I'm getting more into the Twitter thing, and am thinking through what my "next thing" is going to be, following HitTail. I'll be announcing it in Twitter first, but it'll be mixed in with the same pointless chatter everyone else twitters. So if you like, feel free to follow me. While you're at it, you can follow HitTail too.
It's been a great two years so far and we want to thank everyone who has helped to get the word out. We can hardly believe ourselves that HitTail is already in use on over 35,000 websites worldwide. And with that success comes a new chapter in our service. As of Tuesday, we will no longer be accepting new sign ups for the free HitTail Basic service.
But wait! If you already have a HitTail Basic account, don't worry, because you'll continue to have access to the same service you have today. We're just putting up that velvet rope and marking off our early adopter VIPs. Only those who sign up after August 5th will have to pay for HitTail Plus or Premium. Of course, we hope our loyal users will also choose to upgrade too :)
Speaking of HitTail Plus, we would be remiss if we also did not mention our brand new feature. As of last week, paid subscribers have been able to blog about HitTail suggestions directly from the ToDo list interface. That's right, no more opening another window and going into Blogger or TypePad. Save your credentials and start blogging without leaving that addictive real-time HitTail dashboard. For those who are new to the service, feel free to try it out in the demo.
And finally, speaking of blogs, our own blog just surpassed 400 posts. Yes, we practice what we preach and you should too! So get blogging.
Why real time reporting matters for PPC advertising
Real-time reporting helps PPC managers identify trends before they become costly. Instead of waiting for Google AdWords reports, PPC managers can use HitTail to spot abnormal activity in their paid search campaigns in real-time. Watching the real time report in HitTail often shows clicks for broad match keywords that advertisers should not be bidding on or shows a discrepancy in clicks that HitTail records compared to what Google reports. This discrepancy can sometimes be attributed to click fraud.
Here are some examples of both scenarios:
1) HitTail identifies negative keywords that drive up the cost of broad match campaigns
Sometimes there is a discrepancy between the number of clicks Google reports vs what appears in HitTail's real time report.
Example - David Kyle discusses his experience with HitTail detecting click fraud for his AdWords campaign. Recently, Google reported 6 clicks and HitTail reported only one in the same time period. David verified that the additional clicks were from a Chinese IP address that was sending fraudulent clicks to a geo-targeted campaign for a city in North Carolina. See this forum discussion and thread for more details.
The best part about this is the fact that you can make these observations way before your AdWords or Analytics reports become available. With this data, PPC managers can log in to their AdWords campaigns and make the necessary adjustments, potentially saving money for their client in wasted clicks that could go undetected without the use of HitTail.
For that reason alone, Pay Per Click managers should consider trying HitTail Premium to stay on top of their paid search campaigns in order to make adjustments in real time that could save money in the long run.
One of our most frequently asked questions at HitTail is "What do I do with these HitTail suggestions?". We created an FAQ on this topic but I'd like to create a list of all the different ways actual HitTail customers use their keyword suggestions.
Feel free to add your own ideas in the comments.
Create a new blog post using the suggestion as the title / headline
Create new pages or articles on your website targeting the suggested keywords (utilize article writing services such as the Content Spooling Network)
Add the suggested keywords to a Pay Per Click campaign (this is now made easy with HitTail Premium)
Use the keywords on your advertising or landing page
Use the keywords in your email newsletters to your readers or customers
Incorporate the HitTail keywords in your title tags and meta descriptions of existing webpages
Buy a new website domain using HitTail suggestions
Use HitTail keywords to determine product suggestions and stock new products in your eCommerce store
Use keyword suggestions to tag your YouTube videos or del.icio.us bookmarks
We'd love to hear how you use your HitTail keyword suggestions!
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.
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.
Quick results in Search Marketing are only possible with Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising, right? Wrong. The advent of blogging, as well as recent advances to search engine algorithms, has narrowed the gap between PPC and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to mere hours. With PPC, there is instant gratification as your advertisement will appear in search results almost immediately after your campaign is activated. However, this same advantage can now be seen in SEO.
First, let's take a look at some common reasons why SEO projects have not been carried out in the past.
Companies don’t want to abandon tech investments (e.g. content management systems and web publishing tools)
Lack of budget dedicated to SEO
May take a while to demonstrate ROI
Blogging addresses each of these problems.
