Please Spread The Word

So, this is a blatant promotional request to all HitTail beta testers. We're planning for the HitTail website to be the epicenter of the HitTailing revolution, and we're in a race to get the practice known as HitTailing as opposed to longtailing. Longtailing could refer to just about any practice involving the long tail concept… not even marketing in particular. Longtailing could just refer to the general concept of selling niche products. We want HitTailing to be synonymous with the practice of long tail keyword marketing in natural or organic search. And to achieve this, we need to enlist you to help spread the word.

We haven't begun regular email correspondence with the beta testers yet. In the same spirit as we are enormously respecting privacy (imagine that in a tracking system), we are endeavoring to not spam our beta testers. We're currently working on getting our forum running so that HitTail users can communicate with us AND the rest of the HitTailing community in an open forum. We thing this will have the best efficiencies, and be the least spammy. But for now, I'm just putting these across-the-board appeals into our blog. For those who subscribed to the blog, you will receive the emails. For the rest, I am just hoping you will discover it here in good time.

We need your help spreading the HitTail word. We thought long and hard about how to develop this thing to balance the needs of HitTailers with the needs of search engines, and believe we have struck the perfect balance -- achieving what HitTailers want (driving qualified traffic) and what Search Engines should want (quality, on-topic pages).

We also thought long and hard about how search engine optimization fits in. And after a great deal of deliberation, have concluded that it almost doesn't. The mechanics of SEO should be fading into the background of the discussion. There are best practices now. URLs should be search friendly. The main topic of the page should go into the title tag, and be repeated again in the URL, headline, and in links leading to the page. We don't need to train every HitTail user how to do this--particularly in light of the fact that blogging software already does it so well. We're not advocating that you switch your corporate website over to Blogger, WordPress or Movable Type. Duane Forrester has also clued us into bBlog, which we haven't played with yet, but have his assurance that it's an open source blog package with all the same SEO-friendly virtues.

But we are advocating that you start HitTailing with all due haste, and using these softwares so that you can defer the discussion regarding the mechanics of SEO for some later date. Let your tech team get the religion of search optimization. They must see their value in the organization being a direct reflection of how much spontaneous, free website traffic they are generating as a result of their technical decisions. The entire burden should not fall on the shoulders of the marketing folks, because it's an impossible battle if tech doesn't buy in. The projects simply are that complicated, and therefore not worth discussing here. If you really are interested, and have some serious money to pay, contact Connors about it. We love working with tech, and have spread the religion (and the play-by-play rulebook) in some very large organizations.  

But for everyone else, just combine blogging and HitTailing for now. And you can start by helping us spread the HitTail gospel… please! Our beta program is going spectacularly well, and think we can take a few thousand more sites onboard during beta. Make sure that these slots go to friendly folks and not competitors. Or at least to people you know who are in a DIFFERENT market space than you. By helping us promote HitTailing today, you will be helping to shape the super niches of tomorrow. Make your land grab now, and help someone else make their land grab in a way that aligns to your goals. Perhaps you can get someone HitTailing in a space that is adjacent but non-competitive to your own space, so you can start doing some cross-referrals.

Whatever strategy you decide to take, we have made it as easy as possible to spread the word. We plan to tap the power of YouTube and their awesome viral video serving resources. So instead of programming our own "share with a friend" system, we're going to sink all our resources into making HitTailing better. In the very same spirit of using "best of breed" products (analytics, estore, forum), we are using YouTube for viral message dissemination. So please go share the video with a friend. Thanks!

Longtail Marketing

Our goal with HitTail is to become the defacto standard for longtail marketing. You won't hear it stated so bluntly elsewhere, but you will be more successful in marketing to niches because it becomes less competitive. It's easier to be a big fish when you choose to live in a small pond.

If you found this site as a result of a search, you may want to just watch the demo.

And so the thinking goes with longtail keyword marketing. If you target keywords that are less popular, you have less competition. But when a hit DOES occur, that customer is every bit as valuable. In some markets, niche customers are even more valuable. But as the market gets smaller, the likelihood of all customers personally knowing each other increases, and the need use search as a marketing method drops compared to word of mouth.

Long tail keyword marketing is most effective in undefined markets that actually DO exist. It's liking a gold miner hitting a vein of gold. Geoffrey Moore of Crossing The Chasm fame might argue that markets are defined by having a customer base that are somehow socially connected through newsletters and other media or gathering venues (tradeshows, trade publications, etc.).

But if there is a "pent up" worldwide demand for some niche product that has previously undefined terms associated with it, then you have a dispersed worldwide market that needs all the sales opportunities aggregated to a single source to be a big enough "virtual market" to make it worth your time. Such was the case in fires where I forged the HitTailing methods... digital signage. Think about it: using flat panel technology as signs. What are you going to call it? Electronic displays? The varieties are endless. Who is going to buy it? How big is the market? Which terms to target? What terms are sales prospects going to be searching on?

Digital signage is a niche product indeed, but also an example of a super-niche. It's not nachos. The development time that goes into a digital signage product is massive. You wouldn't think it, but keeping oh, say 10,000 PCs running in a stable fashion, each delivering customized programming and messaging to each location, and each doing graphics-intensive and hard drive intensive tasks takes awhile to develop. Small players try to hop into the market constantly, only to throw themselves on the jagged shards of the unanticipated reality. Scala really does have a superior product.

And it is in this environment where super niches come into creation. An effective search engine based long tail keyword marketing campaign with a very real, yet geographically dispersed market, backed up by a superior product or service creates super niches. I've seen it happen, and it is to the continual frustration of small players trying to enter the market. Because when sustained over time, you start to occupy so much space in your small pond that there just isn't enough food for the other fish.

And therein lies the double-whammy win of long tail marketing. By being in it for the long run, you are going to occupy a lot of real estate in a small town. Anyone else trying to get into that market has to compete with you, and will inevitably be forced into buying keywords through a PPC campaign. So, while your hits are free, 24/7 on more free keywords every day, they're paying for every visit they receive. You are acquiring new sales prospects at a higher rate than your competitors, and forcing them to spend more money to keep pace.

The HitTail Ajax Datagrid

So, eventually we're going to have to start deleting old Search Hit referrals. It's just a fact of life, and will probably be one of the things separating the eventual Premium service from the free service. But to make HitTailing a viable endeavor, we had to pull off something that few other companies have been able to successfully accomplish -- and that's letting you surf your search hit referrals in real-time. Log file data is massive. I mean it's gargantuan even for one site. That's what you see happening in the "Ajax data grid" when you step forward and back in your Search Hits.

Services like HitTail that basically record log file data for every pageload of every site they service is a Herculean task worthy of... well, worthy of Google. And as you will recall, Google rolling out Urchin as Google Analytics took their service down for quite awhile. They still managed to record everyone's data (I think) but the analytics part was VERY slow to update. So, who is little ol' Connors Communications to attempt to go even one step further?

Well, for one, we're not Google, and every move we make is not major news. I was at a Google PowWow last night hosted by NextNY to learn about their 500-person operation in New York City, and they commented on why so many of their services use "invites". It helps throttle the massive popularity surges of their new services. Connors' popularity surge problem isn't as severe as Google's, but still, we have our own methods of throttling the data, plus some very unique approaches to serving up the data, allowing us to keep pace with the sudden rising popularity (for us) of HitTailing. How much data are you surfing with the Ajax datagrids?

We already store millions of records. In short order, it will be billions. And this is not stuff we take the time to "index" and serve out static copies. If you visit your Search Hits tab, click Next and Back, it will have the up-to-the-second new data. And even though you're just seeing your own site's data, you're stepping forward and back through a table containing millions and millions of records--served in real-time, updated right under your nose! There are some technical breakthroughs here innovated by Connors. It's admirably sustaining the load put on it by the still-growing list of beta tester sites.

In general, Analytics software needs to process and distill log file data down to a form that can be kept long-term. It's unrealistic archiving your log files forever for WebTrends use, so WebTrends keeps its own optimized database so it can continue to generate reports into the past. It's the equivalent of "generating an index" and throwing away the original data. But this causes problems drilling down to the granular detail that you actually need for search engine optimization, and the HitTailing process.

HitTailing records every single search hit, and so far, never throws away a single record. We won't be able to keep that up forever, but it won't matter, because once your keywords are extracted and moved down the tabs, the original search hit is less important. Eventually losing that data is the price of "free". For eventual premium subscribers, our plan is to let you surf back through that data to the moment you began HitTailing. But for the moment, performance under the load of millions of updating real-time records is as snappy as it was when there were only thousands of records. Amazing!

Flash Video in YouTube

Well, it was quite an endeavor, but the viral promotional video is now on YouTube. So anyone who wants to spread the word about HitTailing can do so using their "Share This Video" feature. It also gives the video a nice high-profile venue. It's worth noting that I scripted the video, recorded the narration track and learned Flash in one week. It wasn't easy, but was highly worth it! I'll be collecting other examples of companies using viral videos to help spread the word. It seems to be one of the most useful tools for online word of mouth marketing.

Sorry to the beta testers who have been asking for features. I've been in constant communication with the development team during the demo creation, and we're rapidly on the way to rolling out some new features. Highest on the list is downloading your keywords in Excel format. We've got a nifty way to mark all your keywords as deleted after your Excel download. But if your Excel download fails, you can re-download any block of keywords in your history. It sort of keeps a record of all your keyword downloads as discreet blocks of keywords that you can re-download at any time.

This has been important for one of our top beta testers, Gary Beal, or The Scuba Guy. He's got some very interesting stories to tell about his use of HitTail. While we tend to position it as an alternative to PPC, it turns out that the HitTail keyword suggestions have the unanticipated effect of raising the effectiveness of PPC campaigns, bringing down costs and raising click-thru rates. In other words, the HitTail keyword list becomes the top performing keywords for PPC! FlyingRose also pointed this out in the very first days of the HitTail beta announcement. But the details are so interesting, I'll save it for a dedicated post.

So, what made the YouTube video into such a big ordeal? The AVI that Flash exported was 300MB. YouTube only allows a 100MB upload, maximum. Going from a 1MB SWF file to a 300MB avi seemed extreme, so I investigated. YouTube recommended a 320 x 240 mpeg4 file encoded with Divx or XviD. Well, this started the giant encoder-enabled codec hunt (compressor/decompressor). The winning codec turned out to be XviD-1.1.0-30122005.exe. Once I had it, I needed the encoding tool, which turned out to be VirtualDub. But even with VirtualDub, the resizing of the Flash video was terrible quality. I actually ended up exporting the entire Flash as individual JPGs at full maximum quality. Quality was of the utmost important for readability of type at small sizes, and because it was just going to be re-encoded by YouTube.

But Flash's resizing of the images was terrible, so I did PhotoShop batch converting. It was a challenge, because resizing and saving JPGs as a batch in PhotoShop required suppressing the save as dialogue box, but it was worth it, because the images were of top quality. Finally, VideoDub using XviD refused the source images as corrupt, and it took awhile before I realized the JPGs had to be exactly 320 x 240! They were 320 x 233 because Flash's default size (which I used) was 550 x 400 -- a logical size to get a flash demo centered on the still-existing 640 x 480 desktops, and a small filesize, considering all the bitmaps I was embedding. When it was all said and done, the file I ended up uploading to YouTube was 3.5MB, which got re-encoded for On2 or Sorensen's playback built into the Flash 8 player. It seemed silly and ironic to go through all these hoops just to get back to Flash format!

Status Update: Demo & Beta

Pshwew, the demo is finished. I'll be adding a few finishing touches over the next couple of days, such as a position-slider, pause and mute buttons. Funny that those things are not just built into Flash. I recall the JibJab 2004 campaign animations had a version 2 where these features were added. It's something you don't realize (or don't want to think about) until you've watched it a quadrillion times. And it's the piece that almost forces you to get into ActionScript, while virtually everything else with an animated demo can be accomplished with no programming.

Having basically learned Flash in a week, and added precise timing to narration, it shows me how someone with the pent-up need to perform can express themselves through Flash without ever having to get up in front of anyone. If you have a sense of humor, and a sense of timing, then Flash is for you. And if you have a narration track or music already to work with, you can go to town. It's no wonder Flash attracts animators like Shawn Vulliez who animated Lemon Demon's Ultimate Showdown, who probably wouldn't otherwise have such a broad audience. Using Flash feels like opening up a can of Shaq Fu.

Anyway, we're listening to our beta testers, and we have been blessed with an abundance of praise, and very few bugs for something a couple weeks out of beta. The suggestions are breaking down into two categories: easier management of multiple accounts, and easier importing/exporting of lists. We have plans for both, and will have a developer meeting tomorrow to determine which and how to implement. A special thanks to Gary Beal and Duane Forrester who you may know as TheScubaGuy and SportsGuy, respectively, whose feedback has been incredible. We're working on your features!

HitTail Rockets in Popularity

So, HitTail is turning out to be wonderfully popular. Part of the pain of success is that over the weekend, we had an outage that affected login. It didn't impact tracking. I went in, did a few optimizations, and had it working again in a couple of hours. That's the price of the early stages of a beta program. All in all, we've been keeping pace admirably with this thing's skyrocketing popularity.

Anyone buying into the silly people who jumped on this as an opportunity to criticize SQL Server, ought to check out the figures from the trusted and objective TPC Council. All we needed to do was fine tune a few indexes, and had a server that consistently outperforms Oracle and IBM DB2 in all classes bellow 3,000 GB of results (where DB2 and Oracle pull ahead). Then, when you look at the cost, whoa does SQL Server look good.

How will we scale? Just throw anohther SQL Server on the barby.

Viral Video Coming Soon

So, I don't have a lot of time to get a post up today for all the new HitTailers out there. I'm leaving the features to the programming at the moment, and instead focusing on the demo. The current demo was awesome for jump-starting the beta program. There's nothing easier than making, then narrating a PowerPoint, and using one of the awesome PowerPoint-to-Flash converters--in this case, Camtasia from TechSmith. It was a truly pleasurable experience, and I highly recommend the product and process to anyone who needs to crank something out quickly. But I have to move beyond that now.

And I've been thinking a lot about memes as per my previous post, along with viral marketing, the SnowCrash scifi book, YouTube, and what presentations I've seen on the Web lately that have inspired and motivate me. I've also been thinking about Cialdini's principles of persuasion, how they're employed in Infomercials, and how they verge on mind control. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I want to do nothing less than program a HitTail meme that sweeps across the world, elevating HitTailing to top of mind marketing-speak.

So, the first thing I did was list stuff lately that has awed and inspired me. I don't have the raw talent to reproduce what some of these masters have done, but I at least want to keep them in mind. I've seen Skip Hardt's SXIP Identity 2.0 demo 2.0 times. It was impressive both times. When I talked with Skip, he told me it was Keynote on the Mac. I was ALMOST motivated to go buy a Mac to get those very modern text transitions. Skip communicates very difficult concepts effectively, using an incredibly fast pace. I like that and am going to use that. What I learned from Skip is that it's OK, and in fact even good, if you have to (are motivated to) watch something twice. Say goodbye to my droning on.

Next is of course the master himself. I re-watched both the launch of the original Macintosh, then the original iPod announcement to see young and older Steve Jobs in action. It's a treat either way. From Steve, I learned that I want to be a part of something that's insanely great, and to involve hitch your wagon to very large endeavors that know no boundaries, like creativity and music. Inspiring stuff. Though I'm not in The Order of Apple, I am a believer.

It's silly, but I watched the hilarious Ultimate Showdown like 10 times to pump myself up for the project. It's totally irrelevant, but somehow got all the right creative juices pumping. Sprinkle in a little Schoolhouse Rock, and you have the tone if catchy, upbeat, viral messaging that I want. Too bad I'm not a singer.

And as I put the script together and recorded the narration, I realized I was neither Steve Jobs, a singer, nor as ready to image-hunt as Skip. My message was so dry in some ways that I felt the need to add humor and alleviate the need for heavy-duty visuals in one stroke. That's when the brilliant subtext humor of The Colbert Report struck me, along with the hilarious intros to Adult Swim on The Cartoon Network. I had my answer. It's a sparse, but funny and tasteful way to get the visuals in.

So, I'm getting off of PowerPoint, and moving to Flash. My narration track is done, and I'm in a time-crunch to get the new demo out, before one more blogger refers to this thing as MyLongTail. It's got to be designed for viral propagation, meaning entertaining, light weight, and about more than just a marketing technique. I need to be selling the dream.

So I have all my visuals, subtext and jokes roughly storyboarded. To do it, I put the narration track on my Creative MuVo MP3 player, took a small paper tablet, and walked from 16th Street up to Times Square and back, listening to the narration over and over and over. Inspiration strikes, I make a note, and repeat. By the time I got back, I had the whole thing storyboarded, attitude, diagrams, subtext and all.

Now, I just have to implement it in Flash. Hopefully, I can get something that comes close to my vision. If it's any good, I'll be rallying the beta testers to help me spread the word. Please stand by.

Keyword Addiction

Watching the search hits come in with HitTail is pretty much real-time, insightful, and incredibly addicting. Thanks to our filtering, each new entry corresponds to a new person discovering you. In other words, anyone who has you bookmarked, or is visiting you over-and-over is filtered out. This "one entry = one person" view gives you the true pulse of the influx of new visitors. And it's a blast to watch (although quite disappointing for some). Seeing the river of black indicates a very healthy site from a search engine perspective.

But what about the "fields of grey?"

When a major new site links to you, you will see a long rash of "grey" links--links with no keywords highlighted in black. This too is a good sign. Basically, anything that passes the HitTail filtering criteria and ends up in the Search Hits tab is good. But here's an interesting test that you can perform.

If you have something semi-news-worthy, you can do the experiment of announcing it in Digg, Reddit or Fark. In Digg and Reddit, you will witness almost in real-time, the people with too much time on their hands checking out your link the instant it appears on their respective "new" pages. Digg really wants news. Reddit is a little looser. But both go completely public right away. In Fark, it doesn't become public right away, but you will see the totalfark links from the paying subscribers.

If you're breaking a story in your blog, or have expressed some keen insight for the first time on the Web, expressed nowhere else, then you have the material it takes to perform this test. It's not technically part of HitTailing, but it is a critical part of the online outreach process--the process required to get the ball rolling in the first place.

And most analytics systems don't let you watch the results in real time. And of those that do, they're not filtering for only uniques in real-time. And for those who watch their log files, you have to wade through all that garbage (you know what I'm talking about).

So few systems show you the pulse of your site in real-time, as far as new user influx is concerned. Forget about click-paths and conversions for a moment. That is the domain of analytics, and the time-delay is fine for a sort of post mortem examination.

But if you want to feel like Neo in the Matrix, watching the flood of data, and truly becoming one with what you're seeing, then HitTail is the site for you. We even experimented with making the keywords neon green against black. Although mondo-cool, it only appealed to an inside crowd and turned off mainstream marketers. So, traditional HTML link-colors, it is--plus the "river of black" for keyword contrast.

So many marketers these days feed their keyword addiction through AdWords. The joke goes that the back-end user interface to AdWords is so addicting that it's called CrackWords. And when your campaign gets so large, and you're constantly going back to see what got click-thru and converted, and you make adjustments, it becomes a viscous cycle. You truly could need to go through detox. In this sense, HitTailing is Methadone for CrackWord addicts. You can't go cold turkey, but you need something less harmful to replace the addiction.

Can you believe that the cure came from a PR firm? It's true! You've gotten used to something that needs to be artificially introduced to the body (the drug of advertising) to feel good. But what is much healthier for you is something that your body can produce naturally (the endorphins of reputation). Natural search engine hits are the endorphins of healthy reputation resulting from a good diet (your choice of topics) and exercise (writing and improving your craft).

And when you think about it, it's perfectly understandable why this novel approach to online marketing came from the media-savvy world of New York public relations. Any form of un-paid promotion belongs in the domain of public relations, whether it headline-grabbing publicity stunts to detailed discussion of why a client's story is genuinely newsworthy. If it's an outright media buy, then it belongs to the advertising world. SEM/PPC or whatever you want to call it belongs to advertising. Search belongs to PR. And the only thing that kept it from happening sooner is that almost every other method of doing well in natural search was abusive to the system. The field got to be called search engine optimization, which had a tint of shadiness. This is worrisome to field so concerned with reputation that is already fighting an image of spin-doctors and the tail that wags the dog.

HitTailing provides the perfect channel. You guide what you write about, because you know it will be effective. Gordon Gould has legitimate concerns on that front, but Connors will be here to moderate the concern and set good examples. As stated over and over, there is infinite room in the long tail of search. Google is quoted as stating that almost half the searches are one of a kind. That means that single-word searches like car and music are outnumbered by increasingly particular searches. And it is not only smart, but it is the obligation of any marketing department to position themselves in the path of those highly pre-qualified prospects. Otherwise, they're going to drilling-down right into one of your competitors, who IS HitTailing.

So, whether you're doing it for the long-term goal of a healthier website, business and bottom-line, or if you're doing it to feed your short-term keyword addiction, the time to start HitTailing is now. The investment is nearly nothing, and as our successful beta program indicates, many people just like you are jumping on the bandwagon. In fact, we may have to close the beta program soon in order to deal with the rapid growth. Just search on HitTail or MyLongTail, and you'll see that favorable review are pouring in. A few of these reviewers are themselves turning into excellent success stories already, if we can just get them to talk. But no one wants to give away a competitive advantage, so you'll just have to take the small first step and try it for yourself.

Wikipedia, Memes and HitTailing

So, I'm reading a bit more about memes in Wikipedia. It gives plenty of food for thought about HitTailing, memes AND Wikipedia.

First of all, Wikipedia is just awesome for this type of entry. Can you even imagine researching meme's a few years ago? You would have been lucky if Google searches would have produced Richard Dawkins name for you. And before Internet search, forget it. You would have needed a research librarian. And it would probably never even make it into Encyclopedia Britannica. I can only imagine how much easier (and controversial) doing reports in school must be. I would have liked to have been in that field when references from Internet sources when from being unacceptable in a bibliography to acceptable. I would like to see any academician put down Wikipedia's informative and several-page-long entry on memes.

Second, what we're doing with this site and HitTailing is definitely programming a meme. That was a big reason for the name change. We're quickly trying to program a new meme that can carry farther and is more suitable for survival than HitTail. We often talk about something having to be viral to be very successful these days, because word-of-mouth is a highly efficient, low cost, and trusted method of disseminating information. When momentum starts to pick up, the snowball effect occurs, because more mass causes more acceleration, causes more mass. In the most modest cases, you've got a silly video passed around the world. In the most extreme cases, you've got a new mega-brand like Google.

HitTailing hopefully lands somewhere in-between. The difficult concepts make it difficult to propagate the idea. But HitTailing is part of a memeplex, consisting of Chris Anderson's long tail idea. And the long tail will probably become part of the world business psyche over the next few years, the way Gladwell's Tipping Point has, or Andrew Grove's "strategic inflection point" almost had. Built into HitTailing is a compellingly clear and simple value proposition, enough so that transmission of the meme can occur.

Memes are also connected to the concept of fads and trends in marketing, which have totally different long-term business plans. Fads turn fast. Trends build to last, and can have deep, lasting impact on culture. Memes give both fads and trends a little push in the right direction--a repeatable behavior that predisposes the population for incrementally larger changes to come. We are in the very earliest stages of HitTailing. But this simple change in behavior is akin to the birth of the public relations industry in its day.

Some folks already thought this happened with search engine spamming. Others thought it happened with search engine promotion, search engine visibility, press release optimization, or whatever else you want to call the other endeavors--which in my opinion, only amount to dipping your toe in the water.

It is with HitTailing that direct-to-everyone online public relations takes the plunge into the deep end. Forget direct-to-consumer. By definition, if it's gone into a newswire these days, it's gone directly to the consumer. And every person and every machine in between is just a different type of filter. And the end-person, be they journalist, consumer, decision-maker, informed reader, or all of the above simply chooses which filtering mechanism they're going to use.

But these filters only affect the "daily read". Filtering is effectively short-circuited once the person wants to know more, and turns to search. When this happens, only the filtering that matters is natural search ranking in the most popular search engines. And the HitTailing meme says that you must cast as large and tightly knit net possible to capture these proactively searching individuals. And the way to enlarge your net, and tighten the mesh is HitTailing, plain and simple.

