What I think you shouldn’t have missed last week…

This week’s edition is short and sweet. Not because I didn’t find enough interesting articles (there were about 9), but yoursturly has yet to learn that leaving 60 tabs open in Firefox is not the safest way to keep said interesting articles and not lose them if FF was to, say, crash…

So I give you the three articles I actually saved in this post’s draft

You might have already seen this one, I’ve certainly ran into it a few times, but just in case: John Jantsch entry on how to raise the price of free. Must read, so use your bookmarks, learn from my mistakes

If you’re interested in learning more about search engine marketing, Josh Klein’s entry on process and framework is also a must read. It will help you better understand what SEM it’s all about and build your very first strategy.

With the jobs market in a full recession, here are some findings that might help: what recent hires recommend to job seekers. This is only a part of a larger survey published on Web Strategy, find out more on Jeremiah Owyang’s full list of posts.

Hope you’ve enjoyed this weeks short version of the monday roundup. As I did miss a lot, please share your interesting reads in the comment box

Naomi Dunford, who’s a never ending source of small business marketing ideas, is right when she says that SEO is scary. It is at first, second and maybe third. It is when you run into a complicated article and although you know the words, you really don’t understand them in the given context. It’s even scarier when you start grasping what kind of work you should really do to be able to say your site is pretty much optimized for the search engines without having experts laugh at you. And it is scary when you look at a new book you’ve just purchased wondering when exactly you’ll have the time to read it. It’s 50 pages, but still, you’re a busy bee!

Well, Naomi manages to solve the time issue for you with her SEO School ebook. After a few pages, you’re laughing so hard, you can’t stop yourself from making time to read it. It’s a trick! She wants you to read the book, fall in love with SEO, or her style (this works if you don’t read her blog), and gets you to learn what you need to make your website better.

Cover Shot Credit IttyBiz

I have to confess I am a little biased. The first time I read a text book that was funny as hell was in my first year of college, when i was studying to get my Journalism degree. It was a book giving us the journalistic writing basics. But it was so funny, it read like a completely different kind of book. And I had little to no experience with such effective teaching methods. It worked great for me! I didn’t feel the least bit inclined to take one our breaks after every 30 minutes of studying. If helped me relax, laugh at myself and learn at the same time.

And the second issue that might add to my original bias: have you seen Naomi’s sales emails? You kind of feel compelled to buy something. And I was just waiting for a chance to find something perfect for me to buy. I had been planning to start learning more about SEO for over a year, so when the book was back on her site, I just bought it.

You’ll learn everything you need about what kind of site you run or want to own, about how much SEO you are really ready to handle, about keywords, research, tools, strategy, links and everything else shinny in search engine land. But it will be so fun you’ll never know what has hit you.

P.S. If you feel you must have SEO School now, feel free to join my Blogging and Relationships group writing project for a chance to win it, along with two hours of PR consulting from yours truly!