Building Search Friendly Navigation

Building search friendly navigation is more than using text links instead of graphics. In fact, a well planned sitemap can allow you to continue to use graphics as your navigation with good search results. For this blog post, I'll be discussing a different sort of search friendly navigation--the sort that allows every page of your site to become an effective landing page. This is achieved simply by working your call-to-action into the navigational graphics.

HitTail assumes a few things to be true in order for the HitTailing process to be effective. The first is of course the search engine optimization built into certain blogging software, which was the subject of a post last week. Today, it's time to talk about how to move your audience from the blog "landing page" to your call-to-action. Sure, you can get the traffic using HitTail, but what do you do with the traffic? How does it convert?

The concept of optimizing landing pages is big in the pay-per-click world, because you have the explicit ability to control which advertisement leads to which landing page, providing the increased ability to control the experience. It's not as straight forward with natural search, but there are some saving graces, and some best-practice techniques that should be used.

The saving grace of natural search landing pages is that it is the very content on the page that attracted the search in the first place, making it optimized by nature. But since you're probably using blogging software, there's a chance you're using the default templates and have not inserted a call-to-action in the navigational graphics.

Huh?

Yes, that's right. Every page on your website should contain somewhere in the navigational graphics your most desired call-to-action. If you take this one simple precaution, both in your blog and main site navigational graphics, then every page of your site is a potentially effective landing page--an important consideration in natural search strategy. I like to think of it as "idiot-proofing" a site.

To give an example, I will provide an anecdotal story of the battle between me (the sales guy) and every designer I ever encountered that worked on the Scala site.

Scala sells digital signage software--that is the software required to remote control flat panel TVs being used as information displays and signs scattered throughout stores and companies. It's a big emerging market, and to make people understand what it is, there is exactly one image that does the trick--and that's a person walking by one of these TVs, glancing at it as if it were a sign. Easy enough, right? It perfectly encapsulates the idea, communicates it in a blink, and can be rendered small and discreet enough to become part of the omnipresent navigational graphics.

Simply put, no matter how many times I laid this out as a design criteria and how explicitly I said it, no Web designer would give it to me. All I got were abstract designs copying the fluff web trends of the day, saying nothing about the company itself. I had to go in and retroactively refit every design so that every page worked as a blink-able landing page.

Imagine the first half-second glance at a Web page after you click a search result from Google. Was your story told? It should have been. If you want to tap into the power of natural search, you've got to start thinking about that approach to Web design. Every page is a landing page, and must tell the most important part of your story at a glance. This usually means graphics and a tagline/slogan, plus a call-to-action such as "click here for more details" or a 1-800 phone number. The graphics can be rendered in just about any style that suits your website and audience. Cartoons are fine in some cases, and photography is suitable in others. But in the same way that literal headlines help you in natural search, literal graphics help natural search. If you sell nuts and bolts, then working nuts and bolts into the navigational graphics that appear on every page is probably a good thing. Once you go abstract, you are completely undifferentiated from the billions of other generic "say nothing" pages on the Internet.

What is the most important call-to-action that is equally appropriate for your entire audience? This can simply be a link back to your main homepage, where you hopefully put your top-level messaging and attempt to send people in the right direction. If you're a direct sales organization with a toll-free phone-number, then use that. In t case, prospects need surf no farther than the one page they dropped-in on. If you're a high-end product with long selling cycles, then it may be the "contact us" link to get them into your salesforce automation system.

HitTailing is mostly about getting the qualified visitors to your system in the first place. In the overall sales cycle, it is the equivalent of the first touch. Occasionally, HitTailing will provide further touches in the sales cycle by virtue of corralling prospects back in each time they go researching (subject matter for a future post). But most of the time, what happens once the prospect reaches your site is in your hands. Usability testing and drop-off page analysis can go a long way towards fixing a broken site. But I recommend the one universal easy site fix that makes your call-to-action clear and one click away, no matter what page the visitor lands on.

Day of the Longtail

Here's the video that was shown at The Long Tail book launch, created by Peter Hirshberg of Technorati, which I referred to in this post.

Blogging, SEO & 1 Template Adjustment

OK, so we tend to recommend Blogger, WordPress or Movable Type for the HitTailing process and getting your feet wet with natural search. Why? What's so special about these, and why are we so into Blogger, in particular?

OK first off, we recommend these three blogging services because they do just the right things for search engine optimization according to today's rules. As Google acknowledges, over 100 factors go into ranking pages. As anyone in the SEO field knows, you really only need to know about 20 to do a bang-up good job. And as anyone living in the long tail of search knows, making your title text appear in only a few locations will get you top position in all the engines.

Yep, that's it. If all content management systems did this, the field of SEO would be a very different place. And that's about all you need to know about the mechanics of SEO to be a HitTailer.

Most content management systems just can't compete with blogging software, and to add insult to injury, blog software has a pinging system that has effectively taken the place of "submits" from ages past. So, while websites wait for crawlers to come around and notice content, blogs broadcast new content bringing in a different breed of crawler which indirectly improves default search performance. Blog post tagging and social bookmarking systems have taken the place of meta tags. And because blog software so dramatically reduces "publishing friction", bloggers can push out a week's worth of new content in the time it takes most companies to make one small addition to their main marketing pages.

So, why Blogger in particular, and why the omission of TypePad as a recommended HitTailing platform? Blogger lets you easily FTP your files into the subdirectory of an existing website, effectively turning your entire blog into a subdirectory of an existing site--even on your main corporate webserver! The significance of this is it allows you to piggyback your blog onto an already built-up site. Linking to such a subdirectory from your homepage will instantly give the blog clout it would take months to build up. And conversely, any clout your blog starts building extends its halo effect to the rest of your main website. There is no clear line between where your blog ends and website begins. It gets you into the right mindset for broader non-blog HitTailing.

Movable Type and WordPress are both capable of a similar scenario described above, because they run on your own servers. They're not hosted apps, and you can therefore plant the blog into a subdirectory of your existing site. You directly control all the servers involved, and no files need to be transmitted anywhere. But due to isolating program code, WordPress and Movable Type blogs often end up on a separate subdomain, even in-house, making them separate websites and loosing much of the instant boost. None-the-less, if you want a powerful blogging platform for HitTailing and are advanced at this stuff, these platforms are for you.

What about the popular TypePad blogging platform? TypePad is much like a hosted version of Movable Type, both from Six Apart. But because TypePad always hosts the blog, you can not make it part of an existing site (contradict me, please). Instead, you register a domain name and set the DNS to resolve to the hosted location on the TypePad servers. While you get your own custom domain, you cannot intermix it with an existing site as if it were in a subdirectory. This is not always a bad thing--especially if you're trying to build up the clout of a brand new site, and all you do is blog. We use this approach with a number of Connors clients. It takes more work to get started, but gives you a third-party site to control. It is an alternative SEO strategy, and not the quickest way to get HitTailing results. But we like TypePad and will be taking some specific efforts to simplify its use in HitTailing. TypePad uses easy plug-in widgets to add features. It's not a template system like Blogger, so inserting the code is a bit more challenging right now.

In Blogger, while it's a little scary for new users, it's quite easy. You go directly into the template, find the close-body tag </body> and insert the HitTail code immediately before that. HitTail data should start flowing in right away.

We plan on making HitTailing as easy as it can be in all popular blogging platforms. We further look forward to recommending additional blog platforms. But don't bother recommending it if it uses parameters and IDs in the URL. Such web addresses are simply not search optimized. Yes, it can still come up in search. But for HitTailing to work well, the same words you put in the title should be used to construct the URL (with no question marks or equals signs inserted into the web address). You're ignoring all the other factors that go into competitive optimizing, such as keyword densities and choice of HTML elements. So, you need the basics working for you as much as possible.

And a final note on Blogger. There is one template adjustment you should make. Most default blogger templates use the time-of-post as the anchor text in the permalink. It needs to be replaced with the title tag. While that sounds complicated, it just means find this...

<em>posted by <$BlogItemAuthorNickname$> at <a href="<$BlogItemPermalinkUrl$>" title="permanent link"><$BlogItemDateTime$></a></em>

...and replace it with something like this...

<em>Link to: <a href="<$BlogItemPermalinkUrl$>" title="permanent link"><$BlogItemTitle$></a> (permalink)</em>

See, you're getting the correct anchor text in the link leading to the permalink page. And that's about as techie as we want to get with HitTail. We'll eventually work suggestions like this into our FAQ pages and other resources.