Chasing The Long Tail

There's a nice article in Search Engine Watch from January by Patricia Hursh asking whether chasing the long tail of search is worth it. She quotes Harrison Magun of Avenue A/Razorfish, and Kevin Lee of Did-It.com who spoke at a search engine strategies conference in Illinois. The consensus appears to be that yes, it takes a lot of time, and they both stressed that "Pay-per-click advertising is a multi-faceted discipline, and marketers should not become obsessed with chasing keywords at the expense of improving ad copy, landing pages or developing a sound bidding strategy."

Hmmmmm. Interesting.

The implication here is that chasing the long tail of search is a PPC strategy. This half of the picture doesn't acknowledge that long tail marketing can be much more effective in natural search. In fact, it's MORE uniquely suited for natural search than PPC.

My assertion is that you are chasing the long tail BY improving copy and landing pages. However, the "copy" is not ad copy, but rather your website proper. And landing pages are not PPC campaign landing pages, but rather the main pages in your website or blog. And as far as the sound bidding strategy, that just sort of goes away, doesn't it?

The bottom line given in the article is that chasing the long tail takes time, effort, money, solid analytics and, patience. I will agree with the solid analytics and patience part. But HitTailing dramatically reduces the money and effort. Once again, it's the eternal golden ratio of service: quality, cost, speed: pick two. With long tail PPC, you get speed and quality, but at an expensive cost. According to the article, you don't necessarily even get speed. You should! I think you must--otherwise, why use the PPC approach at all? Maybe the time goes into increasingly complex campaign management.

So, the reasons for chasing the long tail of search through PPC are diminishing with the appearance of practices like HitTailing coming onto the scene.

We know anecdotally for instance where we employed some of our super-charged HitTailing, that we have exceeded the equivalent pay-per-click campaigns in the exact same competitive market space. On our side, the client could stop paying whenever they wanted and still receive the benefit. On the PPC side, the benefit is not as large in the first place, AND the effect will stop once they stop paying.

HitTailing is like paying a mortgage, while PPC is like paying rent. At the end of a PPC campaign, you're evicted. But with HitTailing, you own the house.

Does HitTail Save Time?

So, how much time does HitTail save you by issuing writing suggestions? First of all, if you're mining your log files, you've got to realize that some of what you're looking at isn't worth targeting, because it's already leading to your site in STRONG positions. Only a small portion is worth zeroing in on. And that's where the HitTail saves you time. The question is how much? Consider this graph...

This graph plots the beta testers along the X-Axis, and the quantity of keywords keywords that is leading to each beta tester along the Y-Axis. General site traffic, graphics and spiders have already been filtered. You can see that a few sites are generating massive amounts of traffic, while most sites are generating a medium (natural) amount of traffic, and a lot of sites are generating almost no traffic. This maps to the average distribution of SEO abilities of people using the HitTail system. A few are highly effective. Many are so-so. Lots (over half) need serious help. By the way, this is NOT a long tail, because it doesn't go far to the right. There are limited numbers of beta testers. If search is all about long tails, then early betas are about big heads.

But that's besides the point. Of the keywords leading to each site, how many should be discounted for further attention? How many have the telltale clues that big traffic gains could be made with just a little work? Well, the ignorable data is in Red. The sweet data is in Green. How much time do YOU think HitTailing is saving the beta testers in guiding their long tail writing?

It is so important to hit home this time-saving message, because of how easy it is to mistake HitTail for analytics. How much time does analytics actually SAVE you? With HitTail, you zero right in on the "green" area--or the HitTailing hot spots. You can go from your daily visit to the HitTail site, get actionable data, and go over to your blogging software all in a matter of minutes. Now, that's efficiency!

A True Alternative to AdWords?

Can HitTailing be a TRULY VIABLE alternative to AdWords?

The slow momentum build will try the patience of most marketing professionals. But backed up with SOME other form of outreach, whether it's AdWords, hiring a PR firm, or doing some media buys, it should make the wait less painful. The waiting cycle can be 2 weeks to a month before ANY visible results. And it can be many more months before enough momentum is built to start reducing keyword buys. And it could be a year or two before you are confident enough to stop keyword campaigns altogether. Yes, HitTailing can be a long, difficult road. Cost, quality, speed: pick any two. If you want speed, stick with PPC.

But since your ability to track return on investment is nearly perfect, when it finally does kick in, you can respond so that the effect is that much more dramatic in the next cycle. And since your investment is really only your time writing and polishing your craft, the cost of customer acquisition will be low indeed. And the effect improves if you take multiple suggestions per cycle. It's like having many plates spinning. Acting upon suggestions results in more suggestions, and so on. Take my advice, and target every logical suggestion that comes in during the initial round.

We have at least one anecdotal story of a company that was using the HitTailing technique, and secured vast numbers of diverse keywords in their industry. It was backed up by the company's powerful non-Internet-based word of mouth that went back to the days of the Amiga Computer. The product was so compelling and the following so fanatical, that they often spontaneously search on the product's name without even knowing that they're still in business. So, the first round of suggestions had to do with the company's name. And it was easy to secure top positions across the board (Yahoo, Google, MSN, etc.). But the next round was more difficult.

No one knew what to call the industry. Some wanted to call it "dynamic signage". Others wanted to call it "intelligent signs". There was a hot debate. But in the entire industry, I believe I was the only one who knew, because I had my finger on the pulse of the potential customer base by closely monitoring all the search engine traffic that I could. I rolled out new content based on tiny clues, and watching for emergent behavior. And that emergent behavior was "digital signage" -- a perfect benchmark keyword for long tail writing. There were endless varieties on this: electronic displays, retail TV, captive audience networks. There was literally no end. And you had to capture EVERY VARIATION to aggregate enough customers worldwide for a decent market. And I did.

When GoTo.com came along, I insisted that the company invest in PPC. We had to have as many things going for us as we could. I was working on commission at the time, and I was crazy-determined to pull out all the stops. I told them if they wouldn't invest in PPC, then I'd put my own money into it. It wasn't until years later when they read about it from other sources that they thought it was a good idea (and their own). In a funny twist, I produced for them the discussion where I urged for this (repeatedly) in the very system I built to track sales leads. How short memories are! There was no denying it. They were thought-followers even though they had their own in-house leader--banging his head against the wall in frustration--documenting the head-banging in a process that eerily foreshadowed the blogging movement.

Little did I know that all the while my future employer was hard at work institutionalizing PPC, while I was focusing on the reverse mission of natural search. Connors' client and founder of Idealab was being ridiculed at the TED Conference (Technology Entertainment Design) for mixing church & state--putting PPC listings at the head of Inktomi search results that most of the popular meta-search sites used at the time. Well, GoTo was bought by Yahoo for over $2 billion, so I guess Bill Gross had the last laugh. Incidentally, Inktomi was also bought by Yahoo, completing the "compete-with-Google" equation. But all this time, natural search optimization has still not matured as a market... and probably never will.

Why?

Because almost no approach to search optimization can mature as a product and last for very long. As fast as it starts to go mainstream, it becomes a vehicle for spamming, and the search engines adjust. We saw this happen with WebPosition Gold. It is still an excellent product, but never as effective as in its early days. The search engines "heal" and go on the offensive.

And YES: writing for the long tail of search is a variation on an SEO-product. But it's a variation that we're endeavoring to take control of and stem the tide of spam before it happens, by illuminating a path, based on good ideas and the writer's art. Only in this way will natural search optimization stabilize and be sustainable in a peaceful co-existence with the search engines.

I've been resisting describing why this will work, because it will sound a bit wacko to many readers. But the idea has at least become at least a little bit mainstream with the movie "A Beautiful Mind". If my theory works, then we achieve a Nash Equilibrium that I guess has about 5 years of life in it before the fundamental rules of the game change too radically for the same strategies to apply. It will take the next generation Internet before that occurs, for reasons too numerous for this post (subject matter for another post). Suffice to say, a true broadcast model over IP changes everything, and the opportunity for disruptive innovation expands ten-fold. Something will eclipse today's search model, though I know not yet what it is (or do I?).

But for now, we're stuck with Google, Yahoo and MSN with competitors nipping at their heels that do ALMOST the same things. Local search will improve, and have map features that will blow the mind. Social bookmarks and all sorts of voting and communication channels will be introduced. But fundamentally, the same simple dynamic that made Google into a super-brand will rule. And that rule is simplicity in the default search. And as long as that's true, AdWords is the FAST way in, while natural optimization is the BEST way in.

So, for what I believe to be the next five years, targeting natural search in the exact same fashion that you CAN do today is worth it. But not by spamming! Not by automatically spinning out 10,000 pages! But by intelligent and deliberate HitTailing. There IS a difference, which the true disciples of HitTailing will be able to tell you with increasing fervor over the coming months. If no one else CAN find your page, except for those who are particularly interested in the narrow niche that you genuinely targeted, because you have genuine goods in that space, then are you spamming? No! Of course not. And if you have endless legitimate ways to discuss your niche, which happen to align to search patterns that you are privy to know, then you are targeting intelligently. And you will eventually have the option of declining to participate in paid keyword campaigns. You are a HitTailer.

The Long Tail of Referrers

Long tails are everywhere. After only about 3 weeks of the public beta, our referring sites have taken the shape of a long tail. A relatively few sites are our "hits", but we have 136 sites already referring traffic to us. And this is without a press release or syndicated article. This is totally word-of-mouth and search hits. In all fairness, SEO-Scoop received a lot of traffic through the new Netscape site, when HitTail ended up on its homepage on the first day of THEIR beta.

Definition of HitTailing

The practice of writing for the long tail of search now has a name: HitTailing. See? Getting hits in the tail! HitTailing. But it works on so many levels!

Consider the evolution of commerce: Bartering, Retailing, and Wholesaling. Each method of reaching the consumer has different advantages and disadvantages. Retail was traditionally many small outlets that reached the consumer where they lived. Walmart perfected the art. Wholesale wasn't much of an option for the consumer until outlets like CostCo, BJ's and Sam's Place made it a feasible mainstream option for the consumer. You usually had to drive further and buy larger quantities to shop wholesale, but the cost savings made it worth it.

Yesterday, outlets like Amazon and eBay took it to the next level. Some call it eTailing. Delivery of goods is achieved through shipping services like UPS, FedEx, USPS and others. But there is theoretically no limit to the warehousing of goods or available shelf space. The only limit is you have to go through custom properties to search: Amazon and eBay, respectively. The fancy word "disintermediation" started getting thrown around, which is basically the cutting out of the middle man--between a well-known seller and a buyer who might be anywhere. Yes, even with eBay, you must consider it one seller, because the products are only served by one site's search tool.

But we've ALREADY moved beyond that. We already see the change occurring with such services as ShopWiki, which takes ALL eStores into account when you do your search. You can therefore do some real long tail shopping and dig up obscure items that would never get listed anywhere else. Participation in eBay or Yahoo Stores not required. You can use osCommerce, or any other shopping cart software.

But the process doesn't begin and end with eStores. Many of the people who have something to sell may be using Yahoo Stores, eBay, or even old-fashioned certified checks and money orders sent in the mail. They're rather low-tech, and really shouldn't have to buy into anything more than the most rudimentary Web publishing system to get the word out. You mustn't be beholden to a particular eStore technology, a custom site's search tool, or even a particular search engine to reach your customers. The days of walled gardens in online shopping are over. If you publish correctly, EVERY mainstream search tool becomes a means of finding you. Today, there are three big ones in the US market: Yahoo, Google and MSN. Ask makes a fourth. And internationally, you can't ignore Baidu, the Chinese search engine that is perhaps as big as any of them. How do you appeal to ALL search engines simultaneously without burdensome and complex international keyword campaigns? Easy, the next generation of commerce: HitTailing!

HitTailing relies on the seller using some sort of Internet publishing system that follows best practices for search engine optimization. That's not difficult. Once you've chosen Blogger, WordPress or Movable Type, you've pretty much accomplished this. They all use descriptive title tags that also appears in the URL, a headline element, and in a few links leading to your page from elsewhere on your site. The unspoken point here is that this is ALL you will ever need to do for the foreseeable future, because that's all the wisdom of the crowd will ever be able to agree on.

This is a subtle and counter-intuitive, but true. Today's mechanical best practices for SEO are going to be with us for a long time, and hold more sway than any new XML format or semantic Web trick or even taggnig. In fact, the semantic Web is already here. Use bold when it's important. Use a headline when it's the main topic. Use a blockquote when it's a quote. See? The meaning is already there. Nothing has set back the semantic Web like the div and span tag. And unless tags are backed by a decentralized system like DNS which also accounts for reputation, then tags are just bricks to build more walled gardens. But I digress.

In HitTailing, we approach the theoretical ideal in commerce: if you sell it, they will come. From each according to their abilities to each according to their needs. Whoops, are we talking about Capitalism or Marxism here? Get it? The lines begin to blur with HitTailing. Extended to its theoretical limits, every person will be able to make a comfortable living by whatever they can provide for which there is demand. And the means of connecting providers with consumers is... general... search!

That's right. HitTailing is about moving the magical product-finding search from inside the walled gardens of the eBay and Amazon in-site search to the general search of Google, Yahoo and MSN. And it's about doing it with out without the consent of the search engines themselves--but in a way that doesn't incur wrath, either. HitTailing is an emergent behavior that was invited by the massively more appealing nature of general search. Those who practice HitTailing are entering a graceful co-dependent relationship with natural search.

You can see this happening today in how so many of us end up on Wikipedia through a Google search. Why should such an exalted capability be reserved for mega-sites? Why can't every single business partake in the bounty that is excellent natural search positioning? The answer is, you can. Most people just don't know how. They don't understand that where they're ALMOST doing well in natural search is their most logical starting point. The HitTail site tries to instill that revelation.

But it's difficult. It's a flash of insight. A moment of revelation. Just as the emergent wisdom of the crowd is counter-intuitive, so is using where you almost do well in search as a starting point. You're already found on that word, so why target it? You have to introduce a bit of strategic thinking. Just because you've landed on the beach in Normandy doesn't mean you've liberated Paris, much less the rest of Europe. Your landing is only a beachhead. It's a logical place to begin your assault, because you must start somewhere.

You've got a long battle ahead with HitTailing. Even though it is the next step in the evolution of commerce, writing for the long tail of search, and reaching your customer base through general search, is a long-term proposition. But just as building a business to last is worth it, so is building a strong natural search presence. Because remember, you're not gaming Google. You're building genuine reputation by leaving a breadcrumb trail of clues that all the search engines are going to have to acknowledge to for years to come, no matter how search evolves.

Yahoo SEO

So, how quickly do the search engines respond to a deluge of in-bound non-reciprocal links and blog-posts being created on a semi-popular keyword? Since we got Netscape'd the other day (sort of like getting SlashDotted), A LOT more eyes have been on HitTail. User registrations are doubling every week, and we're considering cutting off new beta tester sign-ups. So if you're interested, sign up now.

Anyway, a few days ago I was happy that the HitTail site was coming up in position #140 in Google on the term "long tail" (with the space, but without double quotes). Today, it's in position #29. That's a stellar jump, putting it onto the third page of results (for now). This is consistent with the Google patent information of last month, stating how Google is sensitive to the RATE AT WHICH new in-bound links are established. This can also account for the rolling window of opportunity that newly discovered content often experiences. The rate of new in-bound links decreases as it becomes old news, and so relevancy and position in search results follow.

So, everyone please tell your bestest buddy about HitTailing, least someone else (maybe a competitor) fills the limited beta tester slots.

So, what about MSN? We're in position #50. That's the bottom of the fifth page of results. Not the first three pages, but it's a start.

Yahoo? Nowhere to be found (yet).

Anyway, with the exception of Yahoo, I think we can infer that some clue that has been left about the Internet recently, be it the pure Web content, or the new rash of inbound links, or all the blog pings, Google and MSN are quick to promote a site. Yahoo, while the pages are indexed and the site is "known", it has not received a similar relevancy boost from the meme-chasers.

That doesn't necessarily make Yahoo better or worse than the other two engines--only different. It takes longer to do well with Yahoo with long tail writing AND sudden linking. The clues that that Yahoo follows to rank sites in the short-term is simply more subtle. The pages are in there. They're just not ranking well yet. I'll keep you posted here as we have developing evidence of the effectiveness of HitTailing with Yahoo. But for those with little patience, only expect to see changes during that magical 2-week cycle in MSN and Google.

When Will Matt Cutts' Vacation End?

Tired of waiting for Matt Cutts to come back from vacation? Dying to read something new? To garner some new insider tidbit so you can go scrambling to adjust your site? Try reading through the blog posts on this site. While none of it is specifically about Matt, it does hit on a brand of search engine optimization (SEO) that has been repeatedly eluded to over the years as ethical and effective. We've bottled it, and are hereby giving it away free.

Everyone has access to the keyword suggestion tools in AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing. Everyone has access to WordTracker. But where can you find YOUR best keywords? You have a set of keywords just waiting to have their potential released, by merely targeting them. They are word combinations that you never specifically thought to address, but are still leading to your site, but are buried in the results.

Many of us now have been practicing log file mining. And if you have a technique that's working well for you now, read no further. This is not for you. But if you're part of the mainstream masses who can't grep log files, and don't know how to mathematically zero in on the best terms for targeting, then read on. This site is for you. It will put you on equal footing with the tech/math/pattern-discerning geeks (like me), and save you time to boot.

HitTailing is the process of mining your log files, but jumping right to the most promising keywords for building new natural search traffic. Huh? Read over Matt's posts on the best way to find keywords to target. They're in your log files. But if they're in your log files, they already lead to your site and are not worth targeting, right? But what if they led to your site on page 10 of the SERPS?

Whoever clicked on that page-10 link effectively handed you over competitive intelligence. They're telling you:

1. You CAN be found on that term.


2. You HAVE been found on that term (they were interested enough to click).


3. You could probably be doing better on that term.

Get it? That's HitTailing in a nutshell. It helps you ZERO IN FAST on the best terms for targeting, so your site can snowball in effectiveness.

And regarding Matt Cutts' unusually long vacation, I guess it gets me a little nervous considering Robert Scoble's recent departure from Microsoft and Om Malik's departure from Business 2.0. It makes one wonder if the path to instant independent success isn't becoming pseudo-official high profile blogger for some major company, then going off and doing your own thing. Hmmmm. Makes one wonder.

Anyway, check out HitTailing. Feel free to comment on any of these posts. I know that by tapping into Matt's readership, I'll be exposing this Web 2.0 beta to a rigorous workout--concept-wise, and server wise. But I feel we're ready on both accounts. COME AND GET IT!

How to Achieve Online Success

How does a website become massively popular? I'll start with two paragraphs that are a barrage of questions that are on many peoples' minds these days...

How reliant is a company on getting Dugg, SlashDotted? Does your site have to become the darling of the Web 2.0 meme-chasing elite to get traffic? Does your business need to attempt to change our very lives forever in order to make your story undeniably compelling? Do you need to hire a slick PR firm to influence what gets written about, by whom, and in what tone? Does every endeavor need some sort of self-propagating viral component to be competitive these days? Is it all based on luck?

How special are the products that hit it big in generating free word-of-mouth publicity? Can an "average" product break through the online noise and make a big splash anyway? Can Sam's Jams carve out a super-niche for itself and makes Sam a very comfortable living without having to raise VC funding? Or does everything have to be a big development effort on just the right product that positions itself in the path of the tornado, to virtually guarantee success like HitTail or Riya?

I'll exercise my powers of prognostication, and predict that both HitTail and Riya are assured successes because they are in the tornado's path, per Geoffrey Moore's teachings. They are cases of a clearly defined need and a sorely felt pain, meeting a product that has an easy distribution channel and low barrier to entry. You know such products that got swept into the tornado by how quickly they become mainstays, and how obvious they were in hindsight. You've got Google and Blogging and FireFox and Flickr and del.icio.us, and a host of other Web-based killer apps.

And soon, you will have Riya, because for years now, Google through Google images has created a pain point in the land of pictures, but has had an inadequate 6-month update cycle and no ability to "find other pictures like this". Flickr added something like that, which actually works with little sketches that you make, and that's a case of getting it ALMOST RIGHT. But the missing component is that Flickr only works with Flickr uploads. Riya is going to crawl the Internet for all pictures, everywhere, and almost assuredly let you discover new things daily--outside the walled gardens of today's photo sites, and way more rapidly than Google Images. This satisfies a vacuum so strong, graphic designers and other industries feel its tug daily. Yes indeed, Riya is about to get swept into that Tornado and carried effortlessly across the Chasm. All the work went into developing the right product at the right time. And is that luck? No. Is it the path everyone must take? No.

But before we get to the path that others may take without needing the weather-prediction capabilities of Riya, we have to look at how business models fundamentally vary. In particular, anything funded by VC's (venture capitalists), have to have massive upside potential to interest them. VC's probably wouldn't invest in Sam's Jams, unless Sam had the ability to sell to every jam-lover on the planet. And that's unlikely, because jam making is a cottage industry with a relatively low barrier to entry and a well established distribution channel (eBay search).

Many business models fall somewhere between Riya and Sam's Jams. In particular, any product that has long selling cycles into difficult markets. These are the subject of a sales technique called "Solution Selling." Doing justice to describing Solution Selling, and the markets that need it would require its whole own post. Suffice to say, they're generally more upscale products that require research and deliberation before the sale is made. The rule of 5 or 7 apply in these markets (5 or 7 interactions between customer and business before the sale occurs). Because making these sales take such a long time, and there are fewer prospective customers than in huge consumer markets, every prospect is gold. They must be fiercely competed over by only 2 or 3 vendors in the space. And the "relationship" between customer and company is paramount. An aside point is that margins are shrinking in these markets, forcing larger companies to buy smaller ones to remain profitable--ah, but that's a subject for another post as well.

Such products are never going into the tornado. They're too boring and special-interest. But its huge business full of competitive players who NEED that online exposure. Otherwise, they won't be found when their relatively small prospective customer base goes searching. And when they do go searching, there's really no telling what keywords they're going to use. What keywords does someone use when looking for an order entry system that can measure product quantities in fluid ounces or unit length? Get it? It's really obscure stuff with millions of dollars of customer relationships at stake... every instant of every day, as prospects go Googling.

HitTail is designed to bridge the gap between the massively popular tornado riding business model, and the lower-profile, but totally viable models of Sam's Jams or Liquid Length Order Management Systems. By riding the tornado, HitTail is providing a means for the other types of businesses to reach their prospective customer base without spending a dime on advertising. While it is much more effective when supplemented by advertising and other online outreach efforts, HitTailing with enough patience, can be effective entirely on its own. It's like the vendor golden ratio: cost, quality, speed--pick any two. HitTailing is choosing cost and quality, while sacrificing speed.

I believe that companies that need popularity the most are in it for the long haul, and view building their reputation as a long-term project. So, will HitTailing make your non-tornado-riding business massively popular without any of the factors in the question-stuffed paragraphs above? If you don't have to pay back VC's, then the answer may be yes, depending on your definition of massively popular. If your potential user base worldwide is 100,000 people, and you reach every one of them through HitTailing, and sell to 50% of them over the course of 10 years, is that massively popular?

I would say that the above scenario is a massive success within your market. And if you want more success, you would have to expand your market. Massive popularity comes with massive markets. If your product isn't mainstream, don't expect to be top of mind. But if your product has a clearly defined market of people who are able to talk to each other, and keep talking about you because they keep discovering you whenever they research, then you have achieved popularity saturation. Whatever customers have the potential of coming your way, eventually will. And we have documented cases of early HitTailers achieving that level of success. If there are any journalists out there who would like to talk about this, email us at hittail at connors dot com, and we'll hook you up with folks who are ready to talk.

So, to put a fine point on it, your product doesn't need to be designed and rigged to be catapulted to enormous popularity to be successful. But you do need to take advantage of those products and services that are designed to let you capture the maximum share of whatever market you're in. Dominating natural search through HitTailing is the smartest and cheapest way to do this, although it will take some time. In time, you can build your business to dominate a super-niche, a category of businesses that was not possible before the easy ability to tap into the worldwide potential customer base, and to get your product to them with ease. Cottage industries can be category killers, if you choose your industry and keywords wisely.

Is Writing For The Long Tail Spam?

