If you are faced with paralysis by analysis through your Google Analytics, Omniture, Coremetrics or other analytics software, and are looking for a clearly actionable to-do path from your data, look no farther than HitTail. Imagine installing one piece of tracking code, and immediately having writing suggestions start to be issued to you. You are never faced with an assault of reports that implies you should know what to do merely by looking at them. HitTail takes a very different philosophy, and that is to assume that you DON'T know what to do with your data. Instead, it explicitly issues writing suggestions for your consideration, with an easy way to "flow" them into your editorial calendar to-do list. From there, you can use whatever search-optimized publishing tool you like to create the content, and watch yourself achieve top-positions in the search results on that term. I’m doing exactly that here, and you’ll see the HitTail blog at the top on paralysis by analysis before long. Imagine being able to write with that level of confidence about grabbing a top-position. In this case, I’m doing the writing directly inside HitTail, having the post publish automatically to Blogger. Bam! In a few days, I’ll do publish a post on the next writing suggestion in my HitTail to-do list, because… I’m not suffering from paralysis by analysis. I know exactly what to do, because my tool feeds me action items and not reports.
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.
This post is pure HitTailing. I'm both taking HitTail's writing suggestions, and telling you one of the best kept secrets in search engine optimization--blogging software does nearly everything correctly for SEO, and have created a "just add keywords" environment. Blogging software IS content management software for the web, which follows the 80/20 rule. It does 80% of things right for SEO by the time you've invested 20% of the time as everyone else.
One catch is that the keywords whose traffic you're targeting must be ordered exactly correctly for where the traffic's actually at, then turned into a headline. Headlines in particular in blogging software hold search influence because it also becomes part of the title tag, URL and links leading back to the page. This alleviates a lot of the manual work SEO's spend a lot of time fixing in sites broken for search.
After you choose the right keywords to target in your headline, the only difference in whether you're grab the homepage of Google or not in short order is how competitive your targeted term is. One way to ensure that you both receive traffic to be worth your effort is to choose quality longtail keywords generated by HitTail.
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.
The history of HitTail goes back many years, as I began to understand the futility of traditional marketing when dealing with a company that has virtually no budget, a product no one has heard of in a market that hasn't quite developed yet.
That was the story of Scala Multimedia Software in 1998, the company that makes the sort of software that turns plasma and LCD TVs into Minority Report-style digital flatscreen signage. There was no trade-shows at the time, no trade-magazines, and not even a standardized name for the business! It was truly the wild west days of digital signage, where no deployment was over a few dozen screens, because they all had to be updated with landlines. And customers could (and did) come from anywhere in the world. And you had to pay attention to all these geographically dispersed prospects, because you had to aggregate all the customers in the world to turn digital signage into a viable market.
But how do you reach them in the first place?
What sort of marketing campaign could you mount to reach companies in the middle of Malaysia, South America, Africa, Canada, United Arab Emirates, Russia, Europe, Japan, United States, Australia, and even Greenland and New Zealand? It's true. Prospects came from all over the world, often getting their first clue from word-of-mouth referrals from Scala's very early days running cable TV "barker channels" on the Commodore Amiga computer platform in the late 80's.
Word of mouth only got you so far.
Enter the Internet, and a radically new update model where the signage could be updated by pulling their own content down from centralized servers. Flat panel technology was also improving, plasma screens becoming forever bigger, and LCDs starting to inch up in size. And the movies--oh the movies! Finaly, I could stop referring to the flying blimp in Blade Runner, and start talking about the ubiquitous electronic advertisements in Minority Report. There was a mainstream movie that allowed the stuff to be understood by the masses.
The time was ripe.
And the rate of people Googling on the subject-matter increased. Oh, there was no telling what people were going to call this emerging industry. A lot of folks felt is was going to be digital signage. But the head of Engineering at the company was betting on dynamic signage, as it was more descriptive. I withheld judgment, and instead wrote about the field is as many ways, and with as many likely word combinations as I could think of. Remember, this was 1999, and Blogger was barely even on the scene. I used my own homespun perfectly-optimized-for-search content management system to spit out page after page of what I at the time called "vignettes". At least one person who knew me back then to this day suggests that I virtually invented what today is called the landing page.
Stories of these landing pages are numerous and colorful. At least one of them directly resulted in hooking up with a major global distribution partner in a market that the company had been hoping to break into for years. It was all predicated by me thinking to roll out some content targeting "plasma display software". I targeted dozens, if not hundreds of different word combinations by this time. Were were all the ideas coming from? What did I know to try? Was it the GoTo keyword suggestion tool (later Overture)? No! It was the company's own log files, which I could view scroll by me in real time, filtering out everything but the highlighted search hits, thanks to my homespun tracking system.
Now, this was not HitTail at the time--far from it. I lacked the critical insights that subsequently went into re-inventing the tracking system for massive scaling (to the world), and automatic evaluation of the keywords, thereby alleviating the most time consuming part--figuring out which terms we STILL HAD TO optimize for.
My title was Webmaster, but really I was a Jack-of-all-trades, tending to almost every aspect of company operations, baring software development of the product itself. So in short, I was finding the prospects and forcing their progress along the sales pipeline in their journey to becoming customers, managed the system that handled taking and shipping orders. It wasn't easy convincing the salespeople at the time that there were real human beings behind these clicks. I developed a whole array of supporting systems that basically took away anyone and everyone's choice to NOT follow up on the sales leads I was generating. It was a brute-force bullying customer relationship management software, which to this day remains as a closely held secret tool of this company, which has withstood several politically motivated attempts to "turn it off".
I go into this level of detail regarding HitTail's history, and how a predecessor to HitTail virtually created an industry, and gathered contact info of all the world's customers in this market to a single company, to explain to you some of the next steps I'll be taking with HitTail feature development.
I'll be constructing a "Lab", a lot like Google Labs, where I'll be experimenting a bit more aggressively with new product features, forever zero'ing in on that "sweet spot" in which analytics software is not even necessary, because we'll keep compelling you to the next necessary action item to close your sales.
I'm a fan of Michael Bosworth's solution selling techniques, which were very necessary for long sales-cycle items such as 1000-screen digital signage deployments, and a fan of Dr. W. Edwards Deming's total quality management approach, which advocates rapid product improvement based on real-time feedback from your workers and customers. I'm a fan of Seth Godin's Purple Cow (among other books) that says you have to differentiate yourself by being radically and brilliantly different to even stand a chance in today's competitive marketplace, and Guy Kawasaki's pre-Internet/seldom discussed Selling the Dream, in which he plays off his experience launching the Macintosh to teach how to "evangelize" a product and use incredibly clear strategic thinking to do so.
All these principles have gone into HitTail. It's a synthesis of marketing guru books, put together in what I hope is the sort of elegant simplicity, with actual underlying complexity akin to Apple Computer's designs (maybe not in our graphics--yet). But no book has colored our product quite so much as Chris Anderson's The Long Tail, in which he gave a name to the radically simple and effective methodology that was already by this time driving the algorithm behind Connors Communications' proprietary tracking system being used for its public relations customers.
And we saw that the time was right.
Just as with the movie Minority Report made the time right for Scala with digital signage by providing the common cultural awareness (if not the precise language) for this emerging market, Chris' book The Long Tail gave us a way to make HitTail accessible and understandable to the masses.
HitTail's seeming simplicity belies what's actually going on, and we can not count the number of times some know-it-all sysadmin goes "Oh, that's all in your log files" or "It's the same thing as AwStats". What they forget is that we're not providing just another list of top-10 keywords, statistical bullshit. We're skipping over all that keyword research nonsense, and simply telling you what to do next--a huge time saver and advantage in the forever-more-competitive landscape of fighting for first-access to customers online. We're throwing paralysis through analysis in the gutter where it belongs, and looking right at the edge of where you nearly have it going on. Then we tell you how to change your act, ever-so-slightly so you step into the reliable flow of keyword search traffic that you're just around the bend from anyway.
HitTail is not analytics. It's an approach to online marketing pulled right from the minds of some of the best marketing and busines gurus of our time.
But it's the first act.
And after a little time away from HitTail to ensure that the first act is everything we promised (and it is), I'm stepping back onto the scene to plan Act 2.
I'm really enjoying Seth Godin's book, Purple Cow. Its one of those marketing books that reinforces those things you already know intuitively, but a book puts in fresh perspective--much in the vein of the grandaddy of all such books, The Art of War. It's about winning.
The point he makes is that with all the choice consumers have in almost every aspect of life, you have to be really extraordinay (the purple cow) to set yourself apart. I read it on the tail of Joel Spolsky on Software, another righteous read which among other things gives a rating system for software shops and employee interview screening practices.
And these two reads back-to-back, Wow! I feel like creating super-elite, got-their-act-together club, and hoping I got the right stuff to join. There's a lot of edging around the concept of being the best in the world.
Remembering the role that being extraordinary, and thinking of yourself that way, plays in every day life motivates this post. You need to be pretty darn sharp to be hired as a software developer at Foggy Creek Software--or even be hired as an intern. Similarly, to break through with a new product, you have to be remarkably better or different, and ALSO have that difference easily communicated by your fan-base (that must exist) to even have a chance. Word of mouth (or Internet) advocacy is critical. You must design a product that can win the early adopters and also motivate your base. Success is built in at the product design phase, an won by releasing its potential, virally.
And I approriately come to that realization reading a Seth Godin Marketing book on the New York subway, tapping out an article one-handed on my iPhonel, and posting by email to Blogger, knowing its going to get the top position in Google on the topic I target, because of HitTail (Update: no HitTail suggestion was a perfect headline for this article, so I just used a headline I wrote--I'll save the HitTail effectiveness demo for the next post).
Now that I'm active blogging again, I want to point out exactly how effective HitTail has been at doing nothing--and how effective "nothing" has been as a strategy between major announcements. I'm reading Seth Godin's Purple Cow, and he offers numerous examples of how if you don't have something brilliant, its better to do nothing than to do forced or contrite promotions to keep the Marketing department busy.
Like everything else we do, we've broken the model by NOT inundating our userbase with permission emails. Free HitTail users keep getting it got free even though we're been out of beta for a year, and paid users are getting their writing suggestions via email. We diligently collect HitTail quotes off the Web, and answer all questions (no matter where they're posted). Besides that, all's quiet on the email front.
Yes, even though we're a company with roots in public relations, and certainly have the gift of gab, you'll find no email newsletter from us with forced topics for the sake of keeping some artificial schedule. Instead, we put our resources put into providing a superior service, and planning a future for HitTail users that will surprise and delight you as much as our first go-around.
But what if you're hungry for more?
We keep an active forum and blog with RSS feeds, and for the truly HitTail-hungry, they get their extra fix. For everyone else, we just gently reach pit by email when we REALLY have something to say, thereby letting you know its something to actually pay attention to, and not just noise.
The concept of "active" vs. "passive" online outreach comes to mind. Such concepts exist in sonar/radar (submarines sending out pings vs. just listening) and even in keyword position monitoring (querying Google vs. just analyzing your log files). Well, the same exists with online marketing.
A brilliant passive system is best, because its less spammy and obnoxious--putting particiants at ease because they SOUGHT YOU OUT. You reading this? Chances are, you found me-- which has a little something to do with HitTail being awesome.
