Corn Syrup, Mercury, Bees and CCD: The Long Tail of News

Forgive me for diverging from this blog's normal topic of marketing, but I feel that the importance of researching the long tail of news cannot be understated and the following could be a good example of this. The following chain of events occurred from reading the news -- not from using HitTail -- but I think it just goes to show what can happen when you dig deep into data. Hopefully this is not lost on today's investigative journalists. I hope one of you will find this story and research it further than I can.

This morning I read on a story buried on page 8 of my morning paper that mercury has been found in a large percentage of corn syrup. An hour later, I read a new column on the New York Times website about Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) that is quietly ravaging American bees and endangering our food supply. CCD has been a mystery since its discovery in 2006. Yet today I noticed one key aspect that had been left out of prior reporting that I had read. Honeybees are fed on corn syrup while being moved between farms. Corn syrup that has now been found to likely contain mercury. While a minor amount to humans, this could be toxic to bees.

Part of the problem of CCD is that once bees are infected, they often leave the hive never to return. That makes diagnosing them difficult. Yet, according to Wikipedia, symptoms in mercury poisoning include include sensory impairment (vision, hearing, speech), disturbed sensation and a lack of coordination. Maybe the bees can't find their way back. It probably also lowers their defenses, making them susceptible to other diseases.

Bee keepers, please try feeding bees on something else other than corn syrup. Reporters, keep digging in the long tail for potential news angles like this one. I don't know if there is any correlation between the two stories, but both are important issues that independently deserve more press.

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.

Blog Quality Management

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.