Natural Search Vs. Paid Search, Part 2

The Web 2.0 Blog Network graciously covered HitTail today. Thanks. We were particularly interested in how they positioned growing natural search traffic as distinct from search engine optimization. Kudos to this observer for coming up with another excellent way to put non-paid search traffic in context. Not everything on the natural side is SEO, especially when the optimization's already done for you. Blog software has simplified the mechanics to such an extent that all you're really doing is focusing on developing quality content, and trusting that natural search traffic will follow.

And it does.

But we at HitTail like paid search too, and think it is a good deal. In fact, we're getting close to promoting HitTailing via the AdSense network. Yes, it's true! As much as we like natural search traffic, there's nothing like the clear deal of X-amount of money for Y-amount of exposure in the early days of an endeavor when your site hasn't reached critical mass yet.

So, while we suggest employing each marketing method appropriate to its function and your available funds, we still think natural search is best in the long term. That's why we're also in the public relations biz, and not advertising.

So just how good of a deal is natural search? How much is securing a free first page position on a term across all search engines worth? How much is moving onto the next, and the next and the next worth, having your site's innate natural effectiveness snowball until you own your own destiny?

Own your own destiny?

Yes, nothing less than the contemporary version of your company's reputation is at stake. It is very possible to build up a site that is impossible for search engines to ignore, no matter how different they are from each other, and no matter how they change over time. That's what a powerful reputation means in the online landscape. You'll have secured a variety of top positions for a variety of reasons. Over time, these positions tend to become more fortified. And these top positions become an innate characteristic of your company, and a corporate asset you can bank on.

At MediaPost's Search Insider Summit last week, the keynote speaker, Chris Sherman of ClickZ and SearchWise predicted that natural search was going to be one of the hottest trends in search marketing in the coming years.

Wall Street Analyst Jordan Rohan of RBC Capital Markets called natural search the most precious commodity on the Internet, and reiterated just how important Google is in its control of this resource. Google is both the recipient of natural traffic itself (traffic that is not paid for by advertising), and as the router of the flow of natural traffic worldwide (everyone who follows non-sponsored links from Google).

Yet, we all brushed over natural search, right as we acknowledged its being the fountain of life. The fact is, if Google had not turned search into a billion-dollar business, none of us would be there. The purpose of this post is to introduce you to the elephant in the corner of the room known as natural search, and to make you comfortable in his presence.

Natural search is a nice elephant--much more pleasant and easy to get along with than you might have been led to believe.

I made a prior post about Organic Search Optimization Vs. Paid Inclusion, giving the first HitTailing example: "best pr firm in nyc". With just one blog post, we secured a top position in all Google, Yahoo and MSN on this term. We also appeared in Ask, but not on the first page of results.

One of our counterparts in the paid search world, perhaps a little irked by our message, thought it would be clever to buy the term that we used as a public example, to so it showed up in paid search, advertising themselves as something they are not--the best PR firm in NYC. Clever, but wasteful. Those premiere local listings start at $25/mo., and they only know to zero in on the term we told them we were targeting, and are only doing it in Yahoo. In the end, they're paying $25/mo. to provide us a great anecdotal story for a blog post.

There is some question as to stability of Blog-based HitTail search results. As I've documented, HitTailing is quick to appear in MSN, with the Google right on its heels. The Yahoo result took the longest to fall into place, and are in danger of falling out again (only in Yahoo), because the permalink pages are VERY slow to be included.

It takes about one month for a blog post to be included in Yahoo results, but it tends (in our experience) to use the index page (not the permalink page). Consequently, this result is going to vanish from Yahoo when it scrolls off the bottom of the blog homepage. It will be picked up again on the permalink or archive page, but don't hold your breath. If you need to get into Yahoo quickly on long tail keywords, Yahoo! Search Marketing may be your best bet.

But if your thinking about just building search equity, then be happy with quick inclusion in MSN and Google. Think of the long Yahoo wait as payments against interest, while the portion of HitTailing that effects MSN and Google within weeks as payments against principle. You'll get Yahoo. You just have to wait a lot longer.

And Ask takes longest of all.

So in the end, this is not so much a post about natural search vs. paid search after all. Both are appropriate. It's more filling in the details of what you can expect as you venture into natural search. It's the story of colleagues who are apparently watching us very closely, and taking fun jabs that probably no one will ever notice but me--and paying for the privilege.

And it's the story of sites like the Web 2.0 Blog Network, who are recognizing what we are building, and the Web 2.0-ish techniques we are using to promote it. We practice what we preach as we HitTail and blog. Soon, we will be practicing what our counterparts in the advertising world preach as well, because it is the appropriate method at this phase in the evolution of HitTailing. And not long after that, we should have endless anecdotal stories for you about particular long tail phrases, and what they did for us.

The Wild West of SEO at An End?

Today, a blogger commented that perhaps we (a PR firm) were in over our heads getting into the wild, wacky world of SEO. He even implied that perhaps we were a little intimidated, grasping at our repositioning of the service based on our discoveries from the beta testers as evidence. I've got to smile. The truth is quite the opposite. It's now time for the natural search side of marketing to get ready for a major maturation of the industry now that Connors is preparing to take it on as its own internal client.

Sound big?

Recently, my boss pointed out that we've (Connors Communications) has done it for other clients. So, we should be able to do it here. What precisely has Connors done? Well, being the PR firm, our accomplishments are often gleaned by looking at our client's accomplishments over the years.

1. Create the world’s largest bookseller, and laying the foundation for global outsourced eTailing infrastructure able to change the very shape of business.

2. Invent the very paid search industry and turn the whole field of marketing upside down, and TEACH Google what their own business model should be, thereby creating the 7-billion dollar paid search industry.

3. Turn the fixed price model on its heels by letting buyers name their price for airline tickets and other purchases.

4. Establish the new low-price of long-distance calling services, thereby forever changing the Telecommunications industry, and helping to give rise to the Net Neutrality movement.

There's more, but you'll just have to wait and see how Connors clients are fixing the world's email spam problem, and doing for shipping what Expedia and Orbitz did for travel. Oh, the list goes on, and we're always looking for emerging technology category killers positioned to take the world by storm.

Natural search is one such emerging technology. It's the elephant in the corner of the room in every online marketing discussion. It's the piece that marketers know they desperately need in order to stay competitive, but have the most difficulty in mastering. There are many reasons for this, spanning from the technical to the political. Natural search is just not as clear a deal as paid search. Paid search is modeled after the familiar classified ad business; essentially a media-buy of column inches, but with a bidding twist.

Natural search in comparison may take a complete reworking of the website publishing technology infrastructure. It may be doable with light touches, or it may require a gutting. You may be able to keep the old website in place exactly as-is, and spin out a new search-friendly version that serves only to drop you into the old site. Even many SEO firms are not familiar with the options of inserting a new website presentation layer based on XSL transformations.

In a full-fledged SEO engagement, Connors brings some very unique tools to the table. We are a PR agency with the technical capabilities of tying into your business systems and content management systems, exporting the same data that's currently not working to drive traffic, and to slice & dice it into the most optimized format possible according to the search engine formulas du jour. This is advanced stuff, akin to the way Quigo FeedPoint will reconstruct an existing website into XML feeds, and send it to Yahoo Paid Inclusion as a shortcut to getting sites that only exist on the "Invisible Web" included. Only instead of sending it to paid inclusion, we transform the XML feeds into fully naturally optimized websites that sometimes end up supplanting the original version because they are so good.

Many companies have huge storehouses of Web content assets that are going un-leveraged or underutilized. These are often our favorite sort of clients, because with only a light touch, we can activate and maximize these assets. It's often like opening the floodgate on a damn.

The XML transformations are when we take out the big guns. It's not a traditional approach to SEO, and not for everyone.

But we do "traditional" SEO audits and recommendation documents. But wait, we don't stop at the documents. If the client's organization really needs the help, we send in the programmers. That's right. On some deployments, Connors employees work side-by-side with the client's programmers, educating them on modern and flexible methodologies for keeping pace with the change in the search engine landscape. We discuss issues such as retargeting and remixing content for optimal device display capabilities and keyword intersection matrix diversity. We'll work through the impact of Java, .NET or Ajax frameworks on search presence. We'll even modify content management systems, or write them from scratch.

Sound like a PR firm?

