Michael Hyatt just posted a list of the top viewed posts on his site in 2014. For the reasons he outlines in his post, it’s worth copping that riff. Here are my top posts by views in 2014.
These first two links here are not posts or part of the top ten. But it’s worth thinking about how people find you and what they see when they get there.
Home Page: The most viewed page on my site in 2014 was my home page, and by a wide margin. It received 10 times the views of any other page.
Anthony: The second most viewed page on my site is my About page. There is a lesson here if you are a content marketer. We spend a lot of time developing compelling content and too little on the page that does a lot of work for us.
These posts weren’t all written in 2014. They were viewed the most in 2014. If there is any lesson for content marketers or sales people or organizations, the dates these posts were written offers a lesson worth learning and acting on.
Asking Your Clients to Pay Up (August 12, 2012): This page has almost any many views as my About page. It shows up in search results every week. And this is one of the keys to content marketing: answer the questions your audience (or prospects) are asking. Apparently, people need a lot of help collecting from some of their clients.
How to Be Interesting and Useful to C-Level Executives (August 14, 2011): This post is about understanding how you create value, proving you are accountable for outcomes, and having the requisite business acumen to see your dream client’s business through their eyes (or giving them a new view).
The Three Levels of Sales Skills (September 5, 2014): This is the first post from 2014 to show up on this list. Here I outlined the three levels of skills you need to succeed in sales today. It was popular on LinkedIn and Twitter, like a lot of list-based content.
The Best Questions for Your Needs Analysis (February 23, 2013): This post is really a list of outcomes you need from a discovery sales call broken down into Who, What, Why, How, and When questions. It’s a great starting point for developing a list of questions you can use to improve the value you create for your dream clients in early sales calls.
What Hustlers Don’t Do (May 3, 2014): I started writing The Hustler’s Playbook for my three children. I didn’t start with the intention of turning it into a series of posts. But after I’d written a half a dozen, I decided to share them. This is a giant list of things successful people do not do.
7 Ways to Improve Your Business Acumen for Sales (March 5, 2010): Very soon this post will be five years old. It still receives a lot of views because, like Asking Your Clients to Pay Up, it shows up in a lot of searches. There is nothing on this list that isn’t as important today as it was five years ago. In fact, the recipe is even more important now.
How to Say Thank You After Your Big Sales Presentation (September 10, 2010): This post is about reinforcing the value you create, responding to questions in writing, and asking again for the business (you did ask for the business, didn’t you).
7 Ways to Be Better at Prospecting (March 4, 2010): This post is a massive 1,300 words, despite the content marketing world’s best advice that a post should be 350 to 500 words.
Ten Mistakes That Kill Sales Opportunities (January 22, 2014): Another list-based post. And a damn fine checklist to review again and again. This is evergreen content for those of us in B2B sales.
The Hustler’s Playbook: A 10-Step Guide to Hustling (December 20, 2014): How can a guide to hustling not do well? This post is only a few days old, but it’s already found it’s way into the top ten posts of 2014. Good title for a good list drives traffic.
I don’t pay too much attention to search engine optimization or keywords. But it’s always worth taking the time to study how well what you are doing is working for you and what creates value for the people you serve.
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