We like to be as non-traditional in our paid-marketing campaigns as we are in developing free alternative marketing products. That's why, when the time came to buy ads, we chose John Battlle'sFederated Media, whose ad network includes some of the world's biggest online influencers.
And guess what?
Some of the most powerful sites around the Internet will be running our widget!
Yep, you'll be able to sit there and watch the traffic of some awesome sites, the way you watch your own.
When the time came for us to advertise, instead of merely creating yet another flash banner like most other advertisers, we decided to show the live HitTail user interface right in the ad. In other words, some of the most popular sites on the Internet will be showing their search engine traffic, using HitTail.
Already, you can go to these sites, view source, and see HitTail running. Soon, you'll be able to view and reproduce their hits, just like you do when you log into your own account.
I think it will be a nice wakeup call for those who haven't heard of HitTail yet. I can't say who these sites are yet, but many of you will see the widget appearing on their sites as part of their advertisements. Yep, our widget will be delivered as part of an ad unit, fitting the IAB's standard Web advertising formats.
Sorry to those of you who have been keeping it your own marketing secret. But, the cat's about to come out of the bag.
Some of the participating sites turn out to be incredibly addictive to watch. As if you already didn't know, you're about to find out who is Mr. Presentations on the Web (care to guess in comments?), and how everyone is interested in knowing how to download YouTube. Google Zeitgeist won't show you that! I'm hoping we trigger off a similar addictive and voyeuristic phenomenon as occured in years past with all those keyword spy tools that many of the primary search engines used to provide, but which unfortunately only now comes from some of the alternative engines.
HitTailing to get more website traffic is a hit-or-miss proposition sometimes. This blog post is to discuss a miss.
Not everything you do in real life can be an automatic success. Sometimes, it takes a few tries. HitTail is analogous to entrepreneurial success in real-life. You will have your successes, and you will have your failures. But on the whole, your successes should outweigh your failures, because you learn from the past, do more of what worked for you, less of what didn't, and play to your strengths.
You selectively concentrate your successes, and make your failures work for you the best you can.
Case-in-point, we hit a home-run with the concept of "Top PR firms in NYC". We get tons of hits every day on this concept. There are apparently a lot of people interested in seeking out the best folks in one of the best branches of marketing in one of the best cities in the world. Go figure. And no one "owned" this 5-word long tail phrase, where significant amounts of highly qualified traffic exists, but it flies beneath the radar of keyword inventory tools, such as those built into AdWords and Yahoo! Search Marketing.
But conversely, I HitTailed the concept "blog marketing", and we didn't show up until 23 pages in!
The likes of people who kept us buried on that terms is just about every marketer on the planet who advocates the use of blogs for marketing. In other words, I stepped into a competitive term! Though it's not as competitive as "second mortgage". Still.
Even with a mildly competitive term, HitTailing is still worth it. The fact remains that we deliberately penetrate the search engine results, no matter how buried (it could be worse than 23 pages). And the article is being added to a long-page-version of our content (magically generated by blogging software), letting the term "blog marketing" combine itself at random with other related topics that I have blogged about during the course of August, 2007. I could be getting issued suggestions on "corporate blog marketing" or "blog marketing consultants" or some such.
So even though viewed on its own, it was a failed HitTail attempt, I am still optimistic that on the whole, it will lead to future successes.
I have to bring this HitTail review to your attention. It strikes many chords with me.
First, it documents the experience of installing and getting started with HitTail, and the discoveries of where your traffic is really coming from (keyword-wise). Most people just don't get that most traffic comes from the collection of small, incidental word-combo's, which you never targeted, but somehow are still being found on. Added together, it almost always out-performs your top keywords, so keeping the content-engine churning is well worth it.
Second, it's from "A Tale of 2 WAHMs", which is totally encouraging to me. For those not familiar with that acronym, it stands for "work at home moms". I share with Connors Communications (my employer), the general feeling that we're changing the world with HitTail. And while what we're doing isn't exactly like manufacturing 90% efficient solar cells (which will change the world), as an evolving public relations firm (more on that soon), we CAN make a positive impact on peoples' lives. Specifically in this case, we can help to enable a workforce whose composition is exactly analogous to the long tail effect that makes HitTail work.
Think about it.
You've got work at home mom's around the world, carving out businesses for themselves based on eBay, Google Checkout, or a host of other eCommerce systems. Individually, they are each a small business. But collectively, I speculate that it's a work force as large as the largest companies.
Now, I'm not advocating that they band together and start a single company. But I am advocating bolstering marketing capabilities within a portion of the economy where budget's don't exist for TV and newspaper advertisements, and barely even for targeted marketing like AdWords. Unfortunately, they don't have anything like co-op marketing budgets. But fortunately, all you really need these days is something worthwhile to say related to your product or service.
And we provide a megaphone.
UPDATE: Connors has evolved from traditional PR to high end search engine marketing. Click here to learn more about our transition - http://www.connors.com/seo/letter.html
When HitTail tells you to write about something that’s particularly in your sweet spot, it is wise to listen (for a full-update, read to the bottom). Otherwise, you are leaving traffic on the table—traffic that is likely to go to your competitors. But you can pick up this traffic with minimal effort, like picking up money off the ground.
In this case, it is “NYC Public Relations Firms”. The suggestion came in on August 3rd. In reproducing the search hit, I see us on page 6 of results, but a page I hadn’t even created until August 17th was in that spot. I think this is a matter of Google “swapping out” an even newer, more relevant page for one that USED TO be listed. I'll probably post on that as a separate topic later.