The enemy of the sort of steady, reliable HitTailing that results in the traffic-building snowball effect is habits, or lack thereof. Once you're in the writing habit, its easy to maintain. But once out of the habit, its hard to re-start. So, what breaks the writing momentum?
With me, its the need to work at a PC that breaks the momentum. I'm either at work on my employer's time, or at home not wanting to take the time. My best opportunity is on the NY subway, where I have no PC--not even a laptop, because I travel lite.
So, I'm tapping this entire post out one-handed on my iPhone. And that gets to the real purpose of this post--illustrating how to HitTail better by modifying habits, and fitting HitTailing into your daily process one way or the other. The reward of dominating your market niche is well worth some behavior modification. The trick is to make it only a minor and enjoyable behavior change.
In my case, its mobile HitTailing. I'm getting very good at the iPhone's on-screen keyboard.
My first step is to log into my HitTail account to look at my To-Do list--not the easiest thing in the world on mobile, so I'm noting that to talk to the product development team. Anyway, I pick a phrase and get myself into the mindset to write about it. Then, I start a new note and write.
Try to finish. Don't get too wordy. The value of getting it out there quickly exceeds the value of getting it perfect. You can always refine it later.
When done, simply email it to your blog's auto-posting email address (you need to set that up beforehand).
Get the subject line right, because its what gets targeted in search. Use the HitTail writing suggestion exactly (adjusting capital letters only) if it makes sense. If not, work the suggestion into the headline without rearranging or dropping words. We're going for exact matching here. Its the exact match where the traffic exists, and being just a little off could prevent all your potential traffic gain from being realized.
If what you want to write about doesn't exactly match a HitTail writing suggestion, then its better to append two phrases to make a new thought than to change the word order. Use the HitTail phrase first in the sequence if you can, so the keywords don't get chopped out of the URL by your blogging software's URL length limiting functions.
How's that for practical mobile HitTailing advice? Well, my stop is next. Gotta go. Let me know if you'd like to read more practical HitTailing advice like this on future posts.
Final point: after Blogger (or TypePad, WordPress or whatever) auto-posts your email, you can always go back and add pictures, links, and fix spelling. But meanwhile, that post is working for you, keeping that snowball rolling, and picking up more mass.
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.
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?
I'm Back to Help Drive Traffic through SEO and SEM
It's time for me to come out of hiding and start posting again. Like happens to every prolific blogger occasionally, that pesky thing known as real-life interferes. I've finally got a nice tight grip on the reigns, and can take a few moments to re-engage the world through the HitTail blog, which seems to have only been getting better and better in my absence. Kudos to Valerie, Ambar, Adam and all the other (mostly Connors) team that keeps this thing one of the top blogs in marketing.
OK so enough back-patting. HitTail's momentum continues strong, and we have some very exciting things planned. I've decided to take up my propensity for prolific pontification in the SEO arena that dates back to being the Inktomi moderator in the original Search Engine Forums, and re-engage the blogging and SEO (and now... SEM) community.
Whaaaaaat? SEM?
But Mike, you're the SEO guy. OK well, Gary Beal's persistent message to me about HitTail being an awesome tool for PPC, right up there with SpyFu and WordTracker, has finally gotten through my thick skull, and I now view SEO and SEM as virtually the same thing. Basically, in all things online-marketing, you hedge your bet by using just about every service that you reasonably can that Google provides you. You never know how they're cross-indexing their data from different systems to calculate relevancy, and I think it's important to keep a hand in each of them--AdWords, included. I'm managing about $5K/mo in AdWords campaigns just to keep myself engaged on that front. I need to know that stuff well for...
...well, you'll just have to wait and see.
Until then, I'll tell you exactly HOW I'll be re-engaging the community. Primarily, it will take place here on this blog. But I'll be practicing what I preach in actually ENGAGING IN HITTAILING . So essentially, the headlines of every blog post I make will be constructed based on HitTail suggestions. I'll try to document how well these posts do in driving more traffic to the HitTail website, seizing first-positions in Google results on terms that are actually driving traffic, and the various tweaks I perform here to this Blogger section of the HitTail site itself in optimizing it for search. Contrary to popular wisdom, simply starting with Blogger Classic using the FTP feature to transmit the file into a subdirectory of an existing site is a good start in blogging for traffic (there ARE other approaches). But there are dozens of tiny little tweaks on top of that--many of which apply to all blogging and CMS platforms--that can still be done. We've done a bunch of them, like putting the title tag text in the anchor text of thepermalink . But there are others we have not done, such as tweaking out and promoting the RSS feed of this site for maximum reach in subscriptions and syndication, such as on iGoogle. I'll be covering that stuff.
And finally, I'll just be exercising my writing muscles, because using HitTail for SEO can be tough--only because of the "actually having to write" part. It requires a sort of discipline and getting into the groove that doesn't come easy, and lags off quickly. It's just like going to the gym. It's tough to start, but once you do the adrenaline rush keeps your momentum going day-by-day, but if you stop even for a couple of days... BAM! You're out of the game.
Well real-life took me out of the game for awhile, but in the words of George Castanza, I'm back, baby!
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.
I'm frequently asked how to get the top keywords for your site for free, and the common wisdom is to use services like the keyword suggestion tools built into Google and Yahoo. Other people recommend services like Keyword Discovery and Wordtracker. But the truth is that the best keywords for your site are already burried in your log files in a way that's too hard for most Webmasters to dig out. That's where HitTail comes in. We analyze your log files, looking at factors that are consistently overlooked by other analytics packages, and zero right in on the top keywords for your site, and issue them to you as writing suggestions. Just act on them (as I'm doing now), or plug them into your PPC campaigns for instant results.
Have you jumped on the Facebook bandwagon? Meet other HitTail fans by becoming a fan of HitTail yourself. If it becomes popular, maybe we'll even start a group.
So, you wanna be a marketing guru? Well, we're giving our HitTail users a chance to promote themselves right in the user-interface of our site. We're putting the talking-head video into our site. I did the first one on the search hits tab. If you'd like to be on the HitTail site, just:
1. Shoot some video for YouTube where you narrate the purpose of the particular page you're choosing. Openings include:
Homepage (the big prize!) The "My HitTail" tab. The Keywords tab. The Suggestions tab. The To Do tab. Anywhere else on the site you see the "Coming Soon: YOU!" graphic.
If you do the Suggestions tab better than I did, you can even replace me.
You get to introduce yourself at the beginning, and state your website domain. Keep it brief.
2. Briefly describe the purpose of the page, and how you use it. Don't go into detail.
3. Upload your video to YouTube, and forward us the URL to hittail at connors dot com.
We'll select the winners and feature them on our site for awhile. If you're plugging a book or something, you can throw it in when you state the domain name, but keep it brief if you want to be selected.
Great, that's all. Looking forward to promoting you!
For over a year now, HitTail has been talking to its audience about one aspect of the future of marketing--the long tail, where smaller more agile companies can live in "niches" left behind by larger competitors. It works perfectly online, because inexpensive "word of mouth" marketing is intensified through the ability to forward links in email and the use of social networks. But marketing hasn't completely changed. There still are plenty of companies with large budgets, able to shape popular perceptions through saturation TV, print and radio campaigns. These days, those companies are simply adding online banner ads and keyword campaigns to the mix. But it's all still basically just advertising.
Now, the practice of taking advantage of how Google arbitrates traffic to use it to your natural advantage has evolved into the field of search engine optimization. But it's a field that continually shifts, just as the search results do. It only comprises a fraction of what we call marketing. Pay-per-click (a.k.a. Google AdWords) makes this process a bit clearer and more accessible to the mainstream, but even with that added in, it only accounts for maybe $10 billion of what is maybe a $500 billion industry. To really divine the future of marketing, you have to look at how a "long-tail" or niche advertising campaign picks up momentum, and how the company intelligently leverages its revenue to go back into more creative marketing, and how the snowball effect can kick in.
HitTail prescribes a particular formula that helps small to medium sized companies master that process of generating consistent, reliable small successes. When enough of these small successes compound on each other, they fund more aggressive and expensive campaigns. It's very possible, for example, to have completely free natural search produce your first dozen customers, who can fund you to start your first pay-per-click campaign.
Now, if this all sounds very entrepreneurial to you, well then, you got the point. The future of marketing is not about the large, established and complacent organizations. It's about the little guy with enough creativity, determination and patience to get that snowball rolling... rolling... rolling... straight at that stationary competitor.
This post is a bold experiment. HitTailing works best with 3 to 5 word combo's. In the case of more obscure 2-word combo's, HitTail works pretty well too, as it did with SEO FAQ. But what about a 1-word search, with a recently made-up word, which happens to also have become competitive in a very short time-frame? Can this post start bringing in natural search traffic on a single word? How does our AdWords campaign, where we're paying for for traffic on this term play in? Will our considerable click-through on our AdWords campaign boost the natural search page, deeming us a relevant site on that topic, as measured by a separate mechanism? Time will tell.
HitTail is doing very well as a site on search terms related to the long tail and search hits. For the term “long tail” we’re on the second page of results, and for the term “search hits” we’re on the first page. For any combination, such as “long tail hits” or “long tail search” we are on the first page of results.
So, one of the primary effects of HitTail is taking place: the combined variations of different targeted keywords are already coming up high, without even trying. But this blog post is really about zeroing in on your most difficult, and most competitive keywords. In the case of HitTail, one of them is shaping up to be “keyword research”.
I’ve made 2 blog posts in the past that have targeted this term. But they haven’t produced for us yet. It’s a perfect example of how HitTail doesn’t work every time—it just works on average. This keyword combination actually has enough traffic to show on Google Trends, which is an amazing thing, considering what a marketing niche specialty keyword research is. But it also tells me that I’m on the right track with attacking a term that already has a lot of pre-existing traffic.
Unless you have a massive marketing budget, or your own TV network, it’s difficult to change the pattern of searching on the Internet. There were two watershed events that really showed us how search trends can change suddenly: The World Trade Center / 911, and the Janet Jackson Super Bowl event. But 99% of the time, search trends are all over the map, and search marketers are in the business of putting yourself into the path of searchers and search traffic that is already occurring, no matter what you do.
So, how to put HitTail into the path of people researching “keyword research”?
Well, the page can’t just be another text-only, low-effort, long-tail HitTail page. It has to be built up into something a little more special. This is increasingly turning out to be a picture, or maybe some YouTube video.
So, what I'm doing is making an early morning post, just to get this post out there and percolating. But during the day, I'll be beefing it up with:
Some YouTube video.
A bell-curve illustration that we use to diagram the benchmark vs. longtail keyword issue.
And this post will start generating traffic in the meanwhile, and it's existence urgently commits me to following through with the snazzing up the the page that needs to occur to make it effective on my targeted term.
And of course, for anyone who did find this page on the concept of keyword research, you've come to the right place. HitTail is one of the best keyword research tools available, because it helps you leverage the traffic that's already occurring on your site, to get more traffic. Success breeds success. Third party keyword research tools that cull aggregate data from search engines and other people's sites are somewhat overrated, considering there are much more effective approaches available that hardly anyone even knows about yet.
Hi. We're launching a new site, staring YOU. So HitTail will be helping to directly promote its users. We will focus on all those small businesses and the feel-good stories that we keep encountering. Amongst our ranks are many interesting, innovative, and inspiring stories.
