TechMeme featured HitTail and I didn't know it

I just realized that HitTail was featured on TechMeme. That explains the popularity of that DownloadSquad review of HitTail. So, happily, we can add TechMeme to the likes of CNET, TechCrunch, BusinessWeek and PCWorld, all of which covered HitTail. It has been strangely resistant to SlashDot, Digg and WebMasterWorld. My theory is that the later sites are religiously opposed to big steps forward in the world of marketing, no matter how innovative and related to technology it may be. I would think they'd be interested in an AJAX datagrid that's handling stepping through billions of records in real-time. Or perhaps as the first real alternative to relying on Google AdWords for garnering publicity. It's all the more strange, since HitTail IS attracting spontaneous attention from the VC community, and the usual suspects of suitors who buy-out such start-ups. Perhaps it will not be until acquisition rumors are flying before the self-proclaimed "spin-adverse" social media outlets acknowlege HitTail. No worries. That makes all the more effective secret weapon for the rest of us.

TypePad Widget for HitTail

For all you TypePad junkies who have been cramming the HitTail code into a line list, we've just made it easier for you. We have just created a TypePad widget, and been accepted into the TypePad Gallery. Make it popular, so we get accepted onto the TypePad Recommended Widgets list. Thanks to Dave Berkowitz of 360i and Search Insider for originally suggesting it.

HitTail reveals in real-time the least utilized, most promising keywords hidden in the Long Tail of your natural search results. We present these terms to you as suggestions that when acted on can boost the natural search results of your site. It's that simple.

Why Politicians, and Presidential Candidates should use HitTail

Politics like everything in life; isn’t an exact science.
Politicians know for the most part who is going to vote Republican, and who is going to vote Democrat. They’ve seen numbers, charts, graphs, and polls. They know their people; their constituents, their voters, and how the makeup of the country brakes down. They know which are the Red States, The Blue States. Almost every presidential election year the makeup of the country for the most part remains very similar to the previous election year.

What they don’t know is: who are the independent voters are going to vote for?. The independent and the undecided voters usually help to decide an election.
As a politician, they are one of your largest target audiences.

These voters can be swayed in one direction or another. Usually many of them wait until the last minute to vote, and weigh the issues at hand against each other. They watch debates, talk to their neighbors, family members, and friends, and then make the best possible choice. They also do research on-line, going to the official websites, top political blogs, and even candidates MYSPACE Pages for information on the candidates and their stance on the issues.

So what’s a politician to do? How do I reach that audience? How do I find out what concerns them, and how do I use that information to reach them; and ultimately convince them I am best candidate for the job?

Well, HitTail could help these candidates answer that very question.
HitTail can help these candidates know what keywords and key searches people use when they are looking their websites and their stance on the issues.

HitTail can help the candidate know from an on-line perspective what voters are looking for, and what their key issues are.

Having this information can help a candidate in various ways. They could take this information and make sure their speech contains a great deal of material on the key subjects people are searching for. They could re-work their websites, so they are more independent voter friendly; addressing the most important issues that can sway an independent or undecided voter.

Or if there is a very small or incremental amount of people looking for a key term in regards to a candidate, the candidate should use that opportunity to educate potential voters in regards to their stance on that position.

Additionally, candidates could learn that their name may be associated with a certain event, speech, comment, or news story. People may know them from that positive or negative experience. Candidates may want to highlight that thing, or distance themselves from it. HitTail will help to give them that knowledge and advantage.

Additionally by using HitTail, candidates can get a better chance of coming up in positive search results by knowing what topics to blog about; so they have more of a positive on-line identity in a changing political on-line world.

This is increasingly important because as the political season heats up, and the election nears, blogging becomes so very important. Candidates realize a great majority of Americans find out and learn information on the candidates on-line and on the web.

Controlling that on-line presence and making it more voter friendly is the key to competing with other candidates on-line. Using HitTail can help a candidate maximize their efforts in this regard, and help to sway more and more of the undecided voters which in past elections helped to decide the fate of candidates.

HitTail of course has a great deal of experience giving small businesses and bloggers more visibility on-line, So only one question remains: Why Not Politicians?

Seth Godin on SEO - Slam and Counter-Slam

Just this past Sunday, prolific writer and advocate of viral marketing, Seth Godin, published this opinion on SEO:

Hey. It's not so hard. If you make great stuff, people will find you. If
you are transparent and accurate and doing what's good for the surfer, people
will find you. If you regularly demonstrate knowledge of content that's worth
seeking out, people (being selfish) will come, and people (being generous) will
tell other people. It turns out that it's easier and faster to do that than to
spend all your time on the shortcuts.

And today, Solomon Rothman slammed him on WebProNews with a series of real-world examples, stating why Seth was wrong. But I say that they're both absolutely correct, and that Seth is merely a year or so AHEAD of Solomon...

...and that's why HitTail recommends getting started with BLOGGING SOFTWARE. And in Seth's case, he uses TypePad from SixApart, so he doesn't need to worry about SEO. What he says is absolutely true. TypePad does enough things correctly enough that you don't even need to customize. If you just start a TypePad blog and follow Seth's advice, it's going to work for you. Of course, you need to choose your headlines well in order to "get in the path" of existing searchers. But asside from that, all the mechanics are taken care of by themselves, and none of those expensive SEO fixes are necessary.

Look carefully at Seth's blog. Solomon's claim about every page having the same title tag is wrong. Every page contains the same text as is in the headline, which is the same text as is in the URL. Additionally, TypePad constructs the magical internal link-structure that frees you from link building. Combined with the teachings of another business-book guru, Chris Anderson and The Long Tail, you have a winning combo, where you don't even have to think about SEO, and it still works.

I don't have to give real-world examples. Just search on anything, and look at the number of TypePad, MovableType, WordPress, SquareSpace and Blogger sites that come up. These site DO ping invisibly in the background at the moment you press Submit or Post. When you set up your blog, you have the option of making it automatically ping services such as Technorati, Weblogs or blo.gs. The details of who gets pinged from what blogging software varies a bit. But if you're using one of the major platforms, you're not doing anyting in secret, and the modern-day equivalent of a search engine submit is going to occur automatically. Remember those days? They're back.

So Seth, when you read that slam, just send them over here. We'll explain it to them. Sure, there are small template tweaks that can improve even TypePad's default templates. But you've done almost everything that's important for SEO merely by virtue of selecting the right publishing platform.

There is actually a major new entry into the world of marketing that is based on the facts precisely as you explained them, Seth.

HitTail turns Blogger into Black Lab - Mine Again Fan

Here's one of the stranger blog posts about HitTail that we've noticed. Alaeddin noticed a band name in his HitTail suggestions, and upon investigating further, became an instant fan. HitTail knows your music tastes? That was totally unexpected to us too, Alaeddin.

Freemium Vs. AdWare

One of our original and most interactive HitTailers, Dr. Howell, recently asked whether we wouldn't be better served by making HitTail completely free, ad-supported software. And while I see us potentially going that direction to help offset costs, we have to know how good of a business we've got, and whether our, often vocal advocates, are willing to support us directly. But we're not all bad guys (people want to make money). And as thanks to every beta tester who does want to step up to the premium service, we're offering the ability to get "grandfathered" into introductory pricing that will never go up.

After April 30th, the price goes up to $9.95 per month, or $99.95 annual. If you sign up now, it's $4.95 per month, or $49.95 annual. This is a savings of 50%, and it will never go up so long as we offer this service.

And as a further gesture of thanks, if you wish to extend this offer to someone whose online well-being you care about, then the time has come to spill the beans.

That's right.

It's time to tell someone you know and care about, about HitTail.

Stop keeping it a secret!

The long tail marketing movement has begun, and the process of conglomerating the crumbs around the meatiest edges of search (competitive terms) is upon us. You can't keep it a secret forever. And there's no reason you should, as everyone's writing suggestions are different with HitTail--as opposed to every other keyword suggestion tool, which when seeded with the same keywords-in, give the same suggestions-out.

How 2005.

In 2007, the idea is to glean wisdom from your search hit visitors in a way that your competitors still can't... whoops... that's the kind of language that has you all keeping it a secret. Well, winning customers on the Web is not a zero sum game. If your competitors get better at it, it isn't necessarily food out of your mouth. OK, maybe a little food. But look at how world population is growing. Surely, there's enough new people being born onto this planet, that you can be a little bit generous sharing your knowledge of HitTail.

And some are. And to those of you who are, I give you a hearty thanks, and send some traffic your way.