This PR firm example is a perfect case of spiraling out to ever-expansive, all equally valid ways of talking about a particular industry or market. In this case, it’s the branch of marketing, known as public relations. And in particular, it’s for the type of PR firms that have top-notch reputations—ones based in New York City.
Now, I hate to play into the stereotype in which Hollywood casts our industry, and Connors Communications is certainly not like Samantha Jones’ PR firm from Sex and The City, which was mostly about celebrity parties, and “the scene” (though we do make the scene from time to time). But rather, we’re a high tech PR agency, specializing in getting out the word on new technology, on companies usually going through their second or third round of fund-raising, and at the point where they have to get the word out.
We’ve got a pretty impressive track record from both ages past (Amazon.com, Priceline), and recently. We’re experienced in a wide range of specialties, and we’re able to adapt to radically different, or “contrary-to-common-wisdom” messages, such as when we helped GoTo.com break the “church and state” issue in the pay-per-click (PPC) marketing arena, or helped Vonage make VOIP a consumer product play.
In the past, this meant a lot of phone-calls to trusted opinion-makers and influencers. Now, while it certainly still means that, and we have our Golden Rolodex (a.k.a. iPhone), we increasingly attack publicity on the populist front, known as Google (and eventually, the other search engines as well). This is a big part of what makes a tiny boutique PR agency such as Connors a large player, especially while other agencies of similar size get gobbled up by the large marketing conglomerates, sporting “traditional” PR-thinking.
This ability to have the critical insights and ACT ON THEM successfully sets us apart.
So when we had the critical insight that your EXISTING search engine traffic was one of your best sources of competitive intelligence, we jumped right on it, and become our own Web 2.0 company.
Don’t you want your next PR firm to have that sort of technological capability, outside the box thinking, and ability to plan and execute strategies?
Imagine the sort of creativity we’ve put into creating this new fundamental online marketing tool brought to bear on your company’s brand, products, services, or objectives. Contact Connors Communications today.
[Update: August 27, 2007] This morning, I came in and searched on this term, on the long shot that it was picked up from Saturday (at 4:00PM) to today (Monday at 10:30AM). And guess what? We're on page 1. Sure, this is the Google Honeymoon, but if you KEEP Google stimulated with HitTailing, something ELSE you do this week (or soon) will fortify this listing, and reduce the chances of the Honeymoon being over too soon. Notice, we went from page 6 in Google to page 1 in Google in less than 2 days. Someday, some blogger will get the connection I keep drawing to the quarter pusher / quarter slider machines around skeeball amusement parks and arcades.
UPDATE: Connors has evolved from traditional PR to high end search engine marketing. Click here to learn more about our transition - http://www.connors.com/seo/letter.html
Well, I’m really HitTailing away, and it’s time to talk about blog management. What is the correct ratio between blogging purely about what’s on your mind and in your heart, versus about what you KNOW FOR SURE will generate new traffic and audience to your site? (ala HitTailing)
Is blogging primarily a function to generate traffic (SEO) for some other ultimate purpose at your website (driving sales), or it is a “pure” medium for pontification and soapbox journalism? What if you’re a business and have to balance blogging with all your other corporate considerations?
Quite a dilemma.
A little over a year since HitTail’s inception, we’ve built up our own website, practicing what we preach to a certain extent. As you pursue over my blogging topic headlines, you’ll see that for the most part, I blogged about what I wanted to, and rarely gave a second thought to optimizing my headlines.
But we’re going into promotion mode, and as you can see, virtually every time we HitTail, it works. We’re rapidly becoming one of our own best case studies. We can decide WHAT type of traffic we want, and with little more effort than putting a little article like this, we add 10 to 50 more hits a day to our website, of the most qualified sort.
10 to 50 hits sounds like nothing, right?
But think of yourself at a conference. You’re not a speaker, yet you’re trying to do some business networking. Would you consider yourself lucky if you could hand out your business card to 10 to 50 people every day? How about if those people were actually not at random, and somehow knew to seek you out with some public addressing system?
Pretty good, huh?
Now what if on every day of the conference, you could get someone else to hand out business cards on your behalf, to uniquely pre-qualified prospects? And with each subsequent day, you could add yet another networking employee, and pay them no salary, and never lose your prior people? Until eventually, you have an army handing out cards. Well, that’s the essence of intelligent longtail keyword marketing. It’s cumulative in nature, until you reach the point of diminishing returns, which doesn’t really occur until you’ve saturated a market, written about everything there is to write about in that field, and have reached every person whose ever been in the market. This probably won’t happen to most people until they’re ready to retire. And if you do “reach the end” of your HitTailing activity within one industry or market, you simply attack new markets.
But how does a blogging content expansion strategy dove-tail with your regular website?
First of all, blogging is essentially no different than normal Web publishing. There are plenty of websites that use blogging software as their PRIMARY publishing platform, dispensing with the heavy-duty enterprise platforms, like Vignette or Documentum. Web publishing is Web publishing. Don’t let the enterprise elitists intimidate you. Blogger, TypePad, SquareSpace and WordPress can all be used to manage the blog portion of your existing website, or replace many CMS systems altogether (especially SquareSpace). And more mainstream open source CMS systems like Drupal and Joomla are becoming more blog-like all the time, displaying the search engine-friendly artifacts that litter blogging software.
So no matter your existing website, you can just arbitrarily make a new subdirectory or subdomain, and say “this portion of the website shall be maintained with blogging software!”
It’s a relatively easy matter to match a new blog to the look of your existing website, then start creating new content. This is where HitTailing really comes in, to get the most out of your blog—because it’s time to build audience. But you don’t want just any audience. You want the RIGHT audience.
