Is HitTail the Future of Marketing?

The history of HitTail goes back many years, as I began to understand the futility of traditional marketing when dealing with a company that has virtually no budget, a product no one has heard of in a market that hasn't quite developed yet.

That was the story of Scala Multimedia Software in 1998, the company that makes the sort of software that turns plasma and LCD TVs into Minority Report-style digital flatscreen signage. There was no trade-shows at the time, no trade-magazines, and not even a standardized name for the business! It was truly the wild west days of digital signage, where no deployment was over a few dozen screens, because they all had to be updated with landlines. And customers could (and did) come from anywhere in the world. And you had to pay attention to all these geographically dispersed prospects, because you had to aggregate all the customers in the world to turn digital signage into a viable market.

But how do you reach them in the first place?

What sort of marketing campaign could you mount to reach companies in the middle of Malaysia, South America, Africa, Canada, United Arab Emirates, Russia, Europe, Japan, United States, Australia, and even Greenland and New Zealand? It's true. Prospects came from all over the world, often getting their first clue from word-of-mouth referrals from Scala's very early days running cable TV "barker channels" on the Commodore Amiga computer platform in the late 80's.

Word of mouth only got you so far.

Enter the Internet, and a radically new update model where the signage could be updated by pulling their own content down from centralized servers. Flat panel technology was also improving, plasma screens becoming forever bigger, and LCDs starting to inch up in size. And the movies--oh the movies! Finaly, I could stop referring to the flying blimp in Blade Runner, and start talking about the ubiquitous electronic advertisements in Minority Report. There was a mainstream movie that allowed the stuff to be understood by the masses.

The time was ripe.

And the rate of people Googling on the subject-matter increased. Oh, there was no telling what people were going to call this emerging industry. A lot of folks felt is was going to be digital signage. But the head of Engineering at the company was betting on dynamic signage, as it was more descriptive. I withheld judgment, and instead wrote about the field is as many ways, and with as many likely word combinations as I could think of. Remember, this was 1999, and Blogger was barely even on the scene. I used my own homespun perfectly-optimized-for-search content management system to spit out page after page of what I at the time called "vignettes". At least one person who knew me back then to this day suggests that I virtually invented what today is called the landing page.

Stories of these landing pages are numerous and colorful. At least one of them directly resulted in hooking up with a major global distribution partner in a market that the company had been hoping to break into for years. It was all predicated by me thinking to roll out some content targeting "plasma display software". I targeted dozens, if not hundreds of different word combinations by this time. Were were all the ideas coming from? What did I know to try? Was it the GoTo keyword suggestion tool (later Overture)? No! It was the company's own log files, which I could view scroll by me in real time, filtering out everything but the highlighted search hits, thanks to my homespun tracking system.

Now, this was not HitTail at the time--far from it. I lacked the critical insights that subsequently went into re-inventing the tracking system for massive scaling (to the world), and automatic evaluation of the keywords, thereby alleviating the most time consuming part--figuring out which terms we STILL HAD TO optimize for.

My title was Webmaster, but really I was a Jack-of-all-trades, tending to almost every aspect of company operations, baring software development of the product itself. So in short, I was finding the prospects and forcing their progress along the sales pipeline in their journey to becoming customers, managed the system that handled taking and shipping orders. It wasn't easy convincing the salespeople at the time that there were real human beings behind these clicks. I developed a whole array of supporting systems that basically took away anyone and everyone's choice to NOT follow up on the sales leads I was generating. It was a brute-force bullying customer relationship management software, which to this day remains as a closely held secret tool of this company, which has withstood several politically motivated attempts to "turn it off".

I go into this level of detail regarding HitTail's history, and how a predecessor to HitTail virtually created an industry, and gathered contact info of all the world's customers in this market to a single company, to explain to you some of the next steps I'll be taking with HitTail feature development.

I'll be constructing a "Lab", a lot like Google Labs, where I'll be experimenting a bit more aggressively with new product features, forever zero'ing in on that "sweet spot" in which analytics software is not even necessary, because we'll keep compelling you to the next necessary action item to close your sales.

I'm a fan of Michael Bosworth's solution selling techniques, which were very necessary for long sales-cycle items such as 1000-screen digital signage deployments, and a fan of Dr. W. Edwards Deming's total quality management approach, which advocates rapid product improvement based on real-time feedback from your workers and customers. I'm a fan of Seth Godin's Purple Cow (among other books) that says you have to differentiate yourself by being radically and brilliantly different to even stand a chance in today's competitive marketplace, and Guy Kawasaki's pre-Internet/seldom discussed Selling the Dream, in which he plays off his experience launching the Macintosh to teach how to "evangelize" a product and use incredibly clear strategic thinking to do so.

