Happy Friday! Below are my favorite reads from around the small biz blogosphere this week:

• How to Use Competitors to Grow Your Business
• 63 Free or Almost-Free Ways to Market Your Business
• Common Call to Action Mistakes
• Interview with Sara Selepouchin of Girls Can Tell (A great collection of insights on doing wholesale)

Want to see your products in TV and movies? This week only Lauren Aseff is spilling her secrets about how to get your products into TV and movies. The offer ends TODAY, so don’t miss out.

Here are my favorite ecommerce, small business and marketing reads of the week:

• 5 Unique and Effective Email Offers
• The Downside of a High Conversion Rate
• The Dirty Little Secret of Overnight Success
• 10 Marketing Examples of Facebook Photo Albums
• 22 Free Keyword Research Tools
• Ecommerce Optimization Checkout Slideshow
• Revisiting Your Onsite SEO

Happy Friday! Here are my favorite reads from around the web this week:

• 4 Mistakes Small Business Owners Make When Conducting a Blog Giveaway
• 8 SEO Pointers for Ecommerce Product Pages
• 10 Ways to Improve Product Photos
• Anatomy of a Failure – one entrepreneur shares the story of a failed enterprise
• The Realities of Making a Living Online (This one is an absolute must read!)
• 8 Must-Have Google Analytics Features
• Creative 404 Pages to Inspire You to Overhaul Yours
• Offer Free Shipping Without Going Broke

Lastly, on a personal note, if you’d like to help Ex-Boyfriend out with our charitable fundraiser for homeless animals any little bit is appreciated! Read the details here! Fundraiser ends Sunday.

Happy Friday! Here are my favorite marketing and small biz reads from the web this week:

• 7 Headline Writing Links That Will Revolutionize Your Content Marketing – Awesome collection of links to articles that will help you master the art of a great headline. Perfect for email subjects, Adwords headlines, blog posts and more!
• 5 Ways to Get More Traffic with Great Content
• Daily Deals: 6 Ways They Ruin Business and 3 Ways They Might Not
• Facebook Launches “Offers” for Pages
• Facebook Timeline Cover Images: 6 Pointers

Before I get into today’s links, I wanted to let everyone know my apparel & accessories company, Ex-Boyfriend, is doing a charitable fundraiser for homeless animals. As an animal lover, this is a cause that’s near and dear to me. Anything my readers can do to help would be greatly appreciated! Check out the details on how to help.

Now on to the links…

• 3 Tips for Better Email Subscription Forms
• 3 Myths of Guest Writing for Big Websites and 6 Tactics for Doing it Well
• The Complete Guide to Setting Up Facebook Pages With Timelines
• Kabbage: A New Funding Source for Ecommerce Merchants – A great alternative to programs like Kickstarter. Kabbage makes small loans to ecommerce merchants, so you can get the cash you need to grow.
• Top 5 Reasons to Use Google Webmaster Tools

Below are my favorite reads from around the web this week:

• 5 Effective Email Calls to Action
• Pricing Your Products Correctly
• How to Write an About Page
• Useful Ecommerce Trend: The Promo Strip
• The 8 Principles of Product Naming
• 11 Ways to Use Pinterest As a Brand
• Did you know title tags are an important part of SEO? Here’s two great reads on the subject: How to Write Title Tags for Search Engine Optimization and 9 Best Practices for Optimized Title Tags
• Marketing Your Business With Pinterest

Happy Friday, everyone! Here are my favorite recent reads from around the business and marketing blogosphere:

• 12 Link Bait Techniques for Improving Your SEO
• 6 Common Storenvy Myths – If you want your own online shop away from Etsy, Storenvy is a great option. Check out this article to get the facts.
• How to Use Your Competitors to Grow Your Business
• A Stalker’s Guide to Competitive Research
• Optimizing for Search Engines With Keywords and Content – Part 3 of a great SEO series on Practical Ecommerce (parts 1 and 2 are linked in part 3).
• Why Paypal Freezes Accounts and How To Prevent This
• How to Handle Downtime During Site Maintenance

Happy Friday! Hope everyone had a great week. Below are my favorite recent reads from around the web, check ‘em out:

• 5 Reasons Your Gut Feel Stinks – why your business decisions shouldn’t be based on your gut or your opinions
• People Will Share What THEY Do Not What YOU Do – Great reminder that it’s easier to get customers to talk about your brand if you make the conversation about them.
• The Difference Between Good SEO and Great SEO – A round up of some great SEO articles by Search Engine Guide
• How to Analyze Your Ecommerce Competitors

I’ve been so behind in sharing links. The holidays were crazy busy and my Smaller Box updates get a little behind. I realize today’s list is a bit long but it’s chock full of great stuff. Here’s what I’ve read that you should check out:

• The Best Social Media Campaigns of 2011 and What We Can Learn From Them
• Megan Auman’s List of “The 3 Best Things I Did for My Business”
• How to Hire a Good Virtual Assistant
• 5 Marketing Lessons You Can Learn from a Weird “Real World” Business
• Turn a Face to Face Meeting into a Product Experience
• How To: Format Your a Spreadsheet for Google Merchant Center
• Headline Hacks – This free download gives terrific advice on creating magnetic headlines. Great for writing blog posts, email subject lines, etc.
• Copy Blogger’s Cure for Information Overload
• 8 SEO Tutorials for Beginners
• 40 Facebook Marketing Tips
• How To: Create a Unique Selling Point for Your Homepage
• How To: Increase Your Conversions From These 5 Consumer Psychology Studies
• Let Your Customer’s Participate – Great example of how Cheerios helps their customers support our troops.
• 21 Types of Social Content to Boost Your SEO
• Creating Color Schemes for Web Design

Happy Friday! While you’re here, check out my newly beefed up resources page. I’ve added links to a ton of products and services I personally use to run my creative business. I’ll be adding more resources in the coming months so that my readers can benefit from my favorite finds. Many of the vendors I recommend are the result of exhaustive searches to find suppliers with the perfect combination of best price and great products. If you need promotional items, web hosting, domains, graphic design, etc. the resources page has great suggestions.

On a personal note, I’m pleased to announce that an Ex-Boyfriend tee (my clothing company) was featured last week on an episode of ABC’s Modern Family. I’m always touting the benefits of publicity and this placement was a result of hard work from my partner and our PR assistant. (If you want to know how my partner and I do our own PR I’ve written an ebook about it.)

Now, on with my favorite reads this week:

• Quick, Easy and Almost Free Ways to Close Sales During the Holidays
• Get Elastic Serves Up a Terrific Guide for Link Building, Specifically for Ecommerce Sites
• Great Read About Keeping Your Marketing Fresh and Trying New Tactics
• Color Psychology Showcase — What The Colors We Use in Web Design Mean to People
• Can Visualizing Your Success Actually Lead to Failure? — Interesting Departure from Conventional Wisdom
• Awesome Data Mining Tips from Viper Chill — Tons of great tools for researching keywords, competitors, consumer demand, etc.
• How To: Setting Goals in Google Analytics
• 2012 Publicity Calendar