So, get about 100 initial blog posts out there to stimulate and kick-off the HitTailing procedure. Our own website only existed since June of 2006. But today, we have over 1,360 known pages in our site (search in Google on site:hittail.com), and most of that is generated by blogging software. We’ve seized the top positions on lucrative terms all across the longtail marketing space. We’re gaining the reputation of one of the top keyword tools in the industry. This has been a combination of writing about what we KNOW we want to write about, and writing about what we DISCOVERED that we needed to write about. Both are important. But the later (use of our own product) is what’s resulting in our natural search growth, and continual acquisition of new HitTail users.
The HitTailing process was created precisely for this sort of blog management. There must be a balance struck between what your instincts tell you what to write about…
…and what tools like HitTail tell you to write about.
…and somehow, it almost magically seems to work out. Because isn’t “blog management” a perfect topic for us?
In this video blog post, I answer one of the most asked questions about HitTail: How can we find writing topics to suggest for you based on the traffic from your own site, if you haven't written about the topic yet? Part of the magic comes from the unique way blogging software works. It lets you find perfect writing topics related to things you've already written about, but offers up the magic word combinations actual searchers are using. Curious? Watch the video.
HitTail is all about generating traffic online, of the best sort: qualified visitors. We've been extolling HitTail's ability to do this for over a year. But from time to time, it's nice for us to demonstrate how it works. This video was produced as a demonstration of the use of the HitTail product itself, and results it has produced after several months.
I'm about to create an SEO FAQ and plant it on the HitTail site. It's going to be different from many of the FAQ's out there, because our philosophy is different, as many know who have watched us evolve. We agree with marketing guru's like Seth Godin who say that SEO is becoming less important--but only because the technical factors are gradually going away. Those who write best and have the most valuable content, will be rewarded.
But that's not the whole story. Behind that is also the emergence of ready-optimized-for-search blogging software, the arrival of a programming practice called "separation of concerns" to Web development, and new ways of thinking about Web publishing forced by new delivery platforms such as the iPhone.
I've got a lot of birds to kill with one stone with this document. Eventually, I'll give it a new home in the HitTail site proper. But until then, you'll see the "first steps" of as this blog post.
I'm going to title this post the SEO FAQ, because HitTail suggested that I write about it. I might as well start building the traffic now in preparation for re-inventing the entire profession. Apparently, HitTail was found 9 pages in on the topic, and 7 pages in at the time I checked. This is a good sign, because the face of SEO is currently changing, and we are at the forefront of those changes. Without even trying, we're on the radar. Armed with that information, I have an ideal starting point for driving it to the first page.
This will also be an interesting challenge, because there's a bunch of heavy-hitter SEO sites at the top of the list. There's one with a custom domain for the purpose, seofaq.net. Then, there's Jill Whalen, with whom I've had an interesting time trying to explain HitTail and the long tail concept. You've got the big StepForth marketing company and the Google Webmaster Central website. There's About.com and SEOmoz among others. Penetrating the first page will be a fun little experiment.
I'll start out just with this blog post, but it's going to grow into an actual document to go with the new Connors ABCs demo. After folks view that demo, they ask for follow-up material. Really, we can't put much more about the system, or we're giving away too much. We can't say much less, because it's already in demo format, and you can't get lighter information than that. So basically, I'll just be putting the demo into written format, and put it into context with the rest of the SEO industry. So, it will probably fit the format of an SEO FAQ very nicely.
I will have to be careful to not write an entire book. I could start out with some broad questions, and end up with an entire book on search engine optimization. So, I'll start just by getting out the questions.
Why is natural search important?
What sort of companies should pay attention to natural search?
Why is the natural search problem so hard for large companies to fix?
How is natural search different from Google AdWords campaigns?
Is Google the only important search engine?
How long does a natural search campaign take to work?
How do I reconcile all the conflicting information I hear about natural search?
Isn't it true that natural search can never really be formalized as a profession with guaranteed results, because of the way search engines work?
What made Connors Communications tackle natural search so differently from everyone else?
So not all new writing topics come directly from HitTail suggestions. Sometimes, it's much more indirect, but still HitTail-related. For example, because you see ALL referral links in real-time, you can see that a discussion has been created about you in a forum MOMENTS after it's been created. You don't rely on Technorati, Google search or anything else--except for the fact that someone followed a link to your site, and HitTail noticed.
Using this technique, I discovered the MommysHelperCommunity.com. Now imagine for a moment what it would take to discover this link otherwise. It MAY have shown up in analytics software if you looked precisely the right location. You MAY have it brought to your attention within some amount of days of the post occurring.
But with HitTail, I knew INSTANTANEOUSLY! I followed the link back, and I saw the discussion just as it was being born. Basically, the moment the author tests the link--you know!
You might wonder why I didn't step in and start posting there immediately.
Well, this is a great example of how I like unbiased discussion to start first. I'm truly curious to see what people have to say before I go predisposing them. Of course, after a little while I step in, which shows them both that I care about their site (always a big boost to them), and that I'm there to answer questions.
In this way, the entire online world becomes my forum. I don't care where I answer. In one case, I'm in a discussion with a bunch of lovely ladies known as PSO's (phone sex operators). I'm tied in with the work-a-home-moms WAHMs community now through several different links. The level of trust is so unbelievably high, that when the forums are private, I'm regularly granted complementary guest logins so I can go and answer questions.
THIS is precisely where most other PR firms who are doing the online thing trip up. They never know a product with such intimacy that they can represent it as a living online embodiment of the company and the product. In my case, as the creator of HitTail, and an online social butterfly, I find it second nature. And this is the attitude I imbue into my team of online outreach folks here at Connors Communications.
