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