All these principles have gone into HitTail. It's a synthesis of marketing guru books, put together in what I hope is the sort of elegant simplicity, with actual underlying complexity akin to Apple Computer's designs (maybe not in our graphics--yet). But no book has colored our product quite so much as Chris Anderson's The Long Tail, in which he gave a name to the radically simple and effective methodology that was already by this time driving the algorithm behind Connors Communications' proprietary tracking system being used for its public relations customers.

And we saw that the time was right.

Just as with the movie Minority Report made the time right for Scala with digital signage by providing the common cultural awareness (if not the precise language) for this emerging market, Chris' book The Long Tail gave us a way to make HitTail accessible and understandable to the masses.

HitTail's seeming simplicity belies what's actually going on, and we can not count the number of times some know-it-all sysadmin goes "Oh, that's all in your log files" or "It's the same thing as AwStats". What they forget is that we're not providing just another list of top-10 keywords, statistical bullshit. We're skipping over all that keyword research nonsense, and simply telling you what to do next--a huge time saver and advantage in the forever-more-competitive landscape of fighting for first-access to customers online. We're throwing paralysis through analysis in the gutter where it belongs, and looking right at the edge of where you nearly have it going on. Then we tell you how to change your act, ever-so-slightly so you step into the reliable flow of keyword search traffic that you're just around the bend from anyway.

HitTail is not analytics. It's an approach to online marketing pulled right from the minds of some of the best marketing and busines gurus of our time.

But it's the first act.

And after a little time away from HitTail to ensure that the first act is everything we promised (and it is), I'm stepping back onto the scene to plan Act 2.

Stay tuned.

Seth & Joel's Best In The World Club

I'm really enjoying Seth Godin's book, Purple Cow. Its one of those marketing books that reinforces those things you already know intuitively, but a book puts in fresh perspective--much in the vein of the grandaddy of all such books, The Art of War. It's about winning.

The point he makes is that with all the choice consumers have in almost every aspect of life, you have to be really extraordinay (the purple cow) to set yourself apart. I read it on the tail of Joel Spolsky on Software, another righteous read which among other things gives a rating system for software shops and employee interview screening practices.

And these two reads back-to-back, Wow! I feel like creating super-elite, got-their-act-together club, and hoping I got the right stuff to join. There's a lot of edging around the concept of being the best in the world.

Remembering the role that being extraordinary, and thinking of yourself that way, plays in every day life motivates this post. You need to be pretty darn sharp to be hired as a software developer at Foggy Creek Software--or even be hired as an intern. Similarly, to break through with a new product, you have to be remarkably better or different, and ALSO have that difference easily communicated by your fan-base (that must exist) to even have a chance. Word of mouth (or Internet) advocacy is critical. You must design a product that can win the early adopters and also motivate your base. Success is built in at the product design phase, an won by releasing its potential, virally.

And I approriately come to that realization reading a Seth Godin Marketing book on the New York subway, tapping out an article one-handed on my iPhonel, and posting by email to Blogger, knowing its going to get the top position in Google on the topic I target, because of HitTail (Update: no HitTail suggestion was a perfect headline for this article, so I just used a headline I wrote--I'll save the HitTail effectiveness demo for the next post).

Sent from my iPhone

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Active VS. Passive Online Marketing

Now that I'm active blogging again, I want to point out exactly how
effective HitTail has been at doing nothing--and how effective
"nothing" has been as a strategy between major announcements. I'm
reading Seth Godin's Purple Cow, and he offers numerous examples of
how if you don't have something brilliant, its better to do nothing
than to do forced or contrite promotions to keep the Marketing
department busy.

Like everything else we do, we've broken the model by NOT inundating
our userbase with permission emails. Free HitTail users keep getting
it got free even though we're been out of beta for a year, and paid
users are getting their writing suggestions via email. We dilligently
collect HitTail quotes off the Web, and answer all questions (no
matter where they're posted). Besides that, all's quiet on the email
front.

Yes, even though we're a company with roots in public relations, and
certainly have the gift of gab, you'll find no email newsletter from
us with forced topics for the sake of keeping some artificial
schedule. Instead, we put our resources put into providing a superior
service, and planning a future for HitTail users that will surprise
and delight you as much as our first go-around.

But what if you're hungry for more?