While we can't churn out clones of the product-creators to do with other companies what Connors does with HitTail, what we CAN do is the closes thing possible.
We use HitTail to really get into the mind of the Client's potential audience. We get to know the company's founder or product-creator, so we can think like them, and eventually speak in their voice. We get to learn the ins-and-outs of the product, and get under the company's hood. Why do they like it? Why do they hate it?
And by engaging in such practices and surfing back through the referrers (and this is how the article comes full-circle), we know the unknowable. That is, we know what would be unknowable to ANY OTHER PR firm in NYC. This is something we've done regularly for clients for years.
And now that we've extracted HitTail from our high-end SEO offerings, it's time I started teaching the HitTailing audience OTHER ways to use the real-time flow of data that HitTail provides.
This is one.
Don't ALWAYS follow suggestions. Sometimes write for a specific new audience that you just discovered, like the WAHMs (work at home mom's).
Know EVERY discussion that's taking place about you, your products or your company--even when it never showed up in Blog Search or Google Alerts.
So, drinking our own cool-aid turns out to be quite tasty.
I blogged the other day about taking the HitTail writing suggestion of "NY SEO". Sounds reasonable. We provide SEO services in New York City, and never put those words specifically together, but someone found us on it regardless. Finding us on that term, buried tons of pages in (yes, those SEO's are competitive), they tipped their hand to us that we COULD be found on that term, so I put it in our "To Do" list--sort of like an editorial calendar for competitive webmasters and bloggers.
Look where we are now:
Within 2 days, we were on the fourth page of Google results--nice but not spectacular. Today, we're on the first page (5 days). This is sometimes known as the "Google Honeymoon", and many SEO clients are disappointed within a few weeks of getting such spectacular results so quickly. And yes, dealing with the Google Honeymoon is a serious HitTailing issue. Don't misrepresent your capabilities to your client. It could backfire.
Instead, keep yourself from getting over-exuberant, but know that you can produce reliable short-term organic search success. Go ahead and impress your clients or boss with these short-term results, but qualify it. Tell them about the Google Honeymoon, but also tell them that these results can "set in" and become a permanent qualified traffic-generator with the right love and nurturing--ANOTHER reason HitTail isn't obsoleting traditional SEO, though on the surface, it sometimes looks that way. You still need to know how to make your body of HitTailing content take root. But merely keeping the content creation up over time, and always have a "Honeymoon" going on somewhere in your site keeps Google constant stimulated. Perhaps all results benefit? Hmmmmmm.
So at any rate, HitTail is a spankin' awesome way to hit the ground running with SEO and demonstrate to your clients the wonders to come if they stick with you for the long haul.
In taking our own advice a year after we've built up our critical mass of content (we're at about 450 optimized pages just over a year after website launch). We have a superior product and a message that we're proud of, making HitTail itself perhaps the best method of marketing HitTail. People are noticing this, picking up our message, and repeating it throughout the Internet.
We can now demonstrate the efficacy of our own product (drink our own cool-aid), using our own product in posts like this. If we keep that up, we're going to fill a very large space in the online marketing circles within one more year. I mean think about it, us getting top position on everything we write about with reliability that only HitTail can provide.
Was the example an anomaly?
Well, I went on a HitTailing binge there for a few posts. How reliable was it?
On another term I did August 15, Blog Marketing, HitTailing didn't seem to do a blessed thing. I went over 30 pages into the results, looking for my page to no avail. Makes me wonder how the suggestion got issued in the first place. But with 320 million competing pages and Seth Godin's own blog being 7 pages in, I think I ran up against the big head of the long tail of search. There are a lot of Marketers using blogs to... well, market. And their favorite topics of discussion? Marketing and blogging! So it stands to reason, I bit off more than I could chew by taking this suggestion. Perhaps we'll sharpen our filters to eliminate writing suggestions that "can't be easily conquered". We had the same issue on terms like Britney Spears.
But how about other terms?
Well, we did "Public Relations VS. Advertising" for which we're on the first page of results (without quotes, of course!).
I also did another 4-word term, "top pr firm in nyc", which one would think would be too long-tail to be worth it. Well, not only do we now get a regular flow of traffic on this (for which we should), but we're in THE #1 POSITION in Google in under a week.
Rinse and repeat.
Think how effective HitTailing can be when sustained over time. Yep, we've truly got an alternative to AdWords when you're discussing ways to acquire more qualified customers and audience to your website.
OK, how about the very latest? "Boutique PR Firm", which I just did on Saturday wasn't picked up yet. So, there are limits. We encountered TWO just in writing this post:
1. Some terms are still just too competitive, EVEN IF HitTail recommends that you write about them. While we COULD filter out these suggestions based on the difficulty you might encounter in pursuing them, they are by far the minority (we find), and leave them, because although you may not grab a top-spot instantly, it will still fortify your overall site, and stimulate subsequent serendipitous hits, albeit by the most determined searchers.
2. HitTail takes time. While you sometimes see HitTailing work its magic in only 2 days, don't bank on it. And even if your results DO get a top spot quickly, expect significant movement in that position over the following days or weeks. And HitTailing may not be enough to fortify those top positions. Think about making your content so link-worthy that you get those external links genuinely, without link-trading solicitation during the Google Honeymoon.
So in choosing the topic for today? I just took another HitTail suggestion of course. But I wrote the entire article first! Then, I went back to look for the best headline suggestion that matches the article. And even them, I did a quick bit of research to make sure the traffic was worth it, and that it didn't look unachievable.
