Birthdays and Brainstorming – Best of the Web!

It’s hard to believe summer is already coming to an end – or that this crazy Montreal heat wave will ever break.

July has been a really exciting for us at Firepole Marketing; I started working on the new Naked Marketing book, celebrated my birthday, and got my first guest post on Forbes! (I’m still super stoked about that!)

We’ve also spent some time brainstorming some very interesting things you should be on the lookout for in the future – there are going to be some really amazing things coming your way!

In the meantime, though, I’d be remiss if I didn’t notice that it’s been an exciting month for the rest of the blogosphere too, with tons of amazing posts on a huge array of topics. This is one of our biggest Best of the Web features we’ve had in a long time!

So here are some of my favorite posts, articles and exciting others from the last few weeks – enjoy!

Great Minds Create Fascinating Reading Material

Let’s start with some food for thought for a long summer evening. Grab a cool drink, sit back and let your brain expand…

• 30 Years of Business Change in one Blog Post (Businesses Grow)
• Gamification: Measuring and Influencing User Behavior (V3 Integrated Marketing)
• How Seth Godin Broke My Analytics! (One Spoon at a Time)
• Why You Should Ask About Layoffs in Your Next Job Interview (Brazen Life)
• Reversing the Decline in Big Ideas (Harvard Business Review)
• Why I Disabled Email and RSS Subscription on My Blog and Why You Should Too (DIY Blogger)
• Why You Need to Lead… (Traffic Generation Café)
• Shock Email Only Works if You Help It (Power Income Dynamo)
• Monetizing Digital Attention (Seth Godin’s Blog)
• The Choice Paradox: Why Customers Want More and Less Simultaneously (Psychotactics)

Guides and How-To’s

These are really a blogger’s bread and butter, aren’t they?

Providing value to our readers is the most important things we can do, and often that comes in the form of a guide, or comprehensive how to. Here are some of the best that we’ve seen in the last month.

• We Unexpectedly got 60k Users in 60 hours. What we Learned (Patrick Ambron)
• How to Sell Online (DIY Blogger)
• How to Protect Your Business’s Most Important Asset (No, It’s Not Your Website) (Copyblogger)
• Social Media, Conflicting Data, and the Search for Truth (Businesses Grow)
• Web Analytics Consulting: A Simple Framework for Smarter Decisions (Occam’s Razor)
• Weekend Project: Write Posts that Hold Readers to the End, Part 2 (Problogger)
• How to Roll Back From a Disappointing Product Launch (Justice Wordlaw IV)
• The Ultimate Beginner’s Guide to Blogging (Leaving Work Behind)
• How to Create a Kick Ass Crowdfunding Campaign and Make Your Dreams Come True (Suitcase Entrepreneur)

And One, and Two, and Three, and Four…

We all know how popular list posts are – and with good reason! They’re fun. Easily digestible and insanely useful. Enjoy!

• 18 Experts’ Advice on How to Be More, Do More & Have More (Life on the High Wire)
• 6 Enduring Marketing Lessons from the Ironman World Championship (Copyblogger)
• EdgeRank and Five Simple Ways to Increase Facebook Engagement (Business to Community)
• Ten Things I Wish I’d Known about Blogging When I Started (Styling You)
• Can These 13 Search Engines Steal Googles Crown? (Melting Posts)
• 101 Ways to Be Cool, Confident & Create the Life You Deserve (MUST READ!) (Alpha Body Fitness Blog)
• 6 Variables to Test On Your Call-To-Action Buttons (Crazy Egg)
• The 11 Ways That Consumers are Hopeless at Math (The Atlantic)
• 13 Ways Companies Kill Creativity (Online MBA)

Personal and Inspirational Stories

It’s not all business all the time, and this month I’ve encountered a bunch of posts that hit a personal note or otherwise inspired me. I think they’ll do the same for you.

• Flying High on Travel and Collaboration (Ryze Online)
• Resistance – The One Enemy you should Face (Enso Journey)
• What does World Domination Have to Do with Fitness and Weight Loss? (Vic Magary)
• Fan or Peer, Where do you Stand? (Turndog Millionaire)
• Hearts and Homes Made New and You are doing WHAT for vacation? (Too Darn Happy)
• Monthly Income Report: How to Write about Money When You Have Nothing to Show for It (Traffic Generation Café)

Video, Info and Analysis

Videos, graphics and other fun-to-consume golden nuggets of information.