I'm making this quick video to start collecting the work-in-progress success stories of HitTailers, worldwide, and to set the tone as a highly visual and personal site. We want to cover the more inspiring stories, and while we're at it, help you with your site, and the HitTail formula in general.
Simply click this link, and submit a few words about why you would be a good candidate. Don't be shy. If you've overcome incredible obstacles to become a work at home mom (WAHM), let us know. If you're pursuing your dreams, let us know. Whether you're a candy store, Web 2.0 startup, affiliate, eBay'er Yahoo Store'er, consultant, real estate agent, wholesaler, or just someone making some decent money with AdSense, let us know.
The Future of Marketing, Ushered in by Connors Communications
For years, Connors Communications has been recognized as leaders in the field of public relations. Whenever a client required the public to make a major shift in conventional thinking, Connors was there.
Before the Worldwide Web, when online was first coming onto the scene, and companies like Prodigy had to get the word out (and ironically, had to actually BE a prodigy), Connors was there, helping them become a player beside CompuServe and AOL.
When established brands like Disney and National Geographic had to make their transition to the dot-com world, Connors was there, helping with brand identity issues, like NG's yellow square, and carrying some of the first search engine optimization work ever performed for large businesses.
When the first attempts to seriously monetize search were being made by pioneers, GoTo.com (long before becoming part of Yahoo!), Connors was there, helping to break the church-and-state issues of pay-per-click.
When everyone either never heard of VOIP, or thought it was going to be exclusively a business service, Connors was there, helping Vonage turn it into a consumer brand and a household concept.
When Amazon.com was competing to become one of the first successful online businesses, before anyone thought selling over the Internet was even viable on a large scale, Connors was there-helping to pioneer long tail business before anyone even heard of the concept.
When Priceline.com decided to go with the name-your-own-price model, re-introducing haggling into the American psyche, Connors was there.
In all these things, Connors helped break traditional thinking, introducing unorthodox concepts, which were later to become the norm, and part of the mainstream American thinking. This is our unique capability. This is our specialty.
Today we are using these skills in ways people are still having difficulty understanding. Our decision to create HitTail is part of packaging our new brand of marketing for the world, and to provide an introduction of Connors Communications to the world-a sort of "overture", if you will.
So while today, we no longer consider ourselves a "public relations company" as such, I'm always arguing that it's just a matter of semantics. Whereas breaking our story into mainstream media got tons of leverage in the past, today, it's a matter of breaking our story into Google and Yahoo! search results in such an effective fashion, that your website keeps corralling your target audience back into your Web presence over and over, to the point that over time, there is no escape but to become familiar with you.
This is a type of branding that's going on today, which most people don't even recognize as branding. It's how new websites and companies "emerge" onto the mainstream without a speck of advertising. It's using all the principles of public relations that have proven so effective over the ages, and to bring them to bear in a much more efficient and automated fashion. It's giving large companies back the advantage that is so easily being taken away from them by smaller, nimbler companies who have embraced the new landscape.
Yet still, it is about achieving balance, so small large companies cannot respond with such force as to shut the small companies out again. This is why Connors is offering services on the extreme high-end, circa $25K/mo., and on the extreme low-end, circa $100/year. And perhaps more than anyone else, this extreme "bracketing" of products between the two extremes, defines what Connors is becoming-the ability to innovate Web 2.0 products on-demand for our own use, and the savvy to navigate the politics of large media companies to have search engine optimization projects successfully carried out, against all odds.
One of the first sites to catch onto how important our SEO flowchart is, is Indonesian. I'm certainly glad I'm reaching Indonesia, but I am somewhat disappointed that no English-speaking websites have picked up on this yet. I think this chart will trigger off the HitTail marketing revolution because of how it brings down lofty longtail concepts to a route procedure,
I've been linking to the most-critical diagram from just about every page of the HitTail site, trying to get folks to understand the essence of what HitTailing is. I apparently haven't been doing such a great job, and would be appreciative of any ideas on how me might get the message out more. We're getting an affiliate program together that will be based around high-volume sites, so anyone willing to partake, please contact me. Anyone with low-volume sites who would like to eventually participate, just follow out the procedure on the diagram, and contact us when you've built up your traffic!
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.
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.
At yesterday's SEO Super Power Meetup, one of the original beta testers simultaneously praised us for how well HitTail worked, and challenged me on why it works, and why he should trust the suggestions.
The answer needs to be qualified: don't take HitTail suggestions blindly! They have to make sense in the context of your site. But they pretty much always do work. In other words, if you take a suggestion issued by HitTail and put it into the Title field of a new blog post, you're pretty much assured to grab the first page on that term, and generate new qualified traffic.
And it takes something of a leap of faith to understand why--and how we're able to do this at such a low-cost and in real time. We understand that there are other products that give you thousands, or tens-of-thousands of keywords at a single go. But they're much more expensive, and such long lists are mostly suitable for pay-per-click campaigns. But as far as getting writing ideas, lists like that just aren't as good as HitTail.
Why?
A suggestion issued by HitTail means that someone JUST found you on that term, but not on the first couple of pages of results.
So, what does this tell you?
1. You CAN be found on this term. 2. There is at least SOME traffic there. 3. There's a bunch of results ahead of you on that term which for some reason didn't satisfy the searcher.
And these three truths make a HitTail suggestion the best sort of long tail keyword. It's active. You're already associated with it. And sites higher in the results are not satisfying users.
BAM! You have the top position on that term.
It might only amount to 50 visits on that term in the course of an entire year. But that's 50 visits you would probably not have gotten otherwise. And it's traffic on fairly specific, and therefore, uniquely pre-qualified potential customers (prospects).
And of course, if you keep this up over time with many HitTail suggestions, the effect accumulates, and results in compounding returns. The idea is that you're going for complete dominance in your particular market niche, following the most logical, and immediately rewarding path, from a quality-content-expansion point-of-view.
A Meetup Invitation, a Connors Client Slot, and a Link-Back
Anyone who is in the New York area tonight is welcome to stop by they Prey bar for the SEO Superpowers Meetup, and say hello to the HitTail and Connors Communications crew.
A few other items I want to get out there in this post: Connors Communications, the company that created HitTail, and played a fundamental role in kick-starting the commercial Internet, has a few slots opening up in its SEO and PR schedule. Usually, engagements start at no less than $25K/mo. I thought I'd mention it on the HitTail blog, since this is where much of our audience currently resides. So if you know of someone with a large AdWords budget, looking to diversify and free themselves from the Google Tax Man, then drop us a line or corner me at Prey.
Also, for anyone who hasn't noticed yet, almost any reference you make to HitTail in your blog post will usually score you a mention and a link-back in our TypePad collection of quotes and testmonials. So, if you've been waiting to say a few nice words about us, now seems like a good time.
And finally, I'm really pushing to get people to sign up for at least the Plus service, just as a way of supporting us. It's only $99.95 per year, and think how much time we're saving you struggling with those other analytics packages that ask you to jump through hoops before you figure out what to do with your data. As our quote page shows, we're rapidly becoming an integral part of many peoples' day-to-day marketing activities, and the surest way to a long-term relationship is throwing a little support our way!
If you find HitTail useful, then I’m officially asking for the sale. Please consider supporting us by upgrading your account to Plus.
What I’m doing is proving to my co-workers that in this Web 2.0 world we live in, where it seems so much is free, that paying is a way of deliberately supporting those you like. For a moment, forget about the enhanced features you get with the upgrade. Think about us like musicians who have decided to put all our music on MP3, since it’s going to be there anyway, and ask you to support us through attending concerts, and buying the occasional CD to throw some support our way, and keep us doing what we do.
This post may end up a bit controversial, since we seen to be endorsing the business model for the music industry that the RIAA is avoiding like the plague. But supporting artists, businesses, and software you like is going to be a lot more like voting with your credit card than it is actually buying tangible products.
We appreciate every bit of support we get, and I’m making this post as a way of seeing what “just asking” can do for us. The alternatives are things like an NPR fund-raiser, where I make more intrusive and repeated requests. We’re avoiding cutting back any of the goodness of our fully-featured free service. But you can feel good by doing your part, and simply upgrading one of your accounts to Plus.
I can’t offer much by way of promotion, but how about this: anyone who signs up and puts “friend of mike” in the promotion code field, I will send you an invite to join my FaceBook network. You’ll see my status updates on the FaceBook news feed, and will have a special line to me.
I’m also thinking about buying a bunch of those $1 graphics, if I can create an “I Support HitTail” badge. If I can figure out how that works, I’ll officially gift everyone who comes in with that promotion code and the Plus service with a cool badge to demonstrate to everyone that you support us.
What do you do when Google Analytics goes down, and you don't have the privilege of viewing yesterday's data? You switch over to real-time data and see it today--as it comes in! This blog has an idea, as does this one.
Well, we just fixed the biggest criticism of HitTail. Those of you who follow this blog can check it out by simply visiting your "My Account" page.
No, we haven't made any change to our unique filtering system that often confuses people. We stick by it.
Nor is our biggest criticism the controversy we've triggered off in the SEO community. They'll eventually understand long tail data mining.
And no, the biggest criticism isn't even the original point made by John Battelle about how taking HitTail writing suggestions in pursuit of better natural search listings may be somewhat... inorganic.
No, the biggest criticism leveled against HitTail is how people want multiple websites per login.
You all want more HitTail! You want it to be easier to sign up the first account, then add site after site after site. Well, we heard you. And now you have "My Sites" on your "My Account" page. All free HitTail users can rapidly add up to 4 more sites (5 total) to each account. So now for all you HitTailers managing multiple accounts, it's a breeze.
What about the 6th site, you ask?
You always can create a new account, and do 5 more free sites. Free use of HitTail is still effectively unlimited.
But, if you're such an avid HitTailer and fan of our service, why not upgrade one of your sites to the Plus service, and support us? Not only do we greatly appreciate it, but then there's no limit to the number of sites you can add under a single account.
For those who watch the Flash HitTail Demo, the words "WE'RE NOT ANALYTICS" is probably quite familiar. And for those who run multiple tracking systems, like HitTail plus Google Analytics, you will notice that HitTail doesn't track everything.
What???!!!
That's right. And I am often explaining why this is so brilliant, and saves users of HitTail so much time in zero'ing in on what's important... actionable data!
Going against common logic, our patent-pending tracking system knows when to not listen to the activity on your site, and therefore it collects LESS data. And when you're looking for long tail keywords that might be useful for making new content, less is more. Why? Because other systems that capture everything have to sort it out later, reducing the real-time services they can provide. They sometimes make you wait a day or more. Also, they can't keep the data forever. And they have a more difficult time figuring out which of all the garbage data they collected is the meaningful stuff.
What sort of collected data is garbage, you may ask?
Think about it. Where are your hits coming from? Are YOU perhaps responsible for some of your hits (I think you are)? Should you include every search test you perform as part of your competitive intelligence data, especially when what you're trying to do is get into the mind of your prospective website visitors? You're actually polluting your own data with your webmaster testing activities. You're telling yourself things you already know! And isn't the same true of your competitors searching on your site? How many of their keyword tests should you allow to pollute your data? They might hand you over a few interesting terms. But on the whole, they're going to be searching on a bunch of industry insider terms that don't really represent the thoughts of your real prospects, and might be interesting to you maybe once--not over and over, as they're doing.