Happy HitTailing! I'll try to put more concrete posts like this out there to counteract the marketing push I've been doing lately.
Regular readers here bear with me. I try to post pragmatic, applicable information—essentially, tutorials and how-to’s. Lately, I’ve been pontificating in an annoying similar fashion to my counterparts in the industry, who have been rolled into the mega-marketing conglomerates. But rest assured, this post is simply to provide contrast to the prevailing trend in the public relations area of marketing.
[Update: Here's the result of making this post: first page in Google for Boutique PR Firms in under a week!]
Boutique PR firms such as Connors Communications, the creators of HitTail, are increasingly rare, but more important than ever precisely because of their scarcity and ability to execute plans effectively.
Of course the big appeal is that they are able to provide continuous, dedicated staff to a Client in a way that PR firms that were rolled into mega-conglomerate marketing companies cannot. But an unexpected side effect of staying boutique in this Web 2.0 world is that such small firms can harbor small, innovative technology teams.
Yes, modern PR firms have Web 2.0 programmers on-staff to help with viral outreach, custom application development, SEO, social networking, and the like.
Such small teams are great with developing Web applications using agile frameworks in spiral development cycles. In layman’s terms, public relations is rapidly becoming a technology-game because carrying out effective outreach campaigns across fragmented media requires automation and custom tools.
Of course creativity still plays a critical role. But the kitschy PR stunts of yesteryear designed to seize evening news television cameras have gone the same way as those cameras (replaced by millions of home video cameras). Think how much more effective a popular YouTube video is than one-time exposure one some morning TV program. And PR firms who understand this new dynamic are just more effective. Similarly, a webpage that’s drawing in spontaneous new visitors thanks to how Google works is more valuable than a one-time newspaper ad—so PR firms who know how search works are way ahead.
Why is this?
Specifically, human attention has been fragmented and fractionalized right along with the plethora of alternative media—with mega-attention-hubs diminishing in quantity and intensity. Some examples of the last remaining central focuses of human attention include Oprah and The Wall Street Journal. But authoritative hubs are always at risk of being diluted even further, as they lose their independence.
How does a company get its message out these days? Where do you drop your penny to ensure you reach your audience? Mass media is still part of the answer, but so is search.
If money is no object, there’s still the tactic of “buying media” straight across all that fragmentation. I noticed this when watching King of the Hill reruns on FX and noticed a Gatorade commercial. I said to myself, now what business does Gatorade have running commercials on cartoon reruns? And my girlfriend pointed out that they’re buying airtime everywhere—indiscriminately. This impressed me in how companies, given sufficiently large budgets, are still able to live in the pre-fragmented era of 3 big TV networks—because they can still run commercials everywhere. It’s just a larger buy.
But smaller companies are not so lucky. They have to be smarter.
And right as the small companies are becoming smarter, many of the larger companies are losing time preparing for a reality they must soon confront. Intelligently executed low-budget campaigns (that promote superior products and services) cannot be drowned out. They are on equal footing to the big guys.
It’s a double-whammy win for the little guy and a double-whammy loss for the big guy. Why?
Because the big guy is being forced to spend more money to grow at a slower rate. The small company spends less money, and its momentum builds like a self-fueling wildfire. This is a large company’s worst nightmare—a new competitor that doesn’t have to pay much for promotion, and eats into market share or dominates a new market before anyone even knew it existed. Of course, the game plan goes, the big company just buys the new company—but that’s a story for a different post.
Small companies have the edge.
How do large companies remedy this?
Simple: sit down and talk with the small boutique firms who are actually moving forward the state of public relations and marketing. Think twice before hooking up with a company who thinks online outreach consists mainly of blogging and social networking. Try the company that invented HitTail.
UPDATE: Connors has evolved from traditional PR to high end search engine marketing. Click here to learn more about our transition - http://www.connors.com/seo/letter.html
Well, it's time to write this particular article, because the keyword tool created by a top PR company in NYC tells me so. This is probably a rather odd notion for people discovering HitTail and the PR firm of Connors Communications merely by virtue of this post. But this article should make it clear for those just discovering us.
And for those who already know Connors Communications, go back to your HitTail reports. This one isn't for you.
The key thing to understand about the new state of PR is:
Generically reaching out to the entire world population on your important phrases is part of modern public relations. The first thing an influencer that you're pitching is going to do is turn around to Google (or some other engine) and get the dirt on you. The onus is on you to control that messaging!
Most PR firms don't get this. When faced with the question: "Yes, but what are you doing online?" they fumble around with answers that involve disingenuous blogging and/or Afterlife. What they don't provide is a proven online strategy that demonstrates the PR firm's leadership role in the PR industry, and indeed, proof of their status as peers and equals to the clients themselves, as far as technology goes.
What you found in discovering this page is a PR firm with a pedigree that includes launching Amazon.com, Priceline, Vonage and a host of others. The thing to notice here is the difficulty of the PR challenge. It may be obvious today, but selling books online as the path to being an online retailing giant was not so clear back then. Asking Americans to haggle over prices in Priceline... well, Americans aren't hagglers. And introducing VOIP as a consumer product rather than B2B, well that was about as counter-intuitive as it gets. Yet today, VOIP is a household word. Think about that.
All these companies with counter-intuitive messages, launched successfully. They were ultimately right. They all educated the world about a new way of thinking and living. They all had messaging that the world initially resisted, then came around to embracing. They're in-it-for-the-long-haul game-changers.