There's Dazzling Donna of SEO-Scoop, who first wrote about us, but has since forgot about us. She will benefit from the email feature of the premium service, which I happily gave her for free. If you were the first to write about HitTail, this dazzling $99.95 value could have been yours free.

There's the remarkable Gary Beal, PPC Manager extraordinaire, who let us share with the world his testimonial of how HitTail let him save his client $100K on AdWords campaigns. Gary gets many premium accounts for free, which I think he'll appreciate for the SSL secure site support.

There's the environmentally and mathematically inclined David Stockwell, PhD, who has made HitTail part of the foundation of a niche modeling business, whereby your hire him to make your websites self-adapting to best fit their particular environmental niche on the Internet, and thereby capture maximum customers.

Dozens of others have come our way as HitTail lovers, such as the ladies of the BlogSquad who mentioned us several times and added an interview on top. There's Nathan Weinberg of Inside Google who thinks we ROCK, and whose site drives a surprising amount of traffic. There's the prolific programmer, Dave Taylor, who thinks he overwhelmed our servers, but didn't. There's the amazing ProBlogger article by Tony Hung about how to drive traffic in 2007. And of course, there's Wired co-founder, John Battelle, who although I can't count him as among our HitTailers, introduced us to the digirati of the world through his Search Blog.

Of course, we've got to thank BusinessWeek, who mentioned us not once--but twice. First, as a better mousetrap for attracting customers to your website. And second, as one of the most innovative ideas of 2006. Of course as primarily a paper-based publication, they are not actual HitTailers... yet.

This is one true case of where the green goodness of grass roots is not astroturf. Get it? When a grass roots product starts to take off as a result of fake posts by PR people, it's colorfully labeled astroturf, because the grass is fake. Another term I've heard is black hat PR. This is an area where I have to tread lightly, because HitTail is a creation of Connors Communications, the company that appropriately helped launch the best long tail company on the planet, Amazon.com. And ironically, Connors was also the original PR firm for GoTo.com, the company that invented pay-per-click, and subsequently became Overture, then Yahoo Search Marketing. It's ironic, because we're now fixing to change the way the world views natural search as an easy component of any well balanced marketing campaign. But as a PR firm, we have to remain above reproach.

So, thanks to everyone who made this grass roots marketing campaign so green. To you I say, sign up for, and lock-in our, introductory pricing. And for everyone who doesn't, then the time has come to let the cat out of the bag. Say thanks to us for our free product by sending the next future HitTailer our way.

And if you think we should move towards AdWare as opposed to Freemium, let us know that too.

Is Search Dead?

TechMeme over the last few days has picked up stories about the alleged demise of print media. And a SEO/SEM manager from India recently linked to HitTail with a story about the decline of SEO and SEM (search engine optimization and search engine marketing, respectively), in favor of social media optimization (SMO?). He also acknowleged HitTail as the best refuge of search optimizers.

Meanwhile, Viacom is suing Google/YouTube for a billion dollars, 2/3 Google's original purchase price. Some think it's a showdown between old and new media, planned by Google while their publicly capitalized war chest is deep. It's better to get it out of the way sooner rather than later, and force some clarification on copyright laws and fair use. TV Shows are increasingly doing tie-in's with their Web audience. Cast aside any doubt that the very nature of media itself is changing. New lines are being drawn (blurred), and definitions and business models are up in the air.

Chris Anderson appeared to some as the harbinger of doom for the blockbuster hit, with his book, The Long Tail. Declaring the blockbuster dead was great for the book launch, and many were quick to point out the irony of The Pirates of the Caribbean 2 being the all-time weekend earner. But Chris himself was quick to point out, even at the launch itself, which I attended, that he was not predicting the death of big media, but rather a a recalibration. Blockbuster successes may never reach the proportionately high watermark of ages past (when adjusted for inflation and world population growth), and smaller, independently published works will reach a much wider audience.

Chris Anderson would characterize this as the long tail demand curve moving towards its true shape, representing the actual diversity of tastes in the population. And to navigate the formidable choice that exists, we need better "filters". For the past many years, the filter known as Google has reigned supreme. In those same years, the searches built into Amazon and eBay are the unsung hero's of long tail product searches. And today, we see specialized product comparison and opinion searches on the rise, rife with social networking features. The book, The Wisdom of Crowds taught us that sometimes collective wisdom is smarter than any single person, and real-world examples, like Wikipedia is bearing that out. The founder of Wikipedia is now planning a wisdom-of-the-crowd-powered search engine to compete with Google! Isn't that to be trusted more than some anonymous black-boxed relevancy algorithm?

So, is "Search" dead?

Already?

Just as with the premature proclamations of print's demise, so it is with Search. Search has at least evolved into a large centralized, undisputed authority (Google, of course). While not a pseudo-governing committee like ICANN or a decentralized distributed system like DNS, Google has indeed claimed this mantle.

And in social media networking, no one has. Not MySpace. Not eBay. Not Amazon. Not Digg. They're all walled gardens. They're all incomplete ecosystems. And by the very visibility of this global social-search-filter as the big brass ring that every company wants to grab, no one has the surprise advantage that Google enjoyed in its day. So, the chances of someone somehow reigning supreme are very slim. It's going to be a knock-down, drag-out battle the likes of which we haven't seen since the portal wars.

And during all that time, the only truism that will remain is search. Search will be standing in the wings saying "Come back to me. I work so well. And we're making changes to keep pace with the social nature of the Web. Just click 'more' and see."

Public Relations and Search Engine Optimization Combine

With the launch of the HitTail premium service by a New York public relations firm, there is increasing question as to "what is PR?" and "what is SEO?" Are either of them still relevant in the face of growing social networking technology? Or do they all get mixed together and blended into something new?

The answer is yes. They all get mixed together and blended into something new.

But within this new space, there are silos of expertise that look very similar to the old disciplines. Skilled communicators are still in the business of influencing the influencers. Something like yesterday's PR professionals still must reach out to carefully chosen individuals so that a message can be efficiently amplified, without having to astroturf every blog in that space. Human relationships, and the artful skill of pitching a story are still important.

But in this new landscape, there are also blogs run by the client, turning the client INTO part of the media. At Connors Communications, our clients are regularly solicited by publications such as The New York Times to provide quotes for THEIR stories. When a company publishes its own authoritative blog in a market, it becomes reverse pervasive and persistent pitching.

Yet, this still is not enough for the new breed of combined PR and SEO.

There is the quick fix to websites who are not leveraging their database assets to their fullest extent. It takes technical skill and special projects to do this. It's different from what most of the marketing world thinks of as search engine optimization. Rearranging title tags and making the URLs search friendly are just sort of background projects these days, that should be assumed. Leveraging a website usually concerns making it 10 to 100 times larger than it was in terms of actual pages. Each new page is perfectly justified and works within the context of the site. It makes the site maybe 10 to 100 times more effective in natural search. It's a sustainable, long-term cross-engine strategy. And it's about releasing and making visible as much potential website content that was previously un-leveraged.

But that's still not all.

Public relations is often concerned with strategic communications, helping to change and reposition the very companies they serve, putting them in the path of the best customers and the most opportunities. But on the SEO side, there are analogies, especially with the alleged demise of print media. It is possible to revisit the very theory of long-established businesses, with an eye towards the great game of grabbing eyeballs, no matter the media. With that perspective, it's easy to imagine how SEO is really a much broader field of "media attention optimization". There is print media, TV, radio, social media websites, and a host more.

Could it be that search engine optimization combines with public relations to form a discipline of "general public compliance?"

Yep, that's it.

If you're interested in being a client of a company that not only thinks this way, but creates applications like HitTail merely to demonstrate its competence, then start a discussion with us today.

Selling The Dream - Voice Above the Din

Selling The Dream is my all-time favorite Guy Kawasaki book, probably because it's the first time I was introduced to his brand of evangelical marketing, at a time that I thought I could really change the course of computing history. I was a student intern with Commodore Computers at the time the second generation Amiga Computers came on the scene--a kooky, ahead-of-it's-time creative platform. It didn't hurt that when I picked up my first copy of the book, it contained a surprise signature by the author, which I later found to be authentic, based on a signed letter Guy returned to me a few months later, as I was trying to entice him to help me lead a stockholder revolt. Unfortunately, this chapter in my life didn't have a happy ending, as the demise of Commodore (as we knew it) was a forgone conclusion, and I was just along for the ride as it played out. What a heart break.

How does this relate to HitTail? Hold tight. We're getting there.

