HitTail is now a PPC Product?

So there you have it. I've been dropping hints for a few days now, but HitTail's premium service for driving down CPC has just been launched... and HitTail is entering into the world of AdWords campaign optimization. HitTail is now a PPC product.

Yes, it's true!

But how can that be? HitTail lands firmly on the free and organic side of search engine optimization. Isn't this some sort of betrayal suddenly releasing features designed to encourage you to plow even more money into pay-per-click? Isn't HitTail--the kooky company that always advocated freedom from PPC--reneging on its word?

The answer is No.

This is the creator of HitTail speaking, and after many months of managing AdWords campaigns, I'm here to tell you that HitTail methodology rocks the AdWords world--to the point where you can get a deal on the AdWords side that rivals PPC--and additionally have the satisfaction of managing campaigns that today's SEM companies can hardly even compete with. In my recent experience, I set up a "longtail" campaign in AdWords, and systematically moved the best words into this campaign, knowing that there was already SOME traffic on these words, but we weren't coming up on the first page of results. The idea with AdWords is to get these awesome longtail keywords WORKING FOR YOU RIGHT AWAY without even having to produce organic content for your site.

And it paid off in a big way... a very big way... a big enough way that me--one of the biggest advocates of better search results through blogging--to now also be an AdWords advocate...

...but only conditionally... on the condition of getting one over on AdWords.

What happens if you take the super-charged keyword lists provided by HitTail, where you know traffic is already occuring on your site, but not on page one, then you plug it into AdWords? The answer is you instantly get page on of search results (albeit in an ad) on words where some determined searchers went many pages in. So you suddenly tap into the exponentially greater number of people who never make it past page one, and a significant portion of these people click on ads. With effective keywords in-hand, instead of just moving them to your To-Do list and allowing them to unacceptably age, put them to work for you right away.

And the actual goal here is to lower your overall cost of acquiring customers (audience, visitors, whatever) by eliminating (at least temporarily), the most tedious and unlikely to occur part of HitTailing--namely, creating new website content. Now we still do encourage new website content as your long-term road to PPC freedom. But until you get that content out there, put the super-charged keyword lists to work for you.

HitTail for Paid Search AdWords Optimization?

There is a need for niche keywords--longtail keywords. Call 'em what you will, but they super-charge both your AdWords campaigns and SEO efforts. Their very nature as obscure but effective make well chosen long tail keywords the best deal in marketing.

For those already into AdWords, think 4% CTR, $0.06 CPC and tons of clicks. For those still only doing SEO, think about reducing the need to continuously expand website content.

That's about to become commonplace, because one of the best kept secrets in natural SEO is about to cross the chasm into mainstream marketing, and AdWords will never be the same.

With just a wee bit of keyword review and approval on your part, your AdWords campaigns will virtually become self-optimizing. We take the competitive intelligence that your site is always trying to give you but which most analytics software ignores (as long-time HitTail fans know well), and feed it directly into your AdWords campaign.

The result is simply amazing, as long-time HitTailer and million-dollar campaign manager Gary Beal has been trying to tell the world for a year. But alas, we are only just starting to teach the world this amazing approach to AdWords campaign management.

The irony here is that its coming from the very same PR firm that helped launch GoTo--later Overture, and today Yahoo! Search Marketing-- the company that taught Google how to make money. Yes, the very same Connors Communications that helped get Amazon off the ground is about to teach everybody how to be low-budget brilliant marketers... by living on the edge of the keyword competition.

Methods of Driving Traffic

This will be one of the most self-referential posts and blatant examples of HitTailing I have done in a long time. Yesterday, someone in South Africa googled on the exact term I used in the headline of this post. HitTail recognized that we were not fully optimized on this term, and issued it as a suggestion. But when I clicked to reproduce the search, I didn't see us on that page--understandable, considering it was a South Africa Google Datacenter that it was probably pulling from. So, what to do? I could just click around. But instead...

Using the free FireFox RankChecker tool from SEOBook, I popped the term into the Keyword field and www.hittail.com in the Domain field and hit Start. Lo-and-behold--RankChecker showed me that we were in the 83rd spot in Google on the term. So, I went to Google and performed the search, and clicked right on page 8 of results, and low-and-behold, there was HitTail! I clicked on the result to see that this page about driving traffic for less (a previously acted upon HitTail suggestion) was the page that was found.

So being that the page that was found was something that was targeting and optimized on a completely different term, imagine what would happen if I actually targeted it. And hence, the writing of this post, and giving out of some of the most competitive SEO-industry-insider knowledge that exists... period! For you see, the new writing suggestion that was issued was the direct result of a post that was made as a result of an old writing suggestion that was acted upon. And thus the iterative process of continual improvement is happening. This is why I talk about TQM so much. The "output" from quality assurance is being fed directly back into the "input" of the production line, which produces more quality assurance data.

