Happy Friday 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!

International bestseller and a multi award-winning author Jana Oliver captures our top spot this week with her guest post on The Write Life that digs into the important topic of stress and how it affects our writing, along with our creativity in general, and how to deal with it to minimize its effects.

At spot number two freelance blogger Dana Sitar points out how the concept of blogging (and other online writing) is very different that what we learned in English class, which mostly consisted of essays and other technical writing. Times have changed and so did expectations.

Next up at #3, Jasmine Garsd from NPR investigates the growing trend of paid advertising posts on Instagram masquerading as regular organic content and how young audiences have a difficult time distinguishing between the two.

Moving on down the list, we get to an insightful piece by David Lazarus, a Los Angeles Times columnist, about the various types of deceptive “dark patterns” found on blogs, websites, and social networks that confuse readers/viewers in order to increase metrics, opt-ins, collect data, or all three.

Last but not least, long-time blogger Anne R. Allen shares her experiences over the past ten years of her blogging journey, organized into ten insightful tips she learned along the way.

So without further ado, here are this week’s (June 22 – June 28, 2019) most valuable posts from the /t/BES creatives community:

1. Stress and the Writer: To All Things a Season
“Stress is a part of life, but it can be particularly hard on writers, sapping our creativity and making it impossible to do our jobs. Jana Oliver returns to the lecture hall today to share her story and offer tips.”

2. Unlearn Everything You Learned about Writing in School
“Educators so strongly imprint this structure on a student’s brain as the One and Only Correct Way to Write, it’s all I can do in my role to peel it off and start fresh to help a writer create something appropriate for an online audience.”

3. Instagram Advertising: Do You Know It, When You See It?
“For many, the very idea of everyday people becoming brands sounds like some nightmare capitalist dystopia. When the lines between what is real life and what is marketing get blurred, it changes people’s behaviors.”

4. ‘Dark Patterns’ are Steering Many Users into Making Bad Decisions
“Even if you’ve never heard the phrase “dark patterns”, you’re almost certainly familiar with them. They’re the sneaky ways online companies trick you into agreeing to stuff you’d normally never assent to.”

5. Ten Lessons from Ten Years of Blogging: We’re all Bozos on this Bus
“What works today may not work tomorrow. If what you’re doing isn’t working, do something else. Blogging is always growing and changing. Do something screamingly different. It just might work.”

That’s all folks! You can view all the rest of the community’s top submissions (9 more) here.

Be sure to tune in next Friday for another great weekend reading list that will make you a better and more informed blogger, writer, and/or content creator! If you have anything awesome to submit that others might enjoy, feel free to do so!

And don’t forget to help other fellow creatives find this nifty resource by sharing it around! Huge thanks!

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