Fetching Friday – Resources Mashup & Petting Owls

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

• 5 Tips for Creating Shareable Blog Content – There are many smart strategies you can use to create compelling, bite-sized content your readers will devour—and share like crazy. The secret is to tap into the power, speed and instant accessibility of social media.
• Overcome the Fear of Blogging – Here are a few thoughts for those of you with blogging fears, or fears that keep you from starting your blog.
• 6 Laws Every Blogger Needs to Obey so they Don’t Get Sued – Fortunately you don’t have to be a lawyer or law scholar to understand the laws that govern blogging, particularly in the U.S. In fact, you really only have to understand six basic laws.
• 70+ Brilliant Bloggers Talk About #BWELA 2011 – If you feel like you missed anything at BlogWorld, fear not. It’s probably in these recaps!
• 9 Essential Tips for Warm Blogger Outreach Pitches – You must first get to to know the blogger, make a good first impression, and know how to win them over when it comes to pitches.

Business / Career / Freelance

• 95 Tips for Increasing Productivity Within Small and Medium Businesses – The CarolRoth.com Business Unplugged contributor network of entrepreneurs and experts give their best tips for increasing productivity in small and midsize businesses.
• Why Freelance Writers Must Be On LinkedIn – Freelance writers who want successful writing careers must be on LinkedIn. Here’s why and how to take advantage of it.
• Why Freelance Writers Should Self-Publish – You can skip the publisher altogether (along with the bureaucratic red tape of query letters and lengthy approval processes), and just publish the book yourself.
• Make Passive Income Online: 6 Strategies for Making Money on the Internet – Want to make passive income online? If so, read the six strategies the author has personally used to make money on the Internet.
• 23 Quick Actions You Can Do Today to Make Money Writing – If you’re looking for cutting edge techniques to make money writing, this article lists 23 unique actions you can do today.

Personal Development / Productivity

• 3 Things That Optimistic People Do Differently – Both old school wisdom and modern day science say that optimism is one of the greatest indicators of how successful you’ll be. Learn why and how here.
• The Surfer’s Guide to Personal Development – We need to live in the moment, while being mindful of our future goals and plans. However if live too far in the future our performance in the presence suffers.
• The Post on Productivity I Wish Someone Else Had Written – There is not a productivity method in the world that can help people as much as they can help themselves. Here’s why.
• 10 Ways to Complain Less and Be Happier – Complaining can feel easier than trying to fix a problem. Here are 10 tips to stop complaining and ditch the negative thoughts to focus on finding solutions.
• 30 Books I’m Glad I Read Before 30 – If you haven’t read these books yet, the author highly recommends doing so. They will enrich your library and your life.

Search Engines / SEO

• Keyword Research – Part III: 40 Top Keyword Research Posts of 2011 – This list will guide you to even more keyword research tools, strategies, and keyword optimization.
• Quantifying the Impact of Google’s Keyword Referral Data Shutdown – Here’s a visualization of 60 sites’ analytics data, showing the self-reported percent of their Google search traffic that used keyword “(not provided)”.
• WordStream’s Top SEO Link Building Posts of All Time – Check out our most popular link building posts of all time, gathered in one place for easy reference. Bookmark this SEO link building resource!
• Duplicate Content in a Post-Panda World – This is designed to be a comprehensive resource – a complete discussion of what duplicate content is, how it happens, how to diagnose it, and how to fix it.
• 40 (of the) Best SEO Guides, Tips and Insights of 2011 – 40 of the best SEO guides to strategy, tactics, considerations, common mistakes to avoid and more from some of the best SEO bloggers and writers around.

Social Media / Social Networking

• 10 Reasons Why I Opted-Out of Klout – Reasons why one social media persona decided to leave Klout which links to a post on how to do so yourself if you so choose.
• SEO for Google+ Profiles and Pages – It’s time to take a look at the differences between the optimization of your Google+ personal profile and the new Google+ Pages.
• 10 Words That Will Increase (or Decrease) Your Twitter CTR – After compiling a dataset of more than 200,000 link-containing Tweets to generate the CTR heatmap, the author decided to dig into what words, phrases and characters correlate with higher (or lower CTR). Here are the findings!
• 7 Ways To Craft Your Facebook Posts For Maximum Shares – Increase your visibility by writing your Facebook updates in a way that naturally inspires fans and their friends to share with their networks.
• 3 Reasons Using Apps For Posting On Facebook Works Again – Leo gives you three reasons why it is a good idea to use 3rd party applications like Buffer to post your content to Facebook.

Photo of the Week

This week’s top photo comes from an abandoned building in Queen Creek, Arizona. My favorite two things to photograph are wildlife and urbex, and I simply have not had enough of the latter in my photo activities recently.

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!

Petting an Owl

My two favorite winged creatures are hummingbirds and owls. I’d definitely like to get this up close and personal with the latter!

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