What is spam and what is not? I don't want to enter a Bill Clinton semantics game of "it depends what your definition of is, is". That's why enforcing contracts and agreements so often come down to enforcing "the spirit" of the agreement. Whether new blog posts and website content qualify as search engine spam definitely relies on the spirit of the thing.

So, if you're writing for the long tail of search with the express intent of attracting visitors, and thereby getting and keeping customers, are you spamming the search engines?

It depends on what your definition of is, is. And that's why this post in particular is such an important one. You must think about the spirit of the thing. If you know that by writing about a topic, you will be attracting prospective customers of the most qualified kind, is it wrong to write? How fair is it to have competitive intelligence of this sort? If you find the answers to tomorrow's test laying open on your teacher's desk, is it unethical to peek? Of course it is. Do the same rules apply to writing blog posts? As with law, the answer is not black and white, but rather continuous shades of grey. And yes, writing for the long tail of search with competitive inside knowledge that no one else has lands a little further towards black on that spectrum than some might feel comfortable with. But is it wrong? Let's explore.

The first rule of war-style strategy is to make strategic assessments. And one of the most important strategic assessments is to know the lay of the land. And once you know the lay of the land, the most important assessments in whether to engage the enemy in battle is whether it's going to be an easy win. The highest achievement is winning a critical battle before anyone even knew one was occurring. That way, you avoid bloodshed and achieve your objective without drawing the wrath, or even the attention of your enemy. Many introductions to Sun Tzu's classic Art of War draw the analogy to a doctor who treats an illness before the symptoms become life threatening, or even visible to the untrained eye. And one of the most important parts of knowing the lay of the land is to hire local trackers who know the local terrain better than your own scouts. This is how Sam Walton won with Walmart: choosing a battle no one knew was being fought (in Nowhereville, USA), and scouting locations with little 4-searter planes.

And this is why HitTailing is ethical. We are your local trackers. The competitive intelligence is coming from nowhere other than your own site. It is nothing you couldn't get from looking for the telltale clues in your own log files. But by using us, we save you time and give you the advantage of our ability to spot those telltale signs. We know the peaks and the valleys, and the difficult-to-discern telltale signs. And we know how to guide you through this varied terrain to your destination better than your own scouts ever could. We know where the small, but important roads converge into the best locations for future Walmarts. The only thing unethical about this is that Sears didn't think of it first.

And the wisdom to hire local trackers isn't unethical. The decision to use information garnered from local trackers is not only fair in business and war, it's downright smart. This was a major shortcoming of the United States during the second Gulf War. We had plenty of satellite imagery (the equivalent of analytics), but very little agents on the ground understanding the culture and finer details of where the elusive moving targets (people) actually were at any given moment. The intelligence data that came back to choose targets wasn't always good enough to respond in real-time.

These same high-strategy concepts must be applied to taking tactical actions on the Web. But analytics are more like the satellite imagery. HitTailing is like the local tracker. And the recommendations from HitTail are like your tracker telling you your target has passed this way 10 minutes ago, and your best route to intercept them is at the narrow pass in the ravine up ahead. You would be foolish not to listen.

It is with this sort of competitive knowledge in mind that you should choose your next topic for blogging. And it must be in an area that you have something worthwhile to say to your readership. Because if not, you are demonstrating a lack of respect for your readership. And a lack of respect is the first bad sign in what Peter Drucker identifies as the mission of all companies: to get and keep customers. So, show respect. Just because you know you will encounter them in the ravine up ahead, don't dig tiger pits. Instead, be a friendly, unarmed party of travelers who happened to also be journeying in the same direction. And strike up a conversation with them. Tell them your story. Legitimately engage them, even though your intention is to persuade. Because in the end, this is business and not war.

Spam is hostile. Writing for the long tail of search is finesse. While the goal is the same, the spirit of the thing is different. Even if you're selling, try to entertain and make it worth the visit. Today's audience is increasingly media-savvy, and they more and more often know manipulation when they see it. And if they DO see it, make it acceptable by being non-deceptive. Always be respectful of peoples' time. If you have to, be the friendly thief (refer to Robert Cialdini's principles of persuasion and influence--the subject for another post). You can hawk wares, and still be liked and trusted. It's a much nicer approach than "write anything"-style search engine spamming, and more aligned with the mission of getting and keeping customers.

Who Sells YOUR Keyword Data?

Another area people believe (and worry) that we're going is in aggregating keywords for vertical industries, and selling it. We're not. This site runs on trust. How can you be assured? It's a Nash Equilibrium. If we violate your trust, we both lose. It's better to play fair. I won't bore you with the details, but Google on the Ultimatum Game to get an idea of why this works. The only people who can sell your data are those who you've entered an agreement with (comScore, Alexa, etc.), or those who don't need your cooperation in any way and can still get the data (your ISP, HitWise, search engines themselves, etc.).

Anyway, we really don't have as much data as people think. And there are SO MANY other ways this data is being aggregated and sold, that we won't touch it--just like we're not trying to enter the already crowded analytics space.

HitTail is all about collecting as LITTLE of THE MOST IMPORTANT data as possible. In other words, we're opting to have massive amounts of users, and minimum amounts of data--storing only what is most important to provide actionable recommendations.

This is quite different from other data gathering systems. There is absolutely no cross-site "fertilization". Your keyword data is your own, and your competitive intelligences comes only from the fine details of visits to your own site. When this visit satisfies a HitTail criteria, we store it. Otherwise, we don't. So who does? And who is selling it to your competitors?

The people who aggregate keyword data across industries and sell it can take one of three approaches (as far as I can tell). First, they can run snoop-ware on your personal computer that reports back the details of your searches and site visits. Alexa, comScore and even the Google Toolbar (with PageRank turned on) fall into this category. You know you have this software running if you run a network traffic sniffer and watch the traffic on port 80 on your own PC's IP address. If you see communication go out to anything other than the site you're visiting, you know that you have this sort of software running. If you want to see this, find the program called WinDump, and execute this command (for example). It will show you the Google Toolbar chatter.

windump -i2 -s1000 -A host toolbarqueries.google.com > test.txt

Do some surfing, then look a the text file! Data collected in this fashion is very skewed, based on those who "voluntarily" installed the software. For example, Webmasters regularly install Alexa to see how well their sites are ranking in the top-100,000 sites. But Webmasters also disproportionately visit such sites as Webmaster World, artificially inflating its rank as a proportion of all the world's sites.

The second and probably the most effective approach is data mining by Internets Service Providers (ISPs). ISPs have privileged access to large swaths of wonderful statistical data, because THEIR network sniffers can monitor the traffic of everyone who uses them as an ISP, or any traffic that happens to be traveling through their routers. It is a much less skewed cross-section than the snoop-ware approach. But because ISPs are mostly regional, the data is still skewed by geography. The way to solve this is to use the data from many ISPs. But ISPs don't cooperate in this fashion, so it takes outside businesses who are specifically in the business of brokering such data to cut deals with many ISPs. HitWise is probably the most popular example of this sort of company. And if I were to recommend buying aggregate data from some company to get an overview of keywords for writing for the long tail of search, this may be what I recommend. But why pay, when you can get it for free? And that brings us to method #3.

In addition to snoop-ware, and snooping ISPs, the search engines themselves know your keyword searches (of course!). The popular products here are all over the board, from WordTracker to the keyword suggestion tools built into Google AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing. But the most interesting (and free) development recently has been Google Trends, which allows you to enter a keyword and see how much relative traffic exists on that keyword versus other words. I'll write on this much more later, because it's a great tool to identify long tail keywords that are "on the edge" of being worth it.

But back to WordTracker, which is hugely popular in this space. WordTracker collects its data from the search engines owned by the third-tier meta search sites owned by InfoSpace: DogPile, MetaCrawler and WebCrawler. So THEIR data is skewed based on the profile of people who choose NOT to use Google, Yahoo or MSN in this day and age. It's a nitpicking, but still critical and under-addressed point. Yes, WordTracker data is skewed. Perhaps the best data from the search engines comes from the keyword suggestion tools built into AdSense and Yahoo Search Marketing, because it is from the horse's mouth.

So to recap, keyword aggregation can be done with snoop-ware, snooping ISPs or the horse's mouth (the search engines, themselves).

With all these players in the keyword aggregation and resale space, it's hardly worthwhile for us to be yet another. Likewise, we don't want to be yet another analytics package in an already crowded space. Add to that the fact that helping you write for your own long tail of search relies on trust. And what you end up with is a unique partner in your mission to get and keep customers--a tech-savvy partner who helped launch Amazon, Priceline and Vonage.

It costs us very little to aid low-traffic sites and help build them into high traffic sites. Our approach is so difficult to understand that it takes an 8-minute demo to explain (in this beta soft-launch phase). And even then, only the elite early adopters will really get it--until Chris Anderson's gospel goes mainstream. So, jump onboard and join the HitTailing revolution before the competition catches wind of it (or FINALLY understands it!).

HitTail Is Not Analytics

So, I'll be making the demo much shorter. The concepts are quite difficult for most people to grasp. A common mistake I see expressed on the forums is that it is ONLY drawing a list of keywords, while the truth is it's ferreting out the best writing topics to address next in order to raise the capabilities of non-SEO folks, and save marketers lots of time. A shorter demo that gets to the point quicker may help.

Its way too easy to think this is analytics, when it doesn't even try to do analyze anything other that what writing topics are your best next choice to improve natural search performance.

On the other hand, people, who have been figuring out how to write for the long tail of search, but who have been struggling with how to choose the most effective next term "get it" right away. They are the HitTailers of the world. Exporting your entire keyword list is just not the same thing, and they see that right away. Once you have a long keyword list in Excel, what next? It's like a search engine with no concept of relevancy. Yes, you can export the list, but...

Will your entire list be filtered based on what words have just led to your site for the first time EVER? (therefore showing you the effectiveness of the MOST RECENT content you released)

Will your entire list tell you which words are best to target based on how buried in the search results they were when some very determined searcher found you? (therefore showing you happenstance un-targeted terms that are good choices to target)

I suspect that people who discount HitTail at quick glance are the same people who discounted Google, because AltaVista and HotBot already existed. Without looking closely, it is easy to think it was nothing new. But a new and better approach can make all the difference in teh world.

One of my favorite business-writers summed it up by sorting people into four quadrants: early adopters, early majority, late majority and laggards. HitTailers definitely fall into the first two quadrants. I hold out hope for people who don't yet get HitTailing at first glance. It's a difficult concept, and easy to overlook the profound meaning of the the deceptively simple lists--particularly the Suggestion tab.

Let's see if we can't turn a few of them around.

Direct-to-Consumer Press Releases

Since Connors Communications is a PR firm, and we advocate writing so that you reach the consumer directly, it's time for me to weigh in on whether HitTailing actually is the process of consumers reading press releases directly, as advocated by David Meermen Scott of WebInk. The blogging super-advocate of PR, Steve Rubel of Micropersuasion thinks Direct-to-Consumer press releases suck. Well, it seems to me that if you're blogging to reach the consumer directly, and state that "press releases" that reach the consumer directly suck, it sounds a little like the pot calling the kettle black. Is it?

While Steve quickly points out he's a fan of applying an "SEO-mind" to PR, he feels that newswire services are a pristine conduit to journalists that should not be littered with bogus fluff pieces that amount to nothing more than spam. It increases the burden on journalists to distinguish between what should REALLY be reported on as news, and what are merely attempts by companies to circumvent journalists altogether by attempts at low-cost advertising rigged to drop links in Yahoo Finance. Steve even drops that highbrow, but highly insightful term, disintermediation--the fear of every broker and middleman, in every industry worldwide.

The essential question seems to be, what value do journalists add to a story, and how much burden should be put on them to sift and filter news that's going to reach some portion of their readership with or without them, anyway? Because let's face it: blogging lets companies communicate directly to consumers, anyway. And blog communications often have less work and more of that "SEO-mind" put into them. The rate of communication is quicker, but the implied importance of each post is lower. None-the-less, blogging IS a form of a mini press release. Any journalist who closely covers a beat and wants to be competitive with bloggers who break news stories must have their Technorati subscription lists (or whatever blogosphere monitoring tools they use) set up to alert them to posts, least they lose the scoops.

So, should blog posts be elevated to the credibility of press releases to more formally compete with them? Or should the criteria of what justifies a press release be lowered, so they can compete with blogging?

If newswires are directly searchable by consumers anyway already, it's almost a moot point. Add to that the fact that any PR firm worth its salt is backing up a press release with a summarized blog post, so that the blogosphere gets pinged, then aren't journalists merely in a race with consumers for identifying important stories?

Yes.

So, the real issue is that the damage is done. News releases already reach the consumer directly through search. Hard-core consumers have notifications set up through Technorati and other systems to notify them whenever keywords are used in blog posts. Google news alerts does roughly the equivalent for press releases AND website content. It won't be long before consumer-filters deliver custom disintermediated and auto-assembled daily newspapers to these hard-core consumers.

But not all consumers are hard core. Some like their news packaged, interpreted and summarized by a trusted source. True, it is far fewer than in the past. But it is fragmented over far more specialized interests. And mainstream media has fragmented and specialized to reflect this.

But the race for news is the race for news. We live in a world where bloggers regularly scoop journalists. We live in a world where companies that desperately want to "become" news will jump at the chance to disintermediate the news gatekeepers. Blog posts and press releases are just two points on the same information broadcast system. Once you've taken the shotgun approach to disseminating your news, differentiating blogs from a press releases is splitting hairs. Either one could become the source of coverage.

Who is qualified to filter what is news? Companies when they write press releases? Newswire services in deciding whether to carry a story (ha!)? Journalists in deciding whether to pick up the story? Editors in deciding whether to run with it? Or consumers deciding whether to read past the headline? Democratized news dissemination systems like Rob Malda's SlashDot, Kevin Rose's Digg, and now Jason Calcanis' Netscape imply direct-to-consumer. But what do they link to? Almost inevitably, they link to the new stories that HAVE ALREADY BEEN PUBLISHED! Catch-22!

Calling the liberal use of press releases to reach consumers directly spam is elitist -- and ironically correct! Calling news democratized through Digg is hypocritical. Even the democratizing direct-to-consumer news systems irresistibly (and I find humorously) fall right back to the mainstream media as a crutch to tell them what's important. They almost always link to professionally edited news stories. If they're going to do that ANYWAY, then the press release system coupled with the follow-up pitching by PR professionals to journalists to help them understand the story still has high, albeit increasingly subtle value. It's a critical link in the news food chain.

People need to be TOLD what's important. It's an elitist position, but it remains true. The task of filtering your own news raw from source is like drinking from a fire hydrant. It's an enormous, daunting task, and frankly too draining for the average consumer. We have to choose who we trust, and let them act as our professional filter for our "daily read".

At a Search Engine Strategies conference last year, I asked whether this deluge of news wasn't going to ultimately turn journalists back into the gatekeepers of what's important, and it looked like the founder of Topicx.net was going to kill me. He asked in a very condescending tone whether I had been reading the news over the past year, as if the epitaph of mainstream media was already written (subtext: all of us in PR are clueless bad-guys and agents of old-school media). While yes, I believe the consumer-controllable filters will become more powerful for constructing your own personal newspaper, taking into account Web surfing patterns, search patterns and locality, that is just one part of a much more complex filtering process. All that customization is just your end-point "My" settings.

So, companies should try to exercise some constraint on their press releases just out of professional courtesy to their journalistic counterparts--because they continue to be more of a gatekeeper than the democratizing hordes like to admit. Be respectful of their time. Make their filtering process easier. That way, when you back it up with a personal phone-call, they will not see you as the boy who cried wolf. You will get the reputation for a better signal-to-noise ratio than other companies/agencies who try to spam them.

When you want to disintermediate your best-friend journalist who has better chance of getting your story covered, then it is your prerogative. But wouldn't a better choice be to first offer him/her the scoop on your story BEFORE you even blast it to the world? Help someone get the scoop. And do your best to make sure that it actually is objectively newsworthy, so you're not wasting everyone's time. That's exactly what I've done with HitTail, before we've even written the first press release. Blogging, and the more democratic news voting systems then serve as a nice objectivity meter to gauge whether you're really onto something.

And the HitTailing process advocated here is not the same as direct-to-consumer press releases, but it IS on the continuum of direct-to-consumer communication vehicles that use the shotgut approach. It is only PART of your overall marketing mix, albeit a low-cost, highly effective part. And it's not intended to clutter the mind and desk of journalists, but rather to allow consumers to FIND YOU... but only when they're SEARCHING. It influences the reverse-filter of search, and not the forward-filter (the news push) of the daily read.

The Birth of HitTailing

So, I've got 3 blogs that I contribute to. My personal blog at Mike-Levin.com, the Connors blog, and the HitTail blog. Lately, I've been pouring myself into the HitTail blog, because I feel for the first time in a long time that I'm involved in a "cause". This post is about some of the highlights of the passion that fuels HitTail.

I sure wish the Internet and blogging were around during the demise of Commodore Computers, my first technology passion and cause. I was not a Commodore 64 guy as so many of my peers, although my age is about right. Instead, I hopped on the bandwagon circa 1987 with the Amiga Computer. The Amiga, with it's "before-its time" hi-color, multi-tasking, video and animation capabilities made me crazy for a device that I almost resented people calling a PC.

The Amiga was not a computer. It was a crazy-elite, creative, break all expectations sort of technology that made Mac and PC people discount what they saw before their very eyes as "impossible". PC's can't do that, therefore the Amiga is not a PC. It must be some other thing, so that their worldview did not shatter. For me, those times were easily as exciting as the Internet revolution that came almost a decade later.

This is about when I started reading Sun Tzu's Art of War and Guy Kawasaki's Selling The Dream. I became active, and eventually president of the local user group for Amigas that met out of Drexel University. I went to Drexel for college, and to work for Commodore as the college student liaison that actually got to work out of Commodore's international headquarters in West Chester, PA. For those who remember back that far, Drexel was the first college in the country to require all incoming students to buy computers--and they chose Macs. So, irony here was so thick, you could cut it with a knife. And if Commodore did its job of keeping the Amiga technologically relevant, I would still be working for them today.

In fact, when the writing was on the wall, I want to the Bahamas to speak at their shareholder meetings TWICE to deliver warnings of how technologically competitive the landscape was becoming. At one meeting, a fellow shareholder, Richard Ash, was forcibly ejected for insisting that Roberts Rules of Order be followed. It was in that atmosphere, I had to tell Al Haig and the others that it was time to support more than 256 colors at 640x400 resolution (what was then High Res). The last trip was in 1992, about when everything really fell apart. It sucks trying to keep a ship that you're passionate about from sinking. Friends claim it was one bad Christmas season. I claim it was years of being out of touch with the new pace of innovation.

The years that followed went by like a blur. I basically missed being one of those Silicon Valley bubble boys, because I decided to hitch my wagon to the Scala star, and bet on the digital screens that were hanging from ceilings in business rather than the ones on our desks in our homes. In other words, I promoted digital signage, which is just now maturing as a market. But in that time, Scala was my passion, and I developed skills far and wide, from being a production manager saving the company millions in unnecessary printing expenses, to marketing, making the company millions in new business relationships.

And the later is what indirectly led to HitTail. For in the digital signage industry, the prospective customers are spread thinly across the entire Earth. You are just as likely to find your next prospect in Iceland as in Malaysia. China, South America, Australia, Africa, and certainly all over Europe--you just never knew where the next sales inquiry was going to come from. It was a unique marketing challenge. Where do you advertise? What tradeshows do you attend?

And finally, THIS is where the passion for a company coupled with a passion for a marketing technique--the only technique I could identify where we could accomplish the formidable mission of aggregating enough of these thinly dispersed sales leads to constitute a significant market. The technique I'm talking about is of course, Search. This was in the days of AltaVista, InfoSeek, Excite, Lycos, and a bunch of others--a totally different set of names than today's players. Certainly PPC wasn't on the scene until GoTo's arrival. So ad-buys online were still fairly expensive, and not a real option for Scala.

So, I took a piece of global company revenues, and set to work bringing in every prospective customer on the entire planet. I intended nothing less than delivering to Scala EVERY prospect in the digital signage market--period. Prospects, likewise didn't know where to turn to in order to find vendors in this space. Scala's marketing challenge dovetailed perfectly with the prospect's challenge. And general Internet search was the (then, not so obvious) solution.

So once again, you had an alternative platform (Search ~= Amiga), and the irony of promoting in the middle of hostile territory. In those days, a sales person thought that if a sales lead came in over the Web, then it couldn't actually be serious. Oh, what a mistake. Anyway, I was MUCH more successful in my second professional passion then my first, and where Commodore fell, I was able to deliver the world's aggregate sales leads of the digital signage industry to Scala--much to the chagrin of their competitors, and to my delight (did I mention I was on sales commission?).

So, that being accomplished, I was ready for my next challenge. The task of collecting the world's thinly dispersed sales prospects for a single market in order to make it worth developing didn't have a name. I was deeply involved in search engine optimization and a forum called "Search Engine Forums" at the time. But that was no name for what I did. It implied a shadowy world that was in an arms race with the search engine companies, like Google and Yahoo. My techniques on the other hand were reputable. I was proud to talk about them to the Google engineers that I had the occasional chance to talk with at the Search Engine Strategy conferences, which by that time I started attending. What I created was far bigger than collecting leads for one company in one super-niche.

Then, a buddy who had followed his dreams to New York called me up to meet the people at his company. He saw the connection between public relations and search that I had yet to make. I knew that a number of the things that I did were PR-like. I even made the connection between Google PageRank, Reputation and PR. But the overwhelming power of this connection was not clear until I came up and met the people of Connors Communications. Then, the light went on. The spark of the then-wavering passion was re-ignited. The optimistic rose-colored glasses that I learned to look through by Guy Kawasaki combined with the "win while it's easy" mantra of Sun Tzu. And I knew New York inside a PR firm that was serious about technology AND search was the place I had to be. So, I loaded up my truck and I moved to Chelsea.

For two years, I re-worked and re-invented my methodologies, working with Connors clients, purging any practices that seemed spammy, adding practices that seemed consistent with public relations, and generally putting together a formula for search engine optimization that where you didn't have to pay tribute to the Search Gods, yet, you could have year after year of fertile crops without incurring their wrath. I was totally passionate about this, and knew I was coming out with something that could easily rival AdWords in terms of marketing phenomenon's. The problem was (and still is) to some degree communicating it. But I do that plenty in other posts.

And that brings us back to where I began this rambling post. I'm surrounded by wonderful, supportive team, in terms of programmers and PR folks. And it's really exciting to be this close to the Media. It gives just such a different feeling than being in Exton, Pennsylvania. We're regularly meeting with clients in the 5-block radius of Rockefeller Center, and that gives a real "media" flavor to HitTailing--avoiding what I view as the more Valley-oriented Web 2.0 fad mentality.

While I hope to pick up the meme sheep in what I'm doing here, what I'm really after is the massive herds of marketing department buffalo. In other words, HitTailing is on its way to becoming a Trend, and not just a Fad. The chasm still looms ahead, and most of you who are reading at this early point are the early adopters. But instant communication, and the free-first model leads to instant market-creation. So, we're in the path of the Tornado, which we should be able to ride over the chasm quite nicely. So, jump on the HitTailing bandwagon, and come along for the ride.

Writing for SEO

How much expertise in writing and SEO is required to make the HitTail site work? Not much. That's why we highly recommend using blogging software to get started. You can muck around with fixing your website with "traditional" SEO, or you can use a form of content management system that just does it all correctly, is free, psychologically reduces publishing friction, and "pings" the world with a form of news alerts whenever you post.

The traditional SEO route is a much more difficult road to travel. It involves URL rewriting, forcing templates to use variable data where previously they did not, fighting back and forth with aesthetic concerns, such as whether headlines belong on websites, or foundational issues, such as content being hidden in Flash or other non-HTML media. There is a fix to almost every one of these problems. It's just costly and painful for most organizations.

There is another road that is much easier to travel. It's a road that Connors Communications specializes in. But I'll forgo a full explanation, because it's not the subject of this post. Suffice to say, we connect to ANY content management system, and provide a different presentation layer to the website that magically addresses all the SEO concerns. Think of it like your database being Microsoft Word, and your published website being the printer. We swap out printers. But I digress.