Our accomplishments in the realm of pure public relations are rivaled only by the unique technical capabilities of the team we put together to revolutionize the natural search industry. When we look out at the Wild West of SEO, we see not a formidable and challenging landscape to horse-drawn covered wagons. Instead, we envision our transcontinental railway system (HitTail), knowing there's a continental divide out there that that needs some blasting--the mental block preventing every marketer on the planet from realizing the importance of natural search, and how achievable it actually is.

And who better than a New York PR company with Silicon Valley-caliber tech savvy?

Keyword Strategy Vs. Tactics

If you're establishing a domain from scratch, HitTail is not for you... yet.

One of the interesting points that came up at MediaPost's Search Insider Summit is the difference between strategic and tactical keyword selection. Strategic keyword selection comes at the beginning of the website planning phase. What keywords MUST you attack in order to be living up to your marketing responsibilities?

In a product or service model (not an advertising model), you must obviously optimize for the company and product's name. When appropriate, you also optimize on keywords associated with the features and benefits. And so goes the initial strategic brainstorming process, where you pull in such tools as the Yahoo Search Marketing and AdWords keyword suggestion tools, and WordTracker. All these tools by definition are giving you a sampling of what's available. And they give everyone the same sampling based on the same seed words. They are not uniquely customized to your site. And they are perfectly appropriate for the first round of strategic keyword planning.

After a site has been in existence for a few months, hits that you never expected are going to start occurring... highly significant events that you would have likely overlooked were it not for HitTail. And that's where the strategic keyword startup strategy transforms into an evergreen tactical keyword strategy.

Huh?

Simply put, after all your planning and execution of a website, it's time to start filling in the blank spots, connecting the dots, and spiral your way to dominating a conceptual niche.

Did I say simply put?

OK, second try: once your website has been out there for awhile, it's trying to tell you something. That something sounds a lot like "Hey, did you know that some very determined S.O.B. found you on the term 'best blue widgets' and they needn't have been so determined if only you targeted 'best blue widgets' a little better.

And your website's attempt to tell you this valuable information is ironically muffled and obscured by today's analytics tools, which don't zero in on and isolate  the truly most important "keyword events" that occur on your site.

Putting these keyword events to work for you is the underlying premise of HitTail, and why HitTailing is so effective. Markus Merz of the popular Performancing site colorfully characterizes us as the SEO Mafia, leaning heavily on our users to do what we tell them too.

Markus humorously warns people away from HitTail based on the tickling notion that you don't know what you're getting yourself into. It is perhaps the most colorful and "on the mark" review of HitTail that I have read--even giving David Stockwell a run for his money. It's sometimes hard to infer Markus' meaning, and is written for the ultimate search insider, but is clear once you understand that he's telling you we're the exact opposite of analytics (an accountant diligently tallying your books), and more like the Mob (ensuring you X-amount of the business in the neighborhood).

It's very flattering. I just wish we were getting a percentage of the take. Happily for HitTailers, the HitTail creators are taking a much more altruistic approach. HitTailing is the God-given right of every blogger. If we don't provide it for free, we give you incentive to find other ways. And we want the relationship with you, even if we're not extracting the dough. So, what's in it for us?

Simple: value-add. Yes, we're and SEO firm. Yes, we're a PR firm (the one that launched Amazon.com and Priceline). And we're always looking for the next Amazon.com. This may end up being the littlest HitTailer (you?). And once you start using our service, you know we exist. We know you exist. We're planting 1000 seeds, and seeing what blossoms.

And there are many other value-adds. We're going to have to start deleting old Search Hit data, but won't in the premium service. We're not capturing enough data for detailed trending and conversion tracking, but we can in the premium service. We can't serve, say perhaps 500,000 hits per day for a single site, but we could in the premium service. And there are a variety of other possibilities for the premium service.

But before talking about what and how we're going to get you to pay for something in the future, let's talk about how dramatically different HitTailing is from anything else out there on the market right now--even services people are claiming to be "similar".

They're not.

Any analytics package worth their salt can pull a very, very long and inclusive keyword list. It can be called the long tail keyword list. And it might even throw the hit count, and which engine produced the hit into the list.

But they miss the key time-saving point.

HitTailing saves you time by getting rid of the need for analytics software. Analytics is a crowed software space, varying from free to extremely expensive, with capabilities as diverse as the pricing. And there are entire professions dedicated to configuring analytics, generating the CORRECT reports to get MEANINGFUL data, and then requiring further processing to figure out what to do with the data. In other words, how to make analytics data actionable?

Now, giving analytics software its due credit, its going to tell you many more things than HitTail ever will, such as drop-off pages, and where your site is desperately broken and needs help. HitTailing sort of assumes that every one of your pages in your site is a legitimate landing page with an encapsulated call-to-action. This is usually something like a slogan plus an 800-number, homepage or contact link that's on every page of your site via the navigation graphics. Every page should be exactly 1-click away from a call-to-action in order to get the maximum value out of HitTailing, and this will be the subject of another post. But yes, analytics software is valuable stuff, and we're not saying don't use it.

We're just saying you don't HAVE to use it in order to seize your share of what Wall Street analyst Jordan Rohan called the most valuable commodity on the Internet: natural search traffic. It's what ClickZ editor and SearchWise president Chris Sherman called the top priority for search markers, but where there is a disconnect because the industry is centered around paid search. Natural search is the elephant in the corner of the room of any search marketing discussion.

And HitTail leans on you, telling you what to do in a clear and methodical way that we haven't seen since... well, since GoTo.com taught Google how to monetize their traffic through paid search.

Yes indeed, HitTailing is THAT BIG. And just because we're not launching a 7-billion dollar paid search industry with HitTail doesn't make it any less significant to the world of marketers. It completes the unspoken incomplete online marketing campaigns of companies, non-profits and "causes" of all sorts around the world, simply by making the tackling natural search predictable, systematic and incremental. Advanced folks can HitTail with content management systems. New folks can HitTail with blogging software, and also solve their corporate blogging strategy in one genius stroke. It is the other half of the online marketing equation.

So, if it's potentially AS BIG as AdWords and YSM, then how are the HitTail creators going to benefit? Well, PR has never been as big of an industry as Advertising. But PR has none-the-less been massively influential in business. Similarly, HitTail will never be the financial juggernaut that paid search is, but we have our ideas. Whereas PPC business models remain eerily similar to the classified advertisement business of newspapers and yellow pages, the business models on the natural search side have the opportunity to break new ground and become socially transforming.

I don't think we'll tip our hand just yet about what we have in mind, suffice to say it's no less ambitious than the goals of Connors' clients of ages past: become the largest bookseller in the world, provide the IT plumbing for all eTailers worldwide, allow buyers to name what they're willing to spend for product, create the very paid search industry, and revolutionize the telecommunications industry by making long-distance calls for almost nothing. Yes, Connors clients have not only had these ambitions, but accomplished these very things and become the category killer in each of these spaces. And the same strategic thinking is going into the field of natural search... finally!

So, if you're a publisher, webmaster, AdSenser, evangelist, or otherwise have any story to tell that you would like heard, then HitTailing is for you--but not at first. Your first goal is to thing strategically and build up your core website. Install the HitTail code, and use it for what its worth in the early stage: watching for the first inbound links to be established, and the first hits to occur. While not HitTailing in the purest sense, it is addictive none-the-less.

Once your site builds enough initial strategic content, it will feed the HitTailing process, and the suggestions will start to dribble in, at which time you can think about switching into a much more tactical keyword mode. We called this tactical mode "evergreen" at the beginning of this blog post. Evergreen stands for media content that is always appropriate, no matter when it is run (or found). It fills in broadcast time and column space when there is not enough going on in the news. The same applies in blog publishing--even more so because of the SEO factor (whoops, I used that bad word, SEO).

HitTailing is your road to super-charged evergreen blogging content. It's a tactical thing, which fits under the broader strategy category: "No matter what, keep quality content flowing that is assured to drive incrementally more qualified traffic."

The Future of Media

I'm sitting on the patio of a lakeside condo in Keystone Colorado, winding down from the Search Insider Summit, a marathon 4-day event hosted by MediaPost, consisting of morning sessions of expert speakers and panels, followed by horseback riding, golfing and rafting. On this trip, I'm also reading On The Edge, by Brian Bagnall, the story of the spectacular rise and fall of Commodore, typing this article on my laptop and am reflecting on the birth of the personal computer industry that took place only 30 years ago, and digesting it right along with everything I learned at the conference.