Anyway, Selling The Dream, is an under-billed book on the Internet, probably because it pre-dated the popular Web, and reads a bit antiquated today, now that social networking and blogging has filled a lot of that evangelism space. Today, The Art of The Start gets most of the attention. But it's Selling The Dream that taught me about passionate business, and clear thinking. And those are two critical elements of effective HitTailing, and the line that clearly delineates our users from AdSense spammers. Our registered users are often social causes and independent small businesses. They are folks who need to raise their voice above the blogging masses. HitTail sites are full of passion and purpose. And the posts are well-thought out steps in a plan to achieve niche dominance.

In other words, HitTail is helping to sell the dream.

HitTailers are a bunch of Guy Kawasaki disciples and don't know it. We are creating passionate users. It occurs to me every time I see another blogger post that they love HitTail, even though analytics software has been around forever, and been free for quite some time. Why then, does HitTail inspire folks to spontaneously evangelize it? It's because there has been a disconnect, until now, between the gathering of information from your Website visitors, and your ability to turn around and use it. It should be an almost automatic process, with the website owner "getting into the zone", listening to what their website is trying to tell them, as if reading entries dropped in a suggestion box. When the suggestion is good, the website owner is enabled to act upon it almost immediately, making a much tighter spiral development cycle than was possible in the past--in a process that has more in common with Edwards Deming's TQM or Japain's Kaizen than Web development.

So, thanks Guy, for helping me sell the dream.

And to all the HitTailers out there who are reading this, I'm not so much promoting a book, as I am a way of aligning one's true nature to one's endeavors in life. The Internet is a remarkably enabling technology. Theoretically, we are approaching a point where, as Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail, might put it, infinite consumer demand is being met with infinite supply. But that supply isn't the mega-stores. It's you. People liked to bust on Time Magazine's naming of "You" as the person of the year. But they nailed it. But it's not just posting YouTube videos to change the course of elections. It's finding your market, no matter where in the world your customers might be located, and having the ability to raise your voice above the din (with HitTail, of course).

Make the SEO Short-list

Come read the article by my boss, Connie Connors, the woman who REALLY brought you HitTail. I may be grabbing a lot of the spotlight, but this wouldn't have happened had I not hitched my apple cart to this star. First, she recognized the changes that were occuring in public relations and decided to lead instead of follow. Second, she knows how to get press for exciting new endeavors. Case in point, we were in BusinessWeek not once, but twice. First, for building a better mouse trap, and later for being one of the most important new ideas of 2006.

How do I get more traffic to my website?

While a similar question to "how do I get more traffic to my blog", it's actually a bit more complex. Blogs are rigged to do well in search. They automatically inter-link pages correctly. They ping-announce their new content. They put key search phrases in the web address. They provide RSS feeds. There's just no getting around it. Blogs are much more influential in search than typical websites. So, the trick is to give your website all the same advantages as a blog. And unfortunately, that's not an easy fix, the way it is with the HitTail plus blogging software combo. This is so true, that we often recommend that website owners choose blogging software such as Blogger, TypePad or WordPress to get an idea of why HitTail plus blogging software equals amazing increases in website traffic. Once you understand these principles, the "fix" can be carried out on your website, and the HitTailing process can be extended to your entire Web presence.

How do I get more traffic to my blog?

The answer has never been clearer. With evidence mounting on the Internet that HitTailing works, simply install the HitTail code and start taking our writing topic suggestions here and there. Sure, keep blogging about what's most important, but consider whether a HitTail suggestion couldn't be worked into the headline. That's all it takes. Keep it up with regularity, and your blog and blog traffic will grow. This very blog was started less than a year ago, and already it has a Google PageRank of 5. Sure, that's partially due to the success of the HitTail product itself. But how do you think it achieved that success? Taking our own advice on how to get more traffic to a blog was a major contributing factor.

HitTail Premium

As you can see, the HitTail Premium product went live tonight. Yes, it's out of beta. There will be more information forthcoming, and the official announcement. I just wanted to give the loyal HitTailers a head-start on the special promo.

HitTail is Real-time, Easy and Actionable.

With HitTail premium here, and a unique chance to get grandfathered into our "thank-you" introductory pricing, I pause to think about why our non-analytics package has received such unilateral praise. We don't track conversions. We don't tell you whose online now. We don't do A/B switch multivariate testing. We don't do site visitor geo-dexing. So then why is everyone jumping onto the HitTail bandwagon?

By boss, Connie Connors, would remind me that we're real-time, easy and actionable. But these are buzzwords to my ears, and I think people have to have the "I get it" moment. Before that, there's no amount of explanation that will suffice. Sure, we've tried, with our snazzy flash demo, personal appeal, live login, and collecting the tons of spontaneous endorsements around the Internet. And now we're about to demonstrate that it has legs as a paid service. But what does real-time, easy and actionable really mean?

Deep down in every marketer's heart is the desire to watch a website's raw log files and understand what they're seeing. At some point in their marketing career, someone loads it into Notepad.exe to demonstrate to them the futility, and they are crestfallen, spending the rest of their marketing careers looking for second-best. What they discover is highly evolved and complex software that goes way beyond log files in the ability to ferret out every little fact about the site. But with this capability, comes complexity, and to really pursue this path, you have to become a career analytics person--or worse yet, rely on someone who is. It's still not as good as just watching your log files.

HitTail's "real-time" capability is about satisfying that basic marketing need--finally. Massively powerful databases, stunningly fast parallel processing, new programming techniques (AJAX), and a new way of thinking about the problem were required to make this happen. But when marketers finally see it, they get that at long last, they're getting a real-time view of their log files. Better yet, it's distilling the list to just what they want to see--sources of initial referrers. Because, in the end, when you're just sitting there watching traffic, who cares about page-to-page internal page-loads. What's most interesting is how people are getting to your site, and why. And that's exactly what HitTail shows you in real-time. No more. No less. And as the icing on top, it's also extracting the keywords and evaluating writing suggestions right there as you watch. There's no one-day wait. A one-day wait for site activity data is so 1990's.

So, how about when we say "easy"? Well, that's always a loaded term. One person's easy is another person's puzzle. HitTail's "easy" means that there are just 4 tabs to our user interface and the activities under each tab are fundamentally the same. We don't make you play "drill-down-surprise" and we don't make you play "expand and explain". Instead, we make you play "pair down the list". Every list is addictively interesting, and this addictive nature of HitTail enhances the "easy". Everything remains in fixed positions on the screen, and we correspondingly let you "get into the zone". When you're HitTailing best, you're thinking least. Things just sort of run on automatic, until it comes time to write. THEN you think.

Contrast that with the labor-intensive keyword research processes of the alternatives. Worse yet, contrast that to the complexity of trying to do complex things, like user path analysis.

The sad truth is that when you try to do complex things, you have to do complex things.

"Duhhh", you say? Well, not really, when you think about the state of analytics today. Sometimes just getting to your list of initial referrers is a complex thing. Forget about serious keyword analysis. Analytics software loses most people at "Hello". In contrast, HitTail inspires a surprisingly enthusiastic following. Never before on the Internet has the formula for systematically drawing in more and more potential customers... been... so... EASY!

And finally, how about the term "actionable"? What exactly does that mean, anyway? Isn't analytics software actionable? When I pull up those charts and graphs, can't I turn around to my website and know exactly what to do?

Well, no.

First, you need to know what questions to ask, so your analytics software is telling you the right things. Once you have that, you need to interpret the raw data. Are you dealing with usability adjustments? Are you dealing with a deficit of referring sources? Are you dealing with flawed sales-flow and conversion? And once you have your answers, who do you turn to, to do the work? Your webmaster? Your marketing team? Your programmers? Or how about you yourself? Are you personally a candidate to carry out the work that your interpreter of analytics data says needs to be done?

With HitTail, you are.

With HitTail, you receive explicit instructions, you need to write about this, or you need to write about that. And we strongly encourage you to use best-of-breed blogging software, so all publishing friction is eliminated. You don't need to go to webmaster, marketing team, or even programmers. You just go to Blogger, TypePad or WordPress (not the hosted version), and type in a few words to the title field, and write as well as you can about that topic. Press "publish", and within a few day or weeks, you will be attracting more visitors to your site on that term. So, with "actionable", we mean that we tell you precisely what to do with the data that we provide.

It is a demonstrate-able and reliably reproducible effect, making HitTailing a delightfully scientific natural search marketing technique. And it is indeed a technique, rather than a mere tool, exactly because it is actionable.

So, there you have it. HitTail is different from competitive marketing tools, because it is real-time, fulfilling the hidden desires of marketers worldwide. HitTail is easy, in that you can figure out everything you need to know within a few minutes. And HitTail is actionable, in that you are explicitly instructed to take specific actions on your website... repeatedly.