So, HitTail filters all this ridiculous traffic at the source. In fact, when we detect such situations, our tracking system "goes quiet", preventing excess Internet traffic, and makes your pages load even faster. This is one of the various reasons we are one of the most light-weight tracking systems on the Internet.
While HitTail is awesome for watching search hits that come to your site, indeed, almost hypnotizing, it doesn't record EVERY search hit. It only records the search hit data of each visitor only once, then ignores subsequent visits during that browser session.
That disappoints a lot of people. But it shouldn't. You should be shouting for joy that some tracking system is doing this for you.
Because in the end, you're on the lookout for some very important events in the history of your website--events that every other tracking and analytics system ignores--for example, HitTail captures he first time a particular search led to your website... EVER!
Yep, that's part of what HitTail does. And even that is just pre-filtering. We take this pre-filtered data, which is already throttled to prevent garbage, and it is to that we apply our writing suggestion-finding algorithm to determine which of the BRAND NEW topics (which never led to your site before) qualify as viable writing topic candidates.
We've been getting a bit of press lately that I've been remiss in blogging about here. We got coverage in Inc. Magazine a website for entrepreneurs, as well as in The Ventura County Star, one of the tech counties of Southern California. Instead of going on about it here, you can visit the respective sites, or check out our updated Squidoo HitTail Lens.
Does HitTail Do Things that Google Analytics Doesn't?
The answer is Yes!
It's yes for at least two reasons: the immediately actionable nature of the information provided, and the immediately viewable real-time nature of the data.
In fact, it's all about immediacy, and spending less on AdWords (or eliminating your need for AdWords altogether).
What if Google Analytics told everybody the specific topics to write about in order to boost their site's natural search engine standings? People would flock off of AdWords in droves. Why pay for something that you can get for free?
In this sense, Google Analytics and HitTail are diametrically opposed to each other. While it's easy enough to pull a "long" list of keywords, or even "top keywords", none of that begins to give you the competitive intelligence that you need for an informed rapid content expansion strategy.
HitTail is like a coach looking over your shoulder as you pull a keyword list out of your analytics software, striking down over 95% of that list based on how it would waste your time to further develop those concepts.
Imagine the time saved!
Yes, given a "long list" of keywords, you could take each one and perform a Google search, seeing whether the term is already working for you or not. If you find your own site in the first page or two of results on that term, you can discount it as a term for further development, based on the fact that it's already working for you.
But as you work your way through this long list of keywords, you will occasionally find terms where the Web searcher must have been extraordinarily determined to find an answer. You know this by looking at how many pages in they must have surfed before they decided to click on you.
This is all very nuanced, and outside the box for most marketers. That's why the arrival of the book, The Long Tail, by Chris Anderson, the Editor-in-Chief of Wired Magazine, was so timely. It provides a framework by which marketers can understand collecting multiple valuable pockets of free qualified search traffic.
I'll say that again.
HitTail lets you collect and concentrate FREE veins of search traffic gold, gathering them up until it collectively accounts for more traffic than you are receiving through paid search campaigns. In fact, HitTail forms the foundation of a sustainable, cross-engine online marketing campaign whose effect will last long after you diminish your efforts and stop putting money into it.
So to answer the original question of whether HitTail does things that Google Analytics does not, it's an unqualified Yes! HitTail provides data in such a way that you can easily diversify your online marketing campaigns into "un-paid" natural search.
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.
With the shift from one-size-fits-all mass markets to self interest niche and mega-niche markets, many companies are now recognizing the value of reaching out to existing and potential customers online. An increasingly popular way to engage these emerging markets is through podcasts and viral videos, which are now part of good marketing practice for winning new business. But too often companies become frustrated with the process of web analytics involved in targeting these important niche customers.
Whether you’re an analytics professional or a non-technical marketer, HitTail is a tool that makes log file data everyone always had anyway suddenly useful. HitTail shows the Long Tail of your hits and works as a filter for all future hits. The result is a small set of data showing you what you need to better target your audience and potential customers. HitTail is differentiated from other web analytics tools because it can extract keywords and issue suggestions for future website content.
Podcasts and video face a unique dilemma being found by search engines because the content is not predominantly text. HitTail can help by making suggestions to optimize the titles of your podcasts and videos which can help to boost visibility online. Use HitTail to add specific text, like accompanying introductions, that helps your site get found without compromising the look of your site.
When discussing HitTail, we are sometimes asked, why isn't it spam. Quite the contrary, HitTail is blog quality management, for many reasons laid out in prior posts about how Dr. W. Edwards Deming's teachings of TQM (total quality management) and the Japanese notion of Kaizen play in. You can't improve a website in a vacuum. You need input from your users. You need to know what they want. But actual suggestion boxes can be disingenuous, and analyzing the MAJORITY trends of your keyword analytics can only tell you how you're ALREADY satisfying your users.
The data you need to know is hidden in your long tail keywords, and sifting through that mile-long list of keywords can be a big time-waster.
And THAT'S why HitTail is not spam. It's merely an expert companion, a lot like an accountant, whose responsibility it is to sift through all that paper-work, so you don't have to. HitTail acts as a councilor, inspecting your web log data, quickly discounting everything that does not qualify, and inspecting those keywords that do qualify with a fine tooth comb, ensuring that if you are to write about the topic, that the posts would be likely to generate enough traffic for you to be worth it.
And in the end, HitTail DOESN'T DO YOUR WRITING for you. It only makes a suggestion. Whether or not you take that suggestion and act on it is your decision. But when you do, you add a tiny bit more mass to that snowball that you're trying to get rolling down the hill. The snowball principle states that while getting a snowball with very little mass rolling may be difficult, it is eventually worth it, because you will pass the threshold where you have enough mass to keep the movement self-sustaining, and actually, self-fueling.
Reaching this self-fueling state means that you have enough content to keep suggestions rolling in, and when acted upon, you continue to add mass to your site, which in turn, stimulates more writing topic suggestions to be issued. When this happens, the snowball effect is fully achieved, and it's really just a matter of continuing to produce quality content associated with the new writing suggestions.
The new writing must be quality content that answers the questions posed by your website visitors. Don't just produce search engine fodder. Rather, make thoughtful and deliberate posts as if you are actually engaged in an active discussion with your site visitors (which you are), and are a practitioner of blog quality management.
Most mentions of HitTail receive the honor of being mentioned on my Everyone Loves HitTail blog. But once in awhile, there's a mention that I feel compelled to call out here. We don't go calling HitTail an SEO service, because we like to avoid the confusion that exists in the field. Instead, we tell people just to use an already search-optimized publishing system (such as blogging software or SquareSpace). But every once in awhile an SEO top-tools list appears with us on it, which we just have to share, as is the case on Esoteric Lab's Search Engine Optimization 2.0 site.
At HitTail, we are big fans of eMom, Wendy Piersall. Perhaps it's because she promotes us so heavily. Perhaps it's that her story is just so engaging. Perhaps also, we're a mostly a women-owned and operated business.
But we're also seeing a trend of work-from-home moms who are being freed from the decision of going to work and staying with the kids, by bringing their customers to them, in part, thanks to HitTail.
That seems to be part of the lifestyle promise of HitTail. Here's another site, Butterflies are Free, which continues the trend.
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.
Greetings HitTailers! I'll be presenting at the Web2NewYork New York Web Entrepreneurs MeetUp tonight. I'll be one of 6 presenters. I'll spare everyone the PowerPoint, and just dive into the 30-second elevator pitch that I refined at SES, NY. That should take 5 minutes. Then, I'll open it up to questions, answers, ridicule and heckling. Give me your best shot, New York! If I can make it here... well, you know the rest.
Anyone who follows HitTail's progress over Alexa knows that we've had considerable uptake over year 1, plateauing at about Alexa Rank #5000 top sites in the world, and have been creeping up ever so gradually.
Meanwhile, some of our pseudo-competitors who stuck themselves in the analytics box got some early notoriety, spiked, then started to tank. We attribute our sustained success to our real-time data combined with our immediately actionable explicit instructions of what to do with the data.
About half the people I talk with "get it" quickly, and about the other half just refuse to hear the message. I think those who don't get it actually do on some level, but reject that there are services that sit half-way between doing the work for you, and asking you to do the work. They either want to buy their keywords and get it all (Pay-Per-Click such as AdWords), or they have a very 1999 view of search engine optimization, where you have to worry about all the mechanics, such as title tags, URLs, link structure and the like.
I was at the Web 2.0 NY Summit on Thursday, and spoke to many of the media elite about HitTail. One unnamed fellow came up after Connie spoke to ask me about HitTail's chicken-and-egg problem. If the search hits aren't leading to you today, how is HitTail going to help if it's not stealing data from other people? I tried explaining how you "prime the pump" with about 100 posts of your own, then how the perfectly optimized mechanics of most blogging software, plus the long-page versions (the index and archive pages) draws in visitors on unlimited word combinations you've never thought of. This occurs merely because words from posts early in the month combine with words from posts at the end of the month if there's no better match to be found on the Internet. Probably the best I ever stated it was in this 30-second elevator pitch about HitTail.
Still, after all this, if someone refuses to understand that your own best competitive intelligence is to be gleaned from the activity on your own site, then they might be a lost cause. We can send them to the HitTail demo, or ask them to try the free service. Give it a try for a few months, and if they still don't get it, then they should leave it to their competitors. Picking up easy traffic in the long tail at a sufficient rate to achieve niche dominance is here to stay. It's the back door to success.
If it were really easy to understand, it wouldn't have taken a best selling book by Chris Anderson to teach the world. It would have been kept as a secret weapon by the likes of Amazon.com.
But a lot of people are going to be able to get it, and we want to make sure when they do, it's HitTail they discover fist. So, any of our fan-boys out there, be sure you're on our forum. And be ready for us to start reaching out to you to help you help us, so we can keep the free service free, and continue to revolutionize online marketing.
I'm going to make a habit of promoting interesting HitTailers on this blog who have publicly disclosed their use of HitTail through either the TypePad Widget or announcing it on their site. No worries. If you're using HitTail as a competitive advantage, and don't want your competitors knowing, we don't spill the beans. But for those who announce it on their own, I'd love to promote you, assuming it's an interesting site.
Anyway, it turns out there's an entire market for businesses being put up for sale by retiring baby boomers. Think about that. Baby boomers are getting up in years, and many of the entrepreneurial companies they've started are going up for sale, making a viable alternative to starting your own business or buying a franchise. So, check out The Baby Boom Business Exit Phenomenon.
Who would like to be mentioned on the HitTail blog next? Be sure you're using HitTail first, before you respond with comment links here.
We had a successful SEO Super Powers meetup yesterday, considering the rain kept all but 4 non-Connors people away. With myself, my Connors posse, and Marshall Sponder (Webmetricsguru), Pauli Price of Sindex Systems and Rupali Shah of 24/7 Real Media, we discussed a broad array of issues, veering far off the Ajax + SEO subject for the night, but always returning to the theme of how to make business more successful. The life-span of SEO as we know it was estimated from anywhere from 2 to 5 years, with much talk of social media. Time was spent discussing whether or not blogging is SEO, and what the process might look like from someone initially discovering you, to building trust, to some sort of relationship (customer).
