This week’s favorite posts are incredibly insightful, interesting, and personal. There’s no doubt you’ll be able to identify with a few of these scenarios.

1. Marketing for Marketers: Heal Thyself

Ian Lurie runs a very popular internet marketing agency in Seattle. Yet even he admits to struggling on spending time marketing his own business. He admits to getting caught in that “working in, not on” part of self-employment.

In this post, he gives you his solution and details the fantastic success that’s come from it.

Read the full post here.

2. How to Make Marketing Strategy Real

John Jantsch writes the Duct Tape Marketing blog, which should be required reading for every small business owner or self employed professional. His advice is very similar to Guerilla Marketing, in that it’s very practical and focused on small businesses.

In this post, he has a quote that is something I truly believe.

I firmly believe that lack of a clear marketing strategy is what leads many businesses to the ranks of the commodity.

This is so important because when you’re a commodity, you compete on price. And that’s not a sustainable competitive advantage!

Read the full post here.

3. Why your Blog isn’t Making any Money

Content marketing is essential to online success. It’s accessible to everyone and provides tremendous opportunity.

But that doesn’t mean it’s easy.

A post on Copyblogger this week looks at some of the biggest issues with why blogs aren’t succeeding and gives advice on how to turn it around.

Read the full post here.

4. When Being an “Expert” is Harmful

This great post on A Smart Bear this week talks about the downsides of being an expert.

I liken this to a sort of CEO Syndrome: You only know what you know. Sometimes you need to assume you know nothing, and test all of your assumptions from the ground-up.

Read the full post here.

5. Misadventures in Venture Capital Funding

This is an incredibly personal and detailed account of how Rand Fishkin and SEOmoz alomst raised another $25 million recently from Venture Capitalists.

It details an incredible roller coaster ride, and presents some of the challenges of trying to raise money.

Read the full post here.