Happy Friday (And National Tooth Fairy Day) everyone!

Preface: Welcome to another weekly round-up post from our growing community of bloggers, writers, vloggers, podcasters, and other fellow creatives. To be straight to the point, each and every week we hand-pick five top posts from a pool of the highest voted user-submitted/created posts in the community and include them in this weekly round-up blog post, along with the newsletter for all of our e-mail subscribers. As per our submission rules, posts shared can not be re-posts, or older than 1 month (31 days), meaning that all of the following are fresh and recent! Tune in every week and you will gradually become a better and more insightful creative over time!

Starting us off this week is Paul Graham, founder of YC Combinator, and long time web writer, who shares his thoughts and views of what he considers “useful writing”, detailing how to achieve it in formal and informal essay writing, and providing real life examples of why it ultimately matters. Well worth our top spot this week!

Next up, we get to Katy Waldman of the New Yorker, who craftily reviews a new memoir by Elizabeth Tallent called “Scratched”, detailing “how the pursuit of perfection can paralyze a writer,” as aptly summarized in her own words. And you thought your occasional writer’s block was bad!

Wrapping up the top three is Benjamin Hardy reminding us that to succeed in any creative venture or journey, we need to constantly push ourselves to take action. By being relentless, we can tweak our craft, and can form habits that will help us eventually get to our desired destination. Failing is a part of the game plan, and that’s the only true way to learn to get better.

Just below, PJ Howland, SEO professional at Moz, reports on and details out his findings on how Google has removed “spot zero”, and how URLs will no longer serve in both the featured snippet and the front page of Google. These changes can have an enormous impact on SEO tactics and strategies going forward.

Last but not least, we arrive at Patrice Peck, writer for the New York Times, who puts the spotlight on the history of the ever-growing Jasmine Brand blog, which started 10 years ago, and shares some tactics used in it’s explosive growth that catapulted it to one of the top celebrity news sites and social media empires of today.

So without further ado, here are this week’s (Feb 22 – Feb 28, 2020) most valuable posts from the /t/BES creatives community:

? 1.  How to Write Usefully
Highlight: “How can you ensure that the things you say are true and novel and important? There is a trick for doing this. I learned it from my friend Robert Morris, who has a horror of saying anything dumb.”

? 2.  What One Learns from Twenty-Two Years of Writer’s Block
“Perfect” ruminates on the possibility of flaws in order to deny their existence. Because it depends on the absence of error, it exalts not creation but excision, deletion, its logical endpoint a beautifully intact nothing.”

? 3.  You Miss Every Shot You Don’t Take
“You must be stretching your own limits and your own identity. You must be going beyond where you’ve currently been. Otherwise, you’re simply attempting to maintain and preserve your current status.”

4. Spot Zero is Gone — Here’s What We Know After 30 Days
“A month out from Google eliminating position zero, what’s changed? PJ Howland of 97th Floor investigates the data and shares key takeaways, from vastly different CTR to the impact of PAAs and beyond.”

5. NYT: How to Build a Media Company
“She had a degree in mass communication and was an avid reader of celebrity news sites. Ms. Brand was also the go-to source for the latest celebrity stories among her friends.”

That’s all folks! You can view all the rest of the community’s top submissions here.

Be sure to tune in next Friday for another great weekend reading list that will make you a better, wiser, and more informed blogger, writer, and/or creator! Don’t forget to bookmark this blog, or better yet, add us to your RSS reader if you use one!

We’re also active on the following: Facebook | Twitter | Pinterest | Instagram | Snapzu | Medium. Follow us on your favorite ones, we won’t disappoint!

PS: Run a blog, vlog, or podcast, or any other creative endeavor? Start an accompanying homebase/community (like ours) on Snapzu (a social sharing platform for bloggers/influencers/creatives) and utilize it to help you dominate your social media game using the immense power of content CURATION, and effortlessly create and send out awesome routine round-up posts/newsletters like this to help grow your audience (and newsletter) 3x faster. It’s free! More info here.

Header image credit: Paweł Czerwiński on Unsplash