Last year, Twitter announced that they were going to shut down the API that allowed users to display Twitter share counts on their website. Before that happened, I decided to scrape social share counts from some of the most well known blogs that used content marketing to successfully grow their businesses.

I then sorted the data and took a close look at some of the articles that went viral on these blogs. Some blogs have articles that got shared over 10,000 times.

In this article, I take a closer look at some of the most shared articles on these blogs and what we can learn from their success.

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Content marketing has been around for a very long time, but has grown sharply in popularity in recent years. Google’s crack down on just about every easy link building tactic and the growth of social media marketing have made content marketing a compelling choice for growing a business.

Content marketing can benefit just about any business. By creating useful content targeted towards your desired audience, you can generate more leads, become an authoritative source of information and build brand awareness.

More website content through activities like blogging and tool creation can also result in more traffic through search engines, social media and people sharing your content with others.

Why Develop a Content Strategy?

A lot of people think that content marketing is just blasting content out on a blog, but developing a documented content strategy often produces much better results.

According to Content Marketing Institute, only 35% of organizations have a documented content strategy. Out of those with a documented strategy, 60% say that their organization is effective versus 32% with only a verbal strategy and 7% for organizations with no content strategy.

For Small Business Ideas Blog, traffic grew at a slow rate when there was no strategy at all. Once I approached blogging more strategically, traffic increased considerably, including a 1,310% increase in 2014.Read More