Your organization needs little to no SEO expertise to switch from paid keywords to natural search, if you use blogging software for HitTailing. In particular, beginners are best advised to use Google's Blogger site, because you can easily "plant" your blog in a subdirectory of an existing site. That puts all the magical SEO juice you're squeezing into the same place as your main website. This is always a wise move.

Then the other question is how much writing ability do you need? Well, you do need some. In fact, you need quite a bit. But think how much energy you sink into managing pay-per-click campaigns. Why not put a little of that into a creative writing class, or perhaps pick up some books on writing from your local bookstore or Amazon. Or hire freelance writers. Or assign the task to the person in your company who already writes marketing literature.

Writers write to be read. HitTailing adds new levels of value to the writer's craft. Once you walk them through the HitTail demo, I'm sure their creative juices will get pumping. An increasingly important part of SEO (search engine optimization) that so many people neglect to talk about is getting EVERYONE to want it--from tech, to marketing to sales. One of the stakeholders who wants it most, once they learn what HitTailing is all about is actually the writer. So, three two birds with one stone: give them their voice, get your HitTail writer, and solve your corporate blogging strategy.

The Red Badge of Validation

So today we had our first red badge of validation when our servers when momentarily down. Thanks in part to Jason Calcanis' new Digg-like Netscape site from AOL, HitTail got some pretty massive exposure. It's also worth crediting SEO-Scoop once again, as the first and most eloquent site to identify and state what we're doing here with HitTail (previously MyLongTail).

I made the stupid mistake of headlining the article "Finally, a Free Alternative to AdSense & Yahoo Marketing", and a few commenters called me out on it, and they were completely right. It was of course supposed to position HitTail as an alternative to AdWords--not AdSense. Natural search optimization is intended to wean you off your AdWord dependency. It's not supposed to provide an alternative an income source for publishers. There are plenty of those, including AdBrite, BlogAds, and now John Battelle's Federated Media, designed to reach high-end blogs with vast readership.

Anyway, take this as an official correction of the headline. None-the-less, it has been successful enough in driving traffic, and people signing up for the beta program that we feel like we've been SlashDotted... and all that from the first day of an announced beta of another Digg clone. Goes to show you, the sites that can drive traffic can rise and fall overnight.

I think there's about 20,000 technorati who flock from one Web 2.0 beta to the next, following the meme. For those not in the know, a meme is an idea with a viral-like ability to self propagate. The first I became aware of the concept was in Neil Stephenson's groundbreaking cyberpunk Snow Crash novel, where he explored how the human brain was hardwired to receive and carry out meme's (although I'm not sure he called it that) with commands like "bake bread". It worked due to the programming being delivered in an ancient primordial rhythm, more deep seeded than language itself.

It's an interesting concept, and it is humorous to watch a version of it manifesting on the net. Technorati is cool. Go flock to it. Flickr is cool. Go flock to it. del.icio.us is cool. Go flock to it. And for each, there is usually a predecessor who didn't quite get it right, and missed out on riding the meme wave. And there are hordes of copycats who try to ride the meme wake.

So, like so many obsessive entrepreneurial compulsives, my mind starts ticking. What has no one else done? What do I already do? What has Connors already been using as a back end tool that could be universally well received as the next big thing? Clearly, we have something, because our SEO secret sauce is so much tastier than the competition's. So, how to bottle it? And how to label it?

Freedom from your advertising word campaigns! Finally, an alternative! Tired of the keyword bidding frenzy? Don't you see how the long tail concept when applied to PPC only drives up campaign management complexity, keeping it in the hands of outsourced SEM companies? Don't you intuitively get how long tail keyword targeting is a natural fit for natural optimization?

And I'll say it one more time. Along comes Chris Anderson, who thankfully frames the discussion for the masses. He explains how the long tail of the demand curve contains business that actually is worth winning. If your business has a distribution model that allows it to be economical to sell to niche markets, then they're worth targeting. And targeting niche markets means increasingly obscure, and therefore less competitive keywords.

This concept can apply just as well to Fortune 500's or eBay sellers. It is universal, and the application of the concept is limited only by your ability to reach your potential customers, and your ability to fulfill an order. So, HitTail says you should reach your clients through general search. After all, what search box is used more than the Google default? And what search even comes close to the combined default searches of Google, Yahoo and MSN combined? There is no "vertical" search, no local search, or in-sight search (even eBay's) that begins to compare to the combined power of the three giant's DEFAULT search.

And based on the traffic this site is receiving in just over two weeks of a soft beta launch, I can only guess that we hit one of those ancient primordial chords like Neil Stephenson's concept. Our Web 2.0 brains are hardwired to load the meme and carry out its instructions. And in a way, as difficult as the HitTailing concept is, it is certainly easier than baking bread (plant, harvest, grind, knead, bake... really quite complex!). But that's all condensed into "bake bread". Our instructions are plant (the code), harvest (suggestions), knead (ideas), bake (publish). OK, so HitTailing is just as complex as baking bread. But at least you'll make more money.

Building Long Tail Keyword Momentum

So, I've been keeping an eye on when this new domain and site could be found at all in search, and that was only 7 days after activation. Then, I looked at how long it takes to have a fighting chance on a competitive term like "long tail". And that was about 6 months after activation--but it was a very inactive site for that time period. I was not practicing what it preached. So, beginning about May 23rd, I "spiked" the site with content to stimulate the long tail writing process. There have been a smattering of posts during the long dry period in-between, but not nearly enough to get the long tail juices pumping.

So, what about now? It's only 3 weeks since my content push, and results are just now coming in. Those results are in the top position, so they're not being issued as suggestions (demonstrating the value of brainstorming and blogging-cold). But the data does appear under the Search Hits and Keyword tabs, which is still fascinating to watch, and perhaps just as valuable for a new site that is just establishing itself.

The HitTail site is being found on such concepts as:

• alternative to adwords and keyword bidding


• techniques for long tail marketing


• long tail keywords


• graph long tail keywords


• 80/20 rule vs. the long tail


• Should you use a shotgun or a sniper approach to Internet Marketing?

This is all just in the last day or two. You can really see the dynamics of a site coming alive with the HitTailing monitoring tools. Yes, you need patience while the process is kicking in. And yes, you can see this same activity in analytics or your log files. But...

Your log files shows way too much data to draw meaningful conclusions from what you're looking at (OK, except to a few of us techies who literally do watch the matrix).

You usually have to wait for your analytics reports, so you can't really "feel the pulse" of your website. The HitTail site is only really starting to produce results in terms of natural search today. And I am literally seeing the hits as they occur -- lots of fun!

So, for already existing sites, the Suggestions tab may spring to life instantly. You can see that in action with the Connors sample data (which I really need to start taking the suggestions from). But for a brand new site, the domain needs to spiked with content to get the process rolling, and you're going to see most of the initial activity (as it seems) in the Search Hits and Keywords tab. But that's OK. Once you've built a critical mass of start-up content, it should start to become self-fueling in terms of ever-improving new long tail writing topics. And so long as you TAKE some of the suggestions and continue rolling out new content, the momentum should build.

How Free for How Long?

This post is to address two questions:

1. Why is HitTail free?
2. How long will HitTail remain free?

Let's jump right to the bottom line. HitTail will remain free for sites whose traffic remains under a yet-undetermined traffic level. We are still determining what that level will be. And as you come near that level, you will get plenty of warning. And even once you reach that level, if you are not paying, the tracking gif will continue to be served as normal. It will simply stop collecting data. So, there is no downside AT ALL of giving HitTail a try.

The reasoning goes: low traffic sites don't stress our systems. So it's easy for us to provide it free. But once your site really takes off, and we're talking to about "getting SlashDotted" levels, then it costs us, and we will have to figure out what to charge.

But that won't occur until the beta program is over, and it won't occur without plenty of warning. In the rare instance, we have a massive volume user, I'll contact them directly to discuss. So, install that tracking code with the confidence that you will have the benefit for plenty of time to make it worth it.

Next, WHY is Connors Communications providing this service free?

Connors Communications developed HitTail for a variety of reasons, including our own public relations. Before, you didn't know us. Now, you do.

The PR industry as a whole has always been quick to identify and embrace new technology: blogging, for example. Connors Communications also has a knack to identify and bring to market the next big thing--we launched Amazon.com, Priceline and Vonage. Using this knack, we decided it was time to practice what we preached. So we identified one of our own under-serviced needs (mining log files), developed a product (in-house SEO tools), test marketed it, refined it, and packaged it for the mainstream.

Being a smaller boutique New York PR agency, Connors Communications doesn't get the same press as an Edelman, Ogilvy or Fleishman-Hillard. But now, with developing a new public relations technology, I expect we will be remedying that situation. The Internet is truly democratizing. Distributing information doesn't cost much, so one person can have the same influence as whole marketing department. So, the trick is in starting with valuable information, worth propagating. If there's no self-evident value to the message, the message cannot propagate of its own accord. This is what makes a viral campaign viral.

HitTailing is about making valuable information worth propagating... on many levels. First, HitTail is a unique and differentiated competitive intelligence product for the hot field of natural search optimization. And we're giving it away free. The information could propagate on this basis alone.

Second, we're starting what we feel will be a revolution in marketing by creating a systematic methodology that applies pure hit tail theory as laid out by a rapidly rising business concept: the long tail. The information here could propagate on this basis alone.

Third, we're providing what is finally a mainstream, reputable product in a space that has previously been dominated by shadowy and controversial products. This kept everyone away but the early adopters. We've articulated a "safe" value proposition for natural search that is ready for the more pragmatic early majority. The information here could propagate on this basis alone.

Fourth and last, we're solving a sorely felt pain-point in marketing today. The cost of online advertising is being driven up, right as managing such campaigns is becoming more difficult. Everyone craves those natural search positions, because it lowers your own spending while forcing your competitors to spend more. But the path to getting those coveted natural search positions is not always clear. We illuminate that path with a method that we're proud to discuss publicly. The information here could propagate on this basis alone.

For these reasons and more, we made HitTail free, trying to give it that extra little boost that a free Web 2.0 beta gets these days. We're putting it through rigorous real-world testing, listening to our users, and applying agile spiral development techniques, so that what we create is as cool as it is useful. And we respect you, the user. You will notice that our tracking gif is invisible (unlike some other free services). We are not begging for links, or littering the site with every social bookmarking shortcut.

So instead, we rely on YOU, the HitTailer to spread the word. Spreading the word of HitTailing will also spread the word of Connors Communications. And on occasion, we will meet someone with a snazzy new technology that we believe in well enough to take onboard as a member of our elite club of Clients.

But for all the rest who will never be in Connors' office, we still like to think we have a relationship with you. Perhaps we helped you improve your business, or further your social cause. And that makes us feel good.

And if you still think this is just too valuable to give away for free, then consider it word-of-mouth-ware, and go pay. We won't mind.

Deceptive Simplicity

People are continually taken aback by how simple HitTailing is. Well, it took a lot of work to get it that simple. Think back to when someone showed you Google for the first time... you know, when Portals roamed the Earth. In a time so enamored with feature creep destination sites, Google seemed counter-intuitive. We already had AltaVista, HotBot, Lycos, InfoSeek, and the rest of them. Who needed another search engine?

So, what made Google different? Why did simplicity work so well for Google? These are classic age-old questions in marketing. Sometimes doing one thing SO MUCH better than anyone else using a new approach works (Google). Sometimes, feature-laden products that eliminate the need for a diversity of other products works (Treo). There is not one single rule, and it often depends on the nature of the "pain" that your product is designed to ease.

The Treo addressed the need of being connected in a variety of ways, without a variety of things bulging in your pockets or to hunt for in your handbag. So in a way, even feature-laden products like the Treo are motivated for that desire for simplicity. For a superior product, once you're done ogling its style (iPod) is often intended to fade into the background, and not be consciously thought of. It just delivers a benefit without you being too aware of the delivery vehicle (like driving a Car).

Get it? Whether it's a complex feature-laden product, or a simple one-purpose device, style grabs you, then simplicity (the need to not think much) keeps you coming back. Habits form, and the product becomes part of the fabric of our everyday lives.

This worked so well for Google by focusing on just Search, at a time when Search was almost a bad word for Portals. Search encouraged users to LEAVE your site at a time when it was all about building destination sites. What they failed to see was that by Google giving such a positive search experience, their users would always COME BACK. And Google achieved this magic in great part with the insight that "link referrals" were an indicator of relevancy. HitTail has a precisely analogous insight that events in your specific click-stream are indicators are clues that must be brought to your attention. And the resulting "short list" under the To Do tab is as crazy-simple, yet profoundly meaningful as Google in its day.

We love analytics software, and continue to advocated its use, particularly in conjunction with HitTailing. But this is one area where analytics tends to fail. It so overwhelms you with data and features that it fails to step back and just tell you what to do to improve your site. I'm sure in time that it will. But competitiveness often means securing this benefit BEFORE everyone else has it.

And HitTail is designed to do exactly that. Yes, it's simple--some would say deceptively so. It's hard for some folks to believe that they don't already get this out of their analytics software, and so they don't bother listening to the simple HitTail message: if you write about these things, then they will come. HitTail takes a step back from the pedantic drill-down reports to look at the 1000-foot view, see the landscape and say: "you should take the following actions."

With HitTail, we actually have a platform for much more clever and competitive features, and we fully plan on adding them with great care and deliberation. We're not going to join the feature rat race. We're going to do one single thing better than anyone else, do it with style that you can momentarily ogle, but then have the tool fade into the background. In this way, we plan to make HitTailing an essential, but joyful and unobtrusive part of your everyday marketing life.

Linear or Exponential Growth?

For all intents and purposes, this site was only announced as a Web 2.0 beta site two weeks ago. That's when we added the PowerPoint/Flash demo that FINALLY effectively communicated what this site was about, and why it indicates a fundamental shift in marketing... towards HitTailing! And the HitTail term has only been public for one week.

These first two weeks saw only liner growth in beta tester sign-ups, as I tapped only my old search engine forum friends from the JimWorld days. It's only Tuesday, but from what I'm seeing so far this week, we might already be on the verge of an exponential growth spike, as the full group of early adopters of such things becomes aware of, and signs up for the HitTail beta test program.

This is an exciting prospect, but we may have to start limiting new sign ups, so we can scale our services at a sane pace. So, if you've been thinking about testing this service in the free beta program, now is the time. Depending on what we see this week in terms of traffic, we may have to start cutting back on new beta testers.

You might say, we're looking at the long tail in reverse, and we're walking into the head of the demand curve. Registrations started out slow as I had to go humbly to the online SEO forums and ask for beta testers. Then, the occasional blogger picked up the story. Now, it seems that the emails are flying, because there are a lot of beta testers with no referrals (that's what happens with word-of-mouth emails). The question is whether our growth is linear, exponential, or some something in between. I'll be doing a regression analysis this week to model some HitTailing growth predictions. Since there is a maximum market for such things, it will plot according to the logistics or population density curve. Plus, I have to account for Moore's Chasm (it is not a smooth ride). But what will the short-term population growth look like, and how fast will we have to add servers to keep pace?

I think that the help screens that we added yesterday must have helped encourage sign-ups. It gave us not only a chance to document how HitTail works, but also to inject our personality as you'll see under the Search Hits help tab: "As any good HitTailer knows, you do not have to take action on the data under the Search Hits tab. It is merely here to allow you to view the same information HitTail is mining for suggestions... and to make you feel like you are immersed in data flow. Ahhhhhh, can you feel it?"

Next up is revising the demo to be shorter, start reliably, and contain the new site name. Its hard letting go of MyLongTail, but the more we write about the phenomenon that is HitTailing, the more sense it makes.

Thanks, Beta Testers! Keep the feedback coming. We're setting up HitTail at Connors dot Com, which will replace the old MyLongTail address (both will work).

PR 2.0?

So, from some of my previous posts, feedback has come back that maybe I'm being a little too harsh on the rest of the PR industry. Perhaps blogging outreach and press release optimization have some merit. Of course! Each of these approaches is championed by respected collogues and innovators in the field of PR, Steve Rubel and Greg Jarboe respectively. My point is that everything we currently call search engine optimization fits under the PR banner AS WELL. Throw in the HitTailing process, and maybe a viral mechanism, and you've got an unstoppable online PR strategy.

With every passing day, it becomes clearer that the challenge isn't building a better mousetrap. We've done that. It's not communicating the value of online PR. That's self evident. It's not even how to optimize a site, because that's fallen solidly into the realm of best practices. The challenge is communicating the concept of search engine optimization to the mainstream. Selling this concept as search engine optimization still like selling steak as burnt, dead cow flesh. How can you get anyone to try a fillet mignon when everyone knows it as an almost raw chunk of cow loin? Enter the PR industry...

And this is where it starts to get beautiful. PR is most closely related to SEO for a litany of reasons I spelled out in previous posts that I will not repeat here. Their missions are almost identical. But SEO has a PR problem, in that natural search engine optimization is the fillet mignon of marketing, and it's known by tne name "natural search engine optimization!" Ughhhh! The world of mainstream marketing needs SEO bad, but keeps getting hung up for a thousand tiny reasons. Projects break down, and everyone goes scampering for more proven alternatives, like blogging, press releases and yes... even buying keywords through PPC campaigns! The problem is both in the packaging AND the product.

Part of the bad taste that SEO leaves in our mouths comes from the inconsistent information and process that occurs during the vendor search and selection process. How is the RFP manager to wade through it all and make a good decision? This is aggravated by the fact that results can't be guaranteed, and mechanical projects must be carried out in full for a significant effect to be seen. Plus the rules change. It is a real conundrum to nail down what an SEO product actually is, and why it could ever go mainstream? Happily, such questions (and product re-invention) are right up PR's alley!

This is classic Geoffrey Moore Crossing the Chasm stuff, but with a twist. Most people appreciate the value of coming up in natural search. The early adopters have flocked to it in droves. There have been big wins, but also big losses and much pain. No single product has solidified. The early majority sat on the sidelines waiting for the mainstream SEO product to arrive. But instead, they saw the shimmering mirage of SEO in a very different approach, known as PPC. But it was there. And it was mainstream. And now, it's a $7 billion industry. But where was the true SEO product? By definition, it cannot emerge, because when it does, it ruins the search engines, turning them into spam receptacles. Plus, it siphons off revenue.

Well, we're a few years later and a few years wiser, and all those same early majority are squinting into the sun, trying to discern if there is anything but mirages out there? If there ever was a time for positioning yourself in the path of the tornado, this is it. But can a product possibly emerge balancing these mutually exclusive concerns? If a product does emerge, how could it possibly be packaged for the public, made accessible and non-geeky, and not become a spam cannon? Enter Chris Anderson's concept of the long tail, and the related notion that search terms are inexhaustible real estate, for which there is, on the whole, lucrative demand. You can never run out of increasingly niche products to sell, aligned to increasingly specific search terms. And there is nothing wrong with that.

Finally, we have a context in which to frame a natural search product that will appeal to the pragmatic early majority, won't upset the search engine companies, and provides one of the first viable alternatives to pay-per-click advertising. The dire need to develop it was clearest to New York PR pros who live close to the media, and think of search as one of the last great bastions of un-fragmented media. And having developed the technology, these same PR pros are the very ones to position it, package it, and let it loose upon the world.

It does not conflict with the other messages you will hear from PR circles--messages centered around "engaging in the discussion" or "optimizing press releases". In fact, we consider both of those as necessary components to an overall online PR campaign. We just feel that natural search is the underlying common theme to both of these approaches, and they need a more solid core; a core that guides both your blogging AND press release endeavors for maximum effect; a core that can be understood and embraced by the pragmatic majority standing on the sidelines.

And that core is the practice of HitTailing. It ties in perfectly well with Chris Anderson's concept of the long tail--so, it can FINALLY be communicated to the mainstream (thank you, Chris). It satisfies the search engines, because instead of trying to come up on irrelevant words, you are on an ever-improving quest for precise spot-on relevance. The Achilles heel of this approach is that it hinges on writing skills. But as a marketer, you will ALWAYS do well to exercise your writing skills, whether you're applying it to press releases, the corporate brochure, website copy, or yes, even blogging.

Super-informed writing is the common theme. And super-informed writing is not an alternative method to those prescribed by my collogues. On the contrary, I imagine that some day soon, they too will be practitioners of HitTailing, using it to fine-tune and hone their own methods, and the PR industry as a whole takes another giant step forward -- proving once again that we are one of the most nimble, adaptable and always-relevant branches of marketing in existence today.

UPDATE: Connors has evolved from traditional PR to high end search engine marketing. Click here to learn more about our transition - http://www.connors.com/seo/letter.html

Rise of a Competitive Keyword

So, how long does it take to get into the search results AT ALL for a competitive term? Well, this site was launched as a beta under the codename MyLongTail. Embedded into this was the very competitive term, “long tail”. Long tail is competitive because, since October of 2004, Wired Magazine Editor-in-Chief Chris Anderson, has been talking about this demand curve model, and how it is changing the nature of business through such companies as Amazon.com and iTunes. It has since grown into something of a buzzword in marketing, and soon will probably soon join the ranks of The Tipping Point and Crossing the Chasm as models for understanding business and human behavior.

When you have a buzzword like this, everyone jumps on the bandwagon. The more people write about it, and find ways to make money off of it, the more competitive it becomes. It hasn't become as competitive as say, mortgage refinancing or Viagra tablets, but it is competitive enough to examine.

Back in January, I looked at how long it took for a site to get into Google AT ALL. If you don't know how short the process CAN be, you don't know what to tell SEO clients. Well, it took only 7 days to go from launching a new website to being in the Google results at all (on the term MyLongTail). There was no title or description. It only listed the URL, but the complete listing was quick to follow. But it only took 7 days.

Its six months later, and I'm curious how well I'm doing on the much more general and competitive concept of long tail. I haven't been monitoring it closely, so my rise to being anywhere in the results has probably been occurring over those months.

So this morning, I searched on the term "long tail" with a space between the words. Not only is this competing with a hot marketing buzzword that everyone and his brother is blogging about, but there are also long tail birds and bugs to battle. Suffice to say, it's challenging. To appear ANYWHERE in the search results is a challenge. So, it was with that attitude that I went hunting in the Google results for this site this morning. We're ONLY on the 15th page of results. Sure, that's buried in position #141, but it says that there are only 140 sites more relevant.

It's actually quite stunning. This is the type of starting point professional SEO's look for, because it reveals that you're coming up at all, and there is the potential to do better. And the fact that this was a brand new domain, launched only 6 months ago flies in the face of conventional wisdom, that new domains are at a significant disadvantage. Whatever tweaks were done during the BigDaddy update were not as harmful to new domains as we've been led to believe, or the use of Blogger on the domain offsets the penalty.

So, we're changing the name of MyLongTail to HitTail. Our move off of the old domain will be gradual, as we have a lot of beta testers linking to MyLongTail. I am hoping that this won't set back the momentum too badly on coming up on long tail related concepts. In particular, I want the site to become known as the essential place to come to learn about free long tail marketing. It seems appropriate, because of the democratizing process that is inherent in Chris' concept. No longer do we need to buy into the marketing-driven blockbuster hits that are peddled at us, and delivered through limited distribution channels, such as Retail. Instead, we get to search and choose from a nearly unlimited variety of products more tailored to our tastes. But finding that product is still a hit. It's just a different sort that the blockbuster hit variety. This double entendre is contained within our new name: HitTail, in which you engage in the practice of HitTailing.

So, my challenge is subtly shifted. We don't have the extra boost of long tail being embedded into the name. But we do have a stronger name that is tied to both the multitude meaning of hits, and to the concept of the tail, and to the notion of a distribution channel, such as Retail or Wholesale. And my decision of what my top-level benchmark keyword should be is now a bit more difficult. But in the meantime, I think I will take measures to ensure we're found when people research how to take advantage of the long tail effect in marketing.

SEO and PR

With HitTail, Connors Communications claims that the field of search engine optimization (SEO) is a subset of public relations. I know that's going to be fighting words for some readers. But I believe this, because the technical matters of search engine optimization are becoming best practice, and fading into the background of the discussion. They are simply things you need to take care of first. Beyond the technical projects that almost always must be carried out with a new engagement with a search client, the process starts to look a lot like traditional public relations.