I feel that this meeting laid the foundation for future SEO Super Power meetups in NYC, where we will fully embrace, and perhaps even lead, what the field is becoming. Stay tuned for the information regarding the next meetup. And on a related note, I think I'll start getting out to some more of the meetups around New York. There's Technology, Entrepreneurship, Networking, Marketing, Programming, Graphic Design and the like. It's going to be a challenge pairing it down to a reasonable number to attend each month!
Neil Patel reports that the last referrer before a story gets buried on Digg is sometimes crawl3.digg.internal. If true, the folks at Digg need to get a little better about keeping us nerds from understanding their internal processes, because I too just saw crawl3.digg.internal, and with a little bit of quick research, I see that HitTailers who are trying to get the word out about our service have a unique little challenge before them.
Notice this Digg search for HitTail that includes buried stories. There's one from 19 hours ago by HitTail user beautyofthelord. Now notice the same search without buried stories (this demonstration will only be valid for a short while while results churn). The purpose of this post is just to have a second case out there of seeing the crawl3.digg.internal referrer spin by before a story got buried.
I know I need to get back to blogging on significant long tail marketing subject-matter (I've got my HitTail ToDo List), but I've been so busy. I could however not resist sharing this article with all of you, written by Conversation Agent, Valeria Maltoni. I met her a couple of times, first at Seth Godin's launch of The Dip, and second at Darren Rowse's (of ProBlogger) second Meetup here in NYC. It's sort of like a six degrees post, but tells a bit about who I am.
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.
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.
How to Learn Programming in the First Decade of the New Century
If you're intimidated by tech gobbledygook, turn back now. If you've always wanted to join the ranks of the tech-speaking, app-spinning inner circle, then please cautiously continue. With this blog topic, we'll be diving real-deep, real-fast, and breaking this topic off from the HitTail blog real soon, so it doesn't weigh down the HitTail message of driving more traffic to your site for free.
With that preamble disclaimer done, here we go...
I plan on making the ultimate, free, portable, flexible rapid open source development platform possible, able to be understood and utilized by the largest population possible. I plan on sharing the experience witht he HitTail audience (for starters), and eventually the general Marketing/Programming world.
I'll be using it for professional and personal projects alike. It will replace what I currently use, and refer to as my "Generalized System 3" (GS3). And I'll explain my choice of PHP vs. Python vs. Ruby vs. Lisp vs. JavaScript vs. Java vs. .NET, etc.
But before you get too excited about a big programming language shoot-out, please know I'm probably going to use Ruby, and maybe even just extend Ruby on Rails (ROR) in an obsolescence-resistant fashion. What makes this endeavor different from every other ROR tutorial is the granularity with which I'll be documenting the process, and how the finished product will probably be able to be carried around on a keychain, or perhaps as a continuously running webserver on tomorrow's mobile phones. But it will definitely able to be run as a virtualized instance on any of today's mainstream hardware/OS platforms, making it of immediate use (PCs, Macs, Linux, etc.). It will be the killer, ultimate, free, be-anywhere, do-anything programming buddy—cool enough to let you spin scalable enterprise-class apps, and show-up the "take-six-months-to-write-a-spec" crowd.
This new generalized system and agile development framework is likely to be used on places in the HitTail site, as well as for Connors clients. In the spirit of David Heinemeier Hansson and 37Signals, I'll be sharing the process, and much of the code with the world, in the hopes of creating a lot of corollary excitement surrounding HitTail. In the spirit of Paul Graham (Lisp) and Hansson (Ruby), I believe strongly in the merits of a language and agile framework as being a source of extreme competitive advantage.
It's hard to say precisely where I'll go with this project, but the first baby-step starts out here (in describing the project), and I will tap the power of my existing GS3, which provides a baby-step documentation framework, and a minimum-model for what the new stuff should support.
So, this post starts a long and interesting journey, which is more of a side-project to HitTail than directly HitTail-related. While it's not precisely HitTail-related, this is currently the best soapbox I have, and therefore the place I'd like to get it started. And I plan on rolling out a tutorial style I hope will sweep the Internet, called "baby step tutorials". True baby-steps are possible on the Internet in a way they're not in other media like books, because to document every little step would kill too many trees with paper. But with .html files, it just pumps up page views and makes me more money if I run advertising. So, it's a double-win. I document with insanely granular detail.
This process should be of interest to programmer-wanna-be's of the sort that fill the ranks of Marketing departments around the world, who are generally intimidated by the choices, tools, and discussions that surround getting started with programming. Have you looked at the selection of books in the programming section of a Barnes and Noble or Borders lately? It's crazy! I'll explain along the way why this is, and what the "most right" choices for the "least-programmer-like" people are. The average citizen can be a programmer today, with minimum fuss. You're not on the bleeding edge anymore. Programming's easy stuff.
And unlike previous attempts I've made at doing this, I'll do it right this time. The reason that it will not be an aborted attempt this time (I've had false starts in the past) is that I'll be leveraging the power of my already created GS3 as a blue-print, plus the best of what's out there today, plus I have HitTail's momentum and celebrity to ride. I now know what it means to finish things and do them right.
The public will be able to observe, interact, push me forward, and tweak me in certain directions as I go.
While this blog post kicks it off, I will use the comment field underneath to link into the non-blog pages, where this will reside.
This post is about sex and the city, small worlds, marketing gurus, and a new book promotion technique. Lately, I've noticed a trend of book authors referring to us prolific pontificators of marketing-speak in posts that are mostly about promoting new books. Bravo to David Meerman Scott of Web Ink Now with his brilliant book announcement that credits us contributors to the New Rules of Marketing & PR who now can't resist linking to him at every opportunity. It's nice that the PR firm and creators of HitTail, Connors Communications, are acknowledged leaders in writing the new rules.
But that's not what this post is about. It's about another book: Book Yourself Solid by Michael Port.
The latest book shows us that if actors can segue into politics, then they can also segue into marketing. Where better to tap a little bit of celebrity? But I didn't know this, until I got this email from a co-worker (published with permission):
What a small world. Michael Port used to be the manager at the Reebok Club and actually hired me there. When I met him he was an actor who had just been on a Sex and the City episode – the one where Mr. Big takes Carrie to the small, out of the way Chinese restaurant and she thinks it’s because he doesn’t want to be seen with her. Anyway – he then went to open the gym Clay on 14th Street (that Jackie belongs to) and now – marketing guru. Who knew!! Here’s his imdb page if you’re interested.
But even more interesting than the circumstances of this guy's marketing career is what he is saying. I'd love to pull a specific quote and show you. But his description of why HitTail is important, and "way better than anything like Overture or Wordtracker" is built up in a series of paragraphs that must be read in continuous context. As all HitTailers already know, and mainstream marketers are beginning to discover, it's not the keywords that give you bragging rights that matter. It's the conglomeration of "everything else" that counts. And lurking beneath the surface of "everything else" are tons of under utilized, most promising keywords that have the real potential of leading potential customers, clients and new audience to your site.
By the way, Michael Port's book is about sales lead generation, a topic dear to my heart, and the fire in which HitTail was actually forged. It is very possible to do exactly what Michael Port suggests--generate more sales leads than you know what do do with (or can handle). After I first used long tail keyword marketing techniques at a previous employer, I generated so many sales leads per day, that the "old school" marketing guys disbelieved that they were really potentially qualified leads, and tried to disqualify them on the grounds that they came in through the Web. They are no longer with the company.
This HitTail blog post sets the stage for weekly chats with Mike Levin on popular recurring issues. The first is one alluded to by John Battelle in the earliest days of HitTail, when he said:
But....something about it strikes me as...well...inorganic. I recall fondly how editors would respond to surveys we'd do telling them what to write about....What do you think?
So, what do you think? This and more, we'll be discussing at the new HitTail daily Webinars. These Webinars will be nice and informal at first, with a countdown clock revealing what hour they're going to be held. Everyone online at the time can participate. As they get more popular, we'll start scheduling topics and moderating more carefully. But to continue the "is HitTailing a good idea" theme, there's this very recent post from Jos Schuurmans that every HitTailer should read. What would you do in this dilema:
It might work, and it may even be worth trying. But the funny thing is, it would disctract me from the conversations I'd otherwise rather engage in. I'm sure many bloggers will feel the same dilemma.
So stay tuned for the HitTail Webinar feature to be rolled out sometime very soon.
Benevolent Design Confluence & My Life Straw Revelation
So, I haven't blogged for awhile, but it's not for lack of material. I sometimes think I could blog as a full-time job. So bear with my as I pack maybe a month's worth of thoughts and serendipity-packed experiences into one long, excessively rambling blog post. It MAY be worth it for about 1 in 10 of you.
My to-blog list on my phone has about 100 items, and just as I'm prioritizing them, a new item trumps the entire list, such as my weekend visit to the National Design Museum on Museum Row in New York City. I was walking along Fifth Ave. with my girlfriend, and noticed some cool billboard graphics of things like collapsible canoes, filtered life straws working off ground water, and a whole bunch of kooky huts and shelters in the garden behind a wrought iron fence.
After a moment of prodding from Rachel, as she identified this as "my thing", I was hooked, paid the price of admission, and rushed into the garden.
And I was delightfully rewarded when I discovered an actual OLPC (one laptop per child) in one of the global village huts. It's sort of like Etch-A-Sketch had a baby with the Sony VAIO, and had Al Gore for a nanny. The exhibit was called "Design for the Other 90%". I was like a hog in mud. I saw water tanks that unraveled like wallpaper from a spool (sooooo obvious, but no less cool). I saw tiny semi-permanent shelters with loft beds that could be constructed in a half-day. I saw a line of products from something called Moneymaker, which lets you make bricks from native mud plus tiny portions of concrete. And I saw a host of water-pumps and filtration devices to ensure that you both had your water, and that it was safe to drink.
Basically, I saw the future catching up with the present. It's not all about hybrid cars incrementally bringing out-of-control energy consumption of us privileged 10% under control. But it's about improving the lives and bringing happiness and the ability to bring upper-states of Maslow's hierarchy of human needs to the world--in my mind, maybe the noblest endeavor in human history!
So, this is my element. I'm a frustrated mechanical engineer who realized I should have gone into "applied engineering" who actually got into graphic design as a sort of cop-out. Drexel University's design arts program in Philadelphia was awesome, and I studied under one of the most talented people I ever met, but it was admittedly advertising-oriented graphic design--and not industrial design, applied engineering, and certainly not one of the super-noble branches of engineering, such as "closed systems" that will ensure the survival of the human race (by giving us viable ways to get off the planet). Alas, I am but a mere graphic designer, who managed to cobble together enough programming skills to make HitTail. And now, I'm seeing the whole world that I shut myself off from by taking the path of least resistance.
So, is this a lost dreams bellyaching post? Not at all! This is an "it's never too late" post--because HitTail is an interesting intermediary project between graphic design and tangible social good. HitTail allows people around the world to pursue their dreams, and work towards becoming the best in the world at their niche specialty. I'm currently going through the unique experience of clawing my way out of the ticky-tacky little box (watchers of Showtime's Weeds will get the reference), and into the society of people who get things done and make a difference.
