Now Available: RSS Feed for Forum

For a while now, users of the HitTail forum have requested an RSS feed that they could subscribe to--one that would help them keep up with HitTail announcements and rapidly inform users of new posts. If you go to the forum you’ll now see an RSS icon, which looks like this:

By clicking on it, you’ll now be able to subscribe to a general feed which updates with new posts in any topic, along with the ability to subscribe to a feed for a specific topic.

If you use an RSS feeder, the Feed URL for the general feed is here. And that’s it. Now you can be updated on everything that happens over here at HitTail as soon as it goes up, in real time! OK, maybe not REAL time, but you get the point…

Blogging growth opportunity in niches

Danny Dover at SEOmoz recently posted a fascinating article on the state of blogs. There are great stats on who controls the top blogs as well as the gender breakdown and audience profile for high traffic blogs.

One of the key takeaways is that there is still a lot of room for growth, especially in non-Technology topics. In addition, there is a huge opportunity to develop new blogs targeted at women. The key here is to find a niche and develop a new audience in a unsaturated market.

Inspired bloggers out there can then use tools like HitTail to determine what are the hot topics people are interested in within a particular niche that will drive traffic to their blog.

Google Adwords Bidding Strategy

So, now that all you HitTailers are jumping on the AdWords bandwagon, what about a bidding strategy? Well, it turns out that the keyword lists generated by HitTail are naturally deemed relevant by Google, and therefore are able to get the ads to run even while lowering your CPC bid to ridiculously low levels. Sure, it might half or even quarter the visits you get compared to an unconstrained budget. But you pay a fraction per click. I've been able to lower my CPC level to .06 with great success on high volume sites. On lower volume sites, I might suggest the .11 level to get some traffic rolling. And of course, you can use the HitTail feature to flow these terms directly into your AdWords account without ever leaving HitTail.

Eventually, you'll want to go to AdWords and do some manual optimization of your campaigns. At this time, I suggest considering pulling your entire keyword list via the Export function, and import your keyword list en-masse into AdWords. AdWords will immediately deactivate keywords that don't meet it's criteria, or which exceed your CPC bid. That's fine, because it becomes something of an experimential churn campaign, where every day or every few weeks (depending on the volume of your site), you dump the keyword list in again. Don't worry too much about duplicates, as AdWords will automatically de-dupe. Over time, such campaigns become self-optimizing. But to really super-charge things, you start moving your best performing keywords into their own campaigns with more targeted copy in the ads, carefully selected landing pages, and bidding strategy.

Keyword Tool

The biggest change in the industry lately has been the dramatic rolling out of new features in the Google Adwords Keyword Tool, where they added monthly traffic volume estimates, the Google Trends tool, where they report website traffic numbers in uniques-per-day in an Alexa-like graph (log in for absolute numbers), and most recently with their Google Search Insights tool, which is like an interative Zeitgeist. To a lesser extent, some new features are rolling out in Webmaster Central. And contrary to popular wisdom, Microsoft has some of the best keyword research tools in the industry wrapped into Ad Center--but it's a pretty big learning committment to get to the point where you can use them. SpyFu remains the best tool, albeit expensive, for spying on your client's AdWords campaigns. And of course, HitTail, with it's new features including the rockin' feature where you can add new content to your blog directly from your To Do list (which I'm doing now) is hands-down the best way to identify the content-challenged sweet spots in your website, and the actual mechanism to publish the content. Of course, I'm biased.

Goodbye HitTail Basic, Hello TypePad and Blogger!

It's been a great two years so far and we want to thank everyone who has helped to get the word out. We can hardly believe ourselves that HitTail is already in use on over 35,000 websites worldwide. And with that success comes a new chapter in our service. As of Tuesday, we will no longer be accepting new sign ups for the free HitTail Basic service.

But wait! If you already have a HitTail Basic account, don't worry, because you'll continue to have access to the same service you have today. We're just putting up that velvet rope and marking off our early adopter VIPs. Only those who sign up after August 5th will have to pay for HitTail Plus or Premium. Of course, we hope our loyal users will also choose to upgrade too :)

Speaking of HitTail Plus, we would be remiss if we also did not mention our brand new feature. As of last week, paid subscribers have been able to blog about HitTail suggestions directly from the ToDo list interface. That's right, no more opening another window and going into Blogger or TypePad. Save your credentials and start blogging without leaving that addictive real-time HitTail dashboard. For those who are new to the service, feel free to try it out in the demo.

And finally, speaking of blogs, our own blog just surpassed 400 posts. Yes, we practice what we preach and you should too! So get blogging.