And I must address it before I get too deep into this article. There's a brand of SEO for PR that's being practiced that mostly involves propagating "optimized" press releases, articles and white papers that use links back to your site, making PR uniquely measurable. While this is an important component in the connection between PR and SEO, the Connors approach goes far beyond this in both philosophy and methodology. We lump the practice of optimizing press releases and measuring ROI along with the technical matters into the background discussion. Neither are sufficient philosophical or strategic shifts to really change the game. What philosophy and the strategy am I talking about?

PR focuses on publicity generated through means other than paid advertising—that is to say non-paid. Sometimes it's a fantastic attention-grabbing stunt. But more often, it's communicating a company's news to professional journalists, so they can choose whether or not to include it in their editorial coverage. This applies with all media, and the editorial coverage may also be in television, such as a spot on the Today Show. Point being, such publicity is distinctly different from paid advertisements, because it lives in the TV program or the column, and not in the commercials and the ads. In our age of media-savvy consumers who filter out the ads, PR tends to be so effective, because your message is delivered where attention is most focused and trust is at its highest.

This is the exact goal of search engine optimization, and all too often we forget that the main search listings are editorial in nature—just like a TV program or magazine column. The natural results of search in Yahoo, Google or MSN are those sites' opinions of who should appear on what words. Conversely, listings that are put in the margins are the exact equivalent of ads or commercials. They're there because the client paid for it to be there. It's a clear deal—unlike PR or SEO, where it's a less clear deal, but the wins can be much larger than with advertising, at a much lower cost. PR and SEO are philosophically identical methods, applied to different media.

Meanwhile, the mechanical aspects of SEO are being reduced to a playbook. Connors boiled it down to a one-pager that we give to new SEO clients. If you don't do these things, you haven't leveled the playing field for your site, and the bloggers in your space will continue to have more influence than you, decreasing your reach to new customers, and increasing your risk and susceptibility to angry, disgruntled bloggers. Clients must accept this reality, and work with us from an IT-perspective to get their Web publishing infrastructure adhering to best practices at least as well as it is accomplished by blog software. We've worked through this with some difficult-to-change infrastructures. It must be done, or all the rest of your efforts will be for naught. And if it simply can't be done, then we ask for a subdirectory of their site where we can set up a blog, or use our own content management system to publish into.

So, after you take care of the mechanics, how does SEO look like PR? And more specifically, where does a public relations firm get off saying SEO is just a facet of its own industry? Easy! The connection is communicating effectively—often through writing. Video plays in, and I have so much to say about that, that I'll have to make it the subject of another post, and refrain myself to talking about text-based content for now.

Now, there are many reasons adding just the right text to your website helps both your public relations and search optimization goals. I must also refrain from delving into all the factors that spring into play, or else this will be a very long article, indeed. Suffice to say that more content adds more "surface area" to your site, making it into a larger piece of the total Internet, and thereby proportionately increasing your odds of being found. You can tell that through common-sense alone. The odds work in your favor with a larger site. You can throw a few more factors into the mix and still avoid the long discussion by noting that Google's patent from March of last year revealed that they take new content and site growth into account as a factor. And with blog software, each time you add content, the entire world is notified through a pinging system. Adding content on a regular basis is advantageous.

This closely parallels the need in the field of public relations to keep yourself in the news. Especially in high tech, you are most relevant if you have the most to say from a leadership position in the industry. Nowhere is this clearer than in the big tech companies that have "dreamlands" that incubate both pure research, and its application in business. IBM comes to mind, and the constant advances in manipulating atoms, and how this is gradually leading to nano-fabrication. Every little advance is truly news. While not as striking, almost every industry and company that has newsworthy events to report, is well served by doing so on a semi-regular basis to keep them top-of-mind with their prospective customers. When the time comes to make a purchasing decision, the repeated exposure through the news definitely plays in. In marketing terms, this is called cognitive resonance, and it is just as true with PR... and SEO!

So many in the field of search are concerned with that first search hit and getting the conversion on that first visit. But the truth is that most industries are ruled by the Rule of 5, or the Rule of 7 (varies based on the difficulty of the market). This states that a customer doesn't usually make their decision until there have been at least 5 (or 7) separate communications with the company. And re-discovering the company through a search hit counts as a touch! So, search optimization does not merely carry the responsibility of generating that first hit. It also must coral the prospect back again and again, no matter how their search terms evolve and change over time.

And HERE is where it shifts from philosophy to strategy. Philosophically, SEO belongs to the field of PR because of identical missions. Strategically, SEO belongs to PR because of the need to write content for these continually shifting and changing, but still relevant terms — the need to write for the long tail of search.

I've talked about writing for the long tail of search et nauseum in other posts. So, I'll jump right to how the challenge is so similar to the PR task of positioning and messaging. Positioning is something the PR industry does to figure out how you fit into the entire spectrum of products in your industry, and what makes yours special and different. Messaging is how this is packaged and delivered to different audiences. But always, it's spot-on, delivering the desired controlled message, bringing your audience to the same conclusion: many paths, one destination.

Writing for the long tail of search has the exact same parameters. When HitTail suggests new search terms, it is literally the same as a journalist asking you "well, what about..." In fact, some journalists take great pride in coming up with the unanticipated questions to see if the story holds water (as well, they should). A skilled practitioner of public relations has such a thorough understanding of the big picture, that every answer is spot-on, and brings the audience back to the exact same (predetermined) conclusion. This is a skill of public relations.

Compare that to the practices of black hat search engine spammers who write for the long tail of search by harvesting related content (effectively plagiarizing), and spinning out 10,000 derivative pages. Sometimes, this is called search scraping, because they had to perform searches on terms to get the content from Google. Today, their job is greatly simplified with RSS feeds, bringing content aggregation pirating to new levels. We can only hope that the brilliant minds in search will be able to identify original-sources and filter the rest. Because what we're talking about here is original writing, and real writing craft.

So, now compare the public relations approach to writing for the long tail of search to merely blogging in order to engage and lead the discussions in your industry. Many have jumped on this particular blogging bandwagon. While this has merit, we still view it as incomplete. Yes, you will be opening a dialogue with your already existing audience, making it a workable strategy for large companies. But it does very little to strategically EXPAND the size of your sales pipeline funnel. Here too is subject matter for another post, because I could talk forever about the sales pipeline. Suffice to say, that as you blog, you are very deliberately expanding your reach to prospective customers, because those same said prospects VOLUNTEERED competitive intelligence directly to you in the form of what keywords they just searched on. No one else has this data (except, maybe your ISP). Not your competitors, not WordTracker, not the keyword suggestion tools in AdSense and Yahoo. Only you. It's buried deep in your log files, and the process of HitTailing easily brings them to your attention at a steady flow, in real-time, and sorted by potential, so you can literally answer those prospects as quickly as they drop the suggestions into the box.

So to put a fine point on it, growing your site is good. Blogging is better. Blogging with the competitive intelligence provided by the HitTailing process is best. The mission of any company is to get and keep customers. The mission of public relations is to do this at a lower cost than advertising, through channel that are more trusted. The mission of search engine optimization is the same. And when you get past all the technical matters of SEO, what you're left with is the need to write about exactly the right things in exactly the right way to capture new customers. And THAT is a long-established skill set within the PR industry. The PR industry is therefore staking its claim to the whole field of SEO, and the HitTail site is one of the first indicators that they have the technical chops to do exactly that. And at the same time, we will happily help those who wish to do it in-house by providing the HitTail service for free—and change the very shape of marketing in the process.

UPDATE: Connors has evolved from traditional PR to high end search engine marketing. Click here to learn more about our transition - http://www.connors.com/seo/letter.html

Astroturfing, PPC, Blogging and SEO

It is approaching two years now that I've been in my role as a vice president at Connors Communications, heading up the online outreach and search engine optimization group. When I came onboard, my focus was massively on search engine optimization, as it was my specialty from my previous life. I quickly learned that online PR also meant corporate blogging to some, and a shadowy practice called buzz marketing (or less flatteringly astroturfing) to others.

Now, I was no stranger to blogging in the sense of journaling experiences on the Web in a search-optimized fashion and letting search engines do the rest. But I was somewhat new to the "blogosphere" that was growing up around David Sifry's Technorati site, with the pinging and the RSS feeds. In the blogosphere, you kept on top of mentions of your name, or the name of your company, product or industry within minutes of the post being made, instead of the weeks (or months) of traditional search engine optimization. In this way, you could keep on top of the online discussions, and engage in them when necessary.

And that's what brings us to the two approaches to engaging in the discussion. First, you can run your own corporate blog in an official sense. Or second, you can post comments in other peoples' blogs, attempting to sway the discussion in the direction you desire. The later approach can be done in an open and honest fashion, or it can be done by disguising yourself as not being a representative of your company. And in some cases, companies encourage their customers to do this sort of posting on their behalf. And in other cases, the companies hire third parties who specialize in boosting such word of mouth buzz. Several of these behaviors can be described as astroturfing... the very same dishonesty that gives PR a bad name, but applied online.

I'm using this article to propose that blogging combined with search engine optimization and the HitTailing process is by far the most efficient and honest approach to online marketing available today. The astroturfing alternative in addition to being disingenuous, can be downright dangerous for a company's reputation. Think how easily it can backfire when you pose as someone you're not and post somewhere for the first time with a contrary opinion out of the blue. The people who run blogs aren't stupid, and they often times know manipulation when they see it. It's worth mentioning that astroturfing in addition to the inherent dangers, is also an obsessive and time-consuming process--not at all as efficient as everyone finding YOU when THEY search.

This is not to say that it's bad if someone else picks up your message and starts repeating it. In fact, if they do, it is likely they will be speaking with a genuine voice, and posting in locations where they are already known, active participants. In those cases, your message has a much higher chance of being well received, and not called out for being astroturfing. It is the sign of a promising viral campaign that can carry its own weight. The difficulty there is that your product or service actually needs to be good enough to inspire such word of mouth promotion (or the viral gimmick/freebie needs to be brilliant).

For the very best example of an online PR success story that was pure word-of-mouth (including email), which used no gimmick, no freebie, no blog, and no SEO, you need look no further than Google. Google spent almost nothing on advertising, and didn't have to encourage its users to pass around links in email. It just happened spontaneously. It was a true viral organic process. If you were to map out the dissemination of the Google "word", and how it weeded its way into our everyday lives, you would have a textbook example of the truest and best sort of online PR win. The product has mass appeal... literally everyone on the Internet is a potential user (customer?). And its value proposition is so compelling that everyone felt the need to tell everyone they knew. And in a very real way, everyone paying for AdSense advertising is riding Google's massive online public relations success.

But for the rest of us, for online marketing, we're faced with choosing among pay-per-click advertising, banner ads, natural search engine optimization, a corporate blogging strategy, and astroturfing. This article proposes that pay-per-click advertising and astroturfing indicate the weakest posture. They are both activities that must be "resorted to" because the "better way" does not seem open to us, or perhaps not instantly rewarding enough. Pay-per-click and astroturfing can have their uses when extremely cautiously and tastefully applied, but only to get over the hump of launching a site from scratch. Once you start to make ANY ground at all, switch quickly to a stronger approach.

A corporate blog strategy means different things for different size companies. If you are large and known, it usually (and should) mean opening a frank and often gritty communication channel with your customers. Macromedia did this very successfully as one of the first examples of corporate blogging, opening the product development process to the users in a candid way that would scare the bejezus out of most companies. The GoogleGuy, who started out posting in forums was eventually "outed" as Matt Cutts, who started a pseudo-official Google blog. Robert Scoble did the same for Microsoft. Many large companies started doing official corporate blogs, sort of short-circuiting the traditional press release process in PR. And when you're big and have stockholders, people will hang on your every word, and blogs carry a different purpose.

For the rest of us in small and medium size business, corporate blogging isn't quite so effective, because the masses don't hang on our every word, no matter how we might like to think so. But the mission is different as well. We're mostly just trying to find new customers, keep those we have, improve sales, and accelerate company growth. And blogging in that regard is more of a shotgun approach. You don't know what to blog about in order to specifically achieve those goals. And when you do blog, new issues flare up, the search hits may not be what had hoped for, and blogging gets to feel a little to self-indulgent. Consequently, a wet blanket gets prematurely thrown on the whole endeavor. It's just so much easier to find the discussions that already exist, and go astroturfing with fly-by posts -- or to sink more money into AdWords.

But for small and medium sized business, it's imperative to stick with it. The topic selection for the posts needs to become smarter, and as you see incremental improvements in search hits and conversions, the self-indulgent feeling of blogging will subside. It will quickly become core to the company mission, because what else is there really besides your relationship with your customers? Even if that relationship is an imagined one, in is still key to the mission of any business: to get and keep customers.

So, I clearly advocate creating a corporate blog, identifying the best "voice" in the company to represent you, to give them the freedom to blog in good taste, knowing you have the ability to pull down the post if you ever need to, and to begin selecting your subject matter so that it serves the universal mission of all companies: to get and keep customers. I advocate keeping this up over a significant period of time, even if it doesn't feel like its having the intended effect at first (at least two months), and to watch the data that's coming back through BOTH analytics and HitTail. HitTail will help you choose your next blog topic, transitioning you from the shotgun approach that you had to adopt to get started, to a more sniper-like approach that will zero in on more and better phrases and customers.

Avoid disingenuous and disguised posts on other peoples' blogs or forums. If you're not ashamed of what you're doing, just post as yourself. Products deserve to be announced, and if you choose you're venue correctly, they won't drive you away as an astroturfer. But don't disguise yourself, and only do enough to get started. Watch who starts to pick up and repeat your message. Some will be aggregators who are just republishing your posts. But some will be genuine advocates. There's nothing wrong with thanking them for recognizing you, and asking to use their quotes. This is an honest, and somewhat traditional grass roots approach to starting an organic word of mouth campaign online.

And, it's OK to buy some keywords through AdSense, Yahoo, or the alternatives. Its something everyone should do just for the experience if nothing else. It will help you collect some information and think like an online advertiser. But don't over-invest here. Just think of it as something you have to do to cover for the slow period that follows activating a new website, while the HitTailing process picks up momentum.

This momentum-building period should be thought of as getting the snowball effect started. The snowball effect is very real. Get a snowball rolling on a steep hill, and it will eventually pick up enough mass to keep itself rolling. But anyone who has tried this on a shallow incline with poor snow, knows how frustrating it can be. This metaphor precisely reveals the importance of choosing good products to market as raw material for HitTailing. Some markets are steep hills full of keyword-rich snow that serves as good packing material. If you make good choices, and put enough effort into getting the snowball rolling, the suggestion tool will kick in, and your corporate blogging strategy will pick up momentum. In the best cases, your biggest problem should be keeping up with the suggestions.

And the final thought is the triple-whammy effect of when this all comes together just right. Blogging is a friction free way of publishing, solving many of the problems we encounter when you ask the Web or IT team "can you put this on the site?" Most blog software (Blogger, Movable Type and WordPress) are inherently well optimized, taking care of the mechanical problems we encounter when you ask the Web or IT team: "can you get rid of the parameters and get the terms in the URL, headline, title and links?" And because your posts are search-optimized (and pinging the world as news), your pages will start to produce the occasional search hit that feeds data to HitTail to mine for suggestions. If you have the determination to stick it out, you should start to see the magic of this triple-whammy marketing method. It's a much more efficient and honest way of reaching your potential customer-base worldwide than the astroturfing and keyword-buying alternatives.

Search's Long Tail

I think few people realize quite how long the long tail is in the demand curve that Chris Anderson lays out. I've been developing this technique for search optimization since 1999, well before Chris' fateful article, but am thankful to him for framing the discussion in such a way that the average marketing department will understand. You can't target everything, so why not target what works best? That was the reasoning in both natural search optimization and pay-per-click campaign management for the longest time. But it was because it didn't make sense to fill the quality site of a reputable company with garbage doorway pages. And likewise, managing keyword campaigns of tens-of-thousands of words was unwieldy. So you choose your battles wisely, as the saying goes, and focus on the short tail.

Well, focusing on the short tail is short sighted, because you don't know what the most productive short tail for your particular niche in your particular industry is. It reminds me of Chris' point that we will only come to know the true shape of the demand curve of products worldwide as we approach infinite supply of diverse products as well as infinite ability to find those products. Only then, will the true shape of the demand curve reveal itself. And as Chris says, this is a statement about the diversity of people and culture.

Similarly, you will never know your perfect demand curve for capturing the optimum number of sales leads in your industry if you don't start filling in the missing gaps. After all, it doesn't cost you anything but your employees' time to write new content for your website. In natural search, this writing would be analogous to product. And the Web imposes no limits to how much product you can fill your website with. Black hat SEO spammers take advantage of this effect to spin out tens-of-thousands of pages at a time. They will gradually be penalized, for they cannot help but to use duplicate content and create abusive patterns that should be easily caught. But if you follow the method described here, you will be speaking in your own genuine voice to your customers who, hopefully, you know better than anyone else.

You must avoid plagiarizing at all costs. At most, you should just quote someone else, and when you do, put it in blockquote tags, so you're acknowledging what you are doing. This is a finer point having to do with the "semantic" Web. Over time, the original HTML tags that have semantic meaning will carry much more weight than the oh-so-popular, but meaningless div and span tags. But I digress. Back to search's long tail.

As you take the writing suggestions issued by HitTail, and fill in those gaps, an interesting phenomenon occurs. You will find that when you hit the real money-winners, they are going to produce LOTS of hits, and therefore won't stay in the long tail of search. They start climbing their way up... into the short tail! So, writing for the long tail of search actually creates a Darwinian process where the fittest keywords survive. Your top-10 producing keywords from natural search may be very different than what you expect, and you will never know until you start zeroing in on them!

Hopefully, this makes sense to at least a few readers out there. One of the biggest criticisms of the HitTailing system we run into is that you can get the data out of Analytics software. They don't see any point in one more tracking gif. The only answer I can give is to try to zero in on the best topics for writing from just your analytics software. It generally gives you your top producers, and lets you drill down by engine, and lets you pull "the big list" of keywords. But what you lose is context. Is it the first time any of those words EVER led to your site? Which ones are subtle clues? Where did people dig deep, deep, deep into the results to find you? Where is the latent potential built up, just waiting to be released with just the perfect topic selection?

Hopefully, we're shedding some light on what it means to be a HitTailer. HitTailing is the phenomenon that will sweep the international world of marketing once the PPC honeymoon wears off. HitTailing is like a homesteading process, where you claim the natural search real estate that should rightfully belong to you and your company anyway. These are the questions HitTail strives to answer. Zeroing in on the very best keywords in your space using better data than anyone else is the process of HitTailing. Someone who has successfully built the thickest, longest short tail composed of the fittest surviving long tail keywords is a HitTailer.

Fixed Switchover Issues

Greetings all HitTail users. This is a message to anyone who signed up for the beta program between noon yesterday and now, when we switched names. The JavaScript tracking code was not working during that period of time, but we've got it sorted.

The way to confirm that everything is working properly is to CLOSE ALL BROWSERS, then open a new browser window. Perform a search that you know will lead to your site. Then visit the HitTail site, and go to the Search Hits tab. You should see your search there.

There was also a brief issue where not all keywords were being extracted. We found and fixed that as well. There may be a few overlooked hits in your history, but it should be catching them all moving forward. And if those precise hits occur again, the keywords will now be extracted.

Fight Clickfraud (or Click Fraud?)

OK, this next post is intended to be very popular in the search engines for people researching click fraud issues, but I'm not using the HitTailing method to do it. Rather, I'm just floating a test balloon. We will have to consider whether to incorporate the process of floating test balloons into the official HitTailing formula. But anyway, it goes something like this...

Engaging in HitTailing is a practical alternative to battling click fraud. If you're getting your search hits for free, then click fraud is hardly a concern. And there are many other reasons a natural search hit is better than a sponsored one. Visitors view search results as objective, and tend to be more trusting. Natural search results tend to occupy the featured area of the screen rather than being crammed into the margin (marginalized). And study after study shows, much to the chagrin of PPC-exclusive marketers, that natural search results are clicked vastly more, by some figures as high as 80%, than sponsored ads.

So, to see if the discussion of click fraud will be a traffic generator on the HitTail site, we have to begin somewhere! That somewhere is this post. If I hadn't discussed click fraud before, it certainly won't generate any long tail keyword suggestions. So, some writing has to reside on the HitTail site first.

You will notice, I am trying to offer real value to our site readers. I'm not writing for search engines. Nor am I being deceptive in any way. Instead I simply have the knowledge that "if I write about it, they will come." Yet, I don't have a very good idea yet what to title this post for maximum effect, or how much traffic is occurring on clickfraud-related terms.

One of the littlest known facts of natural search optimization is that once you've chosen the title for your page, 80% of what you CAN immediately affect with your decisions is done. The whole rest of the writing of your article will only affect 20% of the variables. You simply CAN'T have that much influence over search by what words you put on the page, or else we would revert to the Tri-anything period of the AltaVista epoch when spam ruled the earth. Google was the mammal scampering around at the feet, and spam was the asteroid.

So, why do I bother with long articles such as this? Easy! Because that 20% is vastly more important than anyone (except maybe Chris Anderson) realizes. I don't know what other concepts are going to combine with the concept of click fraud. But I know that if I say everything I have to say of value on the topic, then I'm increasing the overall chances of chancing into the magical word-combo allowing me to discover and eventually intercept a great deal more traffic than I currently do. Refer back to my post about search hits ARE THE SUGGESTION BOX in an Edward Deming-like TQM (total quality management) process, where marketing is the product. It's a difficult concept. Someone ought to take it up for a college dissertation. But trust me, it works.

What we're doing here will result in search hits of the best sort: ones that I didn't specifically target, but are still related to my subject matter, which may stimulate me into further writing. Plus of course, they're free! And in that further writing, I'm taking the suggestions and answering the questions raised by my readership and audience. These are questions that they didn't even specifically think to ask me, but I know. Anyone engaged in social networking sites who are having difficulty spiking niche membership would do well to pay attention to what I'm saying here, and what their search audience is trying to tell them.

Google actually settled with in the Lane's Gifts v Google case in Arkansas, acknowledging that some click fraud is probably occurring. It's difficult to say how much, but Google and Yahoo's slice of the marketing dollar pie last year was about $7 billion, according to the IAB and PricewaterhouseCoopers numbers. So, click fraud is some percentage of that. I won't even spin the possibilities based on percentages, suffice to say that a lot of money is probably being directly depleted from the marketing budget of companies across the world by their competitors.

So, how damaging is that? Well, first you have to consider that many companies are forced into PPC campaigns, because it is the fastest and surest way to see your name come up in search. And for many, it remains their ONLY exposure in search. It serves as sort of a beacon to your competitors of what keywords you're targeting, it's generally clicked on LESS than the natural search results, PLUS it deducts money from your marketing budget when a competitor clicks it. In short, relying only on PPC campaigns is not healthy for your company.

So, how to solve it? Just gradually start building your natural search effectiveness. If you have a determined click-fraudder in your market space, the only sure way to confound them is to target long tail keywords where he/she would never imagine to look. Over time, you can dominate a niche, and he/she will never see it coming. You fight the battle where its least expected, and by the time anyone realizes it, it's far too late for them to respond. This is what Walmart did in targeting the dispersed heartland of the United States, and not the best markets. By the time anyone realized, Walmart dominated a super-niche.

In many ways, the practice of HitTailing employs Sun Tzu, Art of War-style strategy. It is always best to win before anyone even realizes there was a conflict. So it is with battling click fraud. Success is the best revenge, and the best success is dominating natural search. The slime balls who deliberately attempt to deplete their competitors marketing funds are being swept up by the same panic-and-follow mentality that drives keyword prices up to untenable levels. Such strategies stink of desperation. Shouldn't it be possible to take the high ground AND win? Honestly, I can't answer that. I can only provide a tool that starts to level the playing field a little bit.