There is just far too much abundance of ideas running through my head for a well organized post. This will be a train-of-thought post, covering marketing topics from the conference, tech history from the book, and ideas gleaned from the synthesis of the two. Ultimately, this leads to my thoughts on the future of technology and media.

I am newly impressed in reading this book that I actually entered the crazy, historic world of Commodore at the tail end. Having worked for Commodore it turns out is an ultimate ice-breaker at events like Search Insider Summit. You would never guess it from the revisionist histories of the personal computer, but EVERYONE remembers Commodore, and most often with a fondness and spark of excitement that's hardly associated anymore with today's PCs. At events like this where I always look like the youngest one in the room, and someone nobody knows, because I haven't been high profile, opening up with the fact that I worked for Commodore builds some instant rapport and interest. I figured that out at a mountaintop dinner on the first night of the Summit, which was held at a restaurant that you could only access by gondola. I mentioned to a few of the folks that inquired as to my background that I worked for Commodore, and faces lit up. Who would have imagined.

In addition to the positive Commodore nostalgia, I also realized almost hours before my panel discussion at the conference that this Commodore experience directly tied to the message I was there with. It turns out that I had a front-seat view of the ultimate crash-and-burn failure of pure word-of-mouth. Commodore, aside from the freak exceptions such as the William Shatner commercial, relied almost exclusively on word-of-mouth buzz to build it into a billion-dollar computer company. They expected all their advertising for free from their customers, but in the end, the center could not hold. It was fine so long as they constantly innovated and properly predicted the market. But as the industry matured, competition got fiercer and better at marketing, relying purely on the generosity of their customers was not enough.

By contrast, you have Google today, which is built completely on the force of word-of-mouth. But as Commodore learned, relying on getting all your marketing for free is not enough. And even though I was coming to the Search Insider Summit with a word-of-mouth, free publicity message, I wanted to make sure the audience knew I was not poo-poohing our highly represented counterparts who serviced the world of paid search, and the world of media buying and bid management. Instead, we were offering a tool equally valuable to marketer and SEM-firm alike. It is a new approach to natural search, but just one tool in the marketing ecosystem.

A recurring theme of the conference was how important natural search was, but that almost everyone in attendance serviced the pay-per-click segment, because that's where the money is. It was not outright stated, but I always get the feeling it is also where the clarity is. Paid search has become a commodity, but one whose buying and selling is very complicated and tech-heavy. No matter how context and behaviorally targeted the delivery of your advertising message may be, you are still basically buying media, and it's a clear deal. It's close enough to traditional media buying that the SEM industry is able to be more formal and easier to engage in and do business with than natural search, where there is no such clarity.

Another interesting point that came up a few times at the conference is how paid search is often held to a higher accountability standard due to its inherent trackability, and how endeavors that should be treated as branding campaigns may end up being treated like direct response campaigns. Clients will readily pour a few million into TV and radio with almost no trackability, but cut back search budgets because conversion rates are too low--on campaigns whose success should not necessarily be measured by direct conversions. Similarly, if the site's not ready, there's no point in driving traffic to the site through search, because your ultimate selling tool is the site itself. Education is one of the most important aspects of search marketing.

The conference consisted of both some of the biggest online marketers in the world, and some of the most well-known search agencies, along with representatives from Microsoft, Google, Yahoo and Ask. One other major PR firm was represented, but as far as I could tell, we were the only one there with a pure natural search message. The importance of natural search was hit on right off the bat in the opening keynote speech by Chris Sherman who stated that paying top-priority to natural search will be one of the most important parts of online marketing, to the well-known Wall Street search analyst Jordan Rohan who called natural search traffic the most precious commodity on the Internet. Despite this, every reference to search marketing implied paid search. And the comment was later stated that none of us would be here had Google not turned it into a billion-dollar business. Natural search is acknowledged as king, but seldom dealt with head-on.

And that's greatly due to the point I keep pounding on: the road to natural search is not a clear one. Even if the technical projects are clear, there are still many obstacles to doing well in natural search, sometimes insurmountable obstacles that have more to do with politics than technology. I had my session which discussed these issues, and we laid out how tackling natural search is much easier when you start with long tail keywords, and how HitTail filled in the most difficult missing piece: knowing where to begin. The message was very well received by the relatively small group in attendance, as it was a break-out session, but I think we're starting to get some folks in mainstream marketing recognizing this new approach. We even have had very positive response from SEM firms recognizing the value of another, differentiated list of keywords with which to seed campaigns.

We were thankful to David Berkowitz who recognized our HitTail fanny pack sponsorship bags as the best swag of the conference, and well-branded for a beta product. This was against some heavy competition--a beautiful poker chip set that was literally heavy. We thought hard about how to sponsor an event in a Colorado resort where we would be promoting a natural search product by morning, and golfing, horseback riding and white water rafting by afternoon. It seemed only natural that we did a fanny pack to hold your cell-phone, glasses, or whatever. Plus, we stuffed it full of all-natural goodness like trail-mix, granola bars and all-natural mints. Several people came up to me and commented on how welcome it was, for both the emergency rations and usefulness. That's the kind of strategic thinking you get with a PR firm.

Speaking of PR firms, advertising and PR agencies were sometimes referred to as not getting it. One of the other online marketing firms there joked that you should go ahead and ask a traditional agency about SEO and see the kind of understanding they have. I bit my tongue, but couldn't resist chiming in to agree to another point he made, being sure to label myself as part of a PR firm that gets it. The general perception seems to be that if a PR firm is doing anything with online marketing, it's "the buzz thing" which is exactly how our breakout track was positioned, by an SEM co-sponsor who was moderating the event. I was compelled to get up on the microphone and re-position the session as going after, as Jordan called it, "the most precious of commodities on the Internet, natural traffic". Attendance, while a small group, turned out to be enough to get the word going. This was the first public announcement of the HitTail application, beyond the soft launching of the beta.

We further sponsored a raffle, where each HitTail fanny pack contained a postcard of Summit County, with a keyword printed on the back. We then drew from a bag a list of keywords. A match was found on the first drawing, and Dan Tieu of Hotwire won the Canon PowerShot SD700 digital camera. That happened on the first day, just before the break for lunch.

The Search Insider Summit was particularly interesting, because of the participation of the marketers--or you might say the end customers or clients. There was a question and answer/critique session where two major companies actually came to the stage to have their online marketing campaigns critiqued. One of them was already deeply into online marketing, while the other was only getting into online marketing, but already controlled a seasonally heavy-traffic Web destination site. Together, they represented the travel and financial services space--talk about competitive online marketing space, and ideal candidates for the session.

Of all the speakers and panelists, the perspective that was most new to me was Jordan Rohan's, the analyst. He made some interesting predictions and assertions. One of his assertions was just how important international online marketing actually is. With all the talk of behavioral targeting and incremental traffic building in US-centric campaigns, its nothing compared to the size of business internationally. He had many slides with financial breakdowns, but a point that he hit home was just how influential Google really is. Adding together the market capitalization of all of Google's competitors together doesn't equal Googles'. Google is the undisputed center of the Internet universe right now. It's doing that much better than everyone else, and in many cases equally well on an international basis, such as England and Germany. Twice, Jordan referred to natural traffic as the most precious commodity on the Internet, which I view as curious because most of the money going into fixing natural search (I believe) not going into the type of public companies that would be on his radar. Mostly only paid search revenue can make Wall Street take notice. Unlocking natural search is simultaneously the top priority and lest visible type of search business.

HitTail fills the missing piece so well, that it's really just a matter of people getting it on a broader basis before it takes off like wildfire. Its one of those classic situations of leading the market, and doing something that no one quite understands… today. But stay the course! In time, it will become commonsense, and no one will understand how anyone didn't get it.

And that brings us back to the Commodore book. The birth of the PC industry is just rife with these stories. Jack Tramiel and Irving Gould could have been the two richest men in the world, instead of Bill Gates. They actually were in the position to grab the brass ring several times, and chose to pass on the opportunity each time. Had Irving not starved Jack for resources, and Jack not undermined his people, then Apple would never have happened, and Commodore would be bigger and scarier than Microsoft's monopoly today. Commodore was first, cheaper or smarter in just about everything, but they still lost because of a series of shortsightedness or lack of vision.

