Author: Elizabeth

People love to hate Steven Singer.

That “hate” is so pervasive that the jewelry retailer’s website is: IHateStevenSinger.com. The company is so committed to celebrating the “hate” that it doesn’t even own the domain StevenSinger.com.

What’s behind all that “hate” pervading Philadelphia radio and satellite airwaves? (The company says it’s the longest-running advertiser on The Howard Stern Show.) It’s the story of customer feedback (possibly apocryphal) that launched a marketing campaign that’s lasted for years.

It’s also a story about the power of contrarian thinking – a helpful reminder for content marketers.

@IHSS (I Hate Steven Singer) shows the power of contrarian thinking, a useful #ContentMarketing lesson, says @AnnGynn via @CMIContent. Click To Tweet

Contrarian strategy stands out in a gift-driven market

The website’s History page recounts the origin story: A Steven Singer customer returned 20 years after buying an engagement ring to buy another diamond ring for their anniversary.

If you publish great content and hardly anyone reads it, is it actually great content?

That’s a question for the ages – or maybe the comments section.

Every content marketer plans, crafts, reviews, and publishes articles with the best intentions. We all want to publish the most helpful content, sharp insights, and genuinely leading thoughts.

Sometimes, articles you think will be great don’t hit the mark for audiences. (I’ve written about steps to take when your content “fails.”)

But what about the content assets in the middle? They are not top performers or true duds, but they didn’t get quite all the love you think they deserve.

Looking at CMI’s 2022 content, I found a set of articles that deserve another look. Here are a few that feel particularly relevant to this moment.

Author: Jonathan Crossfield

Reading time: 10 minutes

Why read (or reread) this now: Competition for audience attention

CMI published over 249 articles about all aspects of content marketing in 2022.

I bet very few of you read every one of them. (I understand – you have a lot of things to do.)

Since it’s my job, I read every article and check the performance analytics. So I put together the 10 most popular posts CMI published in 2022 to help you catch up on any you missed. I used data from BuzzSumo and Google Analytics, including social shares, email conversions, page views, unique linking domains, and a dose of editorial discretion to create the list.

Since I’m not big into rankings and more into managing schedules, I’ve listed the articles based on reading time (shortest to longest). I’ve also thrown in an honorable mention that’s quickly climbing in popularity.

All these articles include a ton of knowledge you can use right away. I hope you find these

There is no one right way of doing content marketing.

Depending on their goals, resources, target audience, and so on, different companies do content marketing differently. 

In this post, we’ll share seven inspiring B2B content marketing examples, why they’ve done well, and how you can replicate their success.

Shopify is an e-commerce platform that helps businesses sell online.

Key stats

Number of referring domains: 9,000

Estimated organic traffic: 1,700,000

Number of keywords the tools rank for: 121,000

What it does well

When it comes to content marketing, Shopify has gone the whole hog. It’s invested in almost every type of content marketing: blogs, podcasts, free courses, free guides, and more.

But I want to drill down into one aspect of its content marketing: free tools. Shopify offers over 20 free tools:

These tools have two things in common. First, they solve problems for budding entrepreneurs. For example, you’ll need a

Running an online business is an excellent way to be your own boss, work on your own terms, and (hopefully) make a lot of money.

But growing an online business can be challenging. There’s a decent learning curve, and the way people interact with the digital world is constantly changing.

I’ve personally grown three separate six-figure online businesses over the last 10 years, and I’ve learned a lot about what it takes to earn more. I’ve distilled everything I’ve learned about growing an online business into the following seven steps.

Before you start investing in ads or spending countless hours trying to grow a social media account, you should do some market research to find valuable information about your market and audience—one of the most important things being where your potential customers go for their information.

You can post all you