SEO best practices are already in place
Blogging software by default includes a few basic but important SEO practices by using proper Titles, headlines, URLs, and internal linking structure. Search engines also like sites that have fresh content, which can give blogs great influence over search results.
Recent search engine algorithm changes boost the visibility of blogs
This recent experiment by Ryan Durk took advantage of temporary changes in Google’s logo linking to the search results page for "January 1 TCP/IP". It shows two things: the speed by which a new blog is indexed and the short time between your blog getting indexed and it appearing high in search results.
Blogs are inexpensive and easy to setup
A new blog can be created in a matter of minutes with little technical knowledge. Blog creation is free in many cases, often with a nominal monthly fee for additional features.
Blogging is great for companies that are not ready to make the larger SEO investment or are worried about abandoning a CMS in which they have already invested. Blogging can be used as a proof of concept that shows that SEO can deliver results. Use of blogging software delays the larger discussion of SEO projects that are potentially more time-consuming and require a larger investment that reap longer term benefits. Setting up a blog is inexpensive and doesn’t force you to abandon or modify your existing IT investments.
Then get people to notice your blog.
Conduct Keyword Research
Creating a blog is just the first step. Keyword research can be the difference between a highly popular, authoritative blog and a blog that no one knows exists.
Since everyone competes on the most popular words, try blogging about slightly less competitive topics so your site has the ability to rank for those terms. HitTail can facilitate this process of identifying writing topics that other sites aren’t necessarily targeting, yet will drive traffic.
If you’re just getting started with blogging, write about a subject where you have expertise that you feel will interest your audience. Once you reach a critical mass of blog posts, take a step back and analyze how people are finding your blog and use that information to guide your editorial calendar.
Utilize Social Media and Pinging
In addition to keyword research, it is important to promote the blog using social media tools that increase the visibility of your blog and generate inbound links to your domain. Be sure to utilize pinging services to notify aggregation services of new content on your blog.
Customize the blog template
It is also important to link to your new blog from the Homepage of your main website to make it easier for search engine spiders to discover it. Often times, the default template needs to be tweaked slightly for maximum SEO benefit. For instance, make sure your blog Permalink uses meaningful anchor text and not "www.yourdomain.com/blog/?p=456"
Blogging may not be the long-term solution for fixing a broken site, but it will get your foot in the door for SEO, deliver results in the short term, and facilitate the process of getting buy-in for full-scale, long-term SEO projects for the rest of your website.
Digg Breaking News Stories (And Break Some Of Your Own!) With HitTail
Quite by accident I found an extra use for HitTail that’s pretty killer in terms of generating content for my blog. And I’m going to spill the beans so you can try it for yourself.
Basically, you can use HitTail to discover leads, breaking stories, and gossip.
Yes, gossip!
First, a brief recap on how HitTail works.
You install it on your site and get real-time scrolled keyword results on the searches used to find your site. Then the service points out to you which keywords have the potential to be capitalized by you for best hits on your next post.
So for example, HitTail might point out that somebody used the phrase “green ipod nano” to find your site – even though you didn’t specifically use that phrase in a post. But now you know that there is a relatively untapped interest out there in content on green ipod nanos – and that if you write about them, your hits will increase.
That said, I’m talking about a completely different use for the service. Well, not “completely different” – you’ll still get a lot of hits for your site. It’s just that this service is a whole lot more…edgy. Let me explain what I mean.
While using HitTail last week to monitor my personal niche blog, I notice that the service highlighted a very strange phrase. It was the name of a couple of important people who work in that niche field plus the word “feud.”
Now, as far as I know, those two people, who had a working relationship, were the best of friends. So I thought it odd that someone would have type in their names in relation to a dispute.
So I asked around. And guess what? They did have a recent falling-out.
Now, had I been an Internet gossip columnist, or some hard-core niche reporter – or simply wanted to write a hit-garnering post – this lead on a yet-to-be-discovered story would have been pure gold.
But, just for the pleasure of finding out what hot topics people are typing into search engines AS IT HAPPENS – HitTail is a must for my blogging.
HitTail Gave Me Hot Topics: A Blogger’s Real Story
Hi. I’m a real blogger with a real blog. Here is a personal story about how HitTail worked for me.