We are again at that one of those sorts of apex moments as occurred in the birth of the PC industry, but this time in marketing and media. Old media is like the big old mainframes. Quirky Internet-capable devices of today are like the first PCs. Human attention is a finite resource. Less of that attention is going to traditional media like print and TV with every passing month. More of it is shifting to online venues. There are 2 internet enabled mobile phones to every 1 PC. By 2010, it is projected that there will be 10 Internet-enabled mobile devices to every 1 PC. By that time, the next generation IPv6 Internet will have arrived, and the efficient means of "broadcasting" that was limited to TV and cable will be brought to the Internet at large, and the lines between traditional and online media will be further blurred. The revolution of low-power paper-like electronic display technology like the eInk display in Sony's new eBook will be common, and probably be plastered up like wallpaper. This is how media and media-devices will evolve just as the PC industry did.

That Media Lab inspired $100 laptop should be down to $50 by that time, functionally making PCs free. Ad hoc Internet meshes will provide alternatives to paying internet service providers, and additional completely alternative Internets will be available for the price of watching a few ads. Every publisher no matter how tiny will be able to get their message out and reach their perfectly matched audience through increasingly improved search. That finite resource of human attention will be increasingly fragmented over different media publications. The concept of differentiating between online and offline will go away. All media will effectively be online, and we will look at TV and print media the way we look at calculators and paper legers. They have their use and are not going away. But they'll be totally eclipsed by the new devices.

And the way for marketers to reach their audience will be as dynamic and changing as media and devices themselves. Push-ads will become increasingly behaviorally targeted to achieve that ultimate goal of the exact right message at the exact right time. If the sensor in your phone detects bad breath, an ad for mouthwash will pop up, with GPS instructions on where to walk and get it, at which time they will attempt to upsell you at the point of purchase, and you'll pay with your phone instead of your credit card, thus completing advertisers' ultimate wet dream.

But that other side of marketing will still exist, where a question pops into your head, and you need it answered. So, you type or speak a few words, and instead of push-ads, it's a pull-process. And it will always be a more welcome and less intrusive process than push-ads. In fact, it may be the only way to reach consumers who value privacy, opt-out or otherwise resist profiling. You get ads because you asked for them. And you MUST get ads with your results, because that's what pays for the service. But in spirit, you've asked for more than just ads. You asked for an unbiased editorial opinion on what the best possible answer to your query is. And the results can't just be whored ads, or else all trust is broken. The search companies of tomorrow will have to have to be a synthesis of Consumer Reports and The Yellow Pages to maintain credibility, trust, and therefore users.

Providing the device for free will be a powerful reason to change the ad/editorial ratio or perhaps even the ad/editorial division. Advertorials and Infomercials are the traditional media's equivalent of Yahoo's paid inclusion program. So far, the church and state division in search has been a clear line of demarcation, with only a few exceptions. GoTo.com and then Overture used to mix paid search in with the results that were fed to the then-mega-popular meta searchers. When Yahoo bought Overture and Inktomi, the paid search became marginalized text ads, similar to Google's AdWords. Yahoo allows results to be algorithmically included through XML data feeds, helping sites that would be otherwise invisible to search stand a chance without redoing their IT infrastructure. Is that compromised search results? Probably not, but it's not a black and white issue, either.

But back to the free device issue again. The cost of the end-device will effectively drop to nothing, and the price of bandwidth will be reduced. Advertising will be able to generate enough money to offset most of the cost, so the new media companies like Yahoo and Google have the option of relatively easily becoming an advertising supplemented technology platform, taking Microsoft completely out of the picture. It will be cheaper and more environmentally friendly distribute these devices rather than phonebooks.

These devices or their counterparts will also be the way individuals connect with each other, so right as the power of advertising increases 10-fold, so does the power of word-of-mouth. It will be easier to shine the light on evils committed in the name of industry and profit. The plight of the little guy, and the injustices that plague our world will be laid bare. Millions of micro transactions per second can occur as a result of these viral epidemic word of mouth outbreaks, and may be ultimately more effective than anything advertising can buy. Therefore, the balance between the world of media buying, a.k.a. advertising, and the world of word-of-mouth, a.k.a. public relations will continue to exist.

Content: To Syndicate or Not To Syndicate?

I ran into an interesting situation tonight. A fellow professional in the SEO community launched a story on Digg teaching you how to get a site indexed by Google very quickly--a subject dear to my heart, after having HitTail fully indexed in under a month. The author was advocating the long-standing method of authoring an article and allowing it to be syndicated through all the various methods that can occur these days. And there are many. I disagreed, which was not very well received.

As a blog author these days, you can hardly keep your content from being syndicated. It's just part of the game, but I'm close to giving the advice to turn off the RSS feeds, or to just give a minimal excerpt--not yet, but close. It's very easy and tempting to let all your data out, and ping the world every time you post. But there is the additional temptation to deliberately take the "syndicated author" approach, and write your story deliberately for other sites to carry. You then submit them to the many article submission sites that make such articles available to websites as a free service.

My comment was along the lines of just using original content, which was misconstrued by this author as meaning that the articles were not original. I totally conceded the point that HE was using original content. Rather, my message was to the webmasters of the world that THEY in fact would be better off with original content than with pulling down the same articles as everyone else. The duplicate content penalty often referred to by SEOs may not as serious as it's made out to be today. But it's going to catch up as the syndication problem worsens. Let me explain.

Today, it's very difficult for search engines to recognize and differentiate users of syndicated content from the original source. Add the re-mixing of content that occurs by just using the first paragraph of many articles on a single page, and you have a highly effective page for search, but of decreasing originality and value to the visitor.

Decreasing value, you ask? Yes, this syndicate and re-mix approach was fine when people first came up with the technique, because it was an insignificant percentage of overall content on the Internet, and didn't detract from, and hardly competed with the original source. But today, due to the ease of syndication and coupled with the motivation to do so due to AdSense is flip-flopping those ratios. At the current rate, it won't be long before the ratio flip-flops, and MOST content is syndicated, and that's bad news for those sites, because like so many systems that get out of balance, the center cannot hold. The time is coming when syndicated content will out of necessity have to be filtered.

The Google updates name Jagger and BigDaddy greatly dealt with all the DMOZ open directory clones. That was easy in comparison, because the content was more-or-less the same everywhere. Syndication spam won't be nearly as easy, because they have to deal with more subtle questions.

It used to be that Google bragged about the number of pages of the Internet that it had indexed. A much-discussed spammer recently released a number of pages onto the Internet that alone rivaled the entire size of the Internet from a few years ago. In addition to quantity, the quality of the pages also varies as the ability remix content within pages increases. As the ability to syndicate and remix approaches infinite, the bragging right for search engines will not be how MUCH of the Internet they've indexed, but how LITTLE of the Spam-net that they actually serve. And the task is a subtle and difficult challenge for the engines, akin to separating the wheat from the chaff. Let me explain.

Say a single syndicated article is picked up and republished in 8000 locations all over the Internet, and say that article contains a link back to the author's site. Search engines have at least three questions they must answer...

1. Should they let the links count in determining relevancy?


2. Should they let the article count at all as part of the Internet landscape?


3. If they DO let the article count, which incident of the article should be served in the results?

Like so many of these issues, the fix is made difficult because of the legitimate exceptions. When filtering mirror sites designed to manipulate search engines, Google must be careful not to eliminate Tucows altogether, a heavily mirrored site, but rather to eliminate duplicates down to the one original and most authoritative site. Tucows is not an abuser. It is just an exception to the mirror site rule.

Similarly, with mirrored content. Many authors merely want to be read by as broad an audience possible in order to create their reputation. They release their writing onto the Internet in much the same way that Open Source authors release software. It was in this spirit the Creative Commons licenses were created, and perhaps they (along with some metadata tagging) is part of the solution. But again, we have an exception preventing the filters from being overly Draconian in their rule. Syndicated content must not be an automatic sign of abuse. This is doubly true due to how with blogging it is very easy to accidentally let your content be syndicated through RSS feeds and the ping system.

So, where does this lead us?

If the search engines continue to perform the chore of crawling, filtering, indexing and serving search results, then we may be in the position of making our content LOOK one-of-a-kind to survive the filtering process. This may mean turning off syndication, and expecting your content to be read only on your site. Sure, this cuts down distribution and POTENTIALLY readership. But if the filters are good, it also means that everyone specifically interested in what you have to say is even more likely to find you. The signal-to-noise ratio improves.

Do I recommend turning off your RSS feeds? Do I recommend turning off the pings? Not yet. If anything, consider cutting back your data feed to only an excerpt. But this is bad for people reading your blog over Bloglines, or people such as me reading over my phone. And a general trend towards cutting back RSS feeds I think is a bad thing. Once again, the real solution must come from the brain trusts that now work at the Search capitals of the world. Can Google, Yahoo and MSN intelligently recognize the original source or "epicenter" of syndicated content? Or maybe it's an opening for a new player in the search space?