Hence, our talk about the snowball effect.

Sites become virtually self-optimizing... but not entirely. The process is getting funneled through at least 2 things: 1) YOU. Quality content won't write itself (or will it?). And 2) Blogging software, because who wants to worry about the fuss of SEO when free, easy publishing systems get like 80% of SEO correct out of the box? And this is one of the best methods of driving traffic to your site--adding new content, based on HitTail suggestions.

And yes, it is a lot of work.

But there is another...

...darker...

...method of driving more traffic to your site.

And that method has been talked about by a few industry insiders, and fewer still who share the secret with public quotes like "I use [HitTail] for my Adwords accounts and they double my other campaigns in every positive way. Double the Clicks, half the CPC, half the overall conversion costs."

Yeah uh, so if you want the benefit of HitTail, the other method of driving traffic to your site is to take the keyword lists generated by HitTail and put them into your AdWords campaigns... because who whouldn't want double the clicks, half the CPC and half the overall conversion costs?

Seems like a no-brainer.

Kaizen Marketing through Analytics

Why is HitTail the perfect complement to whatever analytics system you use today? Some folks will say real-time analytics isn't important, but I'm telling you that it IS important by how it immerses you into the actual pulse of your site. For example, if your site hits the homepage of Yahoo, you know it in seconds, rather than the next day, after your servers have already been taken down. Now not everybody lands the homepage of Yahoo, but the same principle applies to if you get a single link from a single site--wouldn't you like to reach out to them moments after they've established the link?

Another benefit of real-time data is just sitting there watching your search hits scroll by as they occur tunes you directly into the minds of your audience--in a way next-day statistical reports simply can't. You are directly plugged into the minds of dozens, hundreds or even thousands of web travelers RIGHT AS they're doing their thing. The image that comes to mind is The Matrix, watching all the green code scroll by, and seeing the woman in red amongst it all. But the difference here is that the people scrolling by are REAL searchers, and you can voyeuristically watch them do their thing. This EXISTS TODAY, and is sort of a Zen marketing state that HitTailers know well--contemplating the black river of keywords.

If HitTail wasn't the and must-have second piece of tracking code based on it's real-time feedback alone, then the way it provides actionable data without the chart fuss that cause paralysis through analysis should cinch the deal. HitTail is the paralysis cure, because you simply move left-to-right across 4 tabs and follow a recommended, proven, route (indeed, nearly mindless) process to improve your site. The process is scientifically built on William Edwards Deming's principles of total quality management (TQM) and the Japanese concept of Kaizen, wherein you take HitTail's writing suggestions and engage in the website content release/feedback/release/feedback cycle immediately. It also works with PPC.

HitTail fills the desperately needed gap in marketing for a tool that dispenses with nonsense reports and jumps right to the bottom-line of what you should be doing to improve your site from a content-standpoint. It quite literally turns your entire website into a giant suggestion box that your audience unwittingly uses every time they visit you via search. The suggestions can be immediately plowed into either new website content in (usually) blogging software for the organic or natural search engine optimization (SEO) approach, or into long tail AdWords campaigns, that result in remarkably low cost-per-click (CPC), high click-through-ration (CTR) and a large number of total clicks. The snowball effect should ensue. None but a few marketing gurus in the PPC industry gurus ever noticed this effect.

Bottom line--no matter what your primary analytics package may be, be it Omniture SiteCatalyst, Google Analytics, WebTrends, Yahoo's IndexTools, Microsoft's Gatineau, or whatever--the must-have second piece of tracking code that should go on your site is HitTail, due to the benefits of real-time data and immediately actionable writing suggestions and super-charged keywords for AdWords campaigns.

Network Effect vs. The Long Tail

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

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

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

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

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

...or not...

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

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

Getting Dropped By Google? Do Something About It.

Ever wonder why some people seem to be immune to Google fluctuations? It's because they're not overly optimized on a small set of words. Instead, they're diversely optimized. We've seen this effect on Connors Clients for over 6 years now. The rest of the world is only just starting to discover that a diversity of carefully targeted content effectively hedges your bets against Google algorithm tweaks. Here's one person who saw a 40% GROWTH in traffic while a lot of his counterparts are falling out. Guess what he attributes his success to.

HitTail Hosts SEO SuperPower Meetup Tonight

Just a reminder to everyone in the NYC area that HitTail is hosting a SEO SuperPowers Meetup tonight. The topic is the effect of Ajax and other Web development technologies, such as Silverlight, Apollo, Java, Mobile and others on SEO today and in the future.

Anyone in the neigborhood is welcome to stop by. It starts at 6:30PM tonight at the Connors Communications office in New York City on 7 West 22nd Streeet, between 5th and 6th Avenues. It's the "Spinning Wheel" building--a small entrance. We're on the 7th floor.

Free drinks.