I’m always looking for hot topics to blog about. I’m also always on the hunt for the “edge” that will allow me to break stories first. HitTail has given me the tools to do both.
Here is an example of what I mean; this really happened! I blog mostly about comic books and popular culture. Using HitTail, I found out that one of the popular phrases to find my blog was “who will play the Joker in Batman 3?” Now, I never wrote a post about that subject; but somehow the search engine in question found some combination of those words in my blog.
What this result on HitTail told me was that there are readers out there who are interested in this topic. Now I have a great story idea with a confirmed potential audience!
HitTail even has a “to do” feature that lets me move the phrase or words in question to a separate page for easy reference. So when the well is dry and I’m jonesing for ideas, I can take a look at my HitTail to-do list.
Next time, I will reveal an even GREATER secret about using HitTail for your blogging needs – how to not only find hot topics, but actual story “leads” to investigate further. I really got the edge using this – you can too.
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.
As part of our major HitTail promotion, TechCrunch edited by Michael Arrington, is now displaying the HitTail Live widget. TechCrunch is a prestigious blog source for all things going on in the tech word from internet product reviews to company profiles, and visitors can now see exactly what keywords are bringing people to the site.
Check out this screen shot illustrating how traffic was driven to the TechCrunch site when people searched on the popular terms "Microsoft," "iPod," and "iPhone." These are competitive search terms, so it's no small feet that TechCrunch was able to pull in that traffic.
HitTail issues suggestions for what to write about to drive more traffic to your site, which no other web analytics tool does!
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!
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The question often comes up, what is the relationship of HitTail to Connors Communications? At the most recent NYTech Meetup, Scott Heiferman, the founder of Meetup asked the question, and partially answered it himself, describing Connie Connors, the founder of Connors Communications, as the PR firm that helped launch and bring public such companies as Amazon.com, Real Networks, Priceline and others from the Dot Com era.
Perhaps most notably in regard to HitTail, Connors was the public relations firm for GoTo.com in the early days, before it became Overture, and later, Yahoo! Search Marketing. This is significant, because Connors helped introduce pay-per-click to the world, fighting the "Church and State" uproar that broke out from mixing paid and natural search results. Today, this is the staple of Google's business, making industry insiders joke that GoTo.com taught Google how to make money.
Connors continues as a public relations firm, specializing in helping clients drive quality prospects to your website, based on the next step in the evolution of online marketing. HitTail was just an "extraction" of this larger product, which today continues to serve a hand-full of hand-selected Connors clients. In this picture, you see Connie Connors at the latest Wall Street Journal / Walt Mossberg D Conference with some friends.
Connie has incubated the HitTail company within the walls of Connors Communications, using it as an "overture" to the world--demonstrating how modern public relations firms have something to offer everyone. So let us know what you're up to, whether you're vying to be one of the handful of clients that Connors takes directly, or one of the tens-of-thousands benefiting from our free to moderately priced products.
You're never to small to be part of something big. And you're never so big that you couldn't be doing even better.
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.
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.
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.
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?
I guess we're working our way up to #1, and judging by the amazing response to our "charter member" promotion that lasted through April 30th, we're on our way.
So my question for the HitTailers of the world is this:
Does anyone want to step up and name us the single most innovative and important thing to do to your site in 2007? You'll be in good company, because BusinessWeek sort of already did. But we're looking for genuine, from the trenches quotes.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And one such suggestion is "best writing topics".
As usual, HitTail reaffirms the funny fact that the collective guessing power of the wisdom of the crowd far exceeds any single person, or even a group of people's ability to brainstorm keywords. It even exceeds the ability of keyword suggestion tools, such as the keyword inventory tools built into AdWords and Yahoo Panama, to guess what's going to UNIQUELY produce for YOU.
Let me explain that.
Your website is already a keyword suggestion box. You're just not listening to the suggestions, if you're not using HitTail yet. So, how are HitTail's keyword suggestions better than anyone else's?
Because we're selecting the best writing topics for that title field or headline field of your blogging software. Simply work the HitTail keyword suggestion into a sensible headline that works within the context of your site, and you have the best topic for drawing in new audience.
We know this, because we've proven it time and time again with our own SEO clients. The HitTailing technique was so reliable, in fact, and underutilized within the context of a hand-full of high-end Connors clients, that we decided to let the world participate. Now, we're literally responsible for thousands of people optimizing tens-of-thousands of topics, bringing in highly qualified prospects, and hopefully converting them into customers and audience.
