Please Support HitTail

Hi Everyone,

Here’s the price of free – a major guilt trip!

If you find HitTail useful, then I’m officially asking for the sale. Please consider supporting us by upgrading your account to Plus.

What I’m doing is proving to my co-workers that in this Web 2.0 world we live in, where it seems so much is free, that paying is a way of deliberately supporting those you like. For a moment, forget about the enhanced features you get with the upgrade. Think about us like musicians who have decided to put all our music on MP3, since it’s going to be there anyway, and ask you to support us through attending concerts, and buying the occasional CD to throw some support our way, and keep us doing what we do.

This post may end up a bit controversial, since we seen to be endorsing the business model for the music industry that the RIAA is avoiding like the plague. But supporting artists, businesses, and software you like is going to be a lot more like voting with your credit card than it is actually buying tangible products.

We appreciate every bit of support we get, and I’m making this post as a way of seeing what “just asking” can do for us. The alternatives are things like an NPR fund-raiser, where I make more intrusive and repeated requests. We’re avoiding cutting back any of the goodness of our fully-featured free service. But you can feel good by doing your part, and simply upgrading one of your accounts to Plus.

I can’t offer much by way of promotion, but how about this: anyone who signs up and puts “friend of mike” in the promotion code field, I will send you an invite to join my FaceBook network. You’ll see my status updates on the FaceBook news feed, and will have a special line to me.

I’m also thinking about buying a bunch of those $1 graphics, if I can create an “I Support HitTail” badge. If I can figure out how that works, I’ll officially gift everyone who comes in with that promotion code and the Plus service with a cool badge to demonstrate to everyone that you support us.

Google Analytics Broken?

What do you do when Google Analytics goes down, and you don't have the privilege of viewing yesterday's data? You switch over to real-time data and see it today--as it comes in! This blog has an idea, as does this one.

Biggest HitTail Criticism Fixed!

Well, we just fixed the biggest criticism of HitTail. Those of you who follow this blog can check it out by simply visiting your "My Account" page.

No, we haven't made any change to our unique filtering system that often confuses people. We stick by it.

Nor is our biggest criticism the controversy we've triggered off in the SEO community. They'll eventually understand long tail data mining.

And no, the biggest criticism isn't even the original point made by John Battelle about how taking HitTail writing suggestions in pursuit of better natural search listings may be somewhat... inorganic.

No, the biggest criticism leveled against HitTail is how people want multiple websites per login.

You all want more HitTail! You want it to be easier to sign up the first account, then add site after site after site. Well, we heard you. And now you have "My Sites" on your "My Account" page. All free HitTail users can rapidly add up to 4 more sites (5 total) to each account. So now for all you HitTailers managing multiple accounts, it's a breeze.

What about the 6th site, you ask?

You always can create a new account, and do 5 more free sites. Free use of HitTail is still effectively unlimited.

But, if you're such an avid HitTailer and fan of our service, why not upgrade one of your sites to the Plus service, and support us? Not only do we greatly appreciate it, but then there's no limit to the number of sites you can add under a single account.

So help us out, and check out this feature.

And help us out by upgrading one of your accounts to Plus!

Sometimes, Tracking Less is More

For those who watch the Flash HitTail Demo, the words "WE'RE NOT ANALYTICS" is probably quite familiar. And for those who run multiple tracking systems, like HitTail plus Google Analytics, you will notice that HitTail doesn't track everything.

What???!!!

That's right. And I am often explaining why this is so brilliant, and saves users of HitTail so much time in zero'ing in on what's important... actionable data!

Going against common logic, our patent-pending tracking system knows when to not listen to the activity on your site, and therefore it collects LESS data. And when you're looking for long tail keywords that might be useful for making new content, less is more. Why? Because other systems that capture everything have to sort it out later, reducing the real-time services they can provide. They sometimes make you wait a day or more. Also, they can't keep the data forever. And they have a more difficult time figuring out which of all the garbage data they collected is the meaningful stuff.

What sort of collected data is garbage, you may ask?

Think about it. Where are your hits coming from? Are YOU perhaps responsible for some of your hits (I think you are)? Should you include every search test you perform as part of your competitive intelligence data, especially when what you're trying to do is get into the mind of your prospective website visitors? You're actually polluting your own data with your webmaster testing activities. You're telling yourself things you already know! And isn't the same true of your competitors searching on your site? How many of their keyword tests should you allow to pollute your data? They might hand you over a few interesting terms. But on the whole, they're going to be searching on a bunch of industry insider terms that don't really represent the thoughts of your real prospects, and might be interesting to you maybe once--not over and over, as they're doing.

So, HitTail filters all this ridiculous traffic at the source. In fact, when we detect such situations, our tracking system "goes quiet", preventing excess Internet traffic, and makes your pages load even faster. This is one of the various reasons we are one of the most light-weight tracking systems on the Internet.

While HitTail is awesome for watching search hits that come to your site, indeed, almost hypnotizing, it doesn't record EVERY search hit. It only records the search hit data of each visitor only once, then ignores subsequent visits during that browser session.

