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At the end of the year, lots of people and companies make their top 5/10/25 lists of top posts, top this, top that, and so forth. The problem, especially for B2B marketers, is that during the last couple of weeks in December when most of those lists are being shared, far fewer people are reading them. They’re out celebrating the holidays and doing stuff other than reading your marketing content.

To mitigate that effect and still do some year-end top stuff, I’m going to try something a little different, and I’d encourage you to give this a shot as well. Take some time over the next couple of days to look at your web analytics and find the top posts for the year. For reference, there are 20 working days in December (assuming that people work Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve), so if you can put together the top 20 posts for the year, you’ll have enough to re-share for the month.

Here’s how using Google Analytics. Go into Content > Site Content > All Pages, select the year to date as your time frame, show the top 50 pages, apply a filter to restrict to content created this year (assuming you use a URL structure that contains the date) and export as CSV.

Put it all together in a basic spreadsheet. If you’re using Google Docs, just import the CSV file straight in. Make sure it’s sorted by Pageviews in descending order. Now, to get a useful URL for social sites, you’ll need to concatenate your root domain to the spreadsheet. Delete the columns after unique page views and create 2 columns, the first with your root domain in it:

Then concatenate the page in column 1 with the root URL in column 4 and populate column 5:

Take this list and have it ready for the content scheduler of your choice, like Buffer or Argyle Social, and you’ll be sharing your top content of 2012 all month long.

Here’s the most important part. By doing a month-long content rewind with a post a day, you’re front-loading your most popular content at the beginning of the month, when people are still at work. By the time people start taking off for the holidays, you’re down near the end of the list, and the most popular content will have been re-seen by the most number of people. At the end of the month, you can always wrap up with a single post recapping the top 20, but by doing this, you make sure your best content is in front of the audience earlier rather than later.

You’ll see this in my own news feed using the hashtag #decrw, for December Rewind.

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