We keep an active forum and blog with RSS feeds, and for the truly
HitTail-hungry, they get their extra fix. For everyone else, we just
gently reach pit by email when we REALLY have something to say,
thereby letting you know its something to actually pay attention to,
and not just noise.

The concept of "active" vs. "passive" online outreach comes to mind.
Such concepts exist in sonar/radar (submarines sending out pings vs.
just listening) and even in keyword position monitoring (querying
Google vs. just analyzing your log files). Well, the same exists with
online marketing.

A brilliant passive system is best, because its less spammy and
obnoxious--putting particiants at ease because they SOUGHT YOU OUT.
You reading this? Chances are, you found me-- which has a little
something to do with HitTail being awesome.

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Forming Good Writing Habits for HitTailing

The enemy of the sort of steady, reliable HitTailing that results in the traffic-building snowball effect is habits, or lack thereof. Once you're in the writing habit, its easy to maintain. But once out of the habit, its hard to re-start. So, what breaks the writing momentum?

With me, its the need to work at a PC that breaks the momentum. I'm either at work on my employer's time, or at home not wanting to take the time. My best opportunity is on the NY subway, where I have no PC--not even a laptop, because I travel lite.

So, I'm tapping this entire post out one-handed on my iPhone. And that gets to the real purpose of this post--illustrating how to HitTail better by modifying habits, and fitting HitTailing into your daily process one way or the other. The reward of dominating your market niche is well worth some behavior modification. The trick is to make it only a minor and enjoyable behavior change.

In my case, its mobile HitTailing. I'm getting very good at the iPhone's on-screen keyboard.

My first step is to log into my HitTail account to look at my To-Do list--not the easiest thing in the world on mobile, so I'm noting that to talk to the product development team. Anyway, I pick a phrase and get myself into the mindset to write about it. Then, I start a new note and write.

Try to finish. Don't get too wordy. The value of getting it out there quickly exceeds the value of getting it perfect. You can always refine it later.

When done, simply email it to your blog's auto-posting email address (you need to set that up beforehand).

Get the subject line right, because its what gets targeted in search. Use the HitTail writing suggestion exactly (adjusting capital letters only) if it makes sense. If not, work the suggestion into the headline without rearranging or dropping words. We're going for exact matching here. Its the exact match where the traffic exists, and being just a little off could prevent all your potential traffic gain from being realized.

If what you want to write about doesn't exactly match a HitTail writing suggestion, then its better to append two phrases to make a new thought than to change the word order. Use the HitTail phrase first in the sequence if you can, so the keywords don't get chopped out of the URL by your blogging software's URL length limiting functions.

How's that for practical mobile HitTailing advice? Well, my stop is next. Gotta go. Let me know if you'd like to read more practical HitTailing advice like this on future posts.

Final point: after Blogger (or TypePad, WordPress or whatever) auto-posts your email, you can always go back and add pictures, links, and fix spelling. But meanwhile, that post is working for you, keeping that snowball rolling, and picking up more mass.

Sent from my iPhone

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Methods of Driving Traffic

This will be one of the most self-referential posts and blatant examples of HitTailing I have done in a long time. Yesterday, someone in South Africa googled on the exact term I used in the headline of this post. HitTail recognized that we were not fully optimized on this term, and issued it as a suggestion. But when I clicked to reproduce the search, I didn't see us on that page--understandable, considering it was a South Africa Google Datacenter that it was probably pulling from. So, what to do? I could just click around. But instead...

Using the free FireFox RankChecker tool from SEOBook, I popped the term into the Keyword field and www.hittail.com in the Domain field and hit Start. Lo-and-behold--RankChecker showed me that we were in the 83rd spot in Google on the term. So, I went to Google and performed the search, and clicked right on page 8 of results, and low-and-behold, there was HitTail! I clicked on the result to see that this page about driving traffic for less (a previously acted upon HitTail suggestion) was the page that was found.

So being that the page that was found was something that was targeting and optimized on a completely different term, imagine what would happen if I actually targeted it. And hence, the writing of this post, and giving out of some of the most competitive SEO-industry-insider knowledge that exists... period! For you see, the new writing suggestion that was issued was the direct result of a post that was made as a result of an old writing suggestion that was acted upon. And thus the iterative process of continual improvement is happening. This is why I talk about TQM so much. The "output" from quality assurance is being fed directly back into the "input" of the production line, which produces more quality assurance data.

Hence, our talk about the snowball effect.

