Every year during the holiday season, we count down our top blogs (as ranked by the number of views) during the past 12 months. This year, there were certainly some surprises on the list. But hopefully, this is a good gauge of what other companies and individuals found helpful or interesting during the past year. As always, our mission with all our content is to help you excel at digital marketing. And with that, here are the top 10 blogs of 2022:

No 10: 6 Examples of Great Small Business Content Marketing

What makes a piece of content good? When it comes to your strategy and approach to developing great marketing collateral, we often refer back to Contagious: Why Things Catch On written by Wharton professor Jonah Berger. In the book, Berger introduced a framework known as STEPPS, explaining the 6 reasons why any marketing content piece might go viral. We provide one example of each approach. More

No. 9: 5 Things Businesses Can Learn from Jacques Pépin

At a time when online trolls can’t wait to tear down famous people, the famed French-born chef has few detractors online. Much of the reason is that he exhibits some core traits that businesses would do well to model themselves after. More

No. 8: What Is Programmatic Advertising?

As a small business, you might have a lot of terms thrown at you when it comes to marketing and advertising. Some of them may be familiar but others may be a bit more “inside baseball” – the kind of term that industry professionals use but is not so well-known outside of that circle. One of these is certainly “programmatic advertising.” While you may shrug a bit when you hear it, the concept itself is important to know about if you’re considering any ads for your small business. More

No. 7: How to Write a Good Blog Post for Your Small Business

When I was a young reporter at U.S. News & World Report magazine in the early 1990s, I remember the editors there would often joke about magazine-style writing – essentially a formula for how to set up an article and write it from end to end. There were four parts to it:

• • Function
  • Understanding
  • Clarity
  • Kicker

And yes, as an acronym, it spelled F-U-C-K – certainly easy to remember, but it’s also a great way to structure any blog you might write. More

No. 6: 7 Ways to Tell a Scam from a Really Good Service

As a small business ourselves, one of the things that dismay us more than anything else is that we’re inundated on daily basis with lies – all of which come from those selling us the promise of something. For that reason, we wanted to tackle here the 7 ways we’ve found to uncover a scam, something we hope you can apply to evaluate any product or service you buy. More

No. 5: The Role of Luck in Marketing

Businesses and all those successful entrepreneurs may not like to hear this – but life (including a lot of marketing) is simply luck. How can this be true, you ask, especially with all those agencies, marketing consultants, and marketing gurus telling me they can guarantee results? Or, that they will definitely improve your performance, ROI, or revenue because they “have a system, which always works.” The truth is, there’s no such thing. More

No. 4: In Praise of Queen Elizabeth II

While you may think the late Queen’s job had nothing to do with directly “selling” goods or services, it certainly was a lot about marketing in the sense that she could have made any number of strategic choices that would’ve significantly altered the perception of the monarchy or even pushed it into complete irrelevance during her reign. Yet, the fact is, she maintained the royals’ status all these years. Her story is really one about how anyone or any company can stay relevant for a long period of time. More

No. 3: The Five Marketing Lies You’re Told as a Small Business

(Technically, this was published in late 2021, but was released after our previous Top 10 for 2021, hence its inclusion for this year.)
Every year, we’re struck by the amount of what we would consider bad advice given to small businesses, especially when it comes to marketing. While some of it is well-intentioned and resonates because it’s a simple slogan or comes in a relatable, easy-to-digest message, that doesn’t mean it should carry significant weight. Here are 5 that we’d vote to eliminate altogether as we head into 2023. More

No. 2: 10 Reasons Why Customers Choose Any Business

We often say there’s no magic bullet when it comes to marketing. You might do everything technically right in a best-practice way but customers still don’t take the plunge and buy from you. And it could be any number of reasons, some of which you can control and others you can’t. That said, over the years, we’ve consistently found 10 core reasons why customers choose different businesses, buying from them regularly. More

And the no. 1 blog of 2022 is:

No. 1: 4 Marketing Puzzles to Solve for Your Business

Puzzles are a lot like marketing – you have to know where to start and you have to recognize patterns to be successful. Here are four marketing puzzles that all businesses have to figure out to some extent, in order to successfully promote themselves. More