And a final note, which will probably get everyone linking to this article is how we select the title for the article, for titles manifest in blogging software into the title tag, the headline, part of the URL (web address) and links leading TO the page from other pages. Get how powerful blogging software is? This is why 80% of what you can do to affect results is determined in your selection of a title. And the tool du jour to pick titles today is Google Trends, because it lets you see how much traffic is occurring on any given term. What's more popular: "pictures of", "picture of", "photographs" or "photos"? Google Trends will tell you in a relative sense (it doesn't give absolute numbers, but will let you map "MySpace" versus "eBay". If a term is not popular at all, it won't produce a graph. So, I decided to use this tool to decide whether "clickfraud" or "click fraud" was more popular. No graph! Could the concept still be that unpopular? I'm not a conspiracy nut, so I don't think Google is deliberately filtering this. It's either such a new concept that no matter how popular it seems to us in the Adver-bubble, it's still that obscure, or it hasn't been around long enough for trending.

Either way, I think that makes this article worthy of a digg, don't you?

What's in a Name? Success or Failure!

I believe your success or failure can be read in the tealeaves of your corporate name and logo. So, please excuse us today while we switch to our new name, but put in a rudimentary black & white logo, while we work out the finer details.

It was a challenge to rename MyLongTail to something more universal and less industry in-talk. It had to be equally friendly and viral as the beta codename. And perhaps most difficult of all, we had to achieve that same magical and lovely balance that transitioned you from looking at the logo "MyLongTail" to the first tab once you've logged in and installed the code, which shows you... "My Long Tail!"

The logo even referred to itself by turning the g-descender into a tail, and spoke of the "My" personalized sites. Not to elevate it TOO high, but I equate this layered meaning and humor as the ultimate sort of achievement in design. I'm a big fan of the book Gödel Escher Bach by Douglas Hofstadter, which draws parallels between the sort of inverted musical canons that Bach wrote, with the Escher's negative-space artwork, and Gödel's theorems. Ambigrams such as those of my master-logo designer professor from Drexel who did the Illuminati brands in Dan Brown's Angels and Demons, John Langdon, tend to achieve this.

It was a magical and lovely balance. The name had embedded humor, embedded meaning and double entendres that I don't think I've seen since DogPile. So for a designer and a creative, choosing an EVEN BETTER name that would live in the halls of corporate America (and the world!) and roll off the tongue as easily as AdWords was a challenge and a delight. We company brainstormed. We enlisted Connie Connors' connections in high places to critique. I even tapped John Langdon for advice. And in the end, we decided we were doing something that was no less fundamental than retail and wholesale... two phenomenon's (technologies?) that that changed the way we live... Connors' own manta!

So, with that in mind, our brainstormed name and best candidate seemed just a little weak... simple to the point of over-obvious: HitTail. But then, we realized perhaps simple and over obvious was exactly what was called for in this case. Then we realized we were dealing with multiple layers of meaning: was it a play on search hits and the long tail? Or was it a play on Retail? And if "hits", was it a play on search hits, or hit products? And since we're a PR firm, getting "hits" in the media is always a goal, and a mention in a blog for example (with or without a link) is a hit.

Then, we realized HitTail was not merely a proper noun. It was something you could engage in: HitTailing. It was something you could be: a HitTailer. We achieved becoming a noun, verb and present participle that could weed its way virally into everyday talk... truly a magnificent achievement that perhaps even surpassing the cute codename chosen for beta. And finally, that delicate and magical balance that moved you from logo to that first page on login... "MyLongTail" to the "My Long Tail" tab is equally strong, in moving you from "HitTail" to "Your Hit Tail".

The Long Tail Approach to Marketing

So, this morning a very interesting yet obvious suggestion came in on the HitTail site: long tail approach to marketing. Yes, obvious. Did I think to specifically frame this site in those terms? No! Is it worth it? Most certainly, yes! Many, many folks will be researching exactly this, once the long tail concept becomes even more mainstream.

Chris mentions that he identifies the long tail in the curve that maps sales against demand. Even products that have sold very little (one unit) have SOME demand, and there are many, many of them that constitute the tail. Since his fateful article in Wired, people have been writing him to tell them how they see the long tail applying everywhere, well beyond business. But marketing is perhaps the most obvious next step, and the struggle to understand how to take advantage of the long tail effect is apparently starting to occur, as the suggestion in HitTail reveals.

So, to take advantage of the long tail in marketing, you have to think in terms of terms. In other words: long tail keywords. Which do you target and why? And how do you do it intelligently, so it doesn't become a full time job? Because just as demand for products is nearly infinite in Chris' model, the combination of terms that describe ONLY YOUR product or service are likewise nearly infinite... leading many to blog without a clue.

Blogging without a clue (great subject for another post), while useful for floating a few test balloons, doesn't help you zero in on what's working best. The best way to take advantage of the long tail in marketing is to blog WITH A CLUE. Sure, you can pull just any one of your "small" keywords out of your analytics, but it's not very efficient. Why?

First off, you're going to have to wade through the same whole long list of keywords every time. The ones you have already considered don't get filtered out. It becomes impossible to manage the big picture: what HAVE I already written about, and what new things MIGHT I write about? In this sense, HitTail becomes more than just a timesaver. It becomes an expert advisor, discounting everything you already considered, and bringing potentially new and lucrative ideas to your attention.

How in the world is this connected to the long tail concept? And how is this marketing? Well, to quote a business guru who has been around the block a little longer then Chris, the recently departed Peter Drucker, "The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself."

Think about that for awhile. Think deeply on it. The "Search", a privilege reserved for the very few in the past--research librarians, information brokers, etc. -- is now available to all. An "understanding" of the customer is magically embedded into the search terms they are performing. As marketers, we are reverse-engineering their research procedure, and attempting to put ourselves directly in their path... with the right message... at the right time... to fulfill a need or desire that they just attempted to articulate.

Well, to get into the path of these researchers, you have to look at the RE in research. It implies they are searching again? What did they search on last time? Was it something similar? Did they find you before, and were they perhaps trying to tell you something merely by the act of searching? Of course, the answer is yes. And this ties into concepts by another business guru hero of mine: Edwards Deming, the father of TQM (total quality management). Demming is often contributed with helping to rebuild Japan's economy after WWII by teaching how to listen to the customers and employees, and working it back into the product. This resulted in transforming such products as the Honda Civic from junk to premium quality. More recently, the process is attributed with Harley Davidson's textbook comeback. Try thinking about long tail marketing being a very similar process, but the information being provided to you is coming in through "search" instead of the suggestion box.

HitTail is in great part about corralling them back using the very information they provided to you the first time, but in more intelligent and strategic ways. It will be the truly enlightened marketing department that internalizes this message and puts it to work in everything they do.

Does Your Site Suck?

Well, I've found one more reason to give HitTail a try. Know if your site sucks. Analytics software and your log files may be useful to help you gauge traffic. But an interesting side effect of the how HitTail works is that it gives a more accurate view, and sometimes a disappointingly so, view of new visitors to your websites.

For you see, HitTail doesn't much care for counting the total hits on your site. Nor does it care about click-paths, total page loads or any of the other activity that occurs once a visitor reaches your site. It only cares about that first touch, and whether or not it is a GENUINE first touch. Have you ever had the feelings that your data was inaccurate as a result of YOUR OWN searching and clicking? Or a competitors? Or even a legit prospect who is just searching over and over and can't get enough? HitTail filters out everything but the first click that led to your site from any particular visitor. Most often, it is search. But on the occasions when someone blogs about you, it might be a link as well.

In either case, each time it shows up in HitTail, it is a fairly accurate representation a visit by only one human being. If the same link shows up three times, its three different people. Spiders are filtered out, as are subsequent searches by the same person. So, if someone is aggressively researching something in your space, HitTail is only going to record the details of the first hit. The overall effect is that anything showing up under the Search Hit is a separate visit by a separate person.

This is why HitTail will always show much less activity than other tracking tools--particularly your log files. It is making a strategic grab for only those pieces of information that are most valuable to you for natural search optimization. But it's also having the effect of revealing to folks just how bad their sites really are performing. Some have told me that their long tail looks more like a short box.

One of the suggestions that I can offer is to put your thinking cap on and figure out a way to go on a high quality writing-rampage. Keep it high quality! You know how some people will never shut up? If they were only on the Web, blogging, they would be some of the most effective HitTailers around. So, do as I am doing right now with this brand-new domain, and spike it with some high-quality content to your users. Avoid re-publishing other peoples' articles if you can. And NEVER plagiarize. Consider hiring a freelance writer to get some initial pieces on your site. Or just start blogging yourself. You have got to get a relatively large base of seed content out there before any momentum-building can occur... yet another factor that drives people to PPC. But have faith, and give it some time. This tool will let you zero in on those tiny little things that are working for you--even if it only ever appears under the Search Hits tab and doesn't make it to Suggestions.

HitTail filters to show only one person per entry on the Search Hits tab, and only those who found you through search or links. This lets you focus just on how effective your site is on drawing in NEW folks. This is a more gritty, real-time view of your visitors than analytics provides, and thanks to the Ajax interface, you can just sit back and watch them roll in... or not. It's either very addictive or somewhat painful. Thankfully, if it's painful, we're offering the cure.

The Must Have SEO Tool Of The Year

I can not be happier that the chatter on the Internet is starting to call HitTail a must have SEO tool. There seem to be a lot of people who are using other techniques to write for the long tail, usually some combination of site analysis tools, spreadsheets and blood and tears. So I believe more than ever this is filling a previous unfilled need.

There are various features, concerns and refinements I will be addressing over the coming weeks and months. Foremost is the privacy statement. We need to put something official together, so you all feel very comfortable putting the code on your site. Unlike analytics tracking code that will leave strange gaps in your trending, you can add or remove HitTail code as you like! So, experiment away--but it does work best if its on every page of your site.

There has been lots of feedback on the demo, generally unanimous praise in breaking a difficult concept down to "oh, of course!" level. I'm told it's as much a key piece of the website as the app itself. But I've got some bugs to work out even on that. It "locks" a lot of the important information of the site up in Flash, bad for SEO, and it's a 5MB download, and it doesn't start playing right away for everyone, and it uses the old logo. So, this is where some of my attention will be focused soon.

There is definitely the contingency of people who just don't see the benefit, or don't see it as any different from analytics. I remind them that it is a writing topic suggestion tool and not analytics. I am not opposed to adding visuals and graphics, but in the end, this is about producing one very short list. Because of the extreme simplicity and counter-intuitive nature of that, it's just lost on some people who desire the information-heavy report screens of analytics software. This isn't about producing reports, but about taking action that will clearly SHOW in those reports... action you would not have otherwise known to take.

Then, there is the contingency of people who grep their log files. More power to you guys--I'm one of you! I know the power of RegEx and writing your own algorithms. To them, I say, continue doing whatever works for you. This will be about mainstreaming it for marketing departments across the world, who don't have those same capabilities. I actually started out as an in-house Webmaster deep in the company bowels carrying out techniques that I considered impossible for anyone outside the company, and has therefore a mission do exactly that.

So, it is my hope that HitTail will be the must have SEO tool of the year. I'll be listening to and responding to the chatter on the Internet, taking every concern into account. Sometimes, I'll have to put aside suggestions over the principle of not spending an ounce of time duplicating functionality of the flooded analytics software market, and focusing instead only on those features that stimulate you into doing the most effective spot-on writing to attract qualified audience and customers. This is not about interpreting long reports. It's about simple statements like: "If you do A, then B will follow."

Getting a Web 2.0 Beta Rolling

So, I'm doing a little bit of online outreach. The launch of the HitTail is very revealing into the momentum-building challenge of the natural search hit component of marketing. I talk about the snowball effect, and it is quite literally true. A snowball is born with very little mass. Every bit of snow it picks up near the beginning is an effort. You have to pack it with your hands. You have to keep sticking on more snow as you begin to roll it. It's a very manual effort. It can be disheartening for anyone trying get a snowball rolling or a website started from scratch.

Virtually all of HitTail's publicity at this point is coming in through the occasional link. The initial pop came from my very first mention of the beta on John Battelle's Search Blog, when he asked for a recommended SEO/SEM firm. Next, we were fortunate enough to be added to the Museum of Modern Betas by Saurier Duval (thanks!). About the same time, Donna from SEO-Scoop recognized what we were building and was very kind with her coverage (thanks to you!).

And then the search hits started dribbling in. First, on the site name "hittail", and next on "snapbot" because I publish every non-browser user agent that hits this site. Then, "MSWC.IISLog", the tool I use to do that. And finally, a smattering of hits that were actually coming from my blog posts. Strange terms that have high-interest and low supply, like "ambigram" and "long tail keywords". I was really excited, because this begins to validate the concept on a from-scratch site with no history. Now, I'm in full-swing, practicing what this site preaches, and I expect with the next round of Google updates, we'll see quite a pop from my deluge of recent posts... just in time for the name change.

I also went around to a few SEO forums, announcing what we're building here. This is always an interesting proposition, because on the one hand, dropping links is bad etiquette (everyone has something they want to promote). On the other hand, it's absolutely necessary when launching a beta like this and needing good beta testers. So, I took a gamble and tapped some old connections at the granddaddy search engine forum of them all: Search Engine Forums, where I got started in 1999 and later become an active participant and moderator.

Unfortunately, I all but stopped posting around 2001, so I was absolutely delighted that I was remembered. In fact, it seems that SEF was ground zero for SEOs going off and doing their own things around the Internet, because everywhere I went, people were warm and inviting. Doug Heil of ihelpyou very flatteringly said he was surprised I hadn't stopped by sooner. This basically occurred everywhere I went, including the high profile Search Engine Watch, and relative newcomers like SEORefugee, where I was actually proactively asked to stop by. I had friends at Cre8aSite and SEOChat. All this wonderful activity was after I finished telling my team at Connors that it looked like I WOULDN'T be able to tap my old connections in the SEO world after, after a few failed attempts to soft launch with announcements at the site that I thought was the heir to the SEF throne. So, for all the support I received, whether I knew you back in the days or not, THANK YOU!

But back to the original point. All this is quite effort-intensive--not at all the value proposition of natural search! This is what is known as online outreach, or online public relations. There's much talk of this in PR circles, and is generally thought of as "engaging in the discussion". It takes a certain nimbleness, intense motivation, and the balls to stand up to anyone else in your company that's going to nitpick over liabilities and tactical blunders. Pishaw! If you speak with a genuine voice, have a genuine message that speaks to the needs and desires of your audience, then let it happen. Posts like this are much more interesting than marketing brochures, for the very reason that they are gritty. Yet still, it is labor-intensive and ultimately unsustainable and unprofitable.

The incremental efficiencies of natural search HAVE TO kick in. The snowball effect MUST start to happen. And a magic very similar to that of compounding interest needs occur. But just as compounding interest won't make you rich if you start too late and put too little money in, HitTailing won't make you successful in natural search unless you continue to deposit new savings. The magic of saving must combine with the magic of compounding to achieve the magic of the long tail of search. And we've bottled that very process!

Well, I'm getting tired of swinging by websites and posting in comment fields. I don't want to email people cold, because that's spam. And I've already gone to all my friends (the SEO forum community). The next step will be up to the beta testers to spread the word (if they want to reveal the "secret"), and tapping the PR capabilities of Connors Communications where I work. I'm sure we'll have a formal launch after the beta process refines the product a bit. We will have better messaging, press releases, and maybe some media event. Certainly, we'll be tapping Connie's powerful connections, and maybe chatting with Chris Anderson to see what he thinks.

There are a host of others out there in the opinion-setting "technorati" that I'd like to reach. But I'm not going to pester them with email. The snowball is building some mass now, and it is much better and more credible if THEY discover HitTail on their own. As a NY PR firm with some very big accomplishments, Connors has street cred, and when folks like Michael Arrington and Tim O'Reilly start discovering this on their own, all the better. The need to mainstream SEO in an easily packaged, easily understood way fashion for mainstream marketing is so palpable, you can walk on it. And so begins the second phase of the soft-launch and HitTail beta program, where people start finding us. The tiny snowball is just starting to roll.

All This From a PR Firm in NY?

So, with a very open and honest attitude, we've opened the Connors Communications HitTail data to the world. This may be somewhat controversial, especially considering it will let other PR firms snoop on our search hit data… particularly our LONG TAIL data! We must be nuts! We are guessing that people from around the world, when they start discovering HitTail will hear of Connors Communications through the demo, and spread the word! See, sharing our data is going to be part of our own online viral marketing campaign.

Of course, we will use the data as well, and will give wonderful anecdotes about choosing amongst different words. We have a challenge right now in that I'm resetting the data with every Connors login, so people can play around and experiment with moving keywords between tabs. So, I'll either install the code twice, or do some paper record keeping. Either way, the stories abound, and I can start to tell them right away.

A suggestion came in this morning: "public relations campaign for new business". I couldn't imagine anything more spot-on! Yet, we never thought of it specifically, and it's buried 9 pages into Google results. And writing about it couldn't be more natural. In fact, I had to discipline myself to do this post instead of that one. But we had better get on it quickly! Good suggestion. Good choice. Good use of long tail keyword data.

On the OTHER hand, a suggestion was issued near the end of May: "emerging technologies in wood". I read it out loud when demo'ing HitTail to a guest at Connors, and everyone laughed out loud. "What are we doing in wood?" they asked. I didn't even bother investigating. We're not targeting the wood or lumber industries, although I'm quite certain it's full of emerging technology. But it's a good candidate for the nifty "delete" button. And in case you haven't noticed, you can click-and-drag on the delete buttons… another innovation from the Connors team.

Going through the suggestions, you get one insight after another. One of our writers once wrote about black hat SEO techniques, and some determined searcher (wanna-be-black hat?) surfed 27 pages into the Google results to find us on that. While we certainly welcome the readership of black hat SEO's, writing for YOUR long tail of search is intended to be a fairly manual non-automated process. We're priming the creative pump of humans in marketing departments across the world. Yes, black hats are using long tail data in different ways, but we're only interested in how it results in a white hat process that you would be proud to sit down with Matt Cutts or any Google engineer and discuss. That's a real sign of SEO 2.0 methodologies: holistic and non-automated, yet still scientific and effective. That will have to be the subject of a different post.

Another term that we find suggested, "SEO case study," is spot-on, but actually producing SEO case studies poses a problem. Connors has achieved some of the highest goals in SEO: allowing major hotel chain clients to be competitive with the affiliates their own space, helping major online magazines compete with the blogging hordes, helping companies with emerging technologies and thinly dispersed customers capture tons of sales leads. Yet, it is decided with each client that no one talk about their natural search success, for fear of their competitors catching on. It makes sense, no? Do we have public SEO case studies? No. But do we have lots of good information to share with the world that you can get no where else? Yes! In a way, introducing the concept of HitTailing is our overture to the world. So, that ties back to the original concept of sharing Connors data with the world.

Connors Communications is a successful PR firm, having launched Amazon.com, Priceline and others. But we're sometimes considered boutique, taking on very few clients, and providing very personal focus and attention. So, the big PR firms like Edelman or Ogilvy get a lot of attention, a lot of the customers, a lot of the links, and are higher profile in search than Connors. But Connors now comes up on the first page on the term "PR firm" in both Yahoo and MSN. We're on page 2 in Google. We're also in page 7 in Ask, but am confident we'll rise.

"PR firm" is no longer in Connors' long tail. It's now at the head of the demand curve. It wasn't always the case. It was the hit tailing process sustained over time, but less than a year in this case.

And this illustrates another characteristic of choosing terms, and the double meaning of "hit" in our new name, HitTail. By engaging in the HitTailing process, you may zero in on a single, never-before-considered, yet critical term. By doing so, you may just produce a single search hit, which still may have made it worth the entire process, depending on the value of a single customer. In the industry where I developed these methods, a single customer relationship could be worth a quarter million dollars over its life. But you may very well be on your way to producing a bona fide hit... a phrase that starts to travel on its journey UP the tail, and into the most in-demand region of the long tail demand curve. And when that happens, it's like suddenly getting massive distribution of your product, and access to far greater potential customers.

Just paging back and forth in a few pages of the Connors data gives me the chills both about how well we are already doing in some areas, and ideas for improvements. It appears that with a little tweaking, we can pretty much dominate the results for anyone looking for a ny pr firm, or a pr firm in ny. That should be worth something, right? Perhaps there's something to this HitTailing idea as a viable alternative to AdWords after all. I expect we'll roll out like Walmart, developing business and users in the great under populated heartland of the Web, and by the time anyone realizes what's going on, we'll own the HitTail space.

UPDATE: Connors has evolved from traditional PR to high end search engine marketing. Click here to learn more about our transition - http://www.connors.com/seo/letter.html

MyLongTail Name Change Coming

Get ready for a name change. We want this to be as large and mainstream in marketing as AdWords and whatever we're calling Yahoo's product these days. In fact, we are learning our lesson from GoTo.com, which became Overture, which became something we can hardly say smoothly in a sentence. Connors Communications, the company that's developing this site, was GoTo.com's public relations firms in the earliest days, and have had the fortunate opportunity to work with Bill Gross' Idea Lab several times since.

We want what we're creating here to become a common noun. We want it to something you can do (a verb). We want to be something you can visit, something you can be deeply engaged in. And as appropriate as MyLongTail was for a cool Web 2.0 beta, we want something with solid, long-term staying power. We want to be Kleenex. We want to be BandAids.

Even better, we want to be as fundamental to business as the concept of Retail and Wholesale. When you think about it, this method of marketing is the exact opposite of Retailing, in which shelf space is limited. Using the techniques we're teaching you here, your so-called shelf space is unlimited! Infinite! We don't have to carry just the top 20 hits. The long tail supports unlimited hits. There's plenty of room for hits... in... the... tail.

HitTail! Or Hittail (help us decide).

If you can't reach your market through Retail, try Hittail. That's right. What we're all doing here is Hittailing. We're all Hittailers. We hope it will be a hit. Hits in search lead to media coverage (a.k.a. hits), which lead to hit products. Which hit do we mean? You decide.

Anyway, we think we now have something that will easily worm its way into the lexicon of business, and live very nicely side by side with words like AdWords, Overture, DoubleClick, and the rest of the pioneers in this field. This is the magic bullet we think it will take to move the difficult and ever-more-competitive, but never-more-necessary field of search engine optimization (like calling steak burnt, dead cow flesh) into the mainstream. It's time to sell the sizzle. So, sign up for Hittail, install the code, let it run for a few days, and come back to see Your Hit Tail... plus all the wonderful writing suggestions that will be issued to you in that time.

Don't worry. None of the existing code will change. But don't be surprised over the next few days as the logo and the URL for the main website does change. Hope you like it, and all feedback is welcome.

Be an SEO Entrepreneur

So, you want to be an SEO Entrepreneur? Thankfully, there is growing acceptance of what is considered as "best practices" for search engine optimization. And even more fortunately, they are closely related to Web usability standards. It can be learned. It can be taught. It can be the foundation of entrepreneurial business. The market is of nearly unlimited size (everyone with a website), and of unlimited levels of business Ma & Pa companies to Fortune 500's.

But avoid the pitfall of becoming a pay-per-click campaign management company by accident. The process goes like this: you have to do a certain number of technical things before a website can start producing decent natural search hits (free hits). Refer to the ducks under the SEO best practices link. If each of these projects is not carried out in full, the overall effect of SEO is significantly diminished. Any one factor CAN bring up and carry the others, but you have to have that factor way out of proportion to the others. Do a Google search for Google patent for an example. You will find the top result violates cardinal rule #1 of SEO: search/human-friendly URLs. But that silly patent is so linked-to, that it overcomes all other factors. But small-time sites generally don't have any factors that are so disproportionately powerful as that page. So small-time businesses have to get all their ducks in a row and carry each and every one of those projects.

When the projects aren't all carried out, you may end up doing something that over-stimulates the search engines in the short-term, but won't last. What happens is everyone gets excited by seeing a rising trend in the search hits, but go into panic as the results wear off. In a desperate move to keep levels up, you look at what emergency measures you can take, and realize mounting a pay-per-click campaign could do the trick. So semi-effective SEO naturally morphs into ongoing SEM. But what an SEO entrepreneur really needs to consider is how you can forcibly get your clients to line up and shoot every duck, and step in with a natural optimization campaign to keep the tension in the machinery after the effect of the short term over-stimulation wears off.

Huh, what was that gobbeldygook? Simply put: fix the site, then start adding content.

But fixing the site can be a monumental task--something an outsourced firm is in no position to do. In many cases, you have to be expert enough in the systems your clients are using to teach them how to do it. You have to have enough technical chops to talk tech with the IT folks, without them calling you a marketing know-nothing the moment you leave the room. You have to respect the concerns and motivations of all parties involved. You have to balance SEO recommendations with aesthetic, artistic and usability concerns. And you have to get everyone to want the same thing you do. Fixing a site is often more political than technical!