Sites become virtually self-optimizing... but not entirely. The process is getting funneled through at least 2 things: 1) YOU. Quality content won't write itself (or will it?). And 2) Blogging software, because who wants to worry about the fuss of SEO when free, easy publishing systems get like 80% of SEO correct out of the box? And this is one of the best methods of driving traffic to your site--adding new content, based on HitTail suggestions.

And yes, it is a lot of work.

But there is another...

...darker...

...method of driving more traffic to your site.

And that method has been talked about by a few industry insiders, and fewer still who share the secret with public quotes like "I use [HitTail] for my Adwords accounts and they double my other campaigns in every positive way. Double the Clicks, half the CPC, half the overall conversion costs."

Yeah uh, so if you want the benefit of HitTail, the other method of driving traffic to your site is to take the keyword lists generated by HitTail and put them into your AdWords campaigns... because who whouldn't want double the clicks, half the CPC and half the overall conversion costs?

Seems like a no-brainer.

I'm Back to Help Drive Traffic through SEO and SEM

OK so it's finally time for me to come out of hiding and start posting again. Like happens to every prolific blogger occasionally, that pesky thing known as real-life interferes. I've finally got a nice tight grip on the reigns, and can take a few moments to re-engage the world through the HitTail blog, which seems to have only been getting better and better in my absence. Kudos to Valerie, Ambar, Adam and all the other (mostly Connors) team that keeps this thing one of the top blogs in marketing.

OK so enough back-patting. HitTail's momentum continues strong, and we have some very exciting things planned. I've decided to take up my propensity for prolific pontification in the SEO arena that dates back to being the Inktomi moderator in the original Search Engine Forums, and re-engage the blogging and SEO (and now... SEM) community.

Whaaaaaat? SEM?

But Mike, you're the SEO guy. OK well, Gary Beal's persistent message to me about HitTail being an awesome tool for PPC, right up there with SpyFu and WordTracker, has finally gotten through my thick skull, and I now view SEO and SEM as virtually the same thing. Basically, in all things online-marketing, you hedge your bet by using just about every service that you reasonably can that Google provides you. You never know how they're cross-indexing their data from different systems to calculate relevancy, and I think it's important to keep a hand in each of them--AdWords, included. I'm managing about $5K/mo in AdWords campaigns just to keep myself engaged on that front. I need to know that stuff well for...

...well, you'll just have to wait and see.

Until then, I'll tell you exactly HOW I'll be re-engaging the community. Primarily, it will take place here on this blog. But I'll be practicing what I preach in actually ENGAGING IN HITTAILING . So essentially, the headlines of every blog post I make will be constructed based on HitTail suggestions. I'll try to document how well these posts do in driving more traffic to the HitTail website, seizing first-positions in Google results on terms that are actually driving traffic, and the various tweaks I perform here to this Blogger section of the HitTail site itself in optimizing it for search. Contrary to popular wisdom, simply starting with Blogger Classic using the FTP feature to transmit the file into a subdirectory of an existing site is a good start in blogging for traffic (there ARE other approaches). But there are dozens of tiny little tweaks on top of that--many of which apply to all blogging and CMS platforms--that can still be done. We've done a bunch of them, like putting the title tag text in the anchor text of thepermalink . But there are others we have not done, such as tweaking out and promoting the RSS feed of this site for maximum reach in subscriptions and syndication, such as on iGoogle. I'll be covering that stuff.

And finally, I'll just be exercising my writing muscles, because using HitTail for SEO can be tough--only because of the "actually having to write" part. It requires a sort of discipline and getting into the groove that doesn't come easy, and lags off quickly. It's just like going to the gym. It's tough to start, but once you do the adrenaline rush keeps your momentum going day-by-day, but if you stop even for a couple of days... BAM! You're out of the game.

Well real-life took me out of the game for awhile, but in the words of George Castanza, I'm back, baby!

Kaizen Marketing through Analytics

Why is HitTail the perfect complement to whatever analytics system you use today? Some folks will say real-time analytics isn't important, but I'm telling you that it IS important by how it immerses you into the actual pulse of your site. For example, if your site hits the homepage of Yahoo, you know it in seconds, rather than the next day, after your servers have already been taken down. Now not everybody lands the homepage of Yahoo, but the same principle applies to if you get a single link from a single site--wouldn't you like to reach out to them moments after they've established the link?

