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I trust you had a great Christmas! As our minds dream of how fantastic 2010 will be, it’s time to look back at the hot topics of 2009. Here are Marketing Pilgrim’s top ten most read posts in 2009. Bing.com; Is it Worth Switching from Google? – A home run for Microsoft? While Bing certainly deserves credit for being the first serious challenger to Google, it didn’t hurt that 2009 was the year that Microsoft stepped-up its media outreach to us. Social Media Monitoring Tools: 26 Free Online Reputation Tools – This post was written in 2007 and has been in our top five for the past 3 years! Social Media Marketing Beginner’s Guide – A great guest article by Jon Rognerud and it still stands-up as a great primer for social media marketing. 8 Essential Free Social Media Monitoring Tools – A smart blogger knows not to simply update a popular post. Instead, you think of ways to expand on it–with a new post! This post from December 2008, added 8 more great monitoring tools for reputation monitoring. 200+ Internet Marketing Gurus on Twitter – Back before there Twitter Lists were just a twinkle in the eye of Twitter’s founders, Brian Chappell authored the definitive list of marketers on Twitter. If we hadn’t introduced a policy to close comments on older posts, I believe this one would have easily broken 1,000 comments by now! 21 of the Best WordPress Plugins for New Blogs – Just a little over a year ago, I spilled the beans on the plugins that power Marketing Pilgrim. Look for a new, updated list, in the New Year! Google Offers Cheap Online File Storage With a Catch – How in the world did this benign looking post from 2007 make it into our top ten list of 2009? Good keywords! The Five Pillars of Social Media Marketing – My good friend Ben Wills authored this post in 2006–which at the time was groundbreaking. In fact, I blatantly–with his permission–used it to frame an entire chapter of Radically Transparent! Google Reputation Management: Fix Your Google Reputation & Remove Negative Results – Do you get the feeling that we have a good grasp of reputation management issues? This post is over 2 years old, but, aside from the Google Pages reference, is still remarkably relevant. Facebook Really Does Make Mone y – When it comes to Facebook, I tend to defer to Jordan’s critical eye. She never fails to deliver! Some observations: As of today, Marketing Pilgrim consists of 6,792 (make that 6,793 with this one) posts and more than 45,000 comments! That’s a lot of words! Traffic was up 17.54% in 2009 compared to 2008. Not a bad growth rate! Referrals from Twitter were up 120%!!! Referrals from Yahoo were down 13%. Our own URL shortener– Gri.ms –let us track the origination of around 10,000 visitors! We know where you live! Want to see previous years’ top posts? Check out 2006 , 2007 and 2008 .

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The 10 Most Popular Marketing Pilgrim Posts of 2009

Although article marketing may simple like a simple enough task, there are quite a few particulars once you get into the meat of making your article SEO friendly and highly effective.  This statement however is not meant to frighten you away from using article marketing as a powerful tool, but instead to educate you on how to make sure that your time and efforts truly pay off.  By following a few simple rules you will see a much larger return than if you simply write an article and post it hoping for dramatic results. In fact, if you have published an article, or a few dozen and not seen any positive ranking results from your efforts chances are you have failed to follow a few of the basics that are elementary but important.  For instance, when it comes to successful article marketing proper placement is a vital tool.  A few quick hints about the structural nature of your article construction and you will be well on your way to making a turn around on your time investment or your monetary investment if you outsourced the task to someone else. The best place to start is with the basics, which means taking a good look at your title and the construction of your title key phrase in the introductory paragraph.  First off, your title should always contain your keyword phrase at the beginning instead of the end. While it may be tempting to write something catchy such like The top ten tops for dog training you can bark about, the phrase Dog training: the top ten tips will actually do better for you. The reason why is because you want your title phrase near the beginning of your title so that search engines correctly identify it and see it.  In the same way, you want to place your title phrase within the first hundred characters of your article.  While these tips are simple, they can make all the difference.  Follow the same rules when it comes to the rest of the paragraphs in your piece and your headings and subheadings and you will be much closer to reaching your final goal of excellent rankings simply from article marketing.

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Article marketing for dummies