Leveraging the Twitter Parrot Effect for Online Marketing

Admittedly, I haven't blogged much here on the HitTail blog. I could slap excuses on it like, HitTail's running reliably as promised since it's launch in late 2006, showing real-time search hits and issuing writing suggestions, which when acted upon, pretty reliably seize you the first page of Google results. It's a nice little secret weapon in online marketing circles, and the fan-base is as strong as ever, despite our switch from freemium to try-and-buy last year.

The fact we sustained such a business-model switch is remarkable, and that we're going into this recession with a $10/mo product that helps you sell your wares online... well, it couldn't be the conditions for a more perfect storm.

I'm hoping for nothing less than to get the entire world of bloggers who are trying to build their traffic merely by virtue of writing (if you write it, they will come) onto HitTail. It's a modest goal, as all the other ways of doing this are too convoluted (analyzing your own log files with an algorithm like HitTail's) or expensive (using one of the few packages that's finally catching onto the long-tail thing). So HitTail fans, start spreading the word.

Speaking of blogging--of course, micro-blogging with Twitter or Facebook status and posted items (now links) is all the rage. When these pages (like Twitter tweet pages) are not protected with a login, they do influence search, but the landing pages are usually nofollowed--meaning that they don't confer the SEO benefit in turn to the sites you link to. None-the-less, services like Twitter are valuable online marketing tools because they do help drive traffic to your site, albeit not directly.

There is another interesting effect that inspired me to get this blog post out today: the Twitter "parrot effect".

In other words, I post, then a HitTail user posts about my post--because it's about them, and micro-blogging is so easy with tools like TwitterFox.

Amplification of my message ensues, and the cycle continues.

So even though I haven't been posting here much in the HitTail SEO marketing blog, I have been posting in Everyone Loves HitTail, where I collect the quotes, testimonials, and generally every mention of HitTail that my monitoring tools clue me into. And recently following a bout of post-vomiting, I noticed my monitoring tools reporting back to me every post I made... twice! Once in the standard blog monitoring tools driven by Technorati and Google Blog Search (as expected), but then again by people micro-blogging about my blog posts. I've posted the screen-shot below to show the Twitter activity on HitTail recently--none of those are me.

Yet, about half are repeating my words.

Nice.

Online marketers, take notice. If you're not maintaining a clip-book of positive quotes in a blog that somehow ties into social networking in a way that ensures your built-in audience is tuned-in, then you're not even doing the basics.

An Alternative to Internet Addiction

We at HitTail haven't been blogging as much as we used to, perhaps because we too have fallen victim to the always-on 24/7 culture that has been simultaneously enabling yet paralyzing so many savvy Internet users. Although I do not personally use Twitter or Friendfeed, it is becoming an addiction to some like Robert Scoble. While he was the one mentioned on TechCrunch, I know others who use the service far too much to be healthy. I, for one, am happy just to post occasional updates and link to articles on Facebook. Yet I can tell even that small distraction has reduced the normal amount that I should be blogging.

Of course, we designed HitTail to be a little addictive, since it is one of the few truly real-time (dare I say, useful?) services. We love data, and the ability to access it via the Internet at any time. But we also know it can be addicting and paralyzing to sort through endless reports. That's why we simplified analytics to just a few screens and combined it with a To Do list that you check off as you go, enabling you to act on that intelligence. And then we took it one step further, allowing an alternative way to get your keyword suggestions by RSS or Email so you don't have to constantly log on to the site.

We feel it's important that business tools adapt to our lives, rather than the other way around. So this holiday season, I hope everyone takes their eyes off the screen for a few minutes this time of year and enjoys the rest of what life has to offer. Don't worry. When you want to get your latest Internet info, you can still get it sent to your other addiction -- be it iPhone, Crackberry, G1, Treo, or Xperia.

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.

PR, SEO, and Blogging

We've been seeing a lot of traffic coming from Steve Rubel's blog post on Friday. I'm flattered that Steve mentioned a recent entry on how blogs can quickly see benefits from SEO. We all know that blogs are often used to position companies as industry leaders and spokespeople as authoritative. That's something our parent company, Connors Communications, knows something about considering its 20+ year history in public relations. And yet obviously times are changing -- which is why we developed HitTail.

Google says that one of the best ways to drive traffic (and therefore get your message out) is by having something worthwhile to say. HitTail helps bloggers gain respect by providing suggested writing topics that interest their audience and are beneficial to readers as well as search engines.

