Roger Wigington: Happy 14th Birthday to @TopRank Online Marketing Blog

Happy 14th Blog Birthday TopRank Blog

Over the past 14 years this marketing blog has had numerous contributors, thousands of posts, hundreds of thousands of social shares and millions of views. To say blogging has had a positive impact on our business would be a gross understatement.

December 28 is our blog birthday and what started simply as an experimental way to share resources and develop writing skills has turned into one of our most effective recruiting, marketing and community engagement tools. That success is thanks to a team effort including Ashley Zeckman with 360 career posts, who has served as blog editor over the past 2 years, Josh Nite with 113 posts, Caitlin Burgess with 106 posts, Tiffani Allen with 90 posts and our newcomers Anne Leuman, Nick Nelson and Elizabeth Williams. Caitlin and Josh in particular have been the backbone of our great content week after weeK!

Additional kudos goes to Josh and Tiffani for shooting fun weekly Friday News roundup videos each and every week of 2017, which you can see at TopRank Marketing TV.

While I’ve authored over 2,500 career posts out of 4,098 total, I didn’t do much blogging in 2017. Our continued success would not have been possible this year without our TopRank Marketing team creating, contributing and helping to promote our blog. Most importantly, it would not have been possible without the support of our community, industry influencers, clients and new subscribers.

Some ask whether a blog counts as social media. I can say our blog is intimately tied to our social network activity and we continue to receive comments on posts. So yes, a blog is very much a part of social media. Content is the Kingdom after all and blog content makes up much of what people share on the social web. Companies like ours and our clients are also leveraging social networks to source content, so it’s a dynamic cycle of creation and collaboration. This is what enables a very small team of marketers to scale quality content in a way that is meaningful to customers.

Being meaningful and relevant is at the core of the purpose for this blog. Being findable, useful and actionable on marketing is the reason this blog exists. Some of our best hires have said they heard about TopRank Marketing because of our blog. Conference organizers have engaged me and other team members to speak at events because of our blog. Fortune 500 companies have reached out and engaged our agency because of our blog. A book publisher engaged me to write Optimize in part because of this blog. Numerous partnerships, and friendships have been instigated because of our blog. One of the most satisfying things to experience is when a successful marketing executive of business owner approaches me at an event or sends a card saying thank you for our blog content and sharing that the content we share here has been instrumental in their career.

To help celebrate our 14th Blog Birthday, Id like to share a list of this year’s contributors and their most popular posts.

Caitlin Burgess – 20 Talented Brand Marketers to Follow on LinkedIn 4,900 shares

Ashley Zeckman – 5 Digital Marketing Brain Training Exercises to Keep You Sharp 2,900 shares

Josh Nite – B2B Marketing: 20 Jokes Only a B2B Marketer Will Get 2,700 shares

Anne Leuman – How 7 Startups Skyrocketed to Success with Content Marketing 2,300 shares

Tiffani Allen – Online Marketing News: Content for Millennials & Boomers, Top Data Trends & PPC for Research 1,200 shares

Nick Nelson – Digital Marketing Tools & Tactics: What the Trends Tell Us 1,200 shares

Alexis Hall – Everything You Need to Build a LinkedIn Marketing Tactical Plan 1,100 shares

Elizabeth Williams – Elevate your Marketing Career with One Simple Word: Strategy 737 shares

Amy Higgins – Stop the Marketing Killjoy: 5 Ways You’re Turning off Audiences with Bad Video 695 shares

Steve Slater – How We’re Building a Digital Advertising & SEO Dream Team 683 shares

Debbie Friez – Break All the Social Rules: Advice from Spredfast VP of Strategy Spike Jones 544 shares

Lee Odden – New 2017 List: 50 Social Media Marketing Influencers 6,200 shares

The consistently awesome award goes to Josh Nite, who published 52 blog posts with an average of 936 shares each and a total of 48,653 shares across all of his posts in 2017!

The consistently popular award goes to Caitlin Burgess who published 49 blog posts and had the most popular post amongst our team for all of 2017!

Thank you to our team for your contributions in 2017!

Going forward into 2018, we’ll be taking much of Steve Rayson’s advice from his analysis and focus on fewer, but more in-depth posts. We’ll be publishing three times weekly instead of 5 during the first Quarter and see how our readers respond. While our editorial plan is very much driven by our own marketing objectives, performance analysis and understanding of customers, our community’s interests are also very important to us. What topics would you like us to cover in 2018? What formats are you most interested in? Who are your favorite writers here at Online Marketing Blog?

Thank you for reading and we wish you a happy and prosperous new year!

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