And when you do it, you'll see results.

And that's HitTail.

• Real-time
• Easy
• Actionable

Lock-In Low Introductory Price for First Year and Beyond

This is the one blog post that every HitTailer needs to read. Our premium product is around the corner, and you can lock-in the low cost introductory pricing for years to come. That's right. Unlike Time Warner Triple Play, where they can (will?) hike the price after year 1, HitTail's low-cost offer will allow you to renew at the introductory low price for year 2, year 3 and beyond.

So now, as an expression of our gratitude to the thousands of beta testers, we are giving you all an opportunity to grandfather yourself into a pricing structure that no one else will have access to after a month or so. This creates a special class of HitTailers, with whom I will have a special relationship, and with whom I will communicate with on a separate forum--the original crowd who saw the power of long tail marketing, and dispensing with "manual" keyword research, in favor of applying all that precious saved time towards the lost art of writing well (and the new art of writing often).

The exact details of the pricing will become clear over the next few weeks (or days?). Suffice to say, it will be in the neighborhood of premium blogging software (a very fair price, that we feel everyone can afford, even if they're blogging as a hobby).

Therefore, those who know about HitTail now have a distinct advantage over their counterparts in the online marketing field. And if there's someone whose online well-being you care about who you have not shared the HitTail secret with, now is the time. Win some points with them by referring them to HitTail now, instead of after this brief introductory pricing window slams shut.

Fact is that Connors is the company that ushered in the era of long-tail sales and marketing by marching arm-in-arm with Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com as their PR firm, reverse auctioning with Priceline.com, streaming media with Real Networks, and yes, even the very pay-per-click industry itself with GoTo.com. Most recently, we've turned VOIP phone service into a household concept, successfully counteracted the EFF's attack on certified email as "email tax", and are in the process of introducing the Expedia/Travelosity of shipping services to the world. Connors consistently and successfully predicts and facilitates the emergence of "game changers".

This time, we're doing it with our own service, HitTail.

So when we say we're about to blow the lid off of natural search as a mainstream marketing tool, we're not kidding. If you're reading this post, then you're participating in online history along with Connors... again. Now, you're starting to see why long-standing participant in the "search engine optimization" community, Mike Levin (me), hitched my apple cart to the star that is Connors.

I don't have much to say right now regarding the details of the premium service, as I don't want to steal the thunder from my exceptional team who is working out the details as I type. But change is scary, and there are oh, many thousands of HitTailers out there, who upon reading this post are going to get a bit nervous that we gave them their first dose for free, and are about to make you pay for it.

No worries! I am the same honest, straight-shooting, but slightly manipulative Mike Levin that you have come to know through the many thousand discussion threads in which we're engaged. So in that spirit, I admit that I'm triggering off a premium-service registration race. And in that spirit too, I am telling you that this is the time to jump on the bandwagon. It's a clear deal. I tell you what you get, and I'll tell you what we get, without even spilling the beans regarding features, which will be a totally separate post.

You get membership in a special class of users that will never again be available. You lock-in your place in history (and pricing) as a charter HitTail Beta Tester AND Customer. You get a channel of communication with me (sharing HitTail secrets) that I will be sharing with no one else. But most importantly, you support an online endeavor that has greater social implications than just a bunch of marketers making money. You support a "way of being" online that helps the little guy, promotes social causes and activism, that disrupts and undermines the mainstream way of doing things, and results in a landscape of which you, the effective HitTailer, are the master.

You are joining an online marketing movement whose implications as an asset builder are greater than the short-term Google advantages that it may yield. Indeed, what you build as a result of HitTailing could possibly outlive Google itself, because of our insidiously simple insight: there's always something that COULD be working better for you, if only you knew to focus your attention there and give it that extra little push over the tipping point. Refer to my earlier analogies to the skee-ball arcade quarter-drop machines. This principle works astounding well today with Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask, and I am confident it will have live in it long into the future, no matter how the "search players" and algorithms change.

So, what do we get?

Money! But more important, Customers. Yes, it's nice to have freemium users. But it's nice to have Customers who directly support us. We still plan on having perhaps every blogger on the planet at least using our basic free product, thereby opening a relationship with perhaps every online marketer on the planet. We will keep our promise in that the HitTail you know today as the beta will remain free as the basic product. But more importantly, those who become part of the HitTail movement by expressly voting with their wallets and becoming supporters, will enable us to continue doing what we do. And what we do is improve people's effectiveness in whatever it is THEY do by letting them reach THEIR audience more cheaply and efficiently.

Directly supporting HitTail allows us to continue pursuing our goal of directly improving the world by making more opportunities for more people. We want to raise the voice of a special group of people in a sea of indistinguishable voices.

The HitTail team went to some considerable lengths to design something akin to real-time analytics, satisfying an online marketer's basic need to watch search hits in a meaningful, real-time way. Further, we went to considerable lengths, including inventing wholly new patent-pending technologies, to ensure that we can scale to accommodate the HitTailing needs of every blogger on the planet.

Think about that.

Compare our readiness and clear understanding of what it is we're doing to other similar ventures of recent years, where "other companies" failed to anticipate and and prepare for the popularity of free analytics services. And I might add, those weren't even real-time, the data you get out of it isn't immediately actionable (it doesn't tell the marketers what to do), and it's none-too-easy either, often requiring career analytics people to make sense of it all.

HitTail is the next stage of evolution for online marketing tools. No longer is it enough to know the next day that you had a surge in traffic, the day AFTER you were on the Digg homepage. These days, you have to know right away in order to respond: alert your ISP, add call-to-actions on landing pages, tweak your conversion process, add follow-up pages, do multivariate testing, dive into the comment discussions, add the page to StumbleUpon, alert your partners, etc. In fact, seeing activity in real-time could CAUSE you to get Dugg in the first place, by allowing you to see what things are on the verge of "catching on", if only given that extra little push.

Sure today HitTail focuses on which keywords are almost working for you, and encourages you to give that extra little push in the form of making a new blog post with a HitTail suggestion in the headline using blogging software that's already pandering to the search algorithms du jour. But tomorrow, the nature of the "clue" and the nature of the "push" may (and probably will) change. And to that, we say that our role is to play hound dog, sniffing out the clues of which way things are going to break one way or the other, and prepare our premium customers first.

And what we're going to ask for you to make that premium commitment, we believe is so low for this initial offer, that we have to be careful that people still understand the value. And as such, we will indeed be hiking the price up to a fairer level (for us) after the offer expires.

And if there's any doubt that HitTailing has value, well, just Google on HitTail a bit. There are so many positive quotes out there, that keeping track of them to republish on this page has become overwhelming, and we encourage you to instead check out our del.icio.us bookmarks, or just go to this real estate discussion where some real avid fans hang out. There are discussions like this going on all throughout the Internet, including ones locked away behind proprietary niche sites that the site owners have been kind enough to let me glimpse. These "special" forums include the place where Yahoo Store operators exchange super-charged tips, and even phone sex operator forums, where hot babes spend hours discussing the ramifications of Chris Anderson's long tail prophesies.

That's all well and good for the grass roots crowd, who all love early access to a secret weapon. But what about those in the know? How about the technorati and digirati of our age? Well, Wired founder and author of The Search, John Battelle was among the first to recognize HitTail, and CNET, BusinessWeek, TechCrunch and others were soon to follow. Even non-rock-star pundits who carry clout due to their credibility as programmers, such as Dave Taylor of Intuitive.com and Chris Pirillo of LockerGnome have given it a whirl, passed the link around on their private "Brain Trust" mailing list, and disclosed that fact publicly. Sometimes, these "in the know" programmers can be counted as bigger feathers in our cap than rock stars in the publishing business.

So on that note, I'll wind down this extremely long blog post that announces our imminent premium service, but which really says nothing but "stay tuned", and be sure to let anyone know who you might like to share the charter membership advantage.

3rd Party Apps Supporting HitTail

In continuing evidence that HitTail is breaking out of the "inner-circles" of SEO and invisible hand manipulators, into the more mainstream blog plug-in widget circles, third-party developers are starting to make tools to support HitTailing endeavors. I already mentioned the awesome GreaseMonkey Statistics Detector. But more recently, we have the WordPress helper, TailHitter, which we are proud to say made it to the WordPress PlugIn Database.