Can anyone de-dupe to exactly the correct authoritative source? What will the outcry be when all those pages drop out of search?

It's not an easy problem to fix, but like email spam, it's one so bad that it threatens to crush the very system.

For now, my recommendation would be just to keep on HitTailing. The recommendations that HitTailing suggests are going to be off the beaten track, therefore keeping you off the radar of many of the auto-search-and-syndicate bots. YOUR site will start to have a footprint markedly different from sites that only regurgitate other peoples' content. When these theoretical anti-syndication filters come into play and the next BigDaddy occurs, you'll more likely be one of the people standing by saying you don't know what the big deal is about.

Next Generation Search Engine, Anyone?

So, Technorati is reporting over 100 mentions/day of the long tail. The deluge of posts from the Chris Anderson book launch has only been going on for a few days, but the HitTail/MyLongTail site is holding its ground fairly well in the Google default results. We started out on pages 7 and 4 for long tail and longtail respectively. We've only been pushed to pages 8 an 5, even with the 400+ new pages that were rolled out over the past few days.

Now, Google results have a time-delay effect, where if those blog posts get linked-to at a steady rate, their positions in Google default search will rise, so the tide of new content may not sweep us under for another month or two. That's one of the interesting things about Google default search: it's not a news system so much as a non-real-time popularity contest. In fact, one of Google's potential areas for next-generation-style improvement would be to make their search reflect the real-time state of the Internet instead of a time-delayed index.

This could be done in at least three ways that come to mind. First, is content providers notifying Google every time new content is released. That was like the old submit system, and is like today's Technorati ping system. But if we were all pinging Google, no doubt the voice of spammers would drown out everyone else's. So, that's no good.

The next approach is their crawlers actually being so massive, omniscient and all-seeing that they can go out and survey the entire state of the Internet several times a day. Today, GoogleBot picks up only a few thousand pages-per-site-per-day, and that's only popular sites (high PR), and only when the content isn't "invisible" to Google. The only problems with this approach are bandwidth, processing power and storage capacity. True, all but bandwidth will be approaching unlimited. But still, maybe not viable for the next evolution in search.

The third approach I'm aware of is small-world-theory, where crawlers are sent out in real time to find answers to queries, totally abandoning the "indexing" system. Theoretically, every time you searched, the results could be different, depending on the topology of the Internet at that very second. The problem here is that the interlinking may not be good enough to ferret out the highest quality content every time. There is also a bandwidth issue, because the crawl must happen in real-time instead of the time-delayed "canned " indexes.

Then of course, there are hybrid approaches combining some or all of the above. And the fact that Google's results do update on a daily basis is evidence that they're doing some hybrid techniques. I doubt they're pushing the entire massive index out to all their datacenters several times/day. I suspect that they're not using small-world-theory crawls (at least not in default search). So chances are, they have a different class of crawlers dedicated to picking up what's new and fresh, and distributing it out as incremental updates that modify the last big datacenter push.

Anyway, that has been my rambling on what some aspects of the future of search may bring. In monitoring the popularity growth of HitTail, I find myself first going to Google and Technorati to watch the results fluctuate. I care most about Google, but appreciate the real-time-ness of Technorati. I hunger to view the shifting-state-of-the-Internet itself through Google default results. Shouldn't that be possible today with Ajax methods? Perform a search, and sit back and watch the results change as the Internet itself does?

The 80/20 Rule & Our Finite Lives

So, I sort of love the 80/20 rule. There is an elegance in zeroing in on the first 20% of the work that results in 80% of the benefit. I like the rule so much, especially in the context of our finite time on this planet, that I wrote an 80/20 rule poem. I first learned about it from the tax code, about the rules for deducting a home office. I have since learned that the recognized origins of the rule is the Pareto principle, and discusses wealth distribution--how 20% of the population controls 80% of the wealth, and how this was universal, no matter when in history or what type of society.

So, the long tail notion is all about the invalidation of the 80/20 rule, where the rules of nearly infinite supply-side abundance combined with effective means of looking for and receiving what you want, evens out the distribution. The more easily product can "flow", the more this new shape of business will emerge, and it is most apparent online and with digital product. It is less-so with products that must be produced at the location of consumption--say, restaurants. Restaurants will always follow the 80/20 rule.

The next thing that struck me as odd is how Chris Anderson points out that the 80 and the 20 measure different things. Say Wal-Mart wants to carry the 20% of products that sell best and account for 80% of sales. The 20% is a portion of products, while the 80% is a portion of sales. So, they don't have to add up to 100%. You can just as easily have 5% of your product account for 90% of your sales (5/90 Rule?) or any variation. It's just a ratio. And it's a ratio of derivative numbers at that, making it much less useful in practice than one might intuitively imagine. The innate elegance of the 80/20 rule is an illusion.

What's really at issue is that the concept of supply-side scarcity is what's threatened. Supply-side abundance is happening BOTH through online services and through super megastores like Wal-Mart. As much as we like to chop at the ankles of giants, Wal-Mart has actually increased diversity of choice on the shelves. It's not always about internet efficiencies and the long tail. Sometimes it's about economies of scale, overall operational efficiencies, and the logistics curve (the unsung hero of statistical business model curves).

But where does supply-side scarcity forever remain, aside from restaurants? No matter how the rules of business change, what are the fixed factors? At least for now, it's the finite timespan of our lives. No matter how infinite choices become, we can only spend so much time consuming. Chris makes excellent points about compressibility of certain consumables (listen to radio while doing something else). But in the end, we only have so many minutes in our lifespan, and we divvy them out as we see fit. Because of this decided scarcity on the supply-side, our lives will forever follow the 80/20 rule--however much of a convenient illusion it might be.

You can't do everything, though trust fund babies can certainly try. For the rest of us, we have to divvy out our precious time between livelihood, family and friends, using whatever's left over for travel, altruism, hobbies, and exploring the long tail of consumable goods. And with the infinite supply-side through online, such as endless blogs such as this, to read, the filters have got to be pretty darn good. For given the incredibly finite nature of our lives, we as individuals are very well served to focus in on the 20% of our precious time seeking out those experiences that will make 80% of the impact on our lives.

HitTailing: The Least Spammy Online Marketing

Why is properly conducted HitTailing is the least spammy form of online marketing? The foremost reason is the self-qualifying nature of the act of searching. You did not cold-call the individual. You did not attempt to insert a popup add between them and their content. You are not even competing for visual attention between editorial content and ad banners.

Your visitor is at your site because they WANT to be there. They asked to be there. They sought you out. And this is the best type of visitor.

The same can be said for pay-per-click advertising, and indeed this is true. It's a major reason why such a small component of the screen (text-based ads) has constituted a 7-billion dollar industry last year. Now, imagine the fact that the iceberg principle is at work here: the actual search engine traffic being routed through natural search is likely to be many times greater than that being routed by PPC ads.

Think about it.

John Battelle opens his book, The Search, talking about Arbitrage. Wikipedia defines arbitrage as: "In economics, arbitrage is the practice of taking advantage of a state of imbalance between two or more markets: a combination of matching deals are struck that capitalize upon the imbalance, the profit being the difference between the market prices." For those not familiar with the concept, this is the same as the middleman or the broker: someone in the middle who has better access to supply-side, and demand-side than the supplier or customer. For the best middleman book I've ever read, check out Winning Through Intimidation, by Robert Ringer. They can leverage this position to make a deal happen that would have otherwise not taken place, and make some money in the process. It's a true art form, and a constant battle against "disintermediation".

Arbitrage is exactly what Google does with AdWords, because of the imbalance in natural search. What is the imbalance? Frankly, it's the inability of the supply-side to come up in natural search without paying. And therefore, PPC has become the second least-spammy, and certainly the most financially successful form of online marketing.

But Google is STILL the arbitrator of business on the natural search side. They're just not getting a cut (of course, Yahoo, MSN and Ask are also such arbitrators, but for the sake of writing flow, I tend to talk in terms of just Google and AdWords). So, think about the monetary value of the traffic being given away... perhaps to your competitors. Is there a value on that free arbitrage provided by G/Y/M?