What is the point of blogging if no one finds your blog? You might as well keep a private journal. Blogs may gain some readers from word of mouth and viral marketing, but you can bet that the most successful ones have been learning something from the keywords that people use to find them.

I'm sure that Steve and others in PR are beginning to recognize that the importance of ranking well in search results is just as valuable, or even moreso, than appearing in news articles due to the fragmentation of media.

When even the New York Times writes their headlines with Search in mind, you have to compete with SEO if you want to be heard on similar topics. Or you can hunt for treasure in the long tail with HitTail.

Realizing SEO benefits quickly through blogging

Quick results in Search Marketing are only possible with Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising, right? Wrong. The advent of blogging, as well as recent advances to search engine algorithms, has narrowed the gap between PPC and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to mere hours. With PPC, there is instant gratification as your advertisement will appear in search results almost immediately after your campaign is activated. However, this same advantage can now be seen in SEO.

First, let's take a look at some common reasons why SEO projects have not been carried out in the past.

• Companies don’t want to abandon tech investments (e.g. content management systems and web publishing tools)


• Lack of budget dedicated to SEO


• May take a while to demonstrate ROI

Blogging addresses each of these problems.

• SEO best practices are already in place
  
  Blogging software by default includes a few basic but important SEO practices by using proper Titles, headlines, URLs, and internal linking structure. Search engines also like sites that have fresh content, which can give blogs great influence over search results.


• Recent search engine algorithm changes boost the visibility of blogs
  
  This recent experiment by Ryan Durk took advantage of temporary changes in Google’s logo linking to the search results page for "January 1 TCP/IP". It shows two things: the speed by which a new blog is indexed and the short time between your blog getting indexed and it appearing high in search results.


• Blogs are inexpensive and easy to setup
  
  A new blog can be created in a matter of minutes with little technical knowledge. Blog creation is free in many cases, often with a nominal monthly fee for additional features.

Blogging is great for companies that are not ready to make the larger SEO investment or are worried about abandoning a CMS in which they have already invested. Blogging can be used as a proof of concept that shows that SEO can deliver results. Use of blogging software delays the larger discussion of SEO projects that are potentially more time-consuming and require a larger investment that reap longer term benefits. Setting up a blog is inexpensive and doesn’t force you to abandon or modify your existing IT investments.

Then get people to notice your blog.

• Conduct Keyword Research
  
  Creating a blog is just the first step. Keyword research can be the difference between a highly popular, authoritative blog and a blog that no one knows exists.
  
  Since everyone competes on the most popular words, try blogging about slightly less competitive topics so your site has the ability to rank for those terms. HitTail can facilitate this process of identifying writing topics that other sites aren’t necessarily targeting, yet will drive traffic.
  
  If you’re just getting started with blogging, write about a subject where you have expertise that you feel will interest your audience. Once you reach a critical mass of blog posts, take a step back and analyze how people are finding your blog and use that information to guide your editorial calendar.


• Utilize Social Media and Pinging
  
  In addition to keyword research, it is important to promote the blog using social media tools that increase the visibility of your blog and generate inbound links to your domain. Be sure to utilize pinging services to notify aggregation services of new content on your blog.


• Customize the blog template
  
  It is also important to link to your new blog from the Homepage of your main website to make it easier for search engine spiders to discover it. Often times, the default template needs to be tweaked slightly for maximum SEO benefit. For instance, make sure your blog Permalink uses meaningful anchor text and not "www.yourdomain.com/blog/?p=456"

Blogging may not be the long-term solution for fixing a broken site, but it will get your foot in the door for SEO, deliver results in the short term, and facilitate the process of getting buy-in for full-scale, long-term SEO projects for the rest of your website.

Digg Breaking News Stories (And Break Some Of Your Own!) With HitTail

Quite by accident I found an extra use for HitTail that’s pretty killer in terms of generating content for my blog. And I’m going to spill the beans so you can try it for yourself.

Basically, you can use HitTail to discover leads, breaking stories, and gossip.

Yes, gossip!

First, a brief recap on how HitTail works.

You install it on your site and get real-time scrolled keyword results on the searches used to find your site. Then the service points out to you which keywords have the potential to be capitalized by you for best hits on your next post.

So for example, HitTail might point out that somebody used the phrase “green ipod nano” to find your site – even though you didn’t specifically use that phrase in a post. But now you know that there is a relatively untapped interest out there in content on green ipod nanos – and that if you write about them, your hits will increase.

