Paralysis by Analysis

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.

Web News Hits - April 25, 2008 - Your Daily Source For Web 2.0 Links

Problogger writes an excellent article on "12 Ways to Be A more Interactive and Accesssible Blogger"

Wired discusses Amazon's cloud computing capabilities:

"Key in your Amazon ID and password and behold: a data center's worth of computing power carved into megabyte-sized chunks and wired straight to your desktop. Clones of that HP tower cost 10 cents per hour — 10 cents! — and they're set to start spitting out widgets as soon as you upload the code. Virtual quad cores are a princely 80 cents an hour. Need storage? All you can eat for 15 cents per gigabyte per month. And there's even a tool for monitoring your virtual stack with an iPhone."

In an interesting development, Yahoo will be including Facebook profile images in its search results.

Chris Boggs at Search Engline Watch presents "SEO confessions of an Online Reputation Management Junkie"

"I admit it -- I've been tracking search engine rankings for my name for years. But online reputation management isn't all about ego or checking out a Friday night date anymore. Your career and future job opportunities are at stake."

Time Magazine presents its first annual blog index. Surprisingly, the number one blog isn't Huffington Post or Techcrunch -- it's Blog di Beppe Grillo:

"Beppe Grillo, a popular Italian comedian, actor, and political satirist, writes one of the few non-English language blogs that's become wildly popular worldwide. That's because Grillo speaks the international language of outrage."

And the The New York Times reports on the shift in online advertising, looking past mere increased brand awareness to as many clicks as possible.

"Is The Mobile Web Dead?" And Other Web 2.0 Hits

ReadWriteWeb asks: "Is the mobile web dead?"

Good question! We think it just might be that reports of its impending death have been greatly exaggerated. Certainly, having a fully-functioning mobile web requires a consistent web viewing platform and resolution (at least getting it down to four with iPhone, Opera, IE Mobile, and Android). Right now there are just too many flavors out there. At least with computer monitors, you can be reasonably sure that everyone will have at least 800x600 if not 1024x768 and greater -- but with phones, there are so many formats!

Still, we think there is a lot of untapped potential with mobile.

Onto today's other posts of interest:

Blog Storm ponders Google's policy on using "widget bait" to rack up links

John Battelle notes that Google's share keeps climbing...their search share, that is.

Meanwhile, Search Engine Land explores the search benefits of the blogosphere with a handy illustration:

Problogger looks at a "new breed of blogger," inspired by this Seth Godin post:

DoshDosh explores the seven essential characteristics of a popular social media profile:

And finally, Techcrunch has announced that Twitter is testing advertising in Twitter streams...

...and that that there is apparently some confusion over deleting Facebook news feed reports from one's profile.

Web News Hits - April 8, 2008 - Your Daily Source For Web 2.0 News

PPC Hero tells you how to “Manage Your PPC Campaign Like A Shark”:

“I was reading an article about sharks and it got me thinking about PPC management. Sure, most people’s brains may not make that leap, but that’s the way I roll. Sharks have been around for approximately 450 million years. Their survival is not by accident; it is a result of evolutionary instinct combined with aggressive predatory skills.”

Search Engine Land explores errors in mapping online systems.

PPC Discussions asks Adwords to “Please Change These 2 Things”

Mashable provides an early and in-depth look at Google’s application cloud service.

The “shockwaves” caused by this recent New York Times article on blogging is still being felt, as Blogstorm helpfully provides “10 Ways To Prevent Death By Blogging”

Finally, Copyblogger gives advice on how to price your freelance writing work:

“If you go looking for advice on how to price freelance writing work, you’ll find that one thing gets repeated nearly everywhere: don’t lowball yourself. There’s a natural tendency in business to feel like you need every client you can find, and that can often mean settling for a below-market rate in exchange for simply having the work. The standard advice is, “don’t fall into that trap.”

Does HitTail Work Every Time?

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.