How to Get Traffic / A Tale of 2 WAHMs

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

Work At Home Moms (WAHMs) Discover HitTail

And I discover them.

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.