That said, I’m talking about a completely different use for the service. Well, not “completely different” – you’ll still get a lot of hits for your site. It’s just that this service is a whole lot more…edgy. Let me explain what I mean.

While using HitTail last week to monitor my personal niche blog, I notice that the service highlighted a very strange phrase. It was the name of a couple of important people who work in that niche field plus the word “feud.”

Now, as far as I know, those two people, who had a working relationship, were the best of friends. So I thought it odd that someone would have type in their names in relation to a dispute.

So I asked around. And guess what? They did have a recent falling-out.

Now, had I been an Internet gossip columnist, or some hard-core niche reporter – or simply wanted to write a hit-garnering post – this lead on a yet-to-be-discovered story would have been pure gold.

But, just for the pleasure of finding out what hot topics people are typing into search engines AS IT HAPPENS – HitTail is a must for my blogging.

HitTail Gave Me Hot Topics: A Blogger’s Real Story

Hi. I’m a real blogger with a real blog. Here is a personal story about how HitTail worked for me.

I’m always looking for hot topics to blog about. I’m also always on the hunt for the “edge” that will allow me to break stories first. HitTail has given me the tools to do both.

Here is an example of what I mean; this really happened! I blog mostly about comic books and popular culture. Using HitTail, I found out that one of the popular phrases to find my blog was “who will play the Joker in Batman 3?” Now, I never wrote a post about that subject; but somehow the search engine in question found some combination of those words in my blog.

What this result on HitTail told me was that there are readers out there who are interested in this topic. Now I have a great story idea with a confirmed potential audience!

HitTail even has a “to do” feature that lets me move the phrase or words in question to a separate page for easy reference. So when the well is dry and I’m jonesing for ideas, I can take a look at my HitTail to-do list.

Next time, I will reveal an even GREATER secret about using HitTail for your blogging needs – how to not only find hot topics, but actual story “leads” to investigate further. I really got the edge using this – you can too.

Blogging with real-time data

We recently came across a great example of 1) how quickly a new blog post can appear in search results and 2) the value of HitTail's real-time reporting.

Kenton Newby describes his experience with amazing indexing results after publishing a blog post and finding it in search results within 2 hours of posting it and at the top of the 2nd page of results for the query "define Google Analytics bounce rate"

We've discussed these types of cases in the past here. One of the big advantages of PPC is that you see results immediately after you activate an ad campaign. With SEO, it usually takes longer to see the results of your work. However, blogging has shown that this gap is narrowing and that it's possible to see the results of your SEO efforts in natural search results within hours or days of publishing.

Note that HitTail's real-time report alerted Kenton to the fact that his blog post was getting traffic as it occurred. This realization would not have been possible using other analytics tools where there is a delay in viewing referrer data.

How do you take action on this data?

The real-time data is especially useful for bloggers who pay attention to social media and get a lot of their traffic from sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, and Del.icio.us. For example, if you are logged in to your HitTail account and you notice a bunch of new referrers on the Search Hits tab from StumbleUpon or Digg, you can take action immediately by bookmarking the site yourself or notifying your network to increase visibility for that blog post. This practice has the potential to create a quick short-term boost in traffic.

Blog Marketing

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?

New HitTail Live Widget being Tested

Hey baby, wanna see my HitTail?

Would you share the first page of your HitTail Search Hits data with the world?

Well, it used to be that you had to log into your own site (or as Connors) to see how cool and addicting our real-time Search Hit tab in HitTail is. But we wanted to start giving everyone a feel for the “black river of keywords” that exists in any site without logging in.

So, we’re testing this new “HitTail Live” widget on our own site for now—but based on whether people like this feature, we might make it available to the public. First, I’m interested in what you think. So, comment!

This widget it somewhat in the spirit of the “search voyeur” features that used to be built into sites like Excite and AOL Search in years past, where you can have insight to the “search stream”. Lately, this has been supplanted by Google Zeitgeist. But somehow, we still think that viewing the real-time flow in a voyeuristic fashion is still hugely appealing. It’s the same issue as day-after Google Analytics, vs. the viewing the real-time click-stream that makes folks like this blogger continue to use HitTail over other choices. Both have their uses, but as this writer states, there’s just something about watching those hits come in.

So, if you’re interested in using this widget on your website, let us know with comments. It’s not a sure thing. For example, would you actually be OK with SHOWING OTHERS the flow of traffic leading into your site? Is it giving too much away?