These difficulties are why we sometimes just sigh and ask for a directory on your site for us to FTP files into. You can then step in with Blogger or some other blogging software and just put files into place that easily satisfy all the "ducks" from best SEO practices. You don't get the same short-term exciting pop in traffic as a fixed site. But it's sometimes the only viable course.

You can set up team-blogging, and let other people add their voice. But most important of all, you can guide them on a corporate blogging strategy (or website content expansion strategy) that keeps the "stimulation" constant.

Most people who blog, have this constant publishing mindset. The more you publish, the more your audience gets in the habit of reading you, the more pings go out over blog news services, the more the search engines notice life in your site, the more overall traffic you get. But most online PR people and SEO professionals stop their strategy there, without realizing that the strategic choice of topics has as much to do with bringing in the correct qualified traffic as the act of blogging (or site expansion) itself.

So, if you're an entrepreneur considering SEO as your new line of business, consider this: you won't be anything more than a media buyer in the keyword bidding rat race if you don't watch out for that pitfall. Being a "pure" SEO is remarkably difficult, because there is no formulatized strategy for SEO. Once there is, the formula stops working because the engines adapt and change to stop spamming. MyLongTail is about the only formulatized approach to SEO that can be brought with equal effectiveness to any website, any search engine, and produce the type of stable long-lived results you need for happy, long-term customers.

Advantages of SEO

Explaining the advantages of SEO is much easier than explaining what SEO is. It's a classic case of selling the sizzle, because you'd have to call the steak "burnt, dead cow flesh". That's about how good of a name "search engine optimization" is for what we do. It's burnt, dead cow flesh. And if you'll buy that, I have come cold, raw fish for you as well. Sushi really is a good Web 2.0 name, isn't it?

So, SEO needs a new name, that's clear enough. But what ARE the advantages of SEO, particularly over pay-per-click campaigns and banner ads? First of all, it generates traffic for free. You don't have to pay. A site that is well optimized, just spontaneously generates new traffic, working for you like a tireless 24/7 telemarketer who you don't have to pay. Who wouldn't want that advantage? In fact, it is absolutely critical for a number of business models that rely on selling advertising space on the site. The model goes: first you build traffic, then you sell the traffic to someone else.

But the mindless pursuit of traffic is for the 90's. We're in the 2000's, baby, and it's all about conversions. And conversions are about having what the visitor came for, being able to communicate it clearly, and having a mechanism where they can either buy or open an ongoing relationship with you for products or services with longer selling cylcles (more on Solution Selling in a future post). But SEO really isn't about all of that. It's about the original search hit, and all subsequent corralling back of the same person through their future searches. And that gets to the second huge advantage of SEO: self-qualifying prospects with higher-than-usual trust.

That's right! Because they searched on a term related to you, it's a much warmer sales lead than a telemarketing-style cold call. Who knows how much has changed between the creation of the call list, and the phone-call being made. With search, they're interested, they query, they're at your site. If it's an impulse-buy item, you could close the sale on that very page! But even if it's a long sales-cycle product, you've just been provided an introduction to a sales prospect that is worth its weight in gold. You see, they are pre-qualified. They qualified THEMSELVES through the search process.

Of course, that's not always the case, or you would have tons more sale. Not everyone is FULLY qualified. But no worries: you didn't pay for the hit! This similarly makes you immune to growing problem of click-fraud, the practice of depleting competitors' marketing funds by repeatedly clicking on their paid ads.

Once your site is basically well optimized according to SEO best practices, it also becomes very low maintenance. It doesn't take a lot of work to keep your existing flow of prospects coming in. This lets you focus on new areas for expansion. Engaging in the MyLongTail process is very similar to attempts to expand into new markets. You may have a market for your product that you did not know about. Well, you can experiment with it through PPC, adding hundreds more potential keywords to your campaign and all the headache and grief that goes with it. Or you can make a few posts on topics suggested to you by MyLongTail, and float them like test balloons. If they have potential, then hits will occur, and more suggestions will flow in through MyLongTail. You made much less of an up-front investment in exploring new markets, and when you are successful, it naturally prompts you onto more success... all for free.

I could probably write about the advantages of SEO all day. I hardly touched on the fact that people can differentiate between paid ads and "natural" results. And just as with product mentions in magazine articles and TV programs that are viewed as editorials, media savvy consumers' defenses are at their lowest. They tend to trust things that are not thought to be advertisements. Add to this that natural search results still take up a majority of the screen, and that maintaining such a balance is required for the search destination sites to maintain trust and the integrity of their brands.

All-told, there are many reasons 2006 is shaping up to be the year of natural search optimization. If only there were a tool to make it accessible to the average marketing departments inside companies across the world... Hmmmmmmm

The 80/20 Rule Vs. The Long Tail

I find it funny that I'm making a website based on the long tail principle, when I've spent so much of my life almost religiously abiding by the 80/20 rule--often debating it with perfectionist friends. For the uninitiated, the 80/20 rule is applied far and wide in life, generally stating that the first 20% of most efforts results in 80% of the benefit. In the demand curve, so often discussed with the long tail, 20% of available products accounts for 80% of total sales, so when warehouse and shelf space is limited, you only want to carry the top 20%.

Well, the long tail is touted as the new shape of business, stating that there is actually seemingly infinite demand for product after that cut-off, and it can amount to a tidy sum of business indeed for those who can reach it. So while the long tail concept is making a fool out of one of my core beliefs, I am also being vindicated by the awesome popularity of agile programming frameworks, which are the living embodiment of the 80/20 rule in software. The "convention over config files" mantra is merely a euphemism "get it right for 80% of your needs/users with the first 20% of the work"... and I like it!

Bottom line: my making a few concessions, a Ruby on Rails programmer can implement circles around a C++ or Java developer, being on the third working spiral iteration, actually meeting customer needs in the real world by the time a product spec is just being completed on the other track. So, while the long tail may rule business, the 80/20 rule still has a home in rapid software development.

On an aside, I like the 80/20 rule so much that I wrote a poem for it...

The 80/20 friggn' rule --
Gotta' use it. It's a tool
Reducing clutter that we pack
Into our lives to hold us back.

When goals elude and time flies past
And with each step, you're still in last
Consider how you lost your aim
You'll find recursive tasks to blame.

With each thing you set to do,
A hundred more come fly at you.
Until at last, you quite forget
The goal for which you had first set.

The 80/20 Rule just asks
That you should start to plan your tasks
So when you're only one-fifth done
You could have stopped and still have won.

Corporate Blogging Strategy

It sometimes seems that one of the most deliberated over points in business is whether and how to blog. Isn't blogging really self-indulgent nonsense for a company, which is more likely to get the blogging employees in trouble than it is to improve business? If goes through official channels, doesn't it lose its sincerity, become sanitized, and slow down the rate at which blog posts occur, and therefore its effectiveness?

Yes to all of the above! A successful corporate blogging strategy has to do with solving all of the above issues. Sometimes, you go the sanitized and editorial route if you have the resources, and can still make an excellent user experience and keep up the posting rate. Not all companies have this luxury. If the company chooses to pick a company evangelist, and give him or her to blog away with unfiltered sincerity, the company must be wise in choosing the person, and comfortable with any liabilities it may incur. But the gritty feel could bay back in spades from a public relations standpoint. Conversely, shallow attempts at manipulation through blogging are often called out as such and end up with angry customers blogging their mind on THEIR OWN blog site. This happened with Juicy Fruit, but I cannot help but think it STILL ended up selling more Juicy Fruit.

Joining the online discussion is always risky. Merely by virtue of being out there, you might tap into long latent sentiments that people were just dying to have a forum for. You can turn off comments, but then you might drive them to post where you cannot control. And if they're search optimized on some relevant word... sheesh! But more and more, companies are finding they must take that risk, because by not engaging your customer base, someone else will. And the best way to join the discussion is in a blog YOU CONTROL.

That's right. Often times, a corporate blogging strategy is thought of as traveling around to all these far-flung discussions and posting comments there--often time posing as someone NOT from the company. It's dishonest, not worth the risk, and frankly not as effective as running your own blog and hosting it directly on your corporate website. Why?

Because of MyLongTail, of course. You want your blog to be influential. You want your blog to be the center of the discussion. You want to be building up the overall effectiveness of your own site, and not someone else's. You want control over published content related to your company, and not for someone else to have it. You want to be building up a permanent company asset. And you want a vehicle that can be used to defend your brand as forcefully and nimbly as even the most disgruntled blogger.

That's right. The same "long tail" effect that makes it so easy for you to capture a mass of small hits on obscure but important little terms, makes it so easy for a disgruntled customer to have an disproportionately loud voice. In the past, one angry customer could be relied on to tell five others. Today, one angry customer has the ability to tell many thousands... basically, anyone who happens to search on that precise same topic.

But it can work exactly in reverse, and a product can get the reputation for being the best and only choice in some niche space. Recently, I needed to podcast (technically, PowerPoint/Camtasia/Flash-cast), so I wanted to buy a decent microphone. A bit of searching right now will turn up one, and only one choice: the Samson C01U professional condenser USB mic. Go ahead, do the test. Search on podcasting microphone. Sure, Derrick Story, an O'Reilly writer published the first article. But the point is that this is a perfect example of a long tail keyword. A market exists. It's globally dispersed. The product is non-mainstream, and will HAVE to be shipped (unless you live walking distance from B&H A/V like me).

But I'm here to tell you that "the ultimate podcasting mic" is only the beginning of the infinite variations that will attract customers and drive sales. How may "ultimate podcasting microphones" are metaphorically in your business? I would guess lots. I would also guess that your marketing department has no idea what they are, and that brainstorming and tools like WordTracker are the only readily flowing source of possibilities.

What if the long tail keyword suggestions just came flowing in? What if they had a special advantage in that you knew they would work if used? What if you knew some tiny amount of traffic had already been produced on those terms when you didn't even try? What if it provided a steady enough flow of ideas that you could keep a person in marketing blogging away full-time, and in a year or two you would be free from your CrackWords addiction, while your competitors were not? What if doing so had the side effect of defending your brand by keeping disgruntled posters from ever getting a toe-hold in search?

I would say that was the foundation of a pretty effective corporate blogging strategy.

AdWords Alternative

I often speak of Google AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing when discussing MyLongTail. Why is that? It's because both of those were difficult concepts to grasp as well in their early days, yet today are a 7 billion dollar industry and growing. It was the Google IPO and the economics of the thing that make them so well known. But there's another reason that goes something like this.

Mr. Executive one day decides to search on his company or product name in Google. Of course they'll come up tops, he figures, because it is his company or product name, after all. Being missing from the first few pages of results, he calls down to marketing to find out whose job it was to make sure they were found there. Marketing goes into a panic, does some quick research, and realizes that the only quick fix is to pay Google or Yahoo. Everything they find about how to get into the most desirable part of the results is strange, indirect, and doesn't follow the traditional model of a media buy. Keyword bidding doesn't quite follow the traditional model either, but at least it's a clear deal. This other thing, unfortunately named "search engine optimization" does not!

There's no clear deal in getting into natural search. Some 200 factors may go into determining a page's position. Some 20 are really understood by a talented search optimizer. And some 5 are really having the most effect. And that's just Google. The rules are subtly different for each engine, and the rules are a moving target. What chance does a mere marketing department have? So, they investigate outsourcing to an SEO firm, and discover quotes that range from $2,500 to $250,000 to optimize a whole site with no actual guarantees. There has got to be a better way!

And indeed there is. But it won't rocket Mr. Executive's site to the first page of search on his company or product name overnight. But at least it's a good start, and can be performed by any marketing department in any company in the world. It is the MyLongTail method, and it simply identifies where you at least have SOME results, and teaches you how to seize on that to secure the next little win. A mass of little wins will add up into a whole lot of traffic.

But will the average marketing department bite? Probably not. It's a gradual build. BUT...

If the marketing department is tasked with conceiving the corporate blogging strategy, then MyLongTail has a chance because it answers the eternal question: what to write about. Yes, the company will have some ideas for the first few posts. It may become the company newsletter to the customers. The CEO might have a post or two to make. But beyond that, blogs can run out of steam. MyLongTail is the perfect way to line up an editorial calendar of super-charged content that is sure to speak to your audience AND drive traffic.

So MyLongTail kills three birds with one stone. First, it offers a healthier long-term alternative to keyword bidding frenzy with AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing. Second, it does this in an extremely simple fashion that any marketing department can perform once they "get it". And last, it provides subject-matter to fuel and drive your corporate blogging strategy.

What is SEO 2.0?

It's recognizing that someone found your site by searching on the phrase "What is SEO 2.0" and finding your site buried in the search results, even though you didn't specifically optimize for it. In recognizing this fact, SEO 2.0 would have you create a new blog post or new website content that answered this question, just as surely as if a website user had sent you an email with the very same question.

You see, communication is going on all the time between your web users and you. Most website administrators and marketers are just deaf to the sound. Why? Because picking out important events that occur on your website is nigh impossible given the current tools. Huh?

Well, someone found this site by searching on the above-mentioned phrase. As producing just one hit ever on my site, would this show up in my analytics reports? Maybe. Would my attention be called to it? Probably not. Would it be cut off because it wasn't one of the top search it producers, and analytics can't show you everything? Probably. Could analytics software recognize that it was the first time that this term EVER led to your site, and that it has something important to do with your main message, and that you should probably jump on this opportunity to answer... but to answer in the most efficient way possible... in a blog, so that all future searchers with the same question FIND YOU?!?! No, analytics software won't do that.

That is the heart of SEO 2.0. It's the missing link. It's the keys to the kingdom. It's the next big thing and the killer app. It gives SEO as a field and a profession as much a chance to mainstream as AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing has over the past few years. All the mechanics of SEO will be turned into best practices, which are not much different than Web usability best practices.

Pathetic pedantic pursuit of the top-10 factors that influence Google will be abandoned, realizing it's a moving target, and there is a much more holistic, yet STILL scientific approach--an approach whose effectiveness spans across engines and across time--an approach that you would not be embarrassed to sit down and discuss with a Google Engineer. For you see, the MyLongTail approach has a critical DISCONNECT in that last tab called To Do. MyLongTail will not do your writing for you. It will not plagiarize. It will not auto-generate doorway pages. All it will do is humbly suggest a topic or term that you may wish to use in your next post, because it knows that if you do, you will be increasing your odds of answering every person on earth who has that same pressing question on their mind... in this case: What is SEO 2.0.

Welcome to MyLongTail.

No Keyword Suggestions Coming In?

So, it's pretty clear that even after you confirm that the code is installed properly, some people still have no suggestions coming in. Well, this has to do with making sure your site meets some base-line level of search-friendliness. This is why I recommend blogging software, especially for someone just getting started with the MyLongTail process. There are three issues here to consider: being visible at all, what content you already have, and priming the pump with new content.

Being visible at all, you should know by whether anything is coming in under the Search Hits tab. If you are sure the tracking code is installed properly, and still nothing comes in under Search Hits, your site may be just too new to be producing visits through search yet, and you should consider some alternative promotional activities, or your site is completely invisible to search, and you should consider different website publishing software, or perhaps (and this is PERHAPS) a different domain.

Once you're visible at all, the next thing is how much content you already have on your site that is working well for you. If you do have a lot, then MyLongTail should start streaming in the suggestions right away--because it is about incremental improvements over hits you are already creating. There is a catching-up period during which time A LOT of suggestions may pour in all of the sudden. After that, they will slow down considerably. This may be disappointing, but is exactly where the MyLongTail becomes so strategic, and will save you lots of time optimizing in the long run. More on that in a later post!

Finally, if you have SOME content on your site that is producing A LITTLE bit, the suggestion stream may also be slow. There may be no suggestions at all. If this is your situation, and you still want to use the MyLongTail method, you've got to prime the pump with content. You have to brainstorm topics you WOULD like to come up on, have something useful to say about them, and start blogging. Get 20 or 30 posts out there over the course of the month. Once the Google/Yahoo/MSN indexing cycle goes by, you will have a much greater chance of producing some hits... particularly the obscure ones that live in the long tail.

But don't stop blogging. You should get into the grove and build momentum. Aside from USING MyLongTail suggestions, this is where some of the greatest advantage in SEO comes from. For a multitude of reasons, not all companies can talk freely and often on their website. The nimbleness and agility that a single individual has is often one of the biggest advantages of the David vs. Goliath in SEO. Everything from politics to IT issues can keep the necessary work from being done in large corporations. So use that though to keep your spirits up during the keyword suggestion dry season.

Double-checking that MyLongTail is working properly

If you suspect that something is wrong, you can double check that everything is working properly finding a page on your site that has some relatively unique text on it, which you know has produced search hits in the past. You homepage is always a good choice. Copy some text, then shut all your web browsers.

That's right! Shut every web browser. The reason is that you have to ensure that you're starting a new session. This is part of the MyLongTail magic that I may explain in more detail later.

Now open a new browser, visit the engine that the page CAN be found in (usually, Google), and paste that phrase into the search box. Be careful of line-breaks. Put double-quotes around the phrase. And submit the search.

You should see your page come up in the search results. If you don't, you may not be sufficiently along in SEO to benefit from MyLongTail. You need to at least be findable! If you see your page, click it. Now, log into MyLongTail, and you should see that hit as (probably) the top item under the Search Hits tab. This will confirm that everything is working.

Trouble-shooting the tracking code

First, the basic trouble-shooting is to make sure the code is installed properly. Surf to any of your pages and view source. Somewhere between the body tags, you should see the tracking code, looking something like this...

<script src="http://[yournumber].mylongtail.com/mlt.js" type="text/javascript">

If you don't, then there is no data being collected. I saw at least one case where the it appeared like this...

&lt;script src=&quot;http://[yournumber].mylongtail.com/mlt.js&quot; type=&quot;text/javascript&quot;&gt;

That's called "encoding" and probably happened from copying and pasting into FrontPage. You have to fix the code, if that's the case by replacing " with double-quotes, and the < with the less-than symbol, and the > with the greater-than symbol. I'll fix this by adding a click-to-copy button that doesn't pick up any HTML formatting.

Another issue of making sure the code is installed properly is making sure the code is installed on every page of your site. If you use a template system, then it should be. But it's worth double-checking. Some people such as myself mix blogging in with the main site, so I have to make sure the code is installed in both my Blogger template and my main site template. But be sure to not insert it twice!

A Long Tail Keyword - How Valuable Is It Anyway?

So how valuable is a long tail keyword, anyway? What we're talking about is picking a topic that you know will produce better for you, if only you addressed it head-on. In this case, it's the notion of a long tail keyword. To answer that, let's first look at the keyword traffic distribution on your site. How much traffic are your top-10 producing keywords accounting for? Well, for the three sites I'm personally monitoring with MyLongTail: the Connors site, my personal Mike-Levin.com site, and the MyLongTail site itself, the distribution looks like this...

MyLongTail.com
Top ten keywords are 53.8 % of all your search traffic.
Long tail keywords are 46.2 % of all your search traffic.

Connors.com
Top ten keywords are 12.2 % of all your search traffic.
Long tail keywords are 87.8 % of all your search traffic.

Mike-Levin.com
Top ten keywords are 12.6 % of all your search traffic.
Long tail keywords are 87.4 % of all your search traffic

So, for Mike-Levin.com and Connors.com, two very long-established sites, it's almost identical. For the relative newcomer, MyLongTail.com, which was established only this January, it's almost a 50/50 split. Using the "Top-10" producing keywords is somewhat arbitrary. It's just that it serves as a perfect benchmark and basis for comparing multiple sites.

I don't have enough data yet to know these splits are representative of new sites versus old sites. But I'm going to guess, yes. It only makes sense. A brand new site can and will only be able to get a toe-hold, by definition on fewer keywords. On the first hit, the distribution will actually look 100% vs. 0%. Then, it will journey on its way to some more healthy split between top-producing keywords, and the long tail.

Is it worth putting a whole new page on your website or blog just to pick up the one or two hits per month that may occur on that topic? Is it worth building the long tail? Where does the rule of diminishing returns kick in, and say "Stop, already! Will adding that one more really make a difference? Can't I stop already, and call the site done?"

The answer is no, never... not if you want to be competitive.

That's right, never. So long as you're adding valuable content to your readers, such as this post, then you know you're going to proportionally increase your natural search hit traffic by that one little bit. Would Amazon.com say no to carrying one more book in their inventory, because they don't think that one sale would make a difference? No, it's contrary to their business model and mission! Similarly, a truly competitive natural long tail keyword optimizer would never say no to a search hit of a potentially qualified customer that they know, almost for certain, that they will get by adding that one more page.

This is a different business than the outsourcing of keyword combination derivation that's done for PPC. For those not familiar, that's where you brainstorm keywords, used suggestion tools to get even more keywords, then hire low-cost labor to do every combination possible for plugging into pay-per-click campaigns.

The MyLongTail method in comparison has strategy, science and style behind it. It's fun. It's the next great game in the evolving field of marketing. Writing for SEO should be nothing like that Wall Street Journal writer's experience, encountering slime-ball plagiarizers ripping off copy from the W.H.O. Instead, every one of your words should be original and from your heart. It's like "Whose Line Is It Anyway" but for marketers. The subject matter can be ludicrous, but the skits are always funny.

Well, the MyLongTail suggested topics can be all over the place, but you the marketer get to choose only the ones that make sense for your audience. Then, you play "whose line is it anyway" to inform, educate or entertain, and compete for the finite amount of daily traffic that occurs each day on that long tail keyword...

...or else, your competition will.

The Next Big Thing: A Killer App for SEO

There is a certain chicken-or-the-egg dilemma in the MyLongTail approach to keyword marketing. Suggestions will only be issued if SOME search is already leading to your site. It expands upon content that already appears on your site by seizing upon happy accidents. This post poses to solve the chicken-and-egg dilemma in a cleverly self-referential fashion.

We've all sat and brainstormed keywords before, and know that there's no way to outguess the collective guessing power of the world. Those of us who look closely at our log files are also often surprised by the infinite variety of terms that actually do lead to our site, which could very well convert into customers, but for which we could have never anticipated.

Finding and targeting all these keywords in doorway pages is enormously spammy. And why target them, if they're already leading to your site? The point is to ferret out new and lucrative terms--only those terms that produced one or two happenstance hits, and are buried so deep that no one else is likely to match the original searcher's determination. These keywords are gold. And the list of such words is much shorter than you might imagine. They come in a few a day, and maybe only one of these is a truly appropriate writing topic... coincidentally just about the rate you might like to blog!

But that doesn't solve an "under-stimulating" site, where the suggestions stop coming in. For those, you have to float a few test balloon posts based on your brainstorming. Get into the mind of the searcher. What MIGHT they be searching on? Then, make a post regarding your thoughts on that topics, and name it with GOOD keywords. I was tempted to name this post "floating test balloons" or perhaps "the happy keyword accident". But that's not in the head of MyLongTail potential users. The SEO-Scoop site said it best: the killer SEO app of the year. And that did indeed rocket me to the first page of Google on the phrase killer seo app.

But that's still not in the mind of MyLongTail potential users, nor the slightly broader audience I wish to reach. They're all looking for the next killer app... or perhaps the next big thing. Well, Blogger supports fairly long titles, and those are perfectly valid headline ideas for this article, so I will use both. This article is not intended to get a sniper-like direct hit on any search terms. It's intended to stimulate the suggestion tool! Who knows what two words will combine in a happy accident and reveal to me exactly the right concept to bring in MyLongTail users.

It sounds like a post on subject-matter toical focus using the gun analogy is coming soon. When you make a page to get search hits, which do you go for? The sniper approach on a particular phrase and exact arrangement of words, or the shotgun approach, where you try to pick up as many as possible hits with one shot?

Made it into The Museum of Modern Betas

I'm absolutely thrilled to say that MyLongTail made it into the Museum of Modern Betas within days of us putting the descriptive PowerPoint/Flash demo out there. I think that was the critical piece in hitting home what this site is all about. It was recently described as too obtuse, which I wholeheartedly agree with. It's a big reason why this wasn't even viable until there was a concept with which to "frame" the description, and timed with the pay-per-click honeymoon being over. While I expect the AdWord and Yahoo Search Marketing to continue to rise, I also believe that the average marketing department will start looking for alternatives, encounter the concept of SEO, be disheartened about how expensive, difficult and rife with conflicting information it can be, and look for an alternative even to that. Indeed, MyLongTail is positioned in the path of the Tornado, and few sites have stated it so eqloquently as Saurier Duval at the Museum of Modern Betas.