I visited my old haunting grounds last week when I visited the opening of Seth Godin's book tour, for his new book, The Dip. Seth enthusiastically detailed how many of us should go the entrepreneurial route, and in doing so, try to be the best in the world at some particular thing. Seth made passing mention of Chris Anderson's book, The Long Tail, which cleared the way for HitTail's mainstream emergence. And I wanted to make the point about how the "best in the world" concept dovetailed perfectly well with the longtail concept, because first you choose a place in the long tail of underdeveloped businesses, then you become the best in the world at it, turning an otherwise pittance of profits into a plethora of perpetual proceeds.
So, I asked Seth a question when it opened for question and answers, and when it came my turn and I introduced myself, Seth proclaimed he was a fan of HitTail, and invited me to tell the room about the site.
Wow, what a kick!
To have Seth Godin, one of the biggest marketing gurus in the world, to publicly proclaim himself a fan of a site that nothing more than a good idea a year ago. On that merit alone, this is a blog post that needs to be written.
But wait, there's more!
While I was in Philadelphia on the Walnut Street Bridge at the World Cafe (Seth's venue in Philly), I decided to slip into Drexel's Nesbitt Design Arts building (now the Antoinette Westphal College of Media Arts & Design) and walk right into a few classrooms to see if I could drop in on some of my old college instructors. And low and behold, on my first attempt into the first room, I discovered a classroom of students wrapped up under the tutelage of John Langdon, the fellow getting his 15 minutes of fame (soon) from the ambigrams in Dan Brown's book, Angels and Demons. This was (shamefully) the first time I saw him in 15 years, but our repertoire was picked up instantly, as we had stayed casually in touch over email. I learned that I missed the premiere showing of the Helvitica documentary by one day. It was a big deal, and one piece of serendipity that I missed in this amazing few weeks.
Now keep in mind, this is against a backdrop of HitTail winning first place in a venture capitalist show-and-tell hosted by Alan Brody of iBreakfast, where we took first prize and won a chance to present at the next VC contest. Plus, we were short-listed onto the potential winners of an international innovation contest being held by one of our high profile clients. So, I'm flying pretty high right now.
My trip back from Philly to New York was ironically rushed to meet a Philadelphian in New York, Josh Kopelman. Now Josh, the founder of Half.com, subsequently bought by eBay, is something of a hero from where I come from. He's a Wharton Business School graduate who actually followed the dream on the fast path out of college. I saw his building go up by the side the PA Turpike, every time I drove on my way to Scala. I spent about 8 years of my life attempting to pursue the dream at Scala, while my contemporaries like Josh were actually doing it right. It's never too late to learn. And one success leads to the next, leads to the next. It's the first one that's the trick. And the details of what you do later in your life, don't have to have anything to do with the details of your first venture.
But in the case of HitTail, it's not a bad thing if they do.
Because my very first real successful venture is about helping people improve their own lives. And who would have thought that the end-result of a career in graphic design would have led to anything in the least-bit altruistic? Which is reinforced by the concept that the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum lays claim to applied engineering under the auspices of design! The world is slowly turning in my direction, and I'm slowly turning in the world's direction. And the confluence of design, engineering, and the all-around betterment of life for "most" of the people on the planet is a nice trend. And I see in my mind a nice continuous development of HitTail into the dream-machine. Today, HitTail tells you what to write about in order to increase your sphere of influence. Tomorrow, HitTail pairs you with your entrepreneurial partners to actually achieve your dreams and improve the world.
But it'll take a few years to get there. For now, I'll be happy issuing writing suggestions and increasing HitTailers' personal spheres of influence. But the message of this blog post which I still have to deliver in a clear fashion is the same as the message I delivered to Sandy Stewert's class (who I visited right after John Langdon's).
Design is everything. Humans design. It's what we do. And whether it's graphics, interiors, industry or chip layout, it's all pretty much the same. Design, combined with the willingness to cross disciplines, coupled with a sense of benevolence, appropriateness, and positive optimism can lead to a very appealing future-scenario. Such scenarios, I believe, are only being heralded by a select few, such as Nick Negroponte of the OLPC initiative, turning him into something of a hero to me. But there are others out there, doing the same from a much lower profile, and more "applied engineering" vantage point. These are people who really make a difference--such as the person who made the life straw--perhaps the ultimate example.
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?
Thanks to everyone who participated in our introductory pricing, which ended on April 3oth. Stay tuned for an interesting follow-up opportunity to you folks who locked in your "charter membership" status!
Today is April 30th, the last day that we say thanks to our beta testers with the opportunity to lock-in never-to-occur-again introductory pricing of $49.95/year. After today, it's $99.95/year or $9.95/mo.
The special thing about this price is that we're never going to hike it on you so long as we offer this service. They call it getting "grandfathered" in, and makes you exempt from rate changes in the future.
My advice is to bank at least one of these accounts. You can always change which URL it's linked to.
So these folks at Lijit appear to be a site-search tool that goes beyond Master.com, Rollyo and the usual suspects, by also allowing you to search bookmarks, blogs, blogrolls and more. I guess it's really an RSS feed search. Anyway, I blog this because they did some clever research, sending out a spider to determine the most popular widgets on the Ineternet. Imagine our surprise, barely a few weeks after releasing our HitTail widget, we show up on their radar.
I guess it's only appropriate that we start the long tail.
So, my challenge to you, the HitTailer, is to give us a quote. And you can do that merely by blogging about us.
We'll know.
It's a fairly sure bet that we're going to link back to you on that site. And while you're at it, check out how eerily cool HitTail, MyBlogLog and the Snap Website Previews work on a TypePad blog.
As it turns out, almost every HitTail quoter I'm linking to who published a positive HitTail comment online are themselves running HitTail. Therefore, whenever I construct a link to them, I am by definition alerting those HitTail-addicted folks of the fact that I linked to them.
Yes, as it turns out, you can view every single link or hit that comes into your site as an important event (as there are much fewer than almost everybody thinks).
And so, its mere moments between me linking to them, and them coming to see who just made a link to them.
This gives them a link, and an opportunity to review and comment upon their quote. Now, for the cool pictures.
People visiting the HitTail quote site get previews of the quoters' sites by merely mousing-over the links, thanks to Snap's cool website preview feature. And if they're a member of the cool MyBlogLog service, their picture appears on the website too as a recent visitor. Then I get to see their picture.
If this isn't an example of the cool undercurrents of the "online discussion" then I don't know what is.
Hi Google. I'm the guy who created HitTail, the long tail keyword tool, and am one of the most highly recommended SEO guys on LinkedIn. Feel free to reach out to me at miklevin at gmail dot com.
Get ready for another one of my long, rambling posts. The pay-off is better understanding Google's value chain--and what a value chain IS. So, bear with me. (For more, visit my site at mikelevin.me)
I'm a HUGE fan of the fundamentals of business. I often equate business principles back to the way it must have been at the dawn of the first village-cities, when seasonal herd migration patterns made seasonal cities into meeting places and giant swap-meets for our ancestors. They were just discovering things like taking a rock and artfully shaping it makes it able to be traded for MUCH more than the cost of the raw materials (picking it up off the ground). At some point in history was the first primitive conceptualization of what we know today as the manufacturing value chain.
The value chain is simply the process by which raw materials acquire more value as they get processed into finished goods. The best products have efficient value chains, where very low cost raw materials get converted into very high-cost products, with relatively little skilled labor or time spent manufacturing. Oil is one such product, because the raw materials are just sucked out of the ground (free?), and the refinement process allows you to spike the cost to above $65 a barrel (at the time of this writing).
Now THAT'S a business. To get much better, you have to look at Visa, which conducts $4.6 trillion per annum, and gets about 2.5%. That's about $115 billion per annum for just keeping the Visa/Mastercard uber-servers running--not even calculating in what the individual banks make on interest alone. The value chain is a bit more complicated here, but they've made YOUR reputation (the raw material) into something of value (credit-worthiness), and the product (debt) of value to THEIR customers (banks) so they can deliver the finished product (deferred payments, with interest).
Are you getting it?
Every business has a value chain, no matter how convoluted. Raw materials are taken. In the manufacturing process, value is added. The end customer generally pays a premium for that product, and everyone who adds value in the manufacturing process gets their cut. How valuable that cut is at each step, is known as the margin. This is true, whether your product is gasoline, donuts or deferred payments.
So, why all this gobbledygook in order to discuss Google's value chain?
Because one must follow a convoluted thought process just like with Visa. And it goes...
1. Nobody pays to use Google. No financial commitment has been made on the part of Google users to use Google. And it's only that sort of financial commitment and subsequent loss-of-face if the solution doesn't work out that locks you in as a customer to the vendor. If there's no cost of switching, and there was never really a purchase in the first place, then you're not a customer. You're a user. And mainstream users are notoriously disloyal to brand.
2. If WE are not Google's customers, and search is not Google's product, then what is? How can we even begin to examine Google's value chain if we can't even get the players straight? Well advertisers, specifically users of Google's AdWords service, are Google's customers. And traffic delivered to customer websites is the product. And the ability to explicitly control what traffic ends up on what websites is the whole of Google's value chain.
Google's ability to arbitrate traffic comes completely from users choosing them as the de facto standard choice for search. It's like club membership in a free club. It took nothing to sign up, and if you find another club, you can switch easily. But the fact that your club meetings are always successful and always a great hit, turns your club into a forum and a venue. Your club has taken raw materials (club membership) and added value (single-point exposure for advertisers). So now, the club is in the position to take sponsorships to help offset the cost of supporting the club.
That's Google... before IPO.
Now, take your club and make sure the hottest stars of the day are always in club attendance as guest speakers. Now, offer interested parties the ability to hold a stake in the club, on the off-chance the club becomes REALLY successful. Now, give that club a market capitalization of $149.2 billion dollars, which exceeds the amount of money being annually earned from advertisers by a factor of x10 (conservatively), and make it the top-recognized brand on the planet.
That's Google... now.
So, Google's value chain is collecting up the "club-less" wandering masses of the Web (the raw material or rocks), creating a series of turnstiles and wayfinding "signs" to route these people (shaping the rocks to arrowheads), and giving advertisers access to uniquely sorted and pre-qualified sets of these visitors, based on interests expressed through keyword searches, and now long web-surfing user profiles (the arrowhead marketplace).
Yes, understanding Google's value chain is still an esoteric process at best. And while there are plenty of established models in life and business to look at, what Google's doing is still so relatively new and at such a massive scale, that it's still a bit hard to wrap your mind around.
But do this little exercise. Take all the public market capital of every online search marketing company and add it together, and see if it comes anywhere near Google's $149.2 billion (you have to keep Microsoft out of the equation). All other search companies added together don't equal Google. Now, look at the percentage of search traffic that's reported to go to Google. Now, the numbers here vary, but you'll hear anywhere from 60% to 90%. If you have any doubt remaining that Google is in a position to dominate, and indeed replace the "Web" or "The Internet" as the big world computer network, then put it aside.
There's a generation of kids growing up Googling "Is Google God?"
It's a reasonable question, considering that at some point in any modern household, a frustrated parent upon being bombarded by the "Why... Why... Why..." child-ask game that always ends in God or the Big Bang, tells their kid to go ask Google.
Two and two, right? Google must be God. Now how's THAT for brand loyalty?
Well, I'm here to say that having achieved the level of success that Google has, but with the entire foundations built on a shaky business premise and "club membership" goodwill value chain, that the first priority is to fortify and diversify. The AdWords money keeps pouring in, because Google charges those who cannot find their own audience to use Google's visitor routing capability.
