.
• 7 Essential Professional Decisions to Determine Your Success or Failure – In this post, I’ve listed all seven essential professional decisions along with some suggestions about each one. At the end, I invite you to share how you’ve handled each decision.
• 7 Ways the Make a Living Writing Blog Makes Money – In the past, I did a post about how I make money as a freelance writer. Today, I take a look at the other side of my writing life — how this blog earns its living.

Search Engines / SEO

• Author Rank: A Step-by-Step Guide to Dominating Search with Content Marketing – If you are a content marketer, blogger or writer, you’ll be happy to hear that there have been five recent SEO changes that will play to your strengths.
• Syncing Your Google Plus and +Local Pages: Plusses and Minuses – For those of you still on the fence, perhaps the following before-and-after walkthrough will help you decide whether it’s right for your business to sync yet.
• 5 Outstanding SEO Personalities in a Quick Interview – Today, we decided to ask some of the remarkable Internet Marketing gurus worldwide about their current view of the SEO industry and a few other SEO-related subjects. Welcome Ann Smarty, Neil Patel, Aleh Barysevich, Peter Attia, and Moosa Hemani!
• How To Conduct A Link Audit – If you remember nothing else, remember that metrics alone should not be used to make decisions. You’re going to have to do some hard work and manual labor and really dig into your links if you want to truly get an accurate picture.
• Top 5 Paid Search Ad Mistakes Small Business Make – Hopefully, you aren’t making these mistakes and if you are, you now know how to fix them.

Social Media / Social Networking

• 4 Quick Tips for a Better Twitter Header – Have you experimented with your new Twitter header yet? Here are a few tips.
• 9 Facebook Marketing Tips to Improve Engagement – Learn some great ideas, new things to try and ways to stand out that will ultimately help your business grow.
• 40 Ways to Get Banned From the Top 5 Social Networks – Learn about the policies on the most popular social networks marketers should understand.
• Does Facebook Promoted Posts Advertising Work for Bloggers – Instead of only a portion of your page’s fans seeing your update, you will get the chance for your fans and friends of fans to see your update. The question is does it work for bloggers looking to promote their blog posts? The answer – sometimes.
• 5 Keys to Effective Social Media and Content Insourcing – At Convince & Convert, we get involved in these “insourcing” programs often, working with corporate clients to create social business structure that facilitates participatory breadth. Much of what we know is contained in The NOW Revolution, and here are five other recent observations and lessons that might help you on your own journey.

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 came from from the Subway in Zion National Park. It was a beast of a hike, but it was all worth it in the end!

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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