2020.
What a year.
Before we wrap up this chapter, let's review our beginning – the 10 most visited marketing articles published, or updated and widely republished, in 2020, including Lessons learned you can apply to your content marketing strategy own .
No surprises here, but our #1 popular post for 2020 is an update of an evergreen post on webinar creation. In mid-March, as the world turned all things far away, I dug up this post and rebooted it, with new tips, images, and other details. It went from an okay performer to the most popular post of the year.
Main lesson: Update and reposition old content can give your site more power than publishing a whole new post.
During the start of the pandemic, I was hesitant to mention COVID-19 on my blog because we are not a news site (never will be) and most of our content focus on marketing strategies that tend to be evergreen. I don't want to be stuck with a pile of outdated content.
But when it became clear that coronavirus was the new normal, I published this post from contributor Ann Smarty, and it was a huge hit in terms of organic traffic, becoming a popular piece of content. Our variable number 1 refers directly to the pandemic.
Main lesson: As the world changes, so does your content strategy. Including newsworthy topics can also lead to an organic traffic.
Jay started writing these podcast stats posts based on research reports back in 2015. Each year, when new reports are published, he writes a new version of the post.
This year, I experimented with leaving the 2019 version directly after we publish the 2020 version. I wanted to see if both articles would rank organically for “podcast stats” as 2019 stats are still interesting for some people. I've been tracking the results for about 4 months and the 2020 version never surpassed the 2019 version in the SERPs, so I ended up setting up a 301 redirect and as of today, this post is position number 3 on “podcast statistics” (this is always changing).
Main lesson: Annual content rewrites can provide a steady stream of organic traffic.
This is another great example of how updating and republishing content can improve your rankings and give your content new life.
This post, originally written by Nathan Ellering in 2015, has received some good organic traffic and is ranking around position 10 for “content ideas” and related phrases. . But it's too outdated (it refers to Google Plus) and isn't a great first impression of the Convince & Convert brand.
I asked Anna Hrach, C&C content strategist and curator if she could update and add a new spin. She narrowed it down to 101 ideas (originally 105) and added fresh, new examples. I chose Anna as a co-author and the organic traffic has increased dramatically. The post also performed well in our weekly newsletter, with the highest number of clicks of all 2020.
Main lesson: Make sure your existing content makes a great first impression. If your content is ranking but is old, it's time for a refresh.
When it became clear that COVID – 19 was not going to end anytime soon, our fearless leader Jay Baer immediately took action and assembled a Social Media Group Discussion webinar During Coronavirus with C&C social media strategists Zontee Hou and Lauren Teague.
Not only did this webinar generate over 1,500 signups and exceed our Zoom webinar limit, but it's an easy, great starting point for written content. Right after the webinar, Jay turned the same content from the webinar into this blog post, becoming our 5th most visited new post of the year.
Main lesson: The fastest way to create new content with writing is to turn your video or webinar content into a written piece of content. We call this content atomization and it's not intellectual.
The first piece of pandemic-related content Jay creates is a page on his talk site, 7 Success Factors of Virtual Events . I knew this would be interesting to our Persuasion & Conversion audience, so when I got our post on “How to Create a Webinar” republished, I did some keyword research. , made some updates and published an updated version of the article for this blog on Step 23. It ranks well and still gets a significant amount of traffic. It is also featured in our weekly newsletter.
Main lesson: You don't always have to reinvent the wheel. Updating existing content for different audiences can help you achieve quick wins.
Before COVID-19 was an interesting thing, contributor Brandon Anderson recommended this article to me based on research he did in his company's content engine, Ceralytics . Admittedly the topic of “marketing tactics” was not interesting to me at the time, but he believed it would work, and he was right!
He used Certalytics to find a topic people were searching for but didn't have much content, and it worked.
Lesson Key: Make sure your content creation is backed by keyword research.
Here is the inspirational post webinar inspired Jay's post on social media changes in the age of Coronavirus (whew). Published on March 18, Lauren Teague wrote this article based on the advice she gave her clients on what to do in mid-March.
Main lesson: Write what you know. Talk about what's happening in your business. If it's relevant to your existing customers, it should be relevant to your prospects and future customers as well.
People love data. They love the truth. And they just love statistics. If you're into martech content marketing, you know that there's a lot of competition as to who can own all of the marketing-related statistical searches. And this post owns some of them.
Main lesson: Do the other company's research and add your own spin and angle. They will love the publicity and you will love how much easier it is than creating a report from scratch.
10. Top 20 Best Content Marketing Examples for 2020
The only thing marketers love more than statistics are examples. We created this post to showcase our client's work and other work we love. It ranks 2nd for “best content marketing examples” and I think it would have been higher on the list if we had published it earlier in the year (we published this post in October).
We've also turned it into a convenient PDF download.
Main lesson: Everyone loves examples (not just marketers) AND they're a great way to highlight your partners and customers.
Our website has been around forever (during the years of digital marketing), so a portion of our organic traffic is from 1 – 10 year old content. But this post focuses on new and republished content that's been active in 2020.
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