But what if you no longer needed Google in order to find your audience?
What if there was a method for finding your audience that worked with Google, but did not require you to pay? What if that same method worked with Yahoo, MSN and Ask.com?
Is that something you might be interested in?
What if using that method actually resulted in you building a business asset, as surely as if you were expanding a distribution network, increasing warehouse size, growing the size of your fleet of trucks, or buying property where you could run your own billboard ads? And if expanding that infrastructure only cost you (essentially) the cost of labor?
Is that something you might be interested in?
Well, that's HitTail. HitTail is based on the premise that no matter how things change, something is "always nearly working for you". And by zeroing in on what's almost working for you, and merely knowing one or two of the important factors for relevancy, you can make tiny tweaks and systematically push these results over the edge (onto the first page of results).
We understand that things may change dramatically.
We know that technologies like Ajax, and radically new search technologies, such as small world theory, social arbitrage, surfing animated ontologies and the like are going to make things crazy-new.
But even then, there are going to be things that are "almost working for you" and clues that can be zero'd in on, which nobody else has thought to look at (but we have). So, there will always be HitTail. And HitTail will always remain a sustainable, long-term, cross engine marketing technique, that could even carry over into a post-Bubble 2.0 burst world.
Huh? A Web 2.0 bubble you ask? But cash hasn't been flowing into startups anywhere near the insane rate of the late-nineties.
Sure it has. It's just been betting safer. Follow the market capitalization to know where the Web 2.0 bubble currently resides. And marketers, hedge your bets with a low-cost, long-term, cross-engine AdWords alternative.
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.
Even while HitTail wasn't speaking at Web 2.0, one of our favorite people and advocates was: David Berkowitz of 360i Search Marketing. We love 360i, and run into them often, as neighboring New Yorkers, and co-sponsors of one of the Search Insider Summit conferences. So it was with extreme pleasure, that we saw Amy Cham blogging live from the conference, and recounting David naming us as the tool of choice for emerging trend #9 (long tail optimization) to watch. Thanks, David. We definitely need advocacy like this coming out of beta, and launching our premium service. And thanks, Amy Cham. We enjoy getting inside your head, and look forward to many more blogging-from-the-seat-of-your-pants, like you're doing at the Web 2.0 Expo. Or would that be blogging-from-the-hip? Real-time blogging? Whatever you want to call it, we like.
I was recently challenged to sum up HitTail in 2 words. Sure, we bring you free traffic, which leads to higher overall potentially qualified sales prospects, and ultimately customers. And HitTail becomes one pillar of a marketing campaign designed to ultimately free you from pay-per-click advertising networks, like AdWords. And I'd love to talk about the "end results" of a healthier company that employs cross-engine optimization tactics that will outlive any particular search engine.
But after long pondering, and a 2-word limit, I'd have to say...
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.
Recently, HitTail forum user bvadel asked an insightful question. What's a healthy site in terms of the ratio of "head" keywords to "longtail" keywords? He generously offers his site's statistics of 13% in the top-10 keyword head, and 87% in the long keyword tail.
Yes, bvadel. That's quite good. Here's how I answered...
Let's look at the life of a site.
Upon launching a brand new site, first there are zero search hits.
Then your first Google hit occurs, hopefully about 7 days in. We know that's not realistic for everybody, but stick with us, and we'll show you how.
On that first hit, your ratio is 100% head keywords, 0% tail keywords (using the Top-10 methodology that HitTail employs).
This ratio continues right up to and including your 10th unique search hit. 100% / 0%.
On the 11th unique hit, your ratio starts to change. You're 90.1% head keywords and 9% long tail keywords. It's still very skewed towards your "most popular" even though the hit count of your 11th word isn't really any different. What's in the head and what's in the tail (such as it is) is arbitrary at this point.
Time passes.
In about 3 months, considering you're publishing diligently, your tail starts to form. The traffic that resulted from your top-10 keywords starts to proportionally shrink compared to the totaling of the less popular tail keywords.
90/10 becomes 80/20 becomes 70/30 becomes 60/40, until finally they meet at 50/50.
Now, the rate at which the ratio flips slows down.
You creep to 30/70. And in about a year, you settle down to what is the average of all our HitTailers, which is ironically 20/80.
That is, 20% of your traffic is resulting from your top-10 keywords, and 80% of your traffic is from everything else.
This is one of the FEW places HitTail will ever look across everyone's data--getting the head vs. tail averages, because it is of great value to the industry at large from a statistical standpoint.
Now here's the rub.
Every once in awhile, a mega-popular site signs up for HitTail. They hardly need it. They're massively popular, to the point that we either have to charge them for the heavy volume premium service, or trade service for service (which we occasionally do).
And those people have ratios like 5/95.
That's right.
Their top 10 keywords are responsible for maybe less than 5% of their overall traffic.
This spectacular fact turns a lot of blockbuster economics on its head, in which 2% of the inventory selection accounts for 80% of the revenue--even at "long-tail" retailers like Amazon.com.
It takes awhile to digest, but it's true.
The more popular your site becomes, the less you rely on any particular keywords.
Popular sites are diversified, and skew heavily towards the tail.
Use HitTail. This incredibly short post will demonstrate to you that even the most competitive terms, such as the one in the headline here, can be targeted and moved to the homepage of Google with relative ease. The "trick" of how to do this is one of the most closely guarded secrets of online journalism. HitTail is a site dedicated to blowing the lid of this secret. We let the cat out of the bag, so to speak, by illustrating the effectiveness of long tail online marketing techniques.
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.
What does the search on your name produce? And how does that relate to the story of King Solomon's Wisdom? And how does that relate to why HitTail is awesome for the SEO industry, although not everyone sees it that way?
This and more, I will answer in this post.
Everyone performs vanity searches on one's own name, occasionally. And once in awhile, a Website owner or marketer will use a person's name in a piece of content either to get that person's attention, or to try to intercept search traffic on that person's name. When the publisher is a search engine optimizer, it's fair to say that they're trying to own a little piece of YOUR reputation. So beware! As HitTail rockets in popularity, and the mainstream marketing world realizes that TypePad, WordPress, SquareSpace and Blogger are their ticket to professional-level optimization, merely by adding HitTail, some of the SEOs come out of the woodwork seeing this as a threat, instead of the groundswell of opportunity for the SEO industry that it is.
Let me explain.
HitTail takes advantage of the fact that blogging software is so enormously tweaked-out optimized out of the box, that mainstream marketing can get into the SEO game much more easily than ages past. The intimidation is removed, and you are less reliant on overpriced consultants to get into the game. Some blogging software packages are free, and HitTail is free. It's a powerful combo.
BUT all this is allowing is mainstream marketing to get into the game. It doesn't make them experts. And some rumors are going around that tiny tweaks to these blogging software configurations can result in as much as a 20% gain in traffic.
While no one walks away from 20% more traffic, isn't it true that SEO's are quite capable of producing 1000% (or more) gains in traffic by those now-industry-standard practices of making sites have search friendly URLs and a sitemap, thereby taking previously invisible sites out of the invisible web? 1000% gains have been reduced to 20% gains? And the work was changing 5 lines of code in a blogging configuration? And people are bragging?
The real story here is that SEO'ing a TypePad site could ONLY result in a 20% gain in traffic.
But that doesn't change the fact that most sites out there are deployed on platforms that are not search optimized, and there is plenty of business to go around there, fixing it.
And most marketing people are scared into paralysis at the thought of blogging and joining the online discussion, so there is plenty of business to go around there, setup, training, and blogging on their behalf until they get with the program.
And even when they are blogging on their own, there are still those template tweaks that get you incrementally more traffic, and all the social media manipulation where you attempt to get "homepage'd" by the likes of Digg and Netscape. So, there's plenty of business there.
And once someone lands on your site, there's many things that can go wrong, preventing the conversion. This is the world of multivariate testing and A/B switch testing. And there's plenty of business there.
So, for the life of me, I can't figure out why a certain brand of SEO gets so nervous about the idea of just any marketing Joe being able to carry out a natural search marketing campaign the same way they could an AdWords campaign these days, using the right PPC and bid management tools. The tools have gotten so good, that even busy media buyers could manage a couple of campaigns on the side. HitTail is exactly that, but on the organic search side.
And as opposed to seeing this as a threat, today's SEO's (and most do) should see this as a validation of their premise, and a vindication of arguments they've been making for years. Google gives it away for free to those who get it so they can charge those who don't.
So what if a larger set of people are being sorted into the group that get it? So what if any marketing Jane or Joe can now get into the natural search game? You weren't going to win these people as $5K/mo. clients anyway. They're just getting their feet wet in the shallow end of the pool. And they have real marketing jobs, with diverse responsibilities, including events, tradeshows, brochures, telemarketing, business development, video production, and appeasing the company officers. They're NOT going to be the ones configuring the blogging software or carrying out a URL rewrite project in Apache.
So don't worry.
This is where I invoke a biblical story of King Solomon. Two women come before King Solomon with a baby, disputing who the real mother is. Solomon says to resolve the dispute, simply cut the baby in two, giving each woman half, at which time the real mother steps forward and says "NO!" Let the other woman have the baby, at which the King knows who the real mother is.
I tell this story of Solomon to anyone who accuses HitTail of oversimplifying the SEO challenges in this day and age. King Solomon wasn't stupid. He knew exactly what he was doing. And in this case, I'm blowing the lid of of one of SEO's most closely guarded secrets so that the mainstream marketing community can get in on the game.
And this doesn't threaten REAL SEO's.
That's right.
I'm saying that the less-skilled SEO's think I'm saying "cut the baby". But I'm not. I'm upping the ante and increasing the size of the pot.
In popularizing HitTail and long tail keyword targeting through blogging software, I am mainstreaming the entire field of SEO, which no matter how much business you think you're getting today, is nothing compared to the approximately $5 - $10 billion slice of the pie that's going mostly to PPC campaigns and AdWords (keyword media buying vs. banner buying).
And it's going to be A LOT larger in the coming years. SEO will either grow proportionately, shrink or grow as an overall percentage. Giving SEO a larger piece of the pie will require a re-calibration, of which HitTail plays a fundamential role.
This re-calibration will have a much larger portion of marketing budgets going to SEO than does currently today. But to make such a re-calibration occur, many people need to be aware of WHAT SEO IS, and the benefit that natural search optimization can provide. It's groundswell. We need PULL so SEOs can spend less time pushing.
And there's no surer way to make mainstream groundswell than letting the mainstream get a taste of natural search optimization themselves.
And even then, we have to deal with the concept of website optimization overshadowing search engine optimization, as I've written about in my recent Media Post article.
Search Engine Strategies starts today. I'll be in attendance at the conference on Thursday, but in town all week. If anyone wants chat about HitTail while you're in town, just email hittail at connors dot com, and we can sync up on what evening events we're attending.
HitTail has long been referred to as one of the tools for long tail keyword research. But on searching the term, I did not see it on the first page of results. Just about every entry on page one of the Google results was a HitTail review. But the site itself was oddly missing.
Here, we notice another HitTail issue. It's based on long tail keyword "actuals". Just because a word combination CAN lead to a site, doesn't mean it ever will. As it turns out, the HitTail site is currently found eight pages in. But that happenstance surf, click, suggestion will never occur, because too many prior pages are good candidates to the curious searcher.
