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).
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