MyLongTail and The Long Tail - How They Relate

How does MyLongTail relate to Wired Magazine Editor-in-Chief Chris Anderson's concept of The Long Tail? It connects on two levels. First, when you graph how much traffic is generated to your site by what keywords, you inevitably end up with the characteristic long tail graph. A very few keywords are responsible for a tremendous amount of your traffic. But when you look at the rest of your keywords, you will notice two things. First, they almost never stop. The long tail of natural search for a site that has a good deal of content is very long indeed. The potential happenstance word combinations (your inventory) is for all intents and purposes, unlimited. And the determination of searchers in stepping through and clicking search results (the demand) is similarly infinite. And very few tools attempt to track your keywords in this way, keeping a permanent record of your keyword click-through (transaction history). MyLongTail does precisely that. It is possible to pinpoint the first time a particular word combination EVER led to your site. This is the data that gets mined for superior natural search optimization--but it is the graph that you get when you plot keywords vs. hits that invokes Chris' concept.

The second way MyLongTail connects to the concept is exactly to how Google's AdWords campaign does. The majority of Google's advertisers are smaller businesses selling products that are not necessarily carried in inventory in retail outlets. They're not on the shelves of Walmart. For people with product that would be difficult to distribute through traditional channels, AdWords makes better sense. You can reach your market no matter how geographically dispersed. Similarly, MyLongTail endeavors to have the same marketing reach, but without necessarily having to mount a massive paid keyword campaign. Because shelf-space is limited, traditional retail only likes to carry products that will sell frequently enough to pay for the space. It's often thought of as the 80/20 rule: 20% of the product accounts for 80% of sales. So, it makes sense to only carry the 20%. The rest, and indeed the majority, of products are simply unavailable. The Internet, with sites like Amazon and iTunes changed that, making it possible to carry unlimited number of products, because of unlimited amount of shelf space. And that's the second way MyLongTail relates to the concept. Anyone with a product or service to sell, who has a difficult time reaching their market with traditional distribution channels would be wise to look at growing their long tail of natural search in order to reach their market. You are growing your long tail of natural search to sell your long tail products to your customer-base that is dispersed thinly across the world.

This is possible because no matter how competitive things look in the search results, competitiveness slopes off dramatically as you put the third, fourth or fifth word into search. In fact, it gets outright simple to be on the first page of Google results when your term is sufficiently obscure. Professional SEO's sometimes for the sake of experimentation make up a word to see how long it takes to appear in the search engines, and what position it will achieve. It's a sort of benchmarking game. The first famous SEO contest used such a made-up word: Nigritude Ultramarine. I did a test last year with the term Googlesteading. So, that's great for made up words, but you can confirm the effect with long phrases by going to just about any website, picking up a long phrase, and searching for it in double-quotes. It becomes very easy to build a long tail of such terms and phrases on your website that don't need to be paid for with a PPC campaign. But its only worth putting that sort of work in if you have evidence that those phrases will produce for you. And that's what MyLongTail does: provides evidence of what terms are most likely to produce for you, so you can intelligently grow your long tail into areas where demand actually exists.

SEO: a Sub-Category of Public Relations?

The biggest thing going against the burgeoning field of search engine optimization (SEO) is the name itself. In the very earliest days of the debate, I weighed in on the side of SEO, making the uncommon argument that we are indeed optimizing the search engines themselves. The thread is buried somewhere in the archives of Search Engine Forums (before WMW and SEW ruled the world), but the mainstream argument went that SEO was technically inaccurate and didn't cover the broad expanse of what we actually did.

I countered that SEO was accurate, and did indeed cover it... that is of course until PPC came along, first from GoTo.com, then eventually Google. So it's ironic now that I end up working for the PR Firm that represented GoTo.com in those early days, in the days of fierce church & state debates over advertisements in search results. And my thinking remains 100% consistent. We are indeed optimizing the search engines, and specifically the natural or free results in those search engines, because everything else is advertising. Only influencing the mainstream editorial results lands in the domain and realm of PR. Yes, a PR firm can consult strategically on what keywords you should buy in a PPC campaign, but don't expect a PR firm to deliver maximum value by managing paid keyword campaigns. Instead, let them focus on optimizing natural results, and getting "hits" just as they would in mainstream media, like newspapers, magazines and TV.

So, blogging wasn't enough, and the PR industry is planting its flag in SEO, huh? No, only the PR firms who have the technical chops and big picture to do so. Even SEM firms who allegedly offer SEO services often only walk clients through enough of the process to do a one-time stimulation of the engines resulting in a temporary spike in hits, only to wane throwing everyone into a tizzy and a mad dash to pay for more keywords in a PPC campaign. Conversely, PR firms often only focus on "optimizing" press releases.

Neither approach is the true PR+SEO way. A competent PR firm delivering SEO services will not only walk you through getting your site up to speed technically, but will educate the client on how to keep the tension in the machinery so that natural search hits do not wane, and they become a permanent addition to the company's assets. That is to say, blog regularly and lead the discussion in your own industry with your own voice so that you are growing the size and search-influence of your main website. Blogging and SEO are interconnected. And a corporate blogging strategy has a lot more to it than espousing onto the Internet. Topics must be chosen with care to align to the company's goals, and topics known to lead to new customers.

So, what to call this next evolution of both the fields of public relations and search engine optimization? Calling it SEO is like calling sushi "cold dead fish". We can do better! I just don't know what that is yet. I've often considered just going with "public relations", because search is just another vehicle for reaching the public. And therefore SEO is just a facet of public relations, and all the SEOers of the world are just working in a marketing sub-field of public relations. That never seems to sit well with SEO pros. Of course neither does it when I tell public relations people they're just in a sub-field of marketing.

Ah, the super-umbrella of marketing, and how that relates to sales and the rest of the business! Sounds like a topic for a future post.

Some Beta Tester Quotes

I'll use this blog post to track the quotes as they come in. By far, the most generous and hopeful is from Donna D. Fontenot of SEO-Scoop.com who said "Just started using this brand spanking new SEO tool called MyLongTail and I am already addicted to it. [...] This could be the killer SEO app of the year!" I encourage you to visit her site for the rest of the quote.

Mark Wilson of Semantic Thoughts has this to say: "Now there is a site to help you build a long tail! [...] They have some very interesting graphics to explain what they do (explaining concepts like this is not easy to do)."

Duane Forrester, and Insider from Search Engine Forums, has this to say: "After only a few hours of this thing tracking data, here's what I think: 1 - it works - too many tools you try are busted out of the gate and the guy keeps saying, 'Sorry about that - try it now...' This one works as explained. 2 - It makes me feel..........excited! [...] OK, now, my overall impression is this could very well become a useful too for me."

And of the PowerPoint/Flash presentation I put together with the trial version of the awesome Camtasia product from TechSmith, here is what a respected ex-boss and serial entrepreneur had to say: "It is a GREAT concept/idea and the presentation is probably one of (if not THE!) best I have seen. VERY clear and informative...!!"

The Tracking GIF Performance Question

Ok, so the next common beta tester question is that of performance. Tracking gifs have been known to slow down page-loads. Will MyLongTail as well?

Of course, we plan for this to never occur. Our ability to expand our servers will rely greatly on how well this things takes off. If I see hundreds of registrations to start to pour in, we are going to be able to quickly dedicate new servers to the cause and ensure slowdown never occurs.

From a technical standpoint, we have taken many precautions to make sure we can continue to operate at with extremely fast performance. I don't want to give too much away because it is part of our secret sauce, suffice to say because we are so focused on one little feature, tracking for SEO, we have to do much less than other sites who serve tracking GIFs. We also have the ability to specifically distribute the traffic amongst multiple servers according to load.

One of the beautiful characteristics of MyLongTail that makes it work so well is that the sites who need it most have the lowest traffic. Sure, we'll attract (and already have) some of the most hyper-competitive SEOs and affiliate marketers who are trying out the latest killer app for SEO, but I expect that over time, the vast majority of users will be members of small or medium size company's marketing departments who are looking for intelligent alternatives or ways to enhance their paid keyword campaigns.

So, the bottom line is that the entire system is rigged to maintain low-stress/low-volume on our equipment, coupled with the ability to rapidly distribute the workload as it achieves massive success.

Starting The Privacy Policy

I clearly have to write the privacy statement as one of the first beta-testing issues. It comes up over and over. I have to research the topic and hand it over to my bosses to hammer out, but I'm going to put the spirit of the thing here so that all you beta testers feel comfortable.

We use the same technology as popular analytics software in order to have access to the page-visit information from your site. Specifically, we use a tracking gif graphic just like Google Analytics (previously Urchin), and certain versions of WebTrends. It essentially gives us access to your log files, and this brings up both privacy and performance questions. I'll answer the privacy question here, and the performance question in another post.

We will not violate the privacy of MyLongTail users. The data will not be shared with other companies or sold or provided in any way. MyLongTail will not be a success if we violate our users' privacy. And to put a fine point on it, Google the company that's developing it: Connors Communications. It's the PR firm that launched Amazon.com and Priceline. It simply could never do something bad from a public relations standpoint as sharing data. We consider ourselves as having the same confidential relationship with you as we would any public relations client. We hope that the relationship we're starting with you through MyLongTail will encourage you to approach us to discuss your public relations needs, or refer associates to us that are looking for a PR firm that really "gets it".

So, your privacy is important to us, and I will be using the spirit of what's expressed in this post as the starting point for an official privacy policy.

Using Blogger for SEO

This is not going to be an exhaustive comparison of the different blogging software packages out there. Instead, it's going to be an explanation of why just using Blogger is the recommended choice for someone getting started with the MyLongTail process. It's true that WordPress and Movable Type are probably better for SEO if you are technical and control your own servers. But if you're a member of a marketing department, have an IT department to work with, or use off-site hosting and don't have access to the IT folks, or are just pressed for time, then Blogger is the path of least resistance, and search-optimized well enough to let the MyLongTail process be effective.

The key differences between Blogger and other systems is that Blogger will FTP the resulting files into any location you wish, and the blog therefore can reside in a subdirectory of your main site. This is important, because the snowball effect of site growth is best performed on just one domain. If your content is good, people will be linking to you organically--one of the biggest accomplishments of a successful MyLongTail campaign!

What Blogger is missing for SEO is previous/next arrows that put the titles in the anchor-text of the arrows. This is one of the single most influential things you can do to for SEO when stringing together a sequence of pages is your preferred user experience. With blogging, it's perfect, because you're just reading a journal with a chronological reading order. Blogger forgoes this device, and instead opts for "previous 10" posts. This is OK for SEO, because the per-page dilution is offset by the fact that every page does it, therefore rendering Blogger as just as influential in search as Movable Type or WordPress.

A few alterations need to be done to the Blogger template, and I'll just skim over them here until I have time to elaborate. First-off, the link leading to the "permalink" page of the post needs the words from the title in the link. Most default templates put the time-of-posting in the link--an inadequate clue for search engines as to what the page is about. So, the permalink needs to be changed to something like "Permalink: title". The next thing, and it's a user-interface issue more than an SEO issue, is that the "Previous 10" links forces you to go back in time as you surf, with now way to return to the most recent post. Therefore, you need to find in the template where the previous 10 posts are being inserted, and put above it a link back to your most recent post. That way, no matter how people surf around, they can always "go back to the top" without being trapped.

Blogging vs. CMS - which is best for SEO?

So, MyLongTail works well with blogging tools or adding pages to your site through a good content management system (CMS). Why do we skim over the mechanics of search engine optimization (SEO), and jump right into the writing issues? Because blogging software does so much so perfectly for SEO, we don't feel it's necessary. Instead, we just recommend you use one of the highly search-optimized blogging systems, such as Blogger, Movable Type or WordPress. They all meet the baseline criteria for creating search-friendly sites that are likely to maintain their influence.

There are so many directions to go with this post. Do we therefore recommend using blogging software as CMS for the main website? Can existing CMS systems be retro-fitted to live on equal footing with blogging software? Can blogging and CMS sites exist together, intermixed so that you blog for SEO, but keep the main site in its current form? Can we recommend CMS systems that are every bit as good as blogging software?

The long and short of it is that a site needs to grow. And that growth needs to occur in a search-friendly and visible fashion. And the topics chosen for growth need to be spot-on, for competitive reasons. Technically, the main difference between blogging software and a nearly perfect CMS system is the pinging. Blogging software makes everything you add into news, to be picked up by Technorati, Feedster, and the multitude of other blog search tools appearing on scene. In fact, some "News" searches are beginning to incorporate some blog posts. And blog search tools start serving your content in minutes, compared to the days or weeks required by the "default" search results. So, blogging software has this advantage. Why is it an advantage?

Despite how well optimized a site is, you still rely on people linking to you, emailing your URLs to around, and good old fashioned word-of-mouth. Therefore, the initial pushing out of your news is important. In the PR world that I (now) come from, this takes place with press releases, and pitching by PR professionals to journalists. In the PURE world of SEO, the pitching is extremely soft, and takes place in the hope that your content is eventually picked up by people searching on exactly the right keywords. But blogging strikes a nice medium. Your blog posts go out as news. Anyone monitoring news in your space will be alerted to your post. Social bookmarking and tagging systems like del.ico.us help expedite this process. One PR professional, Steve Rubel, who is also a publisher asks that you pitch him by tagging your web pages with the name of his site (micropersuasion) in del.icio.us.

So, for people getting started with the MyLongTail process, you have to ask yourself if you are happy with how well optimized your CMS system is (or whatever website management system you use), or whether you want the extra bump that the use of blogging software will give you. And if you choose blogging software, how can you get started with the minimum of muss and fuss? There's enough to say about that, that I'll make it the subject of my next post.

Considering a name change

OK, so we're considering a name and logo change. How integral is the logo to understanding the concepts of this site/app? Is it integral, or can it easily be changed and be communicated just effectively? And have the same impact? Comments dearly appreciated.

Bug Tracking

Well, blogger is a poor excuse for a bug tracking system. When people start jumping on the MyLongTail bandwagon, I'll do something more sophisticated, like the open source Python Trac system. But for now, I'm just starting this blog post. Let the comments be buck tracking!

PR 2.0, SEO and The Soft Pitch

So much of the talk about PR 2.0 centers around how and whether to reach out to bloggers. While blogging and social networking software clearly plays a major role, it's just not the most efficient route to disseminating your message. Search is. Yahoo, Google and MSN search are the new ABC, CBS and NBC. It's the only media you can be sure everyone is tuning into. Through them, you can reach every blogger and soft-pitch them your story. You know your visitor is interested, because they pre-qualified themselves through the search process. And you're pitching many more people than just journalists. You're reaching investors, stakeholders, customers and prospects as well.

Currently, there is a clear deal between journalists and public relations professionals. The journalists get early, and sometimes exclusive, access to information. In return, they are receptive to listen to pitches. It is a symbiotic relationship that helps produce better coverage, particularly in technology where every little advance is both news and business.

But pitching every blogger in the blogosphere just isn't viable--especially with how mainstream blogging is becoming. It's going to be built into the next version of Word. Sure, you can monitor the discussion with tools like Technorati, and even step into the discussion, and specifically reach out to the most influential bloggers. But having search working for you relentlessly delivering your message 24/7 to everyone who is even casually researching your space is much more efficient. And natural search is better than paid, because when you stop paying for the campaign, the visitors keep coming. I've discussed that at length elsewhere on the site. This is about how PR 2.0 is different from what many people think--even Richard Edelman and Steve Rubel.

Anyway, bloggers will never be trained on the clear deal and symbiosis that exists between PR pro's and journalists, because bloggers are you and me, and your mother, and your boss' daughter, Joe from down the street, and a 12 year old in Australia. With the exception of those who really do behave and share similar incentive to journalists, bloggers come and go. They might blog for a year, then completely stop. The central core of bloggers within any industry who are there for the long haul really are a lot like journalists, and with them, the traditional rules of PR very much apply... learning their beat, reading their stories, building a personal relationship with them. Not much has changed if your blogger thinks and acts like a journalist. So, the PR folks just need to add a few more categories to their media lists, and treat those bloggers as journalists. This article is about the consistent soft-sell that's always lurking there right under the surface, like a Paul Graham's submarine metaphor. But instead of the sub being the based on the PR/Journalist relationship, it's now ALSO based on the PR/Search Engine relationship.

With MyLongTail, the PR industry is planting its flag firmly in search engine optimization (SEO). It is perfectly natural, because PR is to SEO what Advertising is to the pay-per-click (PPC) industry. PR is not about clear deals. It's about big wins at a low cost (at least the branch of PR we specialize in here at Connors--very different from lobbying-style PR). Advertising is about clear deals, but a big win will cost you big bucks--usually in the form of media buys. Again, I talk about is PR/SEO connection a lot of other places, so I will not elaborate here. I will jump right into why MyLongTail reframes PR 2.0 in a new light.

With MyLongTail, I reframe the public relations problem in a new way by making the search process itself an integral part to the pitch. And exactly who you are pitching to is abstracted. Instead of pitching a particular story to a particular journalist to get your view in on an article that showed on some publication's editorial calendar, you are simultaneously pitching the world, throwing your entry into what John Battelle coined the database of intentions. You are part of the discussion merely by virtue of being found when people are most interested. This leads to genuine--some call it "organic" mention of you when the time comes for them to write. And better yet, if they link to you, it's a completely unsolicited and unreciprocated link--the very best kind. It puts you in the highest position of authority, because you are leaving clues for all the search engines that you don't need to link-back (a clue that manipulation is occurring).

But doesn't pandering to the search engines put you at risk of being banned? And isn't such a soft background sell just too darn indirect for impatient clients looking for their New York Times article yesterday? The answer is no and yes. No, if you take the right approach, you are not only not at risk of being banned, but you are producing a healthy site that is just as valuable for human audiences as it is for search. You are leaving absolutely no "signatures" that mark your site as pandering to search. You are simply putting yourself on equal footing as everybody else. And the second part, yes, a PR 2.0 soft pitch is MUCH more indirect than pitching a journalist directly, and cannot replace it. The "who you know" approach to PR is merely strengthened and verified by the "what you know" approach of SEO. The two are perfect counterparts. Pitch a journalist. Journalist turns to search to research. What they find confirms your message... over... and over... and over... That is truly effective SEO.

But taking this approach to SEO is just too difficult for most business. It's the principle problem we encounter with new PR clients. We work ourselves through the same technical and editorial projects over and over. This is becoming what is known as SEO "best practices". It's all the mechanical things that you do short of over-optimizing: search-friendly URLs, sitemaps, good title tags, etc. We are trying to turn that into just the background of the discussion. These mechanical projects merely level the playing field for your corporate website against hyper-optimized blogging systems like Movable Type, WordPress and Blogger. So, if this is the EASY part, then what is the hard part of SEO?

Interestingly, in the 9 years I've been doing SEO, almost no one talks about the real key to successful long-term SEO, where the results can outlive any particular search engine. I have the perspective of when Lycos, Excite and AltaVista had their own unique results. Google wasn't even on the scene. I had incredible results across the board then, and when Google came onto the scene, my results only just improved. With each major search engine advance, they are doing one particular thing: looking for clues as to what is the best information. Google's breakthrough was that cross-linking was a clue. New breakthroughs include that domain registration data includes clues. Tomorrow's breakthroughs will include tying content to domain registrations to real-world business incorporations to professional association memberships (for example). There are real-world clues all over the place about what is authoritative on what topics. Search will take much more into account that a professional researcher or information broker would.

That being the case, how can you isolate SEO down to one simple technique that holds little risk of being perceived of manipulation and therefore subject to banning? How can you simplify it so much that people working in Marketing departments of companies across the world can apply it, without hiring outside firms? How can you reframe the problem so that it no longer technical, and can fit into the realm of PR disciplines, which includes SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats), Positioning & Messaging strategy, press release writing, pitching and event coordinating? Easy! You provide a tool that gives you unique insight directly into the minds of your target audience, and you use that to create superior writing that will innately influence search.

Many PR firms are taking the simplest possible road, and "optimizing" press releases. This is merely one piece of a much more cohesive strategy. All PR firms should use matter-of-fact language for their press release headlines (put yourself into the mind of searchers), and should include a full URL. But every company should also blog directly onto their corporate website to facilitate press releases. A press release is itself news worthy of blogging about, and it triggers off the blog pinging system that alerts an a broader audience than press releases alone. But companies should even go a step further, and blog specifically on topics that competitive intelligence TELLS THEM will increase natural search traffic. And THAT is the heart of soft pitching in PR 2.0.

This is difficult to understand at first. But the premise is that search traffic is a finite resource. On any given term, there is a finite amount of search traffic that's occurring on any term, and even less click-through. Those click-through could result in a new customer, media coverage, landing a new investor or the like. It is a grand competition for this finite resource. The competitive level is now Olympic on the most popular terms. There are 10 gold medals, 10 silver, and 10 bronze (1st, 2nd and 3rd pages of results, respectively). It's not even worth trying on the more popular terms if you want to see meaningful results in a reasonable timeframe. You should sooner try out for the Olympics. But that leaves the much more plentiful, but less popular competitions around the world. Only enlightened companies are playing the game on this level. That is what MyLongTail is about. What competitions should you be in? How can you pick your events so you are sure to win? Which events are people even watching?

Some people mistake tools like WordTracker or the suggestion tools built into Google and Yahoo Search Marketing as being the long tail keyword selectors. The fallacy here is that anyone who types in the same keywords gets back the same suggestions. They are not tied to the real traffic happening on your site. There is no competitive edge. A much better alternative is to look at what search hits ALREADY ARE leading to your site, but for which you did not intentionally optimize. This will usually be happy accidents. But these happy accidents created by determined searchers who digs deep into the results to find you, are the most valuable keyword optimization you have access to. Why?

Because it shows where you are teetering on the edge of success. It is real, raw and gritty information. It came from an actual visit from an actual human being to your site. It's not a term that generally relates to a seed term (the way the keyword suggestion tools work). It's a term that specifically relates to you and already existing material on your website. By seeing that happy accident occur, thinking of it as an opportunity, and jumping on the chance for a competitive advantage, you can roll out new content onto your website with a much smarter strategy than your competition. Ironically, your competition is often the very ones that are unintentionally giving you their benchmark keywords. See, they search on their important terms, and click on very deep results to see who they are. If it's YOU, then you just benefited! This is why it truly is competitive intelligence.

So, is simply writing and putting it on your site enough? No, SEO best practices still need to be adhered to, without over-optimizing. That's the usual check-list of on-page and off-page factors, which blogging software does such a wonderful job with. That's why we often recommend to just choose one of the blog packages that lets you plant your blog into a subdirectory of your main corporate site, and just use blog posts for the MyLongTail process. Otherwise, you can research these topics at Webmaster World, Search Engine Watch, or one of the many other sites out there. If you've got to fix a corporate website and just want to hire the perfect consultant to be best friends with both your IT department and Editorial staff, consider contacting Connors. We have wonderful case studies and anecdotal stories about how we've overcome some of the largest obstacles you will ever encounter for SEO. This is particularly true of organizations who realized their mission was to be found in search, so that their advertising-driven business models don't end up being a wash. Think about it: if you buy traffic through PPC only to sell advertising, you're spinning your wheels.

Once the content is on your site, is that enough? No, you still need to do PR, whether it is online or off. Really, you should hardly think of it as online or offline PR anymore. Most publications are also published online. Some of them try to offer unique content on their online version as a special draw, and others leave premium content off their site to help keep the printed magazine subscriptions special. Either way, the person you're talking with when you pitch is either influential or not. So, who you know really is still just as important as what you know. And also, the quality of your writing and pitching counts. So, MyLongTail doesn't address everything yet. It is just a useful tool to help identify the best writing topics to drive natural search. And it is something truly new in SEO.

UPDATE: Connors has evolved from traditional PR to high end search engine marketing. Click here to learn more about our transition - http://www.connors.com/seo/letter.html