What can we conclude? Well, HitTail is uniquely suited to spaces where all the prior pages are unappealing, and they STILL find you. This is why it's SO EASY to pick up the traffic from a HitTail suggestion. The implication is that not only is it a keyword where traffic exists, but it's a space where all the other content is unappealing.
But then, how would I ever think to target the new term? The answer is, I didn't have to. I actually am incredibly optimized on that term, because there is functionally no escape from HitTail once you're researching that phrase. But the question we must ask as the HitTail developers, is whether that is a generality. Should we keep our suggestions hardwired to actuals, or should we "spike" them with speculative terms from other sources?
BlogKing hits on the chicken and egg issue in his latest post, where he recommends reading the news in the morning, commenting in the afternoon, and checking your traffic in HitTail in the evening (or a few days later) to go another round. Going another round implies zeroing in on where the traffic is REALLY at.
And therein lays the true answer to what this post asks. Start with keywords that you KNOW SHOULD lead to your site, based on whatever sources, be it intuition, brainstorming, keyword inventory tools, the morning news, or wherever. Once you've "seeded" your site with content, watch what HitTail is trying to tell you in its capacity as a web suggestion box.
You might have been close with your original post, but you could really hit it home and optimize your website for natural traffic with just one more post.
HitTail is about findability in light of enormous competition. In the old world, where finite shelf space, finite broadcast channels, finite column inches, the mega-hits pretty much shut out small business. But even in those days, small business still thrived on a local level.
The Internet changes things in allowing you to collect the disparate and desperate, condensing and concentrating it into some decent business, where there was no business before. And even such a viable business, no matter how lucrative it is on a personal small business level, doesn't even show up on the radar of big business.
This is why Chris Anderson's opinions about the long tail hold true, just as the opposing voices of Lee Gomes and Dave Taylor. The opinion that the top 2.7% of Amazon's products produce 75% of the revenue is completely consistent with long tail teachings. Why? Because the long tail demand curve is 1/X. That means that the popularity of products at the head of the curve are ENORMOUSLY popular. Indeed, it approaches infinite.
It's just that the equally infinite diversity of non-popular products/services are not denied their markets. No matter how tiny the business in the long tail seems in comparison to mega-hits, it's nice business nonetheless. And it's all about findability. That's how the Internet has changed things. That's how Google has changed things. Finite shelf space, broadcast channels, and column inches have been replaced by infinite product supply and infinite findability.
And the best way to ensure your findability is to put yourself in the path of existing search patterns with some predictable keywords, then watch what happens. What you'll discover is countless additional keyword variations. The collective guessing power of the wisdom of the crowd dwarfs any single person or group's ability to guess. Therefore, with the right tools, you can start with simple, competitive findability, and spiral outwards with less competitive, but more diverse keyword phrases, and "flesh out" the mesh of your findability net.
Let's call this a Web 2.0 graphics contest. That means I'm throwing caution to the wind, and asking for submissions from all you graphic designers, Photoshop users, GIMP chimps and miscellaneous artists. Can you do the HitTail user interface better? Michele thinks so. If you prove him correct, we promise you nothing, but whatever fame and glory exposure on the HitTail site can deliver.
This may or may not amount to anything.
In order to facilitate this mission, I'm thinking of getting more involved in the graphics communities, especially here in NYC, where there are so many of you. Maybe a NYC graphic designer meetup? Who knows. In-person meetings are not required to participate. Just email entries to us at hittail at connors dot com. Be sure to only email GIFs or JPEGs. No attachments other than GIFs or JPEGs will be opened.
Anyway, we'll throw in a free premium HitTail account to the winner. But we promise no exposure whatsoever if you're not chosen (though we may send a complimentary shout-out). And we don't even promise that we're going to choose a winner. Sound fair? But seriously, anyone who reads our stuff knows we're good folks and are generous sharing the spotlight.
If your entry knocks us out, and we choose to use it, we will make you sign releases proving that we're allowed to use it, and then we're going to promote you on the site. If you're an ambitious graphic designer trying to make your mark, this is a chance to design graphics for a Web 2.0 startup whose success, judging by the buzz on the Internet, is likely assured. Nice feather in your cap.
A critical rule of the contest is to know what HitTail is and what it does. You need to understand the list-pairing concept. You have to experiment with paging forward and back through the datagrid and notice how there's no "position popping". That's an unusual thing in a datagrid, tied to the use of non-proportional fonts. All applications should have one homepage graphic, and one interior page graphic containing the datagrid. It's a user interface design project. Notice the mouse-overs used in HitTail. The application needs to be designed as self-documenting, compelling the user to do right without resorting to help screens.
I encourage working a concept such as "writing suggestion tool" or "build traffic" into the navigational design, so that no matter what page you're visiting, the HitTail "story" is being told in an encapsulated visual format. We're talking an attempt to instantly communicate what HitTail's about on each and every page. Two jpegs. Send to hittail at connors dot com.
Writing copy all over the Internet is getting mangled in the name of search engine optimization. HitTail aims to bring back the lost art of writing well, by excusing you from targeting the most competitive terms. These are the terms that make you jump through hoops and do backflips in order to move up by one page, tweaking keyword densities, moving words around on the page, and otherwise doing things a good writer shouldn't.
Back in the days of print, this criteria was known as "word count", and The New York Times joke was "All the news that fits, we print." A play on their motto "All the news that's fit to print."
Well, today's online world has the equivalent. If you're not being found through Google, it wasn't worth writing in the first place. That might be an overstatement, as running things on the homepage of massively popular sites is a viable alternative to a Google search. But who gets their stuff run on the homepage of the NYT or MSN websites? That's why Digg has become so massively popular so quickly. It gives the little guy a fighting chance, without being beholden to Google or other big media.
Even the old-school big-media guys are giving up their beloved double entendre headlines, in favor of matter-of-fact headline. Every few months, big media runs a story about how headlines have to just get to the facts, because it's generally the headlines that show in Google. And if it's not DIRECTLY about what you're looking for, it's not going to get the click.
So, how does HitTail remedy this?
First, you must understand that there are 2 types of matter-of-fact headlines...
1. Those that will get the (pre-existing) search engine traffic easily. 2. Those that will never get the (pre-existing) search engine traffic.
That's right. It's all a grab for pre-existing traffic patterns. No one is going to search on what you wrote about BECAUSE you wrote about it. The cause/effect relationship is exactly the reverse off what most people think.
People will find you because what you wrote about GETS IN THEIR PATH.
Being a cat-owner, never was this as clearly demonstrated to me as the outbreak of poison cat-food. It was a massive pattern of traffic that never existed before. But when the story broke, everyone started searching on it. Then more and more pages popped up getting into the path of those surfers. An entrepreneurial cat food manufacturer would have had dozens of pages out there explaining how their cat food is guaranteed safe, complete with an online ordering form. They could have had a windfall, but probably missed their window by now. I know there's not pages like that out there, because I didn't find them. They're targeting the wrong--or too small--of a list of keywords and phrases.
Once you construct a headline that you KNOW will tap into pre-existing traffic (thanks to HitTail suggestions), it frees you up to write well on the rest of the page. Imagine the burden of knowing that all that SEO criteria for getting the search hit simply goes away. Writers can do what they do best: write. And because writers write to be read, they can have peace of mind, because they know they will be read, simply by virtue of selecting an effective headline.
So don't simply write your headlines in a matter-of-fact style to appease search. Write your headlines KNOWING you're tapping into pre-existing traffic corridors. Or as a speculative alternative, write about topics that you KNOW WILL have the traffic patterns. Can you say, Election 2007? That reminds me, political bloggers should really be using HitTail to raise their voice above the fray of the noisy blogosphere. But that's another story.
OK, this post about Ajax Datagrids is for the geeks. I've done plenty of posts discussing why HitTail is so amazing as a blogging tool, but only occasionally have I addressed the phenomenal feat of displaying all the world's logfile data in real-time.
Why do more Web apps not do this? There are several reasons, but one is how massive the data is. I mean, it's very massive. We're already letting you step in real-time through hundreds of millions of records, with HitTail less than a year old. Before long, when you click that "next" link, you'll be navigating database consisting of billions, if not trillions of records.
And it's all in real-time: next, next, next. Prev, prev, prev. First, last.
And just to flex our muscle, we even go as far as to highlight the keywords for easy visual perusal, and hyperlink them for easy visiting.
This is all done in one simple, elegant Ajax datagrid.
I don't think we'll tell you how we're able to accomplish this, while so few others have. Suffice to say, SQL is not your friend. Web application development tools, particularly the integrated development environments (IDE's) with record sets, are not your friends. Even agile development frameworks with active records, such as Ruby on Rails, is not really your friend.
To make a box capable of manipulating and letting you navigate such massive amounts of data in real-time with such performance requires thinking outside the box. Early-on, I tried describing how we're doing this to a few respected colleagues, and SQL has made the database programming community so myopic, that it may be impossible to program incredibly high performance record-stepping applications that don't require huge record sets and cursors, therefore ruining scaling. The technique is called the indexed sequential access method (ISAM), and it's broken on the Web. In fact, it may have never hit the Web (as far as I know), and HitTail may be the only known example (someone correct me).
So, what's behind HitTail? An enterprise database like IBM DB/2? Oracle? Sybase or Informix?
Open source like MySQL, Postgress or Ingress?
Or perhaps a true ISAM database like BTreive (underlying Pervasive)?
The answer may surprise you.
Much is not what it seems in the world of databases, where the ability to construct a high performance Ajax datagrid is more a state of mind than a particular platform.
You have to throw out everything you know, then successfully deal with a whole new set of problems.
If you're a tech geek with a blog or website, and want to play around with the aforementioned ajax datagrid, then simply register for HitTail. Put the snippet of code on your website. And start surfing the set of records which, among the hundreds of millions of other records, are yours alone.
Explaining what HitTail is is strangely all-consuming. In the HitTail demo, we emphasize the point that we're not analytics software, though everybody keeps asking. We're a writing suggestion tool. WE... JUST... DO... SUGGESTIONS!
Now that we have a critical mass of blog posts built up, HitTail itself starts to give us suggestions.
If you are faced with paralysis by analysis through your Google Analytics, Omniture, Coremetrics or other analytics software, and are looking for a clearly actionable to-do path from your data, look no farther than HitTail. Imagine installing one piece of tracking code, and immediately having writing suggestions start to be issued to you. You are never faced with an assault of reports that implies you should know what to do merely by looking at them. HitTail takes a very different philosophy, and that is to assume that you DON'T know what to do with your data. Instead, it explicitly issues writing suggestions for your consideration, with an easy way to "flow" them into your editorial calendar to-do list. From there, you can use whatever search-optimized publishing tool you like to create the content, and watch yourself achieve top-positions in the search results on that term. I’m doing exactly that here, and you’ll see the HitTail blog at the top on paralysis by analysis before long. Imagine being able to write with that level of confidence about grabbing a top-position. In this case, I’m doing the writing directly inside HitTail, having the post publish automatically to Blogger. Bam! In a few days, I’ll do publish a post on the next writing suggestion in my HitTail to-do list, because… I’m not suffering from paralysis by analysis. I know exactly what to do, because my tool feeds me action items and not reports.
