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
- 19 Ways to Build Relationships With Blog Comments – Business blogging strategy: use these blog comment tactics to build and cultivate better relationships with your business community.
- Building Community on Your Blog – If each fan spends $100 per year on your products and services, and you have 1000 “true fans”, you will have a nice six-figure income of $100,000. The question then becomes… how do you build a community of fans?
- 20 Simple Ways to Boost Blog Subscribers – Find out 20 ways you can increase the number of visitors who subscribe to your business blog.
- 10 Real Ways to Beat the Beast that is Writer’s Block – Will you let writer’s block eat up your productivity, and come back for seconds to devour more free time?
- Your Blog, Your Rules – Why Marketing Should Always Begin at Home – Don’t rely solely on social platforms for housing your content. Read the benefits of having your own blog and using social media to market it.
Business / Career
- 6 Tools to Find Online Influencers in Your Vertical – Want to get more exposure for your brand, business, or website? Try finding influencers in your industry using these six tools.
- 26 Tips for Success With Location-Based Marketing – What’s SoLoMo? How can you improve your location-based marketing? Discover more about optimization for local businesses and mobile marketing campaigns.
- 20 Mistakes that Will Undermine Your Call to Action and Cost You Sales – The most profitable sites use this tactic to convince readers to sign up for a newsletter, download an ebook, attend a webinar, or purchase a product. This is the difference between a highly profitable website and a failed marketing initiative. Yet most screw it up.
- Info Product Rookie Mistake You Don’t Wanna Make – Learn one of the biggest mistakes many of us make when launching our first info product and, most importantly, how to avoid it.
- Build Brand Awareness and Business with Creative Video Blogging – Is entertaining people, while indirectly informing them of what your business offers a good strategy for video business blogging? I’d say, yes, everyone has what it takes, no, not all content will entertain people, and yes, entertainment with a bit of indirect promotion is a solid way of generating business from video blogging.
Freelancing
- The Two Kinds of Fears Freelance Writers Face — and How to Slay Them Both – There are two basic types of fears that paralyze freelance writers and keep them from having the writing careers they want.
- Kickstart Guide to Breaking into Freelance Illustration – I’m going to introduce you to five talented Freelance Illustrators. They’ll tell you how they got into freelancing and what advice they can give you on getting started in a career in Freelance Illustration.
- 30 Essential Tools and Web Apps for Freelancers – Gregory Ciotti delivers a stellar list of 30 essential tools and web apps for freelancers that should be in their toolbox.
- How To Find Out Exactly What Your Writing Client Wants – For the most part, you’re being hired to solve a problem. Obviously the customer thinks a piece of writing will solve that problem. You need to find out exactly what problem the they are trying to solve.
- The Starving Writer’s Quick Guide to Finding Good-Paying Freelance Blogger Gigs – What sort of clients pay more for blog posts? Here is my guide for sleuthing out a better class of blogging client.
Personal Development / Productivity
- 10 Destructive Faults in Our Way of Thinking – The human mind is wonderful and powerful, but it’s far from perfect. There are several common judgment errors that it’s prone to making.
- Have You Ever Time Traveled? Because I Just Did – Things you can learn by reviewing the past.
- 21 Things You Could Do In Just 5 Minutes – We all get the same amount each day. But, you can make more of the time you have. You can be more productive. Not letting life’s little moments slip by.
- 14 Effective Ways to Survive a Stressful Day at Work – It’s a challenge to keep your high spirit and stay sane in stressful working days. Here are some easy tips I used in order to avoid another weeping session in the office bathroom.
- What Are You Restless and Hungry For – Do you ever feel this way, at least somewhere inside, despite your greatest efforts to create a clandestine front?
Search Engines / SEO
- Google’s Matt Cutts Talks Search Result Popularity Vs. Accuracy – This video was his response to a user-submitted question: Does Google feel a responsibility to the public to return results that are truly based on a page’s quality (assuming quality is determined by the accuracy of info on a page) as opposed to popularity?
