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.

1. 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.
2. 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!
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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!
6. 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!
7. 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!
8. 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!
9. 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.
10. Facebook Really Does Make Money – 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.