Indeed, within a few years, we hope to have helped hundreds of thousands of writers raise their voice above the din, and draw in millions of new prospects and readers.
Total Quality Management (TQM), Kaizen and the Suggestion Box
OK, just one quick blog post today, as I dive deep into my work. I likely won't be checking email much today, or taking phone-calls, as I have to finish some very large deliverables for a client. But I wanted to get a post out on one of the topics that has been coming up over and over.
Yes, HitTail suggests what to write about.
Yes, HitTail does this based on the existing activity on your site.
Yes, blogging software helps--particularly the long archive and index pages.
But exactly HOW this process works has not been sufficiently addressed. We've been referring people more and more frequently to this diagram.
So, as you see, "seed" content is required to get the HitTailing process going. If you don't have a product, you don't have a product to improve. There needs to be a website and pages there in the first place. Yes, we understand HitTail is a tempting way to "start the build", but you must start the build using your own imagination, expertise, or other keyword suggestion tools, like WordTracker or the inventory suggestion tools.
Get out about 100 seed posts.
And once your site is seeded, HitTail will start issuing suggestions. And you can focus on constantly improving quality, by "answering" the suggestions popping up under the Suggestions tab, as surely as if it were a Suggestion Box! But if your suggestions are not good enough, then maybe it's time to "spiral out" to new concepts, such as I am doing with this post. I have mentioned Edwards Demming, TQM and the Japanese concept of Kaizen plenty. Yet, very little hits based on it. Consequently, this is a post to remind everyone that HitTail isn't merely analytics software. It's part of a website total quality management campaign.
Of all these Wikipedia links, I most suggest reading the entry on Kaizen. Pay attention to the continuous improvement in tandem with a respect for people.
This is why you take HitTail suggestions to build natural search traffic, but ONLY when they make sense in the context of your site, and REALLY DO improve your website. This post is a perfect example. I need to get these keywords into a headline, but I'm not going to waste your time. Now, you know why Japan made a massive economic comeback after WWII, and how these concepts translate directly into website management and online marketing techniques today.
NOTE: I notice a lot of traffic coming into this article from StumbleUpon. Since writing this article, I've changed the targeted keywords of HitTail from "long tail" to "keyword tool". So, read the article below in that light.
Before I joined Connors, and before HitTail, my notoriety in the SEO community came from one thing: a systematic and public demonstration of working a website up to the top of search results across all search engines for a competitive 2-word combination. This was back in 1999, before it was such a highly sought-after talent.
I'm doing it again with a client I can talk publicly about, because that client is ourselves (HitTail). I will tell you about the first, back in 1999. Then, I will tell you about today.
The phrase back then was multimedia software, and this pitted me against the likes of Apple, Macromedia, Quark, ULead, Diamond and others. It's also as MP3s were on the rise, and the definition of multimedia was shifting. The term was difficult to target, to say the least.
I conducted this demonstration at JimWorld's Virtual Promote, a.k.a. SearchEngineForums.com. It was the first of it's kind, and is still going on today. Most SEO's were secretive with their higher-end techniques. But I laid it all out, and went as far as spelling out how internal link structure was best achieved with a series of pages with previous/next arrows linking them up. It wasn't long after that that Moveable Type, and later TypePad, started doing exactly that.
And right there in front of everyone's eyes, I raised Scala Multimedia to the top of the SERPs in AltaVista, Lycos, Inktomi, DirectHit, InfoSeek, and all the other engines that had their own unique separate databases at the time. Think about that. I was using sustainable long-term, cross-engine techniques back then that have lasted right up to this day. The results survived the switch-over to Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask. But I didn't stay at Scala to maintain these stats. None-the-less, if you check, you'll see they're still on the first page of Google and MSN after all these years (about 7).
This is when I discovered there were two-fronts on which to attack keyword strategy. First, is the aforementioned ever-so-sexy benchmark keywords. They're what everyone KNOWS people are searching on, and for which you MUST come up high. They often include the company's name, the name of the products, and the keywords that are obviously related to the industry.
The second type of keywords are what are coming to be known as "long tail keywords". Back then, I simply knew them as "actuals". You can guess the benchmark keywords, but you can never guess