- In-house SEO, SEO Agency, or Both? 17 Points to Consider – While efficient, SEO is also a complex online marketing channel for acquiring new customers. Is it better to have one or more in-house SEOs or collaborate with a specialized SEO agency? Here are arguments for both and how to find the right mix.
- The Noob Guide to Link Building – Sites with unnatural link profiles create a footprint that is easy to identify from a 10,000 foot view and of course Google has that perspective. Don’t put yourself on their radar by engaging in spammy tactics.
- 12 Killer Resources for E-commerce SEO – This post will provide 12 killer resources on how to improve your E-commerce SEO. Use these resources to help give you ideas to increase organic traffic, revenue, and conversion rates.
- Can There Really Be 85 Types Of Unnatural Links – I don’t want to make light of an issue that is impacting livelihoods, but at the same time, there is a certain aspect the this current “unnatural links†meme that is just silly.
Social Media / Social Networking
- 5 Steps to Hosting Successful Twitter Chats: Your Ultimate Guide – Twitter chat guide: what you need to start a twitter chat event, create a plan, checklist, promotions, analytics and archiving.
- 20+ Overlooked Facebook Timeline Tips You Must Know – Some overlooked tips in managing your Facebook account and Timeline pages effectively: security tips, new features, news feed management, important links and more!
- The Right Way to Use Social Media for Outreach – In this post, learn how to use Twitter and LinkedIn to cultivate relationships with bloggers BEFORE sending a pitch.
- How to Get a Boatload of People to Pin Your Products to Pinterest – Pinterest is now the third most-popular social network in the U.S., and the best part about Pinterest is that it is an image driven site, and people love browsing image after image. And if your business is a product based one, you’re a great fit for Pinterest.
- 10 Mistakes You’re Making on Your Brand’s Facebook Page – A look at some of the goofs brands are making on Facebook. Give it a read, and add to the list in the comments.
Photo of the Week
My husband, Jason Hines, is an awesome photographer. And this week, he outdid himself by getting this amazing shot of Supermoon 2012 which was featured on Mashable!
Be sure to check out his photography blog for more photos and follow him @jasonphines for photography tweets or become a fan of Jason Hines Photography on Facebook!
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Hi Kristi,
Thankyou so much for friday resource mashup and the links on social media are really of my interest at the moment. The photo is very captivating. Is it natural or artificial?
Pete Goumas just posted What Is Mythology
It’s natural… some cropping, coloring, and leveling adjustments in Photoshop, but otherwise that’s how it looked when he saw it! 🙂
I’m sitting here at my desk with a good cup of coffee – dreaming about being in Grand Canyon watching the moon.
But first I’m looking forward going through you great list you put together!
Happy Fetching Friday!
Anja just posted Federal-Mogul and Philadelphia University announce winners of 2nd annual student innovation competition
Thanks Anja… glad you liked the photo!
Love this list Kristi!
And wow- that’s an awesome picture of the Supermoon – Jason’s surely covered it fabulously!
Thanks so much for sharing all these wonderful links with all of us – always a great collection 🙂
Happy Mother’s Day too 🙂
Harleena Singh just posted Why Mothers are Special People?
Thanks Harleena! 🙂
Hi Kristi,
Thanks for putting together another top notch roundup! I love that picture that Jason took, that is amazing! I heard that the moon was amazing the other night but seeing it over the Grand Canyon is really something else! Thanks for sharing!
Stacy
Stacy just posted How to REALLY Fix All of Your Broken Links
It was pretty awesome, although I didn’t catch it until it had been up for an hour. He got it at the best time!
Ooh I like the photo… if you don’t mind me asking, where was it taken? Thanks in advance!
It was taken at the Toroweap viewpoint in the Grand Canyon. Glad you liked it!
Thanks for posting! I always love the links that you post. I’ve been having a lot of problems with writer’s block lately, so at least these posts always give me some inspiration.
Glad to hear it helped Robert!
Wow, that photo almost looks fake. Amazing! Did you have to camp out here all night to shoot this?