That disappoints a lot of people. But it shouldn't. You should be shouting for joy that some tracking system is doing this for you.

Because in the end, you're on the lookout for some very important events in the history of your website--events that every other tracking and analytics system ignores--for example, HitTail captures he first time a particular search led to your website... EVER!

Yep, that's part of what HitTail does. And even that is just pre-filtering. We take this pre-filtered data, which is already throttled to prevent garbage, and it is to that we apply our writing suggestion-finding algorithm to determine which of the BRAND NEW topics (which never led to your site before) qualify as viable writing topic candidates.

The unique experience that this all produces is fueling HitTail's incredibly positive reception.

More HitTail Coverage

We've been getting a bit of press lately that I've been remiss in blogging about here. We got coverage in Inc. Magazine a website for entrepreneurs, as well as in The Ventura County Star, one of the tech counties of Southern California. Instead of going on about it here, you can visit the respective sites, or check out our updated Squidoo HitTail Lens.

Who is Connie Connors?

The question often comes up, what is the relationship of HitTail to Connors Communications? At the most recent NYTech Meetup, Scott Heiferman, the founder of Meetup asked the question, and partially answered it himself, describing Connie Connors, the founder of Connors Communications, as the PR firm that helped launch and bring public such companies as Amazon.com, Real Networks, Priceline and others from the Dot Com era.

Perhaps most notably in regard to HitTail, Connors was the public relations firm for GoTo.com in the early days, before it became Overture, and later, Yahoo! Search Marketing. This is significant, because Connors helped introduce pay-per-click to the world, fighting the "Church and State" uproar that broke out from mixing paid and natural search results. Today, this is the staple of Google's business, making industry insiders joke that GoTo.com taught Google how to make money.

Connors continues as a public relations firm, specializing in helping clients drive quality prospects to your website, based on the next step in the evolution of online marketing. HitTail was just an "extraction" of this larger product, which today continues to serve a hand-full of hand-selected Connors clients. In this picture, you see Connie Connors at the latest Wall Street Journal / Walt Mossberg D Conference with some friends.

Connie has incubated the HitTail company within the walls of Connors Communications, using it as an "overture" to the world--demonstrating how modern public relations firms have something to offer everyone. So let us know what you're up to, whether you're vying to be one of the handful of clients that Connors takes directly, or one of the tens-of-thousands benefiting from our free to moderately priced products.

You're never to small to be part of something big. And you're never so big that you couldn't be doing even better.

Does HitTail Do Things that Google Analytics Doesn't?

The answer is Yes!

It's yes for at least two reasons: the immediately actionable nature of the information provided, and the immediately viewable real-time nature of the data.

In fact, it's all about immediacy, and spending less on AdWords (or eliminating your need for AdWords altogether).

What if Google Analytics told everybody the specific topics to write about in order to boost their site's natural search engine standings? People would flock off of AdWords in droves. Why pay for something that you can get for free?

In this sense, Google Analytics and HitTail are diametrically opposed to each other. While it's easy enough to pull a "long" list of keywords, or even "top keywords", none of that begins to give you the competitive intelligence that you need for an informed rapid content expansion strategy.

HitTail is like a coach looking over your shoulder as you pull a keyword list out of your analytics software, striking down over 95% of that list based on how it would waste your time to further develop those concepts.

Imagine the time saved!

Yes, given a "long list" of keywords, you could take each one and perform a Google search, seeing whether the term is already working for you or not. If you find your own site in the first page or two of results on that term, you can discount it as a term for further development, based on the fact that it's already working for you.

But as you work your way through this long list of keywords, you will occasionally find terms where the Web searcher must have been extraordinarily determined to find an answer. You know this by looking at how many pages in they must have surfed before they decided to click on you.

This is all very nuanced, and outside the box for most marketers. That's why the arrival of the book, The Long Tail, by Chris Anderson, the Editor-in-Chief of Wired Magazine, was so timely. It provides a framework by which marketers can understand collecting multiple valuable pockets of free qualified search traffic.

I'll say that again.

HitTail lets you collect and concentrate FREE veins of search traffic gold, gathering them up until it collectively accounts for more traffic than you are receiving through paid search campaigns. In fact, HitTail forms the foundation of a sustainable, cross-engine online marketing campaign whose effect will last long after you diminish your efforts and stop putting money into it.

So to answer the original question of whether HitTail does things that Google Analytics does not, it's an unqualified Yes! HitTail provides data in such a way that you can easily diversify your online marketing campaigns into "un-paid" natural search.

Network Effect vs. The Long Tail

I just discovered this guy's site which is, well, Worth Reading. Over and over, I discuss the idea of the Network Effect vs. The Long Tail. I usually refer to this as the "who you know" people vs. the "what you know" people. I haven't quite figured out this person's name, but he/she writes about heady topics with the same future mindset that I try using for myself. I recommend reading his piece that perfectly positions HitTail as a realistic approach to marketing that flies in the face of the power brokering good ol' boy network.