So what does a company like Connors do to show the world how the PR industry is changing to keep pace with the times? Well, we change the very state of the Marketing industry, by introducing our own product, and doing it with a free version as an overture to the world. We learned from the best, as we were also the PR firm for GoTo.com in the early days, which was destined to become Overture, then be bought by Yahoo for $1.6 billion dollars. So Connors knows a little bit about making overtures. And this provides yet another example of making a counter-intuitive product stick--mixing paid advertising into natural search results. This is essentially how Google makes most of its money, so it can be argued that Connors' client GoTo.com taught Google the business plan that made it so successful.
A company like Connors Communications makes HitTail in order to show that PR firms are still at the top of the hierarchy of marketing professions. What you WON'T find from Connors is disingenuous blogs. What you WILL find are blogs that are run on behalf of clients, which perform astoundingly well in natural search, and which are regularly asked by major media outlets such as The New York Times whether they can be quoted! That's right. In influencing the media, we make our clients INTO the media.
And in turn, every time an influencer researches your space, they continually rediscover your messaging--reinforced by being corralled back to sites you directly control, or comments by your enthusiastic customers and supporters.
And that's just a tiny piece of the big picture. Of course, there's the larger SEO system from which HitTail was extracted, which we've come to calling the Connors ABCs. We've used it to help some of the largest hotel chains compete with the masses of hyper-competitive affiliate marketers that flood their space. We also help major magazine publishers get back the publishing edge that they've been losing to SEO-obsessed competitors, and the sum-total of bloggers who write about similar topics. Old paper publishers need the tech-savvy SEO edge that we deliver.
And we're looking to get into a few more industries. Plenty of non-competes' exist right now, so if you plan on talking with us, do it soon.
And yes, we do this technology development as a PR firm--one that has relationships with the most influential tech writers on the planet. Rarely do you find a "who-you-know" agency that has brought its "what-you-know" internal capabilities up to the same level. But that's what you'll find when you visit us in our New York office to discuss your plans. We hope to hear from you soon.
UPDATE: Connors has evolved from traditional PR to high end search engine marketing. Click here to learn more about our transition - http://www.connors.com/seo/letter.html
Google Analytics and HitTail often mentioned together
It's more than a year since we launched the HitTail Beta (August 14th--I should have done a happy-beta-birthday), and some of you have been with us since we soft-launched it in the form of MyLongTail at the beginning of 2006, where I documented the fact that's important to HitTail--you can get into Google search results with a brand-new website in under 2 weeks! The "sandbox" penalty was gone. So, imagine what you could do with a site that was already somewhat built up! Imagine what you could do if you knew the terms that were teetering on the edge of working for you already in natural search, and just required a little push.
Well, you just imagined HitTail, and I'm happy to have brought it to so many people for over a year now.
I'm always still surprised and delighted at the articles that keep appearing about HitTail in blogs and newsletters. Here's one that apparently has been out since May of this year from Yaro Starak, the Blog Traffic King, but I only just discovered. It sums up the whole long tail and HitTail thing very nicely, and for those of you who don't get it yet, it's a recommended read. Thanks, Yaro!
The feedback really just keeps pouring in, and I'm surprised by how across-the-board it's coming from. You can read a great deal of the feedback on our TypePad Quotes and Testimonials site. But there are even not-safe-for-work links that I'm avoiding putting there out of good taste. But never one to avoid controversy, I figured I'd share one not-safe-for-work link (NSFW) regarding funny suggestions from HitTail. There are more. Seems we're just as appealing to the adult entertainment industry as political blogs, eCommerce sites and the like.
I guess this makes us an equal opportunity secret weapon for driving website traffic. I'm even waiting for candidates from the 2008 election to start hopping on the HitTail bandwagon as part of getting their message out online. There was brief interest from Obama Girl, but I guess she's so busy with her newfound fame. I'll give her another try.
One of the amazing trends I've discovered in watching the HitTail discussion on the Internet is how Google Analytics and HitTail so often get invoked in the same breath, such as comments from The-Secret and shopgirl.
While Google analytics is statistics, which gives you the typical top-10 lists, HitTail is on the other hand, based on anecdotal and empirical evidence--working much like a private eye piecing together clues. Recently, I was slammed by a HitTail user accusing us of not really being a longtail tool, because we stop 350 keywords in, and the long tail hardly even starts at that point. I humbly reminded him that the "My HitTail" tab was only one of five--and actually the least-important one at that.
That's right!
We only made that long tail graph to demonstrate to people how things JUST START TO GET INTERESTING in the tail, and how much attention is improperly spent on the head, where you're already performing well! So, I added some text to the bottom of the chart to make sure people get the subtle message of how the data displayed in the chart is actually UNIMPORTANT!
The fact that we're not Web analytics software, applying statistics to the data is what makes people so addicted to HitTail. We're not insulating you from the data or interpreting it for you. We're merely zeroing in on serendipitous events that happen to be handing over competitive intelligence. It's not some derivative of this event that's important. It's the event itself--that someone found your site on such-and-such a term, but they worked really hard to find you--usually deep in the results.
This tells you two things:
You CAN be found on that term. Hence, the value of identifying the first time anyone ever found your site on a particular term. It demonstrates POTENTIAL--like surveying for new oil fields.
There's a bunch of crap ahead of you in the search results that likely did not satisfy the searcher, or else they would have stopped sooner.
So, merely by virtue of using HitTail, you're simultaneously surveying for new fields of website traffic "oil", and you're verifying that no one already has a strong claim to that property. There's no waiting for the polar icecaps to melt to claim your Internet gold. You don't have to battle Russia, Canada, the U.S. and Denmark for North Pole natural resource rights. All you have to do is choose an already-search-optimized publishing platform, such as Blogger, SquareSpace, TypePad or WordPress, and take HitTail's writing suggestions.