• The Untold Story behind Kickstarter Stats (Venture Beat)
• Interview: Robert Stephens Founded the Geek Squad and Took It From Bootstrapped Inception To Over $1 Billion in (Estimated) Revenues (Marketing Show)
• Café Communications – Deadlines (YouTube)
• What Colleges Should Be Teaching Marketing Majors (CRM Software)
• The Economy: Where Are We? Q2/2012 (Drop Dead Money)
• White House Landing Page – Video Critique (Affect Selling)
• How to Measure Social Media ROI (Leader’s West)

Social Media Musings

Sometimes the blogosphere’s collective brain seems to fixate on and examine one idea – you’d almost think it was a joint decision – but no – all of these different people independently created some really fascinating infographics and articles about Social Media.

• Is Facebook Damaging Your Reputation with Sneaky Political Posts? (ZD Net)
• How to Measure Social Media (Right Mix Marketing)
• 7 Irrefutable Reasons Why I Should Be Buzztime Inc.’s Next Social Media Expert (MJ Monaghan)
• The Fleeting Title that is “Social Media Expert” (The Sales Lion)
• Pimp Your Facebook: How to Create a Badass Timeline Banner (Life Hacker)
• How to gain a Bigger Audience in Minutes (Content Strategy Hub)
• We Live in a Different World Now (DIY Blogger)

Interviews and Kind Mentions

I have to extend, yet again, my heartfelt thanks for all of the bloggers who took the time and effort to reach out to me, and include me in their projects. It’s been a pleasure working with them, and I hope you enjoy seeing what they’ve done!

• Danny Iny (33 Voices)
• Case Study: How Danny Iny Made $30, 000+ With Just an E-Book (IV Blogger)
• 27 Simple Sages Reveal How They Simplify and Organize Their Amazing Lives (Value of Simple)
• Why you Ought to Build and Online Brand Through Guest Blogging and Not Just Chase SEO Tricks (Quick Sprout)
• Writers and Writing: Danny Iny (SVM Writers Block)
• How to Build a Loyal Audience – Ways of Creating Engaging Content – Digital Marketers Take Note (YouTube)
• 7 Internet Marketing Blogs I like to Read (Peggy Baron)
• Meet the Freddy Krueger of Blogging, Interview with Danny Iny (Color Your Life Published)
• 25 Sizzling Male Bloggers (Sacred Earth Partners)
• Pitching Guest Posts isn’t as Daunting as it Seems (Mellifluity Inc)
• Interview with Danny Iny of Firepole Marketing (Matt Ragland)
• 12 Successful Bloggers to Learn From (Blog Growth)
• Winning the Firepole Marketing Lifetime Access Contest (Rainbow Gryphon)
• The 5 Questions That Will Simplify Your Small Business Marketing (InFlow Inventory)
• 5 Reasons I Don’t Guest Blog, and Why That’s Changing (Publicity Hound)

And a few guest posts, too!

And of course, I wouldn’t be the Freddy Krueger of Blogging if there hadn’t been a few guest posts as well…

• Small Business + Small Marketing = Really Big Losses (Forbes)
• How to Use NAKED to Get More Traffic and Better Conversions (Traffic Generation Cafe)
• 6 steps to 1,000 daily blog visitors (Upstart Business Journal)
• Six Steps to Attracting 1,000 Daily Blog Visitors (MarketingProfs)
• How to Become the Freddy Krueger of Blogging (PR Secrets)

We’ve listed a lot of great content here, but if you think we’ve missed out on anything important, please let us know in the comments!

Danny Iny (@DannyIny), a.k.a. the “Freddy Krueger of Blogging”, teaches marketing that works at Firepole Marketing. Together with Guy Kawasaki, Brian Clark and Mitch Joel, he wrote the book on building engaged audiences from scratch (available on Amazon, or as a free download).

Tagged as: Best of the Web, Danny Iny