Web 2.0 Startup Advice from Squidoo

Seth Godin, prolific business writer, author of Purple Cow, and founder of Squidoo blogged today a series of tips that will be useful for HitTail <-- Squidoo lens, or anyone starting a Web 2.0 startup. It's interesting advice, especially the one about Business Development. I guess the role that partnerships may play varies depending on the nature of the product. I see many opportunities for HitTail licensing agreements, and for it to be built into other products--especially in products like MySpace and Squidoo, where the developers shut their users out of the third-party analytics game by choosing directory-based homepages (squidoo.com/hittail) , instead of the more friendly subdomain-based homepages (hittail.squidoo.com). But with a partnership, HitTail could offer its services to Squidoo, MySpace and others, making licensing and partnerships an important area for us to investigate.

Tips on Social Activism Blogging

Use HitTail.

That's my tip. It's a good tip. It's like 10 great tips rolled into one, it's such a good tip. I won't even expalin it. Just Google on HitTail to get a feel for how effective it can be in helping people draw audience and readership to their Websites through Google and other search portals.

Good luck! I wish you the best in your social cause, whatever it may be--so long as it doesn't hurt anyone. Use the power of HitTail wisely.

Blogging Software as AdWords Alternative

I was recently interviewed by Craig Crossman's and Carey Holzman's Computer America, the United States' longest running nationally syndicated talk radio show about computers. In HitTail interviews such as these, there is always that moment where the interviewer absorbs the fact that we're heavily advocating blogging software for effectiveness in natural search, sometimes to their dismay. People with pre-existing websites, that perhaps pre-dates the blogging craze, justifiably don't want to be left out of the HitTailing fun. But for natural search to be mainstreamed as a marketing tool, it needs to be accessible to the average marketing Jane or Joe. And blogging software provides that simplification.

So is the use of blogging software really so important for HitTailing?

Yes, but only if you want the amazingly stunning sort of results that are reported around the Internet.

The field we know of as search engine optimization, or SEO, is about technical and fundamental fixes to websites, no matter what platform they were published with, be it FrontPage, DreamWeaver, or any one of hundreds of web publishing platforms. It's tough work. And doing the big natural search fix takes what more marketers have got, and they often get intimidated enough by the experience to flock to pay-per-click, or PPC, services like Google AdWords. But what is not commonly known is just how staggeringly effective blogging software is for search. Given a publishing platform that's already naturally predisposed to doing well in search, the challenge really just becomes choosing the correct writing topics that are poised to do well. Enter HitTail.

Recently, I've been explaining HitTailing as analogous to those quarter-drop machines in ski-ball joints. You know, the ones where you choose where to drop the quarter based on how close the already existing piles of quarters are to falling over the edge. The rakes move back and forth, nudging the quarters over the precipice, and all you need do is drop a quarter and steer it down the chute, landing between gyrating rake and pile of quarters in the hopes of knocking a nice little pile over to the edge.

Well, that's HitTail. Every website is exactly like these quarter-drop machines, with keywords ready to perform on your site. All you need to do is drop the right blog post into your site, launching that page to the top of search, and allowing already existing piles of searchers on that term to fall into your site (instead of your competitors').

But then, why blogging software? There are tons of reasons. But primarily, because every page you publish is an opportunity to target another term, and sustaining this over time is your best way of getting the snowball effect to occur. Adding new pages is a much better method than going back and optimizing old pages, and blogging software is the perfect friction-free publishing platform to push out lots of pages.

But there are more reasons, such as the long archive pages where blogs compile your weekly or monthly posts onto one page. Think about the random combinations of words that are possible when multiple diverse blog posts run on one page. Word combinations are occurring on your blog archive pages that are occurring nowhere else on the Web. And the determined searcher who is unsatisfied with the top-10 results on those terms will keep searching, until they find you.

And when they do, you had better be listening.

Because if you're not, the next visitor will have to go through the same highly unlikely series of page-loads and click decisions to find you. But now that you know that you CAN and indeed SHOULD be found on that new word combination, there's no reason to make people hunt for you. When you work that exact word combination into your blog headline, the blogging software is SO WELL OPTIMIZED for search, that that's generally all you have to do to get the next visitor who searches on that term. Keep this up over time, and you get the idea.

This is the exact same thing as turning your entire website into a writing topic suggestion box.

But most analytics software doesn't think of it as a suggestion box. Instead, they show you the useless top-10 lists of what keywords are mostly leading people to your site. Well, why should you care about what is already working for you, if your goal is to make more relevant terms lead to your site? You're not even interested in the super-long list of keywords that some analytics packages can let you pull, because what would your basis be for evaluating which keywords are on the verge of working for you?

Sure, many SEO's do this manually, but keyword research is a labor-intensive process. And you're always looking at the same keywords over and over. All keywords that you've ever considered should work as a filter for all keywords you might consider in the future, so you're always looking at something new. We call that Keywords Forever, and it's a feature of our imminent premium service.

So, CAN HitTail work with other Web publishing platforms? Sure, but the level of suggestions will be much lower, because they don't have long archive pages. The level of hits will be lower, because not every page gets a search-friendly URL, matching title tag and headline, and a bunch of automatic perfect internal link-structure. Blogging software has been doing most of those tricks since they came onto the scene in the early days when Blogger was owned by Pyra. And those little SEO optimizations that weren't there, got perfected when MovableType, and later Word Press came onto the scene. And the final item to seal the deal is how whenever you post a blog entry, it pings a bunch of news crawler-alert systems, in something very akin to Search Engine Submits of yesteryear.

So you see, the case for using blogging software as a means of getting used to natural search as a mainstream form of marketing is very strong. With the right perspective and the right tools, it can be as easy to manage a natural search campaign as a PPC campaign.

Niche Keywords

Aaron Wall of SEOBook made a nice post yesterday about niche keywords. It starts out with the question of whether there is a way to estimate search volume on a niche term that is not highly targeted. It goes onto touch on how the volume of the keyword traffic doesn't necessarily correlate to the value of the traffic. You can have some very low traffic words that convert like crazy, or where the average value of the customer over their lifetime is high. First, he recommends just going into your AdWords interface to look up a word to get an idea of it's search volume, then to use his keyword tool to get some variations and costs. Aaron winds down by mentioning HitWise and KeyCompete as closed paid options of filling out your keyword list, and is generous enough to mention HitTail as a way of getting more suggestions based on your existing traffic.

What's a Great Public Relations and Search Engine Optimization Firm to Call Itself?

Chris Anderson's book, The Long Tail, made many interesting points about how search is a response to "choice" in society at large busting at the seems. It used to be you could only buy food from your corner grocery store. Now, you can buy perishables from all over the country (and world, if not for import laws).

For example, if you were to make a menu of every food available in the world, you would hardly be able to fit every item on a menu. Menus would be the size of phone-books, and many foods would have to be listed under multiple categories. This is why the science of categorizing things into neat little boxes (ontology) is switching over to a meta-tagging model, where items can be in multiple categories. Paper catalogs in this model would be one sample "output layer" from a much richer and robust back end database.

This is why you almost never hear of the Yahoo human edited directory anymore, but "googling" is a daily occurrence in many peoples' lives.

Reaching the point where old categorizing systems bust at the seams is information overload, and is a big part of what's fueling the keyword search movement. Say, you try to keep the theoretical ever-growing-menu of the world's food in use. There reaches a point where there's just so much information and variations in there, that it's easier to just type a few words into a box, and hit search than to deal with the phonebook-sized paper menu. This overload, and corresponding laziness (path of least resistance) is what's ensuring that search has a critical role in our information navigating future.

This also lays the foundation for the greatest game of our time: the competition over natural search hits. We will be living in a Top-10 world for some time. And the battle to be one of those 10 listings on any given keyword phrase is the glorious battle of our time. Desperation to get on that page the easy way has fueled the Google AdWords search marketing phenomenon. But as marketers get more savvy, they're going to realize that an investment in better information organizational technologies will future-proof their natural search endeavors.

Huh?

All I'm saying is that what we know today as SEO is a better investment than pure advertising, because it overall improves your company. It actually is possible to do SEO work correctly, so that the results will benefit you long into the future. It's possible to steer very clear of the occasional snake oil salesmen and charlatans that occupy this space (not everyone!!!), and focus rather on an "information science-y" approach that lets you manipulate and leverage your information assets en masse. It's like moving icebergs from your fingertips. There's a lot of data transformations and stylizing involved.

The way this works is far too much for a blog post. Suffice to say, ensuring that enough data and relationships exists in your back-end database is a big part, as is ensuring that you have more than one way to publish this data. Your publishing method should have LOTS of flexibility. We call the process of leveraging your back end database in innovative new ways "Slice and Dice".

In fact, we call Connors Communications' ability to output from almost anyone's back end database with pages perfectly well optimized for search, as the Slice and Dice Presentation Layer (SDPL).