So, I won't just repeat his points. Instead, I'll explore how you see this in actual practice. Why are big manufacturers forced to pay for their search presence through Google keyword advertising (AdWords)? Why can't they just naturally target and dominate their topics? Shouldn't Ford come up when you Google "cars"? Shouldn't each drug company come up first when you Google their respective drug names?

Yesterday, I was involved in a long discussion about how the top manufacturers in the world, companies like the Fortune 500 and Global 2000, don't really own their own keywords without buying them through AdWords from Google. With only some rare exceptions, searches on generic terms, like "cars" will bring up everything but the big automotive companies. Those results are full of publishers, affiliates, dealerships, and just about everyone but the original manufacturer.

In a way, this makes sense, because many OEM's just don't do marketing, and they rely on their distribution networks and retailers to drive product demand. In other words, they're not marketers, and about all they know how to do is big-budget, big-media (usually TV) cognitive resonance pieces that get the world feeling good about their products. But even if the demand is created at this level, the sales are driven into local dealerships, and in the most extreme case these days, to patients demanding name-brand drugs from their doctors.

This creates a pain point, because the reality is that manufacturers almost never "own" their own company's industry keywords. Sure, they'll own the company name. But that only helps if people are specifically looking for them, in which case, the branding has done its job. It's the multitudes who stray away from brand loyalty, and go Googling to see what else is out there who need to be corralled back...

...or not...

...depending on how determined the successfully branded manufacturer is about keeping their customers. Peter Drucker says that the mission of any company is to get and keep customers. Companies with a successful brand have a certain amount of brand momentum going that makes them lose sight of the long, difficult battle it is to get those customers in the first place. That's why companies that have "made it" let customer service slip as their first impropriety of success.

Success doesn't mean you can slack off--that is, unless you don't mind making an opening for a competitor. All the companies sinking a fortune into AdWords ought to consider how much more valuable it would be to just naturally come up on the keyword in search where they should.

HitTail with Podcasting and Video

With the shift from one-size-fits-all mass markets to self interest niche and mega-niche markets, many companies are now recognizing the value of reaching out to existing and potential customers online. An increasingly popular way to engage these emerging markets is through podcasts and viral videos, which are now part of good marketing practice for winning new business. But too often companies become frustrated with the process of web analytics involved in targeting these important niche customers.

Whether you’re an analytics professional or a non-technical marketer, HitTail is a tool that makes log file data everyone always had anyway suddenly useful. HitTail shows the Long Tail of your hits and works as a filter for all future hits. The result is a small set of data showing you what you need to better target your audience and potential customers. HitTail is differentiated from other web analytics tools because it can extract keywords and issue suggestions for future website content.

Podcasts and video face a unique dilemma being found by search engines because the content is not predominantly text. HitTail can help by making suggestions to optimize the titles of your podcasts and videos which can help to boost visibility online. Use HitTail to add specific text, like accompanying introductions, that helps your site get found without compromising the look of your site.

Blog Quality Management

When discussing HitTail, we are sometimes asked, why isn't it spam. Quite the contrary, HitTail is blog quality management, for many reasons laid out in prior posts about how Dr. W. Edwards Deming's teachings of TQM (total quality management) and the Japanese notion of Kaizen play in. You can't improve a website in a vacuum. You need input from your users. You need to know what they want. But actual suggestion boxes can be disingenuous, and analyzing the MAJORITY trends of your keyword analytics can only tell you how you're ALREADY satisfying your users.

The data you need to know is hidden in your long tail keywords, and sifting through that mile-long list of keywords can be a big time-waster.

And THAT'S why HitTail is not spam. It's merely an expert companion, a lot like an accountant, whose responsibility it is to sift through all that paper-work, so you don't have to. HitTail acts as a councilor, inspecting your web log data, quickly discounting everything that does not qualify, and inspecting those keywords that do qualify with a fine tooth comb, ensuring that if you are to write about the topic, that the posts would be likely to generate enough traffic for you to be worth it.

And in the end, HitTail DOESN'T DO YOUR WRITING for you. It only makes a suggestion. Whether or not you take that suggestion and act on it is your decision. But when you do, you add a tiny bit more mass to that snowball that you're trying to get rolling down the hill. The snowball principle states that while getting a snowball with very little mass rolling may be difficult, it is eventually worth it, because you will pass the threshold where you have enough mass to keep the movement self-sustaining, and actually, self-fueling.

Reaching this self-fueling state means that you have enough content to keep suggestions rolling in, and when acted upon, you continue to add mass to your site, which in turn, stimulates more writing topic suggestions to be issued. When this happens, the snowball effect is fully achieved, and it's really just a matter of continuing to produce quality content associated with the new writing suggestions.

The new writing must be quality content that answers the questions posed by your website visitors. Don't just produce search engine fodder. Rather, make thoughtful and deliberate posts as if you are actually engaged in an active discussion with your site visitors (which you are), and are a practitioner of blog quality management.