But it’s not! He did camp two nights to capture this – the first night was practice for the main show!
Hey Kristi,
Love to get these Fetching Friday posts. I got a lot from the 30 essential tools for freelancer article. Nice shot by your husband of the Supermoon, thanks for sharing.
Heather Georgoudiou just posted How to make your search listings sizzle
Thanks Heather – glad you liked that post! I’ve added a few from that post to my arsenal as well.
Kristi,
Thanks, I especially liked the Denise Wakeman piece, but so much here, oh and Jason Hines photography 🙂 Man! This is becoming a weekly must. Thanks again for putting all this together.
Craig McBreen just posted Don’t chase your big dream, live it one little step at a time
You’re welcome Craig! Glad you liked my husband’s photo too!
Hi,
You know which image you are showing in your article it’s saying so many things about success like this image we should try to do our best and try to shine alone in all over the world with our art of work
India carnival just posted Goa Holiday Packages
Thanks India!
Such a wealth of QUALITY information here! Thank you for posting all of this! You are MARVELOUS!
Dave Lucas just posted Letter to a young blogger…
Thanks Dave! 🙂
Hi Kristi,
I was struggling today to just do 5 things in 21 minutes but your article helped me a lot!!! LOL.. it seems that sometimes I get frustrated and act without thinking! Very helpful articles… Have a great evening!
John
John Mak just posted 4 Surefire Ways to Secure Your Online Business with Backups
Glad it helped John! 🙂
Thanks for including my article in your mashup this week, Kristi! Several people have commented that they want to implement your popup box asking for topic suggestions. Thanks for the inspiration…blog on!
Denise Wakeman just posted 5 Awesome Tools for Pinterest Power Users
You’re welcome – that popup has led to some good topic ideas, but also some really off-base ones. I think spammers get confused about whether they can get a link out of it sometimes though. 🙂
As always, great Mashup Kristi! Whenever I go back to your website, your mashup always provides me with articles to busy myself with. You just never run out! I really wonder how you find time to just review all these tips from blogging all the way to SEO and social media. It’s crazy! Tell me your secret
Sean just posted How does the Google Penguin Update Affect SEO and Negative SEO?
It’s not too big of a secret – I subscribe to over 500 blogs in my Google Reader, and I check through them daily for new posts. Any headline that catches my eye gets tweeted, and then I go through the tweets and the Reader at the end of the week to make the final top 5. 🙂
That is one AWESOME picture of the supermoon. And not only is your aggregation of awesome posts great reading throughout the week, I just noticed something else while browsing. For those looking to build up their headline writing skills, several headlines are stacked up here, ready to compare and contrast. You can be sure that the content behind every link is high-end, yet some of these headlines jump out at readers and will be clicked first while others might not be clicked at all. There’s a lesson learned here, and if you’re working on building better headlines, maybe start by asking yourself which links you clicked first and why.
Samuel just posted How To Write A Good Article!
I have thought about the headlines myself – specifically how in some topics, there are lots of numbered posts (10 this, 15 that). And it’s always interesting to think about why I gravitated to one post over another.
Another great set of posts to read through. Thanks for putting them together for us as you do every week, it sure saves me a lot of surfing time.
Now about that picture— friggin’ amazing! Jason is an awesome photographer:) Lots of talent in that household.
DeniseGabbard just posted SEO– DIY or Pro Services?
Thanks Denise! 🙂
Great- Thanks again for sharing the links as in every Friday Mashup. I love reading the Friday Mashup. Always offers me great content to read up on.
Anton Koekemoer just posted Branding your business with social media marketing
Wow! That photo is stunning! Thanks for an awesome list of resources, I have wasted away the better part of this afternoon reading through them 🙂
Thanks Kristi!!!
Superb photography of Jason, I read his blog too, all snaps are awesome.
this snap shot of Supermoon is really cool, seem to be awesome natural seen.
Thanks for sharing
Brainpulse just posted The Art Of Hiring Professional Dedicated Web Developers