The Future of Advertising

For anyone who is interested in the future of advertising, I am going to be giving a short talk on the subject at the New York Future Salon meetup tomorrow. And if advertising does not excite you, there will also be other cool topics on the agenda such as future connectivity, Internet governance, and decentralization.

Full details are available on Meetup.com, but here is the time and place:

• Stone Creek Bar
  140 East 27th Street
  New York, NY 10016
  (between Lexington and 3rd Avenues)
  
• Saturday, September 20th @ 4pm

Forming Good Writing Habits for HitTailing

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.

NY SEO

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!]

HitTail at New York Web Entrepreneurs MeetUp tonight

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.

SEO Super Powers Meetup #1

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!

HitTail Hosts SEO SuperPower Meetup Tonight

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

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

Free drinks.

Web 2.0 Expo - SEO & SEM Trends to Watch

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.

NYC Search Engine Super Powers

Search Engine Super Powers of NYC... UNITE!!!

Join the city's most authorative meetup group on optimizing, e-commerce, blogging, and search engine marketing.