And yes, this is coming from a public relations firm.

And yes, we realize we have gone so far beyond other public relations firms, and even search engine optimization firms, that we have to come up with a new name for what we do. "Public relations" most accurately encompasses "relationships between people", which is what even SEO is about when you think about it. It's everything that's not under the "paid advertising" umbrella. So, public relations is essentially every unorthodox form of marketing, where you're garnering publicity without outright paying the person who owns the first touch with the potential customer (typically, "the media", but increasingly Google).

Are we search engine relations? Nope, too techie. Are we customer relationship management (CRM)? Perhaps, but already taken by a category of software. I don't have the answer yet. Maybe the terms SEO or PR can still be pulled out of the fire. Or maybe the term is so obvious and right in front of all of our faces, that we just can't see it.

Keywords Forever

The HitTail premium service is rapidly approaching. But don't worry. HitTail as you know it today will remain a free public service to bloggers everywhere seeking to amplify their voice in the noisy Web.

We will reserve announcement of the detailed feature list until closely before release. But there is one I want to talk about today in order to get you thinking about why and how HitTail works so well...

Keywords Forever.

Such simple words, and so much competitive advantage for HitTail users. This is the fundamental reason we're a writing suggestion tool, and not an analytics package. We record the keywords that have lead to your site--forever. And this makes other features of HitTail (like the writing suggestions) all the more powerful.

That's right. We have a growing list of keywords for each website using HitTail. And this long keyword list begins to act as a uniqueness filter. By this, we mean that we use the old list to filter the new list. That's why the keyword tab works like a first-time keyword radar system. We can tell the first time a particular keyword combination has led to your site--ever! (or at least since you've installed the HitTail code)...

And that's REALLY cool.

This sounds somewhat simple, but it makes all the difference in the world. No other service that I know of keeps the list of keywords leading to your site forever, so that you might zero in on the new words most quickly. The new keywords under the keywords tab are filtered based on all the words that have led to your site in the past. So everything there is TRULY new, and is keyword gold ore. That keyword gold ore is where the HitTail algorithms kick in and refine keyword gold--in the form of writing suggestions. So, everything you're looking at is new, and not the tired old stuff that you've looked at in your analytics software for years.

So when we say "Keywords Forever", we're talking about our ability to warehouse every keyword that ever led to your site, and use it as a real-time filter for new hits coming in. It's sometimes hard to wrap your mind around, but this saves you incredible amounts of time in your keyword research.

When choosing an analytics-like tool for deriving blog writing suggestions and alleviating writer's block, be sure to check if it's got the Keywords Forever feature, because without it, you're going to be considering the same terms over and over. We de-duplicate these terms early on, and respect your time.

While we will be attempting to preserve the Keywords Forever feature for our free users, we can assure it for our premium users. It's a subtle difference, but it definitely provides a one-of-a-kind advantage to online marketers worldwide.

Managing Dangerously Addicting Distractions

Now for a totally off-topic post for the HitTail blog: managing distractions and ensuring professional effectiveness. This post itself is such a distraction. One of the biggest dangers to productivity is media. I both AM the media (in my blogging activities) and user of media in my ceaseless consumption of news and blogs. In fact, I'm at the end of a one-year self-imposed moratorium against TV, as it is the worst time-wasting offender, and I needed it out of my life in order to help create and launch HitTail. But I just ended that moratorium by becoming the latest Triple Play sucker. But also, I'm in the third month of a 3-month Connors Communications client engagement with perhaps the most ambitious goals yet--nothing short of changing the DNA/Religion/Culture of a media company to have a sort of fierce online competitiveness.

It takes nothing less than my full focus.

But HitTail's going on, and it's hard to let my baby grow up on its own.

But I have to!

And to achieve that, I need to shut down distractions with extreme prejudice. And I'm just too weak willed. Even now I feel the pull of the Search Hits tab, which is more addictive than caffeine. We didn't win the PRWeek PR innovation of the year, so I'm trying to make the best of that, with a congratulatory post, so that maybe some people will see that the third runner up is at least as innovative as opening a transparent PR firm in a virtual world--OK, that's pretty cool. You have to love the symbolism. And finally, I'm deliberating over not getting into the early beta of SpotPlex. Spotplex, if you can hear us: "please let us in!" And one thing leads to the next, so it starts an endless vicious cycle of online promotion addiction. Yes, you can actually be addicted to carrying out an online public relations campaign.

So, this blog post is about my journey in getting these distractions under control, so I can get back to 12 hour days.

The first step to my eliminating distractions is confidence in my people. I have to ignore stuff that my detail-oriented mind wants to delve into. But I invested a lot in my people, and I have to trust them to make good decisions. The HitTail DEV team rocks. I can turn off all distractions and not worry about disaster striking.

Second, I identify all the distraction vectors, and there's a lot in this new online and wired world of ours. Distraction vectors include phone, PC and drive-by's. The phone and drive-by's are easily dealt with by turning off the phone and isolating myself as best I can. It's not enough to physically isolate yourself anymore. Now, you've got to turn off IM, quit out of email, turn off email pop-up notifications, remove extra icons from the task tray and the quick-launch toolbar, and clean up the desktop. If using a web browser is part of your work, you have to turn off StumbleUpon and any other silly distraction magnets that got plugged in. This line of reasoning has led at least one software developer to come up with a distraction-free word processor. And now, I'm inevitably doing all my work through remote desktop, so I have my full development environment wherever I am, so I have to make sure the connection is fast enough so that the terminal server latency isn't too distracting (it always is--but the benefits far outweigh the cost).

My ideal work environment would be an isolation sensory deprivation chamber with one and only one application running in front of me, taking up almost my entire field of vision, but for a keyboard and mouse. Whenever I needed to venture into the vast wasteland of longtail garbage that is the Internet, I would need the online equivalent of horse blinders to induce the sort of myopia that prevents even the opportunity for distraction from occurring. I don't know what's worse: Google or the CrackBerry. Both are supposed to be profoundly enabling, but turn out to be profoundly derailing. Wait until the iPhone hits, and you can have all your information addiction in one pocket-sized package.

So, this is enough writing to get me back on track for today. Having voiced this issue helps make me hyper aware. This article IS my horse blinders. It will now lurk in the edge of my consciousness, reigning me back in whenever a distraction starts to take hold.

I can also take proactive measures to cut distractions off at the pass. For example, I go in through 3 layers of computers to do my remote desktop work: local PC, NAT'ed office work PC, and finally, the DMZ'd servers. And each one threatens to let the distractions of the prior level leak through with ziggurat of Window taskbars. So I use the version of remote desktop that can open full-screen (not the MMC snap-in), and remove the "pin" to make the remote desktop yellow bar go away. So, it looks like I'm in just one PC.

And finally, I fed by blogging addiction, knowing that this will carry me for a few days.

Now, onto some serious work.

Social Activism Blogging

Smart keyword selection is an essential part of activism. These seemingly disparate worlds of online marketing and promoting your social cause are directly related because search, specifically Google, is becoming the new arbitrator of who finds what... based... on... what... keywords!

Yep. In yesteryear, your filter was the selection of NBC, CBS or ABC. Then came 500 cable channels, and the TV channel guide filter broke, and search was added. Meanwhile, on the Web, search dominated all, and the ability to buy your way into search became a $5 billion industry, and Google became the new power broker of our era.

But whereas in regular media, the content which brought you to the site was TV programs or newspaper and magazine articles, Google's content is natural search results. By giving a certain amount of customer arbitrage away for free, they are able to charge for enough to support the system. All media that's advertising-supported is a middleman, pairing buyers with sellers.

With that quick bit of background out of the picture, any activist or social cause needs to know that they're in the same game of getting paired with sympathetic audience. Problem being, you don't know who that sympathetic audience is, where they're reading or watching, and the like. All you know is that if they're a part of your potential audience, then someday they're going to Google on terms related to your cause. And you need to be in their path.

But where to start?

Of course, you start with brainstorming. You know your audience well enough to come up with a list of terms you need to target. Then, you use these terms in the headline of your blog posts. Over time, this will start to generate search hits.

And that's where HitTail comes in.

HitTail provides a systematic way of making sure you thoroughly cover an expanding spiral of topics that spiral out from the central base of core content. The core content is the brainstormed topics with which you seeded your blog.

Over time, you will start to pull in a larger and larger base of readers--both those sympathetic to your cause, and those hostile. But the good news is that you control the online discussion. You will (hopefully) be one of the ten top-10 listings on that keyword. If you team up with like-minded activists, together you can be ten of the top-10 listings.