No one knows the numbers except for the search engines themselves, and perhaps people in a position to peer in on traffic on some of the more major backbones of the Internet. And the data is often closely guarded, for it doesn't serve the industry's interests to reveal how much they're giving away for free to get the $7 billion. I always talk about natural search as the editorial content and real attraction of search engines. But in a way, it can also be thought of as a loss leader product.

So, we've established that PPC is almost as un-spammy as HitTailing. But what about online ads? And what about online word of mouth outreach?

Well, ads are a mixed bag. Simple banner and tower ads simply compete for visual attention next to editorial content. That's not so bad, but because a search was not involved, yes, they are a bit spammy. If they are context-sensitive ads, then they are a bit less-so. Pop-up are more so. The more context-sensitive the add, the less spammy, and the more translucent, the less spammy. Translucent? Yes, indeed. Ads can't be transparent, or else they'll never work. And they can't be forever marginalized, or else media-savvy consumers will increasingly filter them out. For an excellent example of ads that are translucent, check out in-text advertising, such as Vibrant Media (full-disclosure: they're a Connors client).

So then, how about proactive online outreach? HitTailing itself falls into this category, but by publishing your own blog, instead of posting on others. Social networking also falls into this category, and it can be very effective when your word-of-mouth message is closely aligned to the interests of the network, such as music on MySpace. But even here, the levels of spammyness vary from marginally OK to unacceptable. Fly-by posts on forums is sometimes known as Astroturfing. Same with attempts to "make news" on Digg and other democratic news sites. But almost every example of going out and putting information on sites controlled by other people will be categorized as a bit more spammy than publishing on your own sites.

See, publishing on your own sites is not spammy, because they are your sites, with the one qualifying condition that the content you're putting there is of real value. If' you're just shoveling search engine fodder onto a blog, then it's a splog, and is spammy.

This is the reason why encouraging good writing style, and furthering the craft of online writing is an important principle of HitTailing. It won't work without quality writing, and quality thinking. So yes, it takes work and thought and is not the easiest path. But it is a healthy, sustainable path. And if practiced properly, HitTailing can be the lest-spammy of all online marketing.

Solution Selling vs. HitTailing

In every way, HitTailing is about the incredibly soft sell. This is in marked contrast to the Solution Selling world that I come from, where a salesperson actively reaches out to you, moving you along your 5 or 7 touches to the close. Solution Selling works particularly well in difficult markets that have high price products and long sales cycles. It's not unusual for a sale in a difficult market to take a year or more to close.

And that's a lot of time to search.

Do these occasional hits by the prospect on your website on their research jaunts count as Touches in the truest Solution Selling sense? The jury is not in yet. There's certainly no fields in sales force automation (SFA) software for how many natural or PPC search hits the prospect has performed during the sales cycle. Maybe there should be. Yes, I would definitely argue there should be.

But what ROLE do these passive search hit-based touches play?

First, let's get it out of the way: yes, it's a passive role. Or at best, HitTailing is passive aggressive. While this sounds like a disadvantage, it is the most polite and least spammy forms of online marketing. Think about it: you're adding content of genuine value to your audience to the Internet (it is of genuine value, isn't it?). You're waiting for people to FIND YOU through the unique and under-recognized self-prequalification process known as Search. This is why PPC is also so effective: they're context-sensitive adds following a uniquely effective pre-qualifying action. You know they're interested, because they just searched!

Next, you're not stepping on anyones' toes. Even online ads are an attempt to insert information between a site's visitor and the main content. HitTailing is even less spammy than banner and popup ads.

But what about online outreach by finding the important influencers in your space, and reaching out to them by commenting on their blogs?

Well, it's a mixed bag, to say the least. Sometimes, you will score big, by aligning what you have to say precisely to the interests of the blogger. That was the case today, with Arnie of Critical Assumption. Indeed, based on his recognition of what I feel is my all-time-best-post, I think I found a kindred spirit in Arnie, and he may end up mentioning HitTail as a cool site.

But I've had exactly the opposite reaction too from a blogger who felt that my online outreach of late has been too much. I totally see how SEOs who frequent several SEO forums feel this way. And we've quickly remedied the problem by launching our own forum, so HitTail discussion doesn't have to occur in other peoples' forums. Despite that, I'm still getting invites to go speak at forums.

I've also throttled back blog comments to only those where I am SURE the message will be well received. If there's anything that looks like a shadow of competitive services--actual or perceived--I won't post.

And this gets to some interesting notions that have been on my mind of late. I'm tempted to produce a diagram about the lifecycle of a site. There is a time for online outreach, and a time for PPC and a time for HitTailing. It varies a bit from site to site, but I think much of it can be generalized for all sites. And I'm still resolving what is probably the part of it that I am least familiar and adept at: proactive online outreach. I much prefer being the invisible guy behind the scenes responsible for boku sales, where no one even knew I was involved. That explains my disappearing off the face of the SEO planet between 2002 and 2004, prior to which I was very active at the original Search Engine Forum. I was funneling all my energies into producing those online sales, and had very little energy left over for forums.

Fast forward to today. 2004 to 2006 was spent retooling my SEO methodologies to the public relations clients of Connors Communications, and a generally broader audience. A small piece of those services which are ready for public consumption was extracted from Connors' greater offerings as the HitTail site. I have a message I'm just chomping at the bit to get out. I am indeed practicing what I preach by HitTailing. But it's not fast enough!

We've got a new blog meme; a new marketing religion; a new take on word of mouth; a broadening of the definition of public relations. And we just have to share. And part of that sharing is dropping it like a pebble into the middle of the pond that is the online marketing community, and to watch the ripples. Those ripples serve as both validation, and the early adopters to help us rapidly refine the product. But how big of a pebble do we drop? How many pebbles at what areas of the lake? If the pebble is too big (a rock), it's impolite. If the rock is too small, you haven't given it a fair chance.

Certain products will take off like wildfire after the first pebble is dropped, because they have all the Inside the Tornado factors going in their favor. HitTail isn't one of them, because although the conditions are right, the message is difficult to communicate. Therefore, we've (I've) felt obliged to drop quite a few pebbles to give the idea a fair chance. Where does due diligence and perseverance turn into spamminess?

Well, I'm not going to find out. I've never been adverse to risk, but there is a better way. We're going to stick to HitTailing, practicing what we preach. But we're also going to put the public relations machinery to work on it, also practicing what we preach. And finally, we're going to stay engaged in with the online community.

But this is not Solution Selling. The market is easy. The price is free. The only barrier to entry is enlightenment. We'll do our best to enlighten, but there's nothing better that we can do than to solicit HitTailers to give us their stories, like David Stockwell.

If this is a trend, then HitTailing is in very good shape, indeed.

Lesson learned: when trying to get the snowball effect to occur, it takes as much finesse as it does persistence. Push too hard to get the snowball rolling, and it crumbles. Push too softly, and it will never roll and pick up snow. You've got to feel out that place in-between, and have faith its working.

HitTail Success Stories & Ideal Markets

So, we're asking for success stories in the forum. You can feel free to go over there and post them. Promoting HitTail beyond the quick pick-up of the early adopters who get it is a challenge, because the ideas are so contrary to some of the more common marketing wisdom out there. Interestingly, the people who seem to get it most are those making money from AdSense. Their parameters for making money almost call for HitTail:

1. The traffic must be natural, and not paid-for, or else, it's a wash.


2. The traffic must sincerely be interested in what's being said on the page, or else, no one will click the context-sensitive ads.


3. They're in it for the long haul, and the slow build. The way AdSense starts making you only a few bucks a week sends a clear message about the need for patience.

That being said, the same criteria that are intuitively obvious for an AdSensor SHOULD be equally embraced by mainstream marketers. How can marketers ever hope to compete with people who are systematically and gradually rising to dominance in certain "conceptual spaces"?

What do I mean by conceptual spaces? Well, the HitTail part of marketing requires you casting of your benchmark keyword restraints, and venturing off into the tangentially related, but still spot-on relevance of HitTail suggestions. This may guide you in directions you never thought to take. And by following the suggestions over time, you start to flesh out content over a conceptual area on the terms that truly are generating the traffic. This is as opposed to the terms people think are generating the traffic, based on industry knowledge, brainstorming sessions, and the common keyword suggestion tools.

One of the first HitTailing success stories to come in has cleverly labeled Niche Modeling, which is actually about predicting the shape of our world in an ecological sense. Its very hot stuff these days with Michael Crichton and Conservatives thinking global warming is overblown, with Al Gore and the rest of the world thinking it's the crisis of our times. There's lots of audience out there for this sort of stuff, and lots of competition for the readership.