Personally, I feel it will help reveal the trends on the Internet that the online marketing community doesn’t want to acknowledge: natural search is king. Paid search (which is indistinguishable from natural search from a referrer perspective), which you can identify by the “lack” of a natural listing, is just way less common than people think. Sure, it can drive traffic, but can it even begin to compete with natural search niche domination?

By showing you this widget, we’re now also showing you a slice of the traffic coming to the HitTail site itself. It’s also a wonderful example of how awesome our filters are. Doing this should by all reason pollute our data with people surfing or referrer links. But it won’t. Think about that. If you click one of those links in the Widget, and surf BACK INTO the HitTail site using a reproduced Google search, shouldn’t you see that you just did that in our widget? Shouldn’t that sort of self-referential referrer loop ruin the data?

In any other tracking system, it would.

And THAT sort of subtlety is why folks like Tatraplan detect something special about HitTail’s particular brand of showing referrers.

And with this new public-facing widget, we think there’s a much easier way to check out HitTail’s coolness, without “logging in as Connors”.

If you agree, and might like one of these for yourself, let us know.

The Gold Coast Discovers HitTail

Today, there was a major mention of HitTail in the Ventura County Star. Be sure to read the whole thing, but here's an excerpt: Fred Simanek, chief executive officer of MyNextDeal.com in Thousand Oaks, uses both for his commercial real estate Web site.

Simanek said an important part of launching a new site is driving traffic to it. He found a product called HitTail, which gives Web site owners, whether casual bloggers or large businesses, a piece of code that tracks how people find their Web site.

It uses that information what keywords people used in which search engines to create a report for the site operator. That allows a business to incorporate the search terms into its Web site content so people using similar keyword searches in the future can find the company more easily.

It even creates a "to do" list.

Gaining intelligence

Simanek said he liked that it was so simple to use.

"Who doesn't want to have a to do list telling you, Here's some improvements you can make on your site,'" he said.

Simanek said he checks the report every day.

HitTail Inside the Tornado? So Some Think.

If saying a thing and getting others to repeat it makes it true, then HitTail has a very bright future. Case-in-point: the new, but still fascinating Toshihiro Tova blog. In particular, on this post, one of my all-time-favorite topics of seminal or quintessential business books, such as Geoffrey Moore's Inside the Tornado, James Surowiecki's The Wisdom of Crowds, or Chris Anderson's The Long Tail. Interestingly, this post is about all three and more. I eat these books up like candy, and internalize their messages like sports-fans inexplicably memorizing stats.

It's a rather long blog post, but there is one sentence in particular that naturally caught my attention, because if true, holds very exciting days ahead for HitTail and all its users and customers:

Not every company finds themselves inside the tornado having to deal with hypergrowth. And since the bust, it’s even fewer. But still, it does happen, such as with MySpace. And Connors may have such a case in HitTail–only time will tell.

Well, HitTail is the perfect storm, is it not? All the pre-qualifying conditions are met, are they not? Marketers around the world are worn down trying to make sense of analytics, alternatively hiring specialists, trying to make sense of it for themselves, and writing the whole thing off as an exercise in information paralysis. They're tired of being beholden to one traffic arbitrage provider--Google via AdWords--and they're looking for alternatives. The AdWord budgets have grown so ridiculously large, that it's an easy matter to take, maybe 25% of that budget, and try new things.

And when you select those new things, there's two things you should be wary of.

The first thing is everything else that looks exactly like AdWords, but delivers that much less pre-qualified traffic. Don't get me wrong. Alternative PPC products may be awesome. But all you're doing is reallocating WHERE you're buying your PPC traffic. You still however have not truly diversified your online marketing strategy. You just moved numbers between columns.

The second thing to avoid is the big SEO gamble. You're going to pour countless amounts of money into an infrastructure tear-down and rebuild, which is more painful than the loss of traffic from not having the correct infrastructure in the first place. If an SEO consultant starts discussing scrap and rebuild on the first meeting, think "warning lights." And even if it's the pursuit of best practices through projects like the search friendly URLs (URL rewriting), it's still a gamble that they can work with your Tech Team and get it fully and successfully implemented.

So, where SHOULD you drop your diversification penny? (or about 25% of your overall AdWords budget). The answer is long tail targeting. Just select a blogging platform, preferably one that meets our HitTail qualifications, meaning SquareSpace, TypePad, Blogger or WordPress. Work it into your existing website. Write off the non-optimized portions for a couple of months. And revel in the free traffic that is low hanging fruit.