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?

eBay buys StumbleUpon, Google jabs eBay

With eBay rumored to buy StumbleUpon and Google announcing plans to develop a StumbleUpon competitor, the need for "real-time analytics" has skyrocketed. The main thing about these services, and services like Digg, is that they cause sudden traffic spikes, instead of the evenly distributed swell that Google index inclusion creates. As such, there are important hosting and social networking elements to consider. First, you must be able to sustain maybe 100,000 visits in a single day. Second, you must be able to identify when such surges are occurring and take action on THE SAME DAY to leverage the new traffic. Do you have a call-to-action on that page? Is all the traffic bouncing? For these reasons and more, you need HitTail, and the ability to watch your referrer traffic in real-time. Watch the Digg Effect, the StumbleUpon Effect, and soon, the Google Effect, in real-time.

One Word SEO Demo

This may be a fleeting occurrence based on the rapid recent construction of links to the HitTail site as a result of some very high-profile coverage (thanks, John!).

But yes, we come up very high right now on the single word "demo".

I only know this because someone clicked through on it about 5 minutes ago, and HitTail issued it as a suggestion.

We debated over whether to allow single-words to ever reach the suggestion tab on their own. And after long deliberation, we've decided to call them out under the Keywords tab, but not move them to suggestions, because of the futility of working them up.

But now having HitTail appear for the word "demo" in Google 4 pages in, I am sorely tested. It is at least worth HitTailing one post. I particularly liked the double-entendre of the headline I got to use.

But the rub is that Google is particularly sensitive to the RATE at which links are being constructed. So if a whole bunch of links just got created to us on the term "demo", it pushes us up short-term for the word demo.

This is a warning we always give to our clients. Don't get too excited with brand-new eerily cool results. The elation is premature. Premature Googlelation?

WOW, I would have loved to have used THAT as the headline. But the idea here is to get into the path of pre-existing traffic patterns with the headline alone. So, the headline is really where you need to make as few compromises as possible on word choice and arrangement from the HitTail suggestion.

There are a few things to point out.

The process of discovering where we position on a word we're not yet monitoring, is sometimes known as Passive Rank Analysis. Some competitors make a big deal of this as a feature, because it reduces the need to proactively spider the search results, and therefore violate the terms of use of most search engines, or alternatively, use their API, where the results are not necessarily the same as a genuine search.

Well, we've never made a big deal of passive rank analysis. We just figured that's how HitTail should work. It's not about tracking positions of your known keywords (benchmarks). Instead, it's about reporting on the activity of ACTUAL keyword hits (actuals). HitTail lives in the actuals.

The next point here is that Connors regularly gets the coveted one-word keywords for our clients. We thought long and hard before making this statement, but yes, we have several hard-and-fast cases. The downside is that one-word keywords, as cool as they are, are actually less significant than one may think, as they are excessively general, and don't necessarily produce the targeted traffic you desire. But none-the-less, it's desirable, because you're in a much better position on that word plus any other word.

A third point to make here is that I thought our one-word "root" for which we ascended was going to be "long" or "tail" or the made-up "longtail". And indeed, we're rising on all three (page 3 for just tail). But picking up a strong position on the term "demo" is just a logical bonus.

I had locked myself in a room for a week to make the long tail demo of which they speak. And it was apparently a very worthwhile endeavor, and worth the effort, as we are referred to as the way to understand long tail thinking (aside from Chris' book, of course). Or perhaps as the fastest pitch evah. It could be that the YouTube version has thousands of views, and is joining the ranks of viral video in terms of pure reach. Or maybe, people recognize it as one of the most creative demos and websites they ever came across.

And finally, it's really unrealistic to take the steps one would have to take from an SEO standpoint at this point to fortify HitTail on the term, demo. We're just not in the business of demos (though we're repeatedly asked). The work it would take to truly fortify a one-word term is ridiculous; landing page 4 is one thing, but the increased resistance encountered as you creep up the SERPs is enormous.

I'd be spending all my time doing that instead of doing it for paying Clients, or blogging for the HitTail community.

How Long to Get Into Google Blog Search?

The clock is ticking to see how long it takes hittail.typepad.com to get into Google. But first comes the blog search tools, such as Technorati and Google BlogSearch. In setting up TypePad, I turned on Technorati tags, and the pinging of both major blog ping servers, Weblog and blo.gs. My flurry of HitTail quote posts got picked up by Technorati moments after I "claimed" my blog at Technorati. Google BlogSearch wasn't so fast. But is HAS picked up one of the posts so far. And that's quite important. That blog DIDN'T EXIST before this morning.

And remember that these blog pings are the modern day equivalent of search engine submits from yesteryear. So, I'm confident that this is the first step of this blog's journey into Google default search results. I think it might be measured in days.

The answer to how long it takes a new site to get into the blog search engines is hours, if not minutes.

Blogging Software as AdWords Alternative

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And when they do, you had better be listening.

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

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

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

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

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

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