This scenario with high traffic, high competition, lots of niche subjects is a perfect HitTailing environment. In many ways, davids99us stated the principles of HitTailing better than I ever have. I'll have to incorporate some of his points into our main material. It is like the opposite of the also-ideal environment where HitTailing methods were developed: digital signage, where there is a small and geographically diverse audience, all of which are searching on different terms. So, the competition is low, but the need to be "predictive" is high.

Eventually, I'll have to map out the different market scenarios, and where HitTailing is and isn't appropriate. In a chat recently with David Scott, and he posed the question, where would HitTail not be appropriate. Well, I said if you're buying a new airliner, you're going to buy from Boeing or Airbus. There really are only two left, and you know exactly who to call. Then, there are markets where everyone just for whatever reasons absolutely knows everyone else. Well, word of mouth will work better than HitTailing in those markets, because word of mouth is most efficient in highly interconnected social networks.

On the other hand, I've identified a few good HitTailing markets.

1. Emerging industries, where no one knows what to call it. There are no industry trade shows or trade magazines yet. There may be a few scattered blogs and newsletters. Digital signage was a great example.


2. Popular culture niche topics, where there are unlimited things to talk about, with studies being published all the time. davids99us' example of the Earth's environment was a great example.


3. Cottage industries, where you're just never going to get distribution otherwise, and you need to sell over eBay or other online methods. I recently bought a $350 litter box for my cats called the Litter Robot. That was a good example.


4. Mainstream competitive industries where there is an abundance of never-before-addressed terms that could lead to business. This equally applies to B2B and B2C. It's the perfect corporate blogging strategy.

The Long Tail Book Launch Party

The Long Tail book launch in NYC was a fun event. I scored front-seat viewing in the tiny Theater 2, in front of all the seats reserved for the Wired Magazine folks. Flaverpill sponsored the event, and introduced Chris. There was a funny story about how their opening conversation when they met turned into the basis of the event: who do you listen to on your iPod? The Brazilian Girls, James Murphy, etc. And there they were as the music at the party. The crowded, crazy party!

It was a delight to hear Chris speak. He was very non-pretentious and approachable. His talk very much gives the impression of being the champion of the little guy, right as his book is zooming to best seller status--an irony he is very much aware of. He talked about his background as a garage band electric guitar rocker. He made a few quick remarks about his high school and college experience that I don't want to quote for fear that I misheard, and then his jaunts into physics and economics. His background was eclectic to say the least, and ironic in that promoting the long tail book was in a way getting back to his roots as hardline rocker in Chicago.

After an hour of Longtailtini's and Longtail Sunrises, we listened to Chris' talk, where he summed up the book for those who hadn't read it yet, and showed a humorous video made by Peter Hirshberg of Technorati. It was narrated from the perspective of "The Man", and done in a campy 50's horror movie style: "While we were producing hits, they were studying us..." The punch-line was that the audience is up to something. Day of the Long Taillllllllllll.

There is defiantly a balance being struck between the message that the "hit" is on the decline, which helps promote the book, and the acknowledgement that hits are still very much with us. But Chris showed some dramatic points about "water levels", stating that the first day of spring in 2000 the high water mark was reached with InSync's second album, and how he believes, but wouldn't put money on it, that that level of success will never again be achieved in the music industry. That was the most successful CD release that will ever happen. Similar charts showed percentages of housholds that tuned into "I Love Lucy" (70%) vs. the modern equivalents, like CSI (~10%).

Chris made himself very available after the talk, both for chatting and book signing. My boss, Connie, had met Chris at the WSJ D conference a few weeks ago. And Chris immediately knew who I was. The HitTail demo resulted in a few emails being sent to him. I think of the HitTail endeavor in relation to Chris like Solution Selling courses in relation to Michael Bosworth. Michael Bosworth framed the discussion, and made the concept much more accessible to the masses, and Chris has done much the same with business whose model follows the long tail shape.

Less Online Outreach

So, I'm dialing back on the online promotion for awhile. I think HitTail is getting its fair chance amongst the forum-participating SEO community. And I repeat my thanks to those who run the forums who allowed me to stop by and say a few words--particularly JimWorld and Search Engine Forums, where I made my start, and where they clearly cut me some slack. I'll only be answering direct questions now in the various threads that I check in on a couple of times a week. For the word-of-mouth promotion to kick it, it's now up to the HitTailers.

Same goes for Blogs. I've made the rounds to those who have blogged about the long tail of search, and asked that they look at HitTail via the comments. I've stepped on a few toes. You never know where a message will be well received, and where you're treading around conflict-of-interest. I read each site I post at, and try to match up the synergies. Anyway, HitTail was originally positioned as an alternative to paying for search hits, which is a little to adversarial to the PPC industry. But they themselves are adjusting to become paid inclusion or pay-per-conversion. And as we're learning from our beta testers, HitTail goes a long way towards those goals as well. It's just another tool in the toolbox, and one that doesn't have to threaten anyone: neither pro SEOs nor SEMs.

None-the-less, my online outreach has reached its conclusion on this monumentus of days, when the reason the service works can actually be described in mainstream language. Thanks to Chris Anderson for making the long tail a new addition to the language of business. I'm almost through the book, and keep picking up gold nuggets. For example, I learned that the math formula behind the long tail is generally the power distribution curve, which is called that because it's follows the simple 1/x formula--or x to the -1 power. I learned the history of the Zipf curve and how that too was rooted in social analysis. Is every mathematical business term rooted in sociology and attempts to figure out where the money's going: the bell curve, the tipping point, and now the long tail?

Yes, I watched Technorati for the flow of book reviews, and chimed in. At first, I was a little too forward with mentioning HitTail. Now, I'm just using it as part of my name, and focusing on the commentary, of which I have plenty to say. I reconnected with Marshall Sponder, who I spent a great deal of time talking to at John Battelle's book launch at the Coliseum Bookstore here in NY last fall. He has an intriguing post about higher profit margins in the long tail in the Wine industry on his WebMetricsGuru site. I'm also in an interesting exchange with Joystick.org about what the theory aspect of the long tail is, where he states that the effect is quite factual, with which I agree. I think one of the overlooked aspects that makes it a theory is that Chris imagines the true shape of the demand curve if perfectly met by supply, by ever-more-perfect filters and distribution.

We will be relying on word of mouth to kick in to spread the HitTail word now. For those who would like to freely interact, there is always our new forum, where it will never look like promotion. And we'll be looking for more exposure opportunities. The message goes beyond the HitTail service itself, and more broadly into the fact creativity can be used mining your log files for the best clues about what people are looking for. Your little piece of the database of intentions is tied up in those log files, waiting to be gleaned. And doing it well is more than a matter of pulling the keyword list, and perhaps the accompanying HitCount data. There are MANY more clues in there waiting to be discovered, very similar to how linkage was a relevancy clue for search.

And so, we're looking for other opportunities to get the word out. Thanks to the SEO forums for categorizing us as wheat, as they separated the wheat from the chaff of first-time forum posters who came bearing a URL. We do recognize the exception you made for us, and are reciprocating in kind by attempting to advance the entire state of the industry. By wrapping it in a similar context that "leads into" SEO business, we can set companies down the right path without scaring them away with the luggage that unfortunately now comes with the SEO acronym. Anyone can get relatively short-term natural search improvements through HitTailing, but this will only take them so far. And hungry for more, that's where the rest of the industry steps in.

And as we learned, the "rest" of the industry includes both SEM and SEO, because the two are inextricably bound in an upwards spiral of relevancy. There are probably two entirely different systems of measuring relevancy at work here, and when one validates and cross-verifies the other, is where some of the most dramatic gains are made. So while as a public relations firm, our heart lies with natural search due to the similarities to editorial content, we acknowledge that it is the less orthodox approach, and perhaps best in cash-tight situations. Budget allowing, the healthy marketing mix should include advertising, where the deal is much clearer, and is more like a media buy.

So, we're now taking our message on the road. Next week, we're at the Search Insider Summit. We've already spoken at the Magazine Publishers of America (due to how closely aligned natural search is to their audiences' mission). And we'll be moving onto other, more general marketing trade shows and conferences, where we think HitTailing may be more readily received than SEO. Selling the entire "SEO" package can be difficult still for the vast majority of business that desperately needs it.

Selling into difficult markets, where HitTailing methodologies were developed, we certainly understand the rule of 5's or the rule of 7's, where multiple touches with the prospect o