If you are an activist, you are the media. Start blogging, and use HitTail to make it work well.

Online Public Relations Campaigns

There's no endeavor in business that can't be examined under the light of Peter Drucker's belief that the mission of every company is to get and keep customers. This is true, even if your product is a widget, service, or even investment capital. One way or the other, you are in the business of serving a constituency who doesn't necessarily need to use you for what you provide, and once you win them, they don't necessarily need to stay with you. Whether they do or not is a function of customer service and continued product development. And when they do stay with you over time, winning new customers couples with customer retention, and you've probably got yourself a very nice business.

It is in this hard light of fundamental business principles that I define what online public relations campaigns are. There's a naive definition going around, saying that it's consists of public relations professionals lurking on the Web, tactically interjecting their opinions so to sway general online attitudes towards the client's goals. Their tools are comment spamming (astroturfing) and making fake blogs (flogs) where they pose as happy customers (sock puppets). The reason this approach is naive is that it doesn't hold up over time. Just like the old Built to Last was abandoned during the Web 1.0 boom, in favor of built to flip, the principles of good customer service are sometimes suspended in favor of a built to flip mentality. The problem here is that with flipping, you sold your company and washed your hands of the problems you created. When you're in it for the long haul, your online public relations campaign had better be an enlightened one.

First of all, everything you do is part of the permanent memory of the Web. Even if you "clean up" old mistakes, the Internet Archive Project might have a copy, along with untold numbers of Web caches and locally saved copies. Don't ever think that a stupid indiscretion is gone, or that any of your activities are 100% anonymous. And with that in mind, you should always try to keep your nose clean. That's not to say that you cannot sin boldly, so long as you are ready to take the heat and stand by your decisions, such as I did when I mistook the social news site Reddit as more of a social bookmarking site, like del.icio.us. But in general, it's better to say who you are, be honest about your motives, and seek out audiences that will be uniquely receptive to your message.

Of course, you don't have to actively seek out your audiences at all, with a more SEO or HitTail passive approach to online outreach. But such bait-and-wait tactics are not fast enough for everyone, and sometimes you need to give your online public relations campaigns a little more kick. In those cases, we recommend being ready to sink a lot of money into quality people, because it's tough to get. The fallacy is that because the tools are much more accessible, and bloggers have much lower editorial criteria, it's easier to spin online stories that will land you audience and customers. The thinking goes, just hire a college intern and show them how to post in comment fields. The truth is that the explosion of voices in the media through blogging has made it all the more difficult to get your message heard, and in order to really make any progress, you need positioning and messaging as carefully planned as any time in the history of marketing, and execution that is even more brilliant.

Take HitTail for example. I can speak to this online campaign because I'm personally participating in it as the online faceman. I also have an excellent support-staff, but Google on HitTail or my name, or a variety of topics related to long tail marketing. There I am. When I reach out to people in the still close-nit circles of online marketing, I almost always get an instant, warm reception. When I do posts on other peoples' blogs, people are most often flattered that I stopped by. On the rare occasion they flip out on me, their tune changes after a couple of weeks when they start to discover what HitTail really is, and the fundamental shift in online marketing that it represents, and that I cared enough to stop by and speak a few words with them.

For us to find someone else to be the online faceman of this campaign would be difficult, to say the least. And what would we charge to rent ME out to other clients? And could I even do a good job?

Conducting your own online public relations campaign can be equally challenging, with your particular approach being as uniquely keyed to your business and "players" as I am to HitTail. Is there someone in your company who is already on a blog-like champion campaign, but is clueless about blogging? Perhaps you should follow him/her around with a voice recorder and turn their inspired ramblings into illuminating blog posts for your market. Perhaps you have an endless supply of successfully closed customer support cases that are locked up in your databases that should be marked up and released onto the Internet to show what a world class customer support company you really are. Perhaps it's a combination of many techniques.

Either way, it's a custom fit service for your company that's difficult to outsource, because no one knows your business as well as you. Enter public relations firms. PR companies are one of the few who may indeed know your company better than you do yourself. Why? Because the straight-talking company-to-customer messaging is their domain. WHAT? The use of public relations and straight talking in the same sentence? Yes. Contrary to popular belief, and seasoned public relations company almost becomes an extension of your own company, understanding the workings so well that they can be called upon to speak on your behalf. And that's exactly what's required if you intend to use an outside firm for forming new online relationships, which will eventually lead to the winning of new customers, and the retention of the ones you've got. How do I know this? Because I too work for a public relations company.

The Future of Media & Business / What HitTail's REALLY About

There is so much I'd like to talk about, I hardly know where to begin. Ironically, I'm someone who doesn't need HitTail, because my stream of consciousness provides me with an unlimited number of writing topics on which I'm fairly confident that search traffic exists to be intercepted. In this way, I plan on building myself into sort of an Aaron Wall of SEOBook, whom I respect immensely. So, I'm following my instincts right now, instead of the HitTail suggestions. However, that doesn't stop me from smattering some blatant hittailing through this blog. I would like to add traffic to my site after all. Ahemm, but let me move on...

I'm not done seeding "core content" of this site that fuels the hittailing workflow, allows me to engage in the circular process that leads to the self-fueling and self-sustaining snowball effect. Previously, Connors Communications, the brilliant PR firm that I work for, would have charged a client at least $5000/month for an SEO engagement consisting of this sort of advice. But with HitTail, we're really going to change the world again, the way we did once by helping the quintessential long tail business, Amazon.com, and later overhauled the very field of marketing by aiding GoTo.com clear the way for pay-per-click search results, which in turn illuminated the way for Google AdWords and changed the world. And if we're going to change the world again, then we've got to be a little less tight-fisted with our advice.

HitTailers are our marketing disciples, and the process of HitTailing is our gospel. The lessons are difficult, and we find ourselves continually having to re-explain many aspects of business, economics, programming, and even history and human nature. People hardly even understand the 3-parties that are ALWAYS involved if you're trying to make money on the web: the buyer, the seller and the middleman. And unless you're publishing for complete altruistic or vanity reasons, then you're a middleman. It's hard to imagine that publishers who attract readers and sell advertising don't always get the idea that they're middlemen. But this up-for-grabs ad revenue being divvied out by companies that control traffic is quickly transforming our world into one where the only necessary seller is the manufacturer, and the only necessary buyer is the end user. Cutting out the middleman is a process called disintermediation. We can see disintermediation everywhere, and the occasional reversal of disintermediation with support companies such as RedHat, where the middleman's justification is completely support. Why that's still a direct buyer/seller relationship is a separate story. Finally, certain goods and services that are hard to order and deliver online will always be immune to disintermediation, such as restaurants. But nearly everything else is vulnerable and being bullied by a new breed of online middleman--ones that can arbitrate Internet traffic.

So the boyz of Wired Magazine make it much easier to explain HitTailing. First, John Battelle, spelled out how this middleman works in his description of arbitrage in The Search. Without understanding the lines that connect buyers and sellers, and how companies like Google insert themselves in the middle, then get out of the game. You'll never control the flow of traffic and thereby be an effective middleman. Later, Chris Anderson, had his turn in the spotlight spelling out how the difference between finite shelf space in your local store is different from infinite shelf space on the Web, and how this enables new business, the pursuit of more personalized tastes, and basically changes everything forever. Of course, that's The Long Tail. Yep, these two guys kick sand in the face of the digirati who love the irony of saying Wired is Tired. It's not. These guys are as fundamental to educating tomorrow's businessmen as my heros, Demmings and Drucker were in the past-- um... OK, maybe not THAT important, but important none-the-less.

With all that foundational educational crap out of the way, HitTail is instantly understandable and even obvious in hindsight. But it divides the world into two groups: those who get it, and those who don't. You can also frame this discussion by dividing the world into the "who-you-know" folks vs. the "what-you-know" folks. It's an eternal battle, like between cats and dogs. The what-you-know folks have a tough time with the long tail and the notion that people can come up through the trenches, eat their lunch, and change the world forever. Although Bill, Sergey and Larry all came up through what-you-know channels (it's the double-whammy advantage of door-opener-schools like Harvard and MIT), they embraced what-you-know methodologies. And the world's a different place. Who-you-knower's tend to fortify, while what-you-knowers tend to change the game into something where they can more easily win (did I mention Steve?).