Stop me before I mix metaphors again. But the point is, natural search optimization, using a sane, proven and safe method, is EXACTLY the right place to diversify your online marketing campaign. Connors Communications has clients whose sites are about 1000x larger than they started out, where the original "dynamic" site is dwarfed many times over by the content that they deliberately wrote and added, knowing (thanks to HitTail's ancestors) that qualified traffic would follow.

This is a capability traditionally held in reserve for Connors' clients, which we're rolling out for free as an overture to the world. PR firms aren't such bad guys. In fact, a few of us are even some of the good guys, on all the right sides in the DRM war, Open Source war, Net Neutrality war, war against Spam, and ultimately, expanding the rights and capabilities of the individual.

And when you pick HitTail apart, isn't that what we're ultimately doing? Expanding the capabilities of the individual by giving them a much louder voice, and resultantly more influence, in the blogosphere--and the overall "InterWeb" in general?

We think so. And so far, the Wisdom of Crowds agrees.

So won't you join us on our journey inside the tornado?

SEO, VC & Blogging - Comparing Events, Crowds & Comfort Levels

I attended Darren Rowse's ProBlogger meetup in NYC a few weeks back, and met almost everyone in the room. And he took over almost an entire floor of a popular New York City bar. I was totally comfortable and in my element, as folks like Keith Levenson of Vibrator.com went around popping promo stickers on people's shoulders. I was like "yeah... I can personally meet everyone in this room." Keith pretty much set the tone.

Then a few weeks later, I attended a Venture Capitalist event at a prestigious Union League sponsored by Red Herring. It was the Monday before Search Engine Strategies, and I was trying to get into social mode (sometimes difficult for me). High on ProBlogger, I felt it would be a breeze. Brrrrr, was I wrong. The button-down'd VCs were decidedly NOT the same profile as the rabid blogorati of the NYC area. And my education into how to work dramatically different crowds began. Not that it was bad. Just that it's not "me". I guess if it was, I'd be a VC and not one of the Web developer / executive cross-overs types that they like to fund.

I struck it off very well with the cross-over crowd, such as Laird Popkin, the CTO of Pando, a P2P torrent-like file sharer, with whom I could talk tech. Equally engaging was Angelo Valenti, an Executive and Entrepreneurial Coach, who immediately identified me as someone needing coaching, and gave the invaluable advice to play the "billionaire card". Those who look most out of place are often the ones with the best ideas and most money. They don't know you from a Web 2.0 billionaire. Use it. And if you wanted to play the Sesame Street game "which one of these is not like the other," there was the aventurista, Sarah Tavel, who turned out to be a VC AND a blogger. So, there were some nice highlights.

And of course, the host, Alex Vieux, the publisher of Red Herring, was an absolute pleasure to meet. But the majority of the room was an inscrutable mystery to me. I guess that's why I've hitched my apple cart to Connie's wagon.

And finally, there was SES, which while I only attended one day (Thursday), turned out to be one of the most auspicious events I ever attended. It's amazing the difference between being someone and not being someone can make. If I was a nobody at the VC event, and I was a pseudo-celebrity at the ProBlogger event, then I was half-way in-between at Search Engine Strategies. Fortunately, Danny Sullivan, Lee Odden, and a few of the other panelists knew me. But this mainstream marketing crowd curious about how to use search most decidedly doesn't know the "in the know cool sites."

Working the SES crowd was harder than ProBloggers (really our sweet spot), but WAY easier than the VC crowd. There's no intro like: here's a tool to build your natural search traffic. Oh yeah, it's free. The auspicious part was that I was meeting people left and right who I worked years previously to meet. I coincidentally met Neil Patel, "blogmaster" behind Guy Kawasaki's sites, who I've been in touch with on and off for years. This was from a random walk-up intro to a panelist, who in-turn recognized my name! I'd love to go on and name everyone, but let me just shout out to Stan Barett and Marshall Sponder, the look-alike's who don't know eachother, but whom I see at the same events, and sometimes have to wait until I hear an English accent before I say "Hi Stan" or "Hi Marshall".

Bottom line lesson of this blog: every event is like a life form manifestation of the event's host and their audience. Some you take to, as if they're old friends. Some are just tough to figure out. And some just take a little warming up to.

