First of all, please wish TopRank’s Online Marketing Blog a Happy 7th Birthday!
It was 7 years ago today that I started this blog as an experiment to document industry news and develop my writing skills. With the help of many different people, it’s turned into quite a bit more than that.
THANK YOU for reading, sharing and contributing your insights. They are all very much appreciated and help fuel the continued publishing of this blog after thousands of posts: 2,496 to be exact and I’ve had the privilege of writing 2,075 of them.
The year 2010 provided to be one of focus on Social Media and Content Marketing topics over our past emphasis on SEO and Online PR. All are great topics in the online marketing mix, but as you’ll see below, readers are eating up social media content as fast as they can get it.
Here are the top 10 posts from Online Marketing Blog published in 2010:
(according to visits)
1. 10 Ways to Create a More Engaging Facebook Page – Facebook marketing is hot in 2010 and with close to 600 million users, it’s only going to get hotter in 2011. These basic tips are a great starting point for companies that want to increase their reach and customer engagement on Facebook.
2. 22 Social Media Marketing Management Tools – With 1,495 retweets and nearly 200 Facebook shares, this post about social media was very popular. Due to the meteoric rise of publishing and sharing tools, the social web can be overwhelming for marketers. These tools are part of growing category of software that help marketers, advertisers and public relations professionals manage their brands’ social participation.
3. 11 Free Tools for Social Media Optimization – You can’t scale social media marketing or search engine optimization without tools and the intersection of social media and SEO offers a tremendous competitive advantage. These tools offer a range of benefits for creating and measuring search friendly social media content.
4. 5 B2B Social Media Winners – Social media isn’t just for consumer products and services. Content marketing and relationship building are key to longer sales cycles common to B2B marketing and social media offers an exceptional platform for engaging prospects with content and social media. These examples show how successful B2B companies are implementing social media into their marketing mix.
5. 25 Women That Rock Social Media – Let’s hear it for the women of social media. A response to a listing of (mostly men) top social media pundits on ClickZ by Erik Qualmann, this post lists 25 women who are rocking the social media world.
6. 5 Examples of Social Media in Healthcare Marketing – In line with our editorial plan that offers a matrix of tactical marketing tips intersecting with vertical markets, this post resonated with marketers part of the huge Healthcare industry looking for examples of social media in action.
7. Social Media Strategy – A Definitive Guide – Tapping into the amazing network I’ve been fortunate to develop of the past 10 years or so, this list of social media strategy advice comes from a range of industry luminaries. It also offers contrasting views between Guy Kawasaki and Chris Brogan on social media strategy vs. tactics.
8. Why Do So Many Companies Suck at Social Media? – This was another post about social media that did well socially, with 1,159 Retweets and 300 Facebook shares. While numbered tips posts do quite well, personal observation posts like this one seem to connect with other marketers (and consultants) experiencing the stumbling of many companies and their efforts to make sense of the social web.
9. 5 Ways to Weave LinkedIn Into Your Marketing Mix – LinkedIn is on the rise with over 90 million users and every Fortune 500 company represented. A plethora of new features and integration with other social channels has made LinkedIn a place worth spending time on outside of recruiting.
10. 5 Steps to Build a Twitter Marketing Strategy – Sometimes the best blog posts come from answering people’s questions via email. That’s the genesis of this post on practical and first hand advice on building a successful Twitter marketing strategy.
Overall, the most visited pages for this blog included our famous BIGLIST of SEO Blogs and the best list of Blog and RSS directories. Based on social signals, search referring traffic and other KPIs, numbered lists continue to dominate the format that gains greatest exposure for content we post here. I’ll continue to provide those kinds of insights in 2011 and also welcome your feedback
If you’re a regular reader, what were some of your favorite posts over the past year? What would you like to see more of? Would you like to see more posts form other TopRank Marketing staff? Industry news? Videos (besides my travel videos of course), interviews, conference liveblogging?
After 7 years of blogging the focus of this agency blog is still to document what TopRank Marketing considers as topics worth discussing with an emphasis on Content, Search and Social. Advertising, PR and Email will also enter the mix a bit more as well as some new faces from the TopRank Marketing team. On top of that, your feedback is especially welcome.
Thanks again for reading and Happy New Year to you!