Anyway, these battles sometimes sound like a clash of the titans, in which us little guys could never compete. Not so! Lately, the MySpace couple jumped over. And you see it happening with Web 2.0 startups all the time. VC money helps, but is not necessary--it's really just an attempt of what-you-know people trying to insert themselves into a who-you-know success by providing something that really anyone can provide--the simplest and most pure of all commodities, money. The process can even be turned into an idea-farm, like Y Combinator or Idea Lab. A lot of good can come from these things, but if your ambitions are not quite changing the world, and all you want to do is what you love, then HitTail is all you need.

OK, so that really hits this post home. HitTail is not only a practical alternative to paying for your search hits. It's a practical alternative to raising VC money, because if you've got something to sell, and development isn't an issue anymore (thanks to rapid and agile development methodologies), then all you really need is low-cost exposure and publicity. And HitTail provides that for the great unwashed masses of bloggers. We've built a ladder that anyone can climb to the top. But like a video game, each level is not actually easy. There's a hunt/solve problem/reward, and repeat pattern in HitTailing that also characterizes the most addictive and successful of videogames. But all this addiction and energy that gets wasted on video games can just as easily be sunk into your passion.

Hunt for a problem that needs to be solved that no one has tackled yet. Tackle it, and let people know about it on your blog. See the traffic start to come in through Google and the occasional links constructed to you. Learn from these hits (and link), and repeat the process. Like a video game, this addictive process where you keep bringing to yourself to the next plateau, leads to amazing levels of achievement, which when viewed in the context of Office Space America, you appear to be nothing less than your own little Steve Jobs. OK, maybe just Guy Kawasaki. But the point is, you have purpose and habit-forming systems to keep you focused and on-track.

Again, you see that we are not merely building yet-another-analytics-tool with HitTail. We've got mission and purpose--which is to enable our users to pursue their own mission and purpose.

Link Building vs. Link Baiting vs. Genuine Buzz

Established SEO-wisdom says you have to build links to your site for SEO. Newer SEO-wisdom says that you have to bait people to link to your site. My question to you is how hard did Steve Jobs have to work to get everyone to link to Apple on the iPhone? Creating products that are insanely great is a viable alternative to manipulative SEO techniques. Of course, this is manipulation of another sort. But if you can create genuine buzz around a new category of product that fulfills a real need, the urgency to perform SEO goes down. You don't have to ask for a single link. People link to you, naturally.

The question is how viable is this, really? Well, for a typical affiliate marketer with undifferentiated products, it's very difficult. But if your affiliate niche is exciting enough to create your own online identity, perhaps as an eStore, then it's quite doable. And if you have a genuinely unique and differentiated product that has any sort of consumer appeal, it's easier still. That's exactly what we're doing with HitTail. Sure, we're making a product that reduces the need for such glitzy online marketing, but it does help. We can each be our own little master showman, like Steve Jobs.

HitTail for example, fills a unique niche that no one else has moved into. It defies traditional wisdom that says anything that's like analytics software needs to be filled with charts and graphs. Instead, we jumped right for the jugular of simplicity by issuing explicit writing suggestions. We lay out a general formula for increasing your natural search traffic, provide proof and testimony, and let our users do the rest. I tapped some old friends in the SEO circles, made a neat demo. I made sure we didn't intersect with competitors, and that the concept was understandable in the context of current marketing trends. And friends I never met, like Larry Chase are doing the rest.

Let me tell you about Larry Chase, and why link baiting isn't necessary. Within any industry, there are a few very well connected people. These are the hubs in what makes the six-degrees-of-separation and small-world theory work. It's also what makes the public relations companies and real journalism work. Larry Chase runs a Marketing Resource Directory with an enormous mailing list. Everybody in marketing gets on it sooner or later, including myself. He mails infrequently enough to not be annoying, and with content of enough value that you deliberately stay subscribed. He hit the exact right balance. And that makes him a very well-connected person.

So, it's with cautious measure that he puts his reputation on the line by distributing an email regarding SEO techniques that actually work and are safe to advocate. He's not going to list things that can get you banned. Number one on this good list is HitTail. Why? We never asked him to look at it. He somehow discovered it on his own, or through people he trusts. He may have found us by searching on long tail marketing, or one of the other phrases I targeted. But I didn't ask him, and only know him by reputation. It's probably the cross-validating buzz that's taking place in SEO-circles that sold him or his writer.

So, what am I doing talking about this buzz-driven alternative to HitTail right on the HitTail site? It's because I don't want to give a skewed view of online marketing. Long tail keyword targeting is only part of the formula, and it's a long, slow build. The fast-track is powered by the buzz-engine, and is the reason I hitched my apple wagon to Connors' star. HitTail's been chosen by BusinessWeek as one of the best ideas of 2006, has been mentioned on John Battelle's Search Blog, has been covered by CNET and TechCrunch, and most recently in Larry Chase's newsletter. Oh yeah, we're up for PRWeek's PR Innovation of the Year.

Developing a genuinely new product that an old group of friends would surely like was a necessary first step. Even this first step that I did on my own required me tapping people I knew, to suspend their no-linking/no-promotion policies for a moment. But reaching that next level required a systematic process of one success leading naturally to the next, in a way that in hindsight seems almost planned. It is educating me why not all Web 2.0 startups catch on, even if they've got great products, and why the "who-you-know" network backs up, facilitates and enhances the "what-you-know" techie in us. Sure, we can't all be Steve Jobs, but with the right product and the right support, we can get our slice of the pie.

Foreign Language Long Tail Marketing

For those who haven't noticed yet, HitTail is now translated into Deutsch, Francias, Nederlands and Italien. Connors already has a reputation for international SEO, but now we're enabling millions of bloggers worldwide to optimize for the long tail of search in their own languages. So, you thought your long tail was long in English? Have you thought about the fact that if you have an international market for your product or service, you may have a long tail in the language of each?

Seems difficult? Yes. Yes, it is.

I'm not going to sugar-coat it. SEO becomes proportionally more difficult with each language you target. This is why PPC is such a good idea for international search marketing. You only have to naturally optimize your native language site, and a few landing pages. Then, you translate your keyword list and drop it into AdWords or Panama. The amount you have to translate is reduced, and you don't have to deal with the complexity of translating language-specific idioms.

So, is optimizing for natural search in foreign languages a hopeless task? Do you have to translate your entire website, and keep all the varying versions in sync?

Nonsense! This is yet another advantage of using blogging software for natural search. No one is going to expect you to go back and retroactively translate blog posts to keep them in sync. Blog posts are sort of an imprinted memory of what you were thinking at the time. It gets you off the hook. Your blog posts in different languages don't even need to say the same thing. Merely, the headlines should be rough equivalents of each topic you're targeting.

In other words, you only need the headlines to match in each language. And even that is a rough estimate, because the keywords you SHOULD be targeting could vary in each market, based on culture and nuance. So, how do you know which keywords you should target in each language?

Hmmmm, let's see...

You could use... HitTai!

That's right. Do you need a way to truth-check what your native language-speaking translators are telling you? Translate some initial "seed" content into each language. Make sure your most-important benchmark keywords are included somewhere in the copy of those translations. Then, ask your native language translator to translate your blogs into each language as you go.

There will reach a point where the data being collected by HitTail will give you new insights into the local markets. These insights may show you that you were totally off base in your initial translations.

Case in point: we refer to natural search as the elephant in the room of any online marketing discussion. Why? Because all roads lead you to "buying" your traffic. Some of the powers-that-be would love to close that lovely loophole whereby quality content producers still get their traffic for free. Who gets anything for free in this world? Who would make a product that lets you get something for free, and provides that product for free? We did it. And now we're telling you how we did it. But our elephant doesn't translate, because it's an American English idiom. What's an idiom? Shooting from the hip, I'd say it was an expression that makes sense because of cultural context. But then, I'd be flying by the seat of my pants. Our elephant in the corner of the room, somehow becomes a pink elephant in translation. So, our unspoken natural search friend becomes an alcoholic delusion. Anyone who has listened to the English-to-Japanese translations translated back to English knows exactly what I mean. If you haven't had this experience, it's a necessary experience for any online marketer dealing with language translations.

The bottom line is that, thanks to HitTail and long tail search marketing techniques, the actual copy on the page doesn't have to be long to be effective. Take advantage of that fact, and put your limited translation resources into culturally-correct headlines. Then, either translate very little on the page itself, or find yourself a native language-speaking blogger who can translate the essence of your posts. Do this for the first bunch of posts that you've already made, then see what suggestions start coming in. Adjust your new foreign language posts to make the most of HitTail suggestions and cultural context. Forget about translating the bulk of your main website into every language, unless you've really got that sort of resources. Let each language-specific blog take on a life of its own. This is like how Coke allows it's regional companies to adapt their offerings for each country.