Another benefit of real-time data is just sitting there watching your search hits scroll by as they occur tunes you directly into the minds of your audience--in a way next-day statistical reports simply can't. You are directly plugged into the minds of dozens, hundreds or even thousands of web travelers RIGHT AS they're doing their thing. The image that comes to mind is The Matrix, watching all the green code scroll by, and seeing the woman in red amongst it all. But the difference here is that the people scrolling by are REAL searchers, and you can voyeuristically watch them do their thing. This EXISTS TODAY, and is sort of a Zen marketing state that HitTailers know well--contemplating the black river of keywords.

If HitTail wasn't the and must-have second piece of tracking code based on it's real-time feedback alone, then the way it provides actionable data without the chart fuss that cause paralysis through analysis should cinch the deal. HitTail is the paralysis cure, because you simply move left-to-right across 4 tabs and follow a recommended, proven, route (indeed, nearly mindless) process to improve your site. The process is scientifically built on William Edwards Deming's principles of total quality management (TQM) and the Japanese concept of Kaizen, wherein you take HitTail's writing suggestions and engage in the website content release/feedback/release/feedback cycle immediately. It also works with PPC.

HitTail fills the desperately needed gap in marketing for a tool that dispenses with nonsense reports and jumps right to the bottom-line of what you should be doing to improve your site from a content-standpoint. It quite literally turns your entire website into a giant suggestion box that your audience unwittingly uses every time they visit you via search. The suggestions can be immediately plowed into either new website content in (usually) blogging software for the organic or natural search engine optimization (SEO) approach, or into long tail AdWords campaigns, that result in remarkably low cost-per-click (CPC), high click-through-ration (CTR) and a large number of total clicks. The snowball effect should ensue. None but a few marketing gurus in the PPC industry gurus ever noticed this effect.

Bottom line--no matter what your primary analytics package may be, be it Omniture SiteCatalyst, Google Analytics, WebTrends, Yahoo's IndexTools, Microsoft's Gatineau, or whatever--the must-have second piece of tracking code that should go on your site is HitTail, due to the benefits of real-time data and immediately actionable writing suggestions and super-charged keywords for AdWords campaigns.

Web News Hits - April 25, 2008 - Your Daily Source For Web 2.0 Links

Problogger writes an excellent article on "12 Ways to Be A more Interactive and Accesssible Blogger"

Wired discusses Amazon's cloud computing capabilities:

"Key in your Amazon ID and password and behold: a data center's worth of computing power carved into megabyte-sized chunks and wired straight to your desktop. Clones of that HP tower cost 10 cents per hour — 10 cents! — and they're set to start spitting out widgets as soon as you upload the code. Virtual quad cores are a princely 80 cents an hour. Need storage? All you can eat for 15 cents per gigabyte per month. And there's even a tool for monitoring your virtual stack with an iPhone."

In an interesting development, Yahoo will be including Facebook profile images in its search results.

Chris Boggs at Search Engline Watch presents "SEO confessions of an Online Reputation Management Junkie"

"I admit it -- I've been tracking search engine rankings for my name for years. But online reputation management isn't all about ego or checking out a Friday night date anymore. Your career and future job opportunities are at stake."

Time Magazine presents its first annual blog index. Surprisingly, the number one blog isn't Huffington Post or Techcrunch -- it's Blog di Beppe Grillo:

"Beppe Grillo, a popular Italian comedian, actor, and political satirist, writes one of the few non-English language blogs that's become wildly popular worldwide. That's because Grillo speaks the international language of outrage."

And the The New York Times reports on the shift in online advertising, looking past mere increased brand awareness to as many clicks as possible.

"Is The Mobile Web Dead?" And Other Web 2.0 Hits

ReadWriteWeb asks: "Is the mobile web dead?"

Good question! We think it just might be that reports of its impending death have been greatly exaggerated. Certainly, having a fully-functioning mobile web requires a consistent web viewing platform and resolution (at least getting it down to four with iPhone, Opera, IE Mobile, and Android). Right now there are just too many flavors out there. At least with computer monitors, you can be reasonably sure that everyone will have at least 800x600 if not 1024x768 and greater -- but with phones, there are so many formats!

Still, we think there is a lot of untapped potential with mobile.

Onto today's other posts of interest:

Blog Storm ponders Google's policy on using "widget bait" to rack up links

John Battelle notes that Google's share keeps climbing...their search share, that is.

Meanwhile, Search Engine Land explores the search benefits of the blogosphere with a handy illustration:

Problogger looks at a "new breed of blogger," inspired by this Seth Godin post:

DoshDosh explores the seven essential characteristics of a popular social media profile:

And finally, Techcrunch has announced that Twitter is testing advertising in Twitter streams...

...and that that there is apparently some confusion over deleting Facebook news feed reports from one's profile.