It's that easy.
So, we don't ask you to give up Google Analytics. It does a bunch of things HitTail is unlikely to ever do. But because our philosophy is so radically opposite to statistics (anecdotal evidence), they compliment each other perfectly--and this is perhaps the reason so many people mention GA and HitTail in the same breath.
If you have to choose just one more tracking system to run in addition to Google Analytics, HitTail is it.
As many of you have noticed, HitTail is entering a new phase. In addition to pushing hard to continue delivering a high-quality free service, we're also beginning to ask our users to support us by upgrading at least one account to Plus. Alternatively, you might like to support us by contacting us or referring SEO business in New York our way.
Connors Communications, the public relations firm that gave birth to HitTail, performs a very high-end brand of SEO, most appropriate for larger companies who are invested heavily in AdWords, and are looking to bring their natural search traffic up to par. To that end, we've created some exciting technology, which is such a challenge to convey that we made this video.
Now that the video exists, I'm tapping into the HitTail community to see whether I can't get that URL forwarded around a few offices, preferably in the New York area, where I can schedule coming out to meet with you in the next couple of weeks. The Connors office is on 22nd Street, between 5th and 6th Avenues, making it extremely convenient to set up meetings.
Typically, we do a situation analysis, looking for the opportunity to leverage large storehouses of pent-up corporate data, which has never properly been unleashed onto the Web. This often takes the form of product catalogs, published articles, or even user contributed content such as forums. The possibilities of corporate data to drive qualified natural search traffic visitors to your site are limitless, and it's by far the fastest way to pick up permanent new traffic quickly.
Anyway, I believe by making HitTail, we've pretty firmly established our credibility--not to mention Connors' pedigree as the PR firm that helped launch Amazon.com, Priceline, and got many others off the ground (we still do that too). We're now further differentiated we're engaged with the online community as genuine technologists and Web 2.0'ers, rather than the low-road approaches that some of our PR agency counterparts have taken to online outreach.
So contact me if you're in the marketing department of a New York City company, and would like to set up a meeting. Also contact me if you're a consultant, and you think some of your clients may be candidates for the Connors ABCs, because we do finders fees. And if you're part of an online marketing company looking to add a very high-end natural search product to your line-up, contact us because we're getting ready to pilot our Value Added Reseller program, and may be able to train and authorize you to deliver this solution yourselves!
[Update: I added this screen snapshot to show how this blog post got a search hit on the term NY SEO merely 2 days after being posted. Where this in itself doesn't mean that a valid opportunity was created (it was probably another SEO searching), but it does show that there is a big opening for regionally targeted phrases--even in the most competitive markets!]
Yes, HitTail is a form of blog marketing. Once you've invested the time to build a blog, you want your intended audience to arrive at your site. But how does that happen, precisely? There's a lot of stock put in "building your subscribers" through your RSS feed. But I have a different message. A blog's exposure and effectiveness is mostly a function of people's ability to spontaneously rediscover it whenever they go to Google or some other search engine to research the topics your blog touches on.
That's right. Blogs are in great part, a search engine optimization play.
We can't say that enough. Blogs are content management systems that pander to precisely what search engines like to see in a page. They make the correct type of search-friendly web addresses. They construct the proper page-to-page internal link structures, which would be otherwise tedious to hand-code. They put exactly the right words in the title tag and headline. Blogs line up the "crosshairs" precisely right to drive traffic on the subject-matter of the blog post.
So, choosing the headline correctly for that page's topic is enormously important. In fact, we say that once you choose the proper headline, the rest of the page is freed up for the art of writing well. That's not to say the headline shouldn't be well written. It's just that the majority of traffic you're going to get for this page is determined at the moment you create the headline. So, it should receive special consideration.
So, to market your blog, specifically what you do is take a HitTail suggestion from under the Suggestion tab. Once you've decided to blog about that topic, as I'm doing here with the topic "blog marketing", work it into a sensible headline. In this case, the precise suggestion IS the headline. There's really no purpose for anything other than those two words in this headline.
Yet by saying so little, I'm saying so much. Perhaps this post will be one of those pieces of smoking-gun evidence of how well HitTail works. I guess we should give it a few days, then search on blog marketing. By discussing the topic in blogging software, I'm actually performing the act.
And sustained over time with topic after topic, my natural search traffic grows.
It's all very circular, see?
UPDATE: Connors has evolved from traditional PR to high end search engine marketing. Click here to learn more about our transition - http://www.connors.com/seo/letter.html
Yes, HitTail is a form of blog marketing. Once you've invested the time to build a blog, you want your intended audience to arrive at your site. But how does that happen, precisely? There's a lot of stock put in "building your subscribers" through your RSS feed. But I have a different message. A blog's exposure and effectiveness is mostly a function of people's ability to spontaneously rediscover it whenever they go to Google or some other search engine to research the topics your blog touches on.
That's right. Blogs are in great part, a search engine optimization play.
We can't say that enough. Blogs are content management systems that pander to precisely what search engines like to see in a page. They make the correct type of search-friendly web addresses. They construct the proper page-to-page internal link structures, which would be otherwise tedious to hand-code. They put exactly the right words in the title tag and headline. Blogs line up the "crosshairs" precisely right to drive traffic on the subject-matter of the blog post.
So, choosing the headline correctly for that page's topic is enormously important. In fact, we say that once you choose the proper headline, the rest of the page is freed up for the art of writing well. That's not to say the headline shouldn't be well written. It's just that the majority of traffic you're going to get for this page is determined at the moment you create the headline. So, it should receive special consideration.
So, to market your blog, specifically what you do is take a HitTail suggestion from under the Suggestion tab. Once you've decided to blog about that topic, as I'm doing here with the topic "blog marketing", work it into a sensible headline. In this case, the precise suggestion IS the headline. There's really no purpose for anything other than those two words in this headline.
Yet by saying so little, I'm saying so much. Perhaps this post will be one of those pieces of smoking-gun evidence of how well HitTail works. I guess we should give it a few days, then search on blog marketing. By discussing the topic in blogging software, I'm actually performing the act.
And sustained over time with topic after topic, my natural search traffic grows.
There are a number of HitTail videos starting to accumulate, and I figured it was time to put them all on one page--at least in the blog. It should give a nice overview of the online marketing shift that's taking place, centered around HitTail. Enjoy!
We made this video for Bambi Francisco on MarketWatch, but when it was never used, we just started using it on our own. It's yet another explanation of how HitTail works.
And finally, with all these great SEO capabilities, that we're regularly told are years ahead of the competition, we decided to start a New York Search Engine Optimization Superpowers Meetup. Here's some video shot by my friend, Marshall Sponder, the WebMetricsGuru!
Here is one more video, which I added on August 24th. I forgot this NYTech Meetup video was available. It's not one we produced, but HitTail got a big round of applause, and it certainly belongs on this list.
Here is another video, which we just produced yesterday (August 23, 2007). It's the long-awaited video of precisely how to use HitTail. Looks like we'll have to produce a dedicated video page soon, and stop using this blog page.
So, these are a few words about our high-end product, and the history of HitTail. As many know, HitTail is the brainchild of the public relations firm, Connors Communications, founded by Connie Connors, one of the folks who helped build-up some of the Dot Com giants, such as Amazon.com and Priceline.
Unlike other PR firms who have entered the online space, in a possibly overzealous fashion, and perhaps even risked their reputation with kitschy, manipulative stunts, such as disingenuous blogging, Connors has chosen a path less traveled, but we think infinitely more rewarding. We have actually become one of the new generation of disruptive, game-changing companies that we endeavor to promote online. In other words, we don't only talk the talk, but we walk the walk.
We created HitTail.
So, what do we do with this incredible audience we're accumulating, as we become highly recognized in marketing circles around the world? Why, we use it to win you as our next client, of course. Our brand of SEO is very high-end, really only making sense for folks who already have $100K AdWords campaigns, but would like their natural search piece of the pie.
How does this relate to HitTail?
As more and more HitTailers are coming to discover, this beloved Web 2.0 long tail writing topic suggestion tool is actually an "extraction" from our larger product, which Connors has been using with high-end client engagements for some years now—where budgets of $100K/mo are traditionally being poured into AdWords, and they're looking for a more sensible approach.
And now we're ready to describe this previously tightly-guarded secret to the world.
We named it Connors ABCs.
Why ABCs? We think it describes how we view ourselves as the new fundamental building blocks of a new form of online marketing—where you fix your website, without scrapping and rebuilding everything you've got. Yes, it's SEO (search engine optimization), but brought to a whole new level, through a non-intrusive presentation layer that lets us remix websites like DJs remix music.
We describe this complex system of re-working and re-publishing data you already have so often, that it wore us down.
Hopefully using this demo, the enthusiasm that starts to build once we start to talk with you can become infectious, and you can pass the word along in your company. But fair warning! As Mike Crowl stated in his review of our presentation:
It assumes that you’re intelligent and can keep up with both audio and visual input at the same time, so that while your ear is listening to one part of the message your eye is either getting an alternative picture of that message or something additional.
So even if you don't have a budget of $25,000/mo to spend, Mike Crowl suggests that you check out the demo, because:
I haven’t seen one as slick and mind-catching in a while.
Hi everyone. As an officer at Connors Communications, I'm always lining up the next high-end SEO client. To that end, I'm inviting whoever thinks they might make a good job referrer, or even a potential employee or contractor, into my personal LinkedIn Network, or to directly start a discussion.
Connors does a fundamental natural search traffic fix to sites, where the company is typically spending a few million a year on AdWords, and want to take ownership of their own fate.
It's not cheap stuff, and we only take 2 or 3 clients at a time, so we can do them justice. We have one immediate opening that I have to fill, and I thought I'd tap into the HitTail community to help me get some introductions.
So, feel free to join my LinkedIn network. Serious folks only, please. If you're just interested in building up your personal blog, continue to communicate with me here in the forum.
Did you know that HitTail was "extracted" from a high-end system sold by Connors Communications to Fortune 500 and Global 2000 companies? This is a special preview to HitTail users of this service.
Although it's probably above the price-range of most HitTailers, I ask you to watch the demo and consider whether you know someone who might be interested. Good-will like this is what helps keep quality free services free. So, if you know someone this might be of interest to, please forward it to them. We hope for introductions to larger type companies who "feel the pain" of not getting the natural search traffic that is their due. There are tons of companies shoveling money into pay-per-click campaigns, who should be taking measures to own their own fate.
Here's an article that echoes many of HitTail's sentiments about how to write well AND bring in he most qualified visitors through search. Anyone who is not totally familiar with the subtly different brand of SEO that HitTail advocates should check out this article on the lost art of writing well.
We like to be as non-traditional in our paid-marketing campaigns as we are in developing free alternative marketing products. That's why, when the time came to buy ads, we chose John Battlle's Federated Media, whose ad network includes some of the world's biggest online influencers.