HitTail's 30 Second Elevator Pitch at SES NYC 2007

This was perhaps the best Search Engine Strategies (SES) I ever attended, in great part, instead of being one undifferentiated SEO in the crowd, I was Mike Levin the HitTail guy. Unlike previous years, where I attended all four days and came away with only enough to make it worth it, this time I only attended yesterday (Thursday), and came away with a lot. I mean, an awful lot.

I'd love to share all the funny anecdotes that were packed into just one day. But the first thing I want to get out of my mind and into the blogosphere is the highly effective 30-second elevator pitch.

HitTail is a writing suggestion tool for bloggers and website owners of all sorts -- to help you grow your natural search traffic... free.

It works much like analytics software with a simple line of JavaScript code. For users of major platforms (Blogger, TypePad and WordPad), there are plug-ins to facilitate installation of the code, making it easy for even total newbies.

Every website has some search-life in it. Every website is trying to tell you something.

Most analytics packages overlook the most important event: when some determined visitor finds you buried several pages into search. This tells you two things:

1. There is actual traffic occurring on this term, and you CAN/ARE being found on it.
2. There are several pages of crap ahead of you which didn’t satisfy the visitor. The hit was probably coincidental, often a result of unlikely word combos from archive pages.

So the reasoning goes, if you intentionally target it, you can bring yourself from several pages in on that term to the first page.

Keep this up over time, and you will grow your search engine traffic, naturally.
It may even free you (being marketers) from reliance on Google AdWords to drive traffic.

Oh yeah. It’s free.

Works every time.

Keyword Tool

It's undeniable. Keyword tools are everywhere, and everyone's spinning their own version and working them into their pay-per-click campaign marketing dashboards. Third party tools harvest keywords from second-tier search sites, such as InfoSpace's WebCrawler. First-party tools incorporate Yahoo results into Panama and Google results into the AdSense fetures--known as keyword inventory tools, with the added bonus of reporting keyword traffic stats and monetary value. And some keyword tools even do their own crawls, harvesting keywords off of competitor's sites, search results, APIs, or yank them right out of the datastream, in cooperation with participating ISPs.

Yes, there are unlimited numbers of ways to come up with keyword lists to help with your natural and paid search campaigns.

But we like ours.

It's simplistic in its conception, to the point of strange.

Yet it's effective in practice, to the point of unfair.

And that technique is harvesting keywords right from your website's own logfiles. But instead of merely pulling "the long keyword list" as so many analytics products allow, we pair down the list with at least two passes, so you don't have to.

And for anyone whose done serious keyword research, you can appreciate how much time this saves you. You get YOUR BEST LIST of keywords to target before you even export anything to Excel.

Think about that for a minute.

If you don't get it, forward the link to this article to someone in online marketing who you trust, who you think might get it. Ask them how creative and time-saving they thing this is. Ask them how it might improve your online marketing campaigns, and indeed, your life--by giving you time back for your families, hobbies and friends. Think how it could make your boss love you, those around you admire you, and take you one tiny step closer to being indispensable.

Exactly HOW does this radically different keyword research work flow happen?

We take the precious time that keyword geeks are flushing down the toilet by saving all their log files forever, running complex Regular Expression matches against them, ensuring that the work it suggests isn't duplicating work you've already done--and we distill it all down to one little Suggestions tab.

That's a long way of saying: "We tell you what to write about."

When the story of HitTail first broke, co-founder of Wired Magazine, John Battelle, was a little dubious about this "telling you what to write about stuff". And what good editor and writer wouldn't be? It sounds like one more spam-promoting tool to shift even more power into the hands of disingenuous bloggers just making a traffic-grab to increase their AdSense beer money.

But we held firm, by not creating an API that would allow spam-mash-ups. We held firm, by teaching our users about quality and distinctive online voices resulting in long-term reputations. We held firm by practicing HitTailing ourselves, demonstrating how just because you know you're going to get the traffic by mere virtue of smart headline selection, doesn't mean you can fill a page with garbage. We held firm by positioning it as a tool for reputable bloggers and small to medium sized businesses (SMBs) striving to get and keep customers directly, instead of yet-another-SEO-tool for AdSensers.

So here we are, as the one tool that consistently gets mentioned side-by-side with Google Analytics as the one must-have piece of tracking code. If you're only going to run two things to help improve your website, then those two things should be Google Analytics and HitTail. And that only makes sense, because would Google ever provide you a keyword tool that would increase your natural search performance, and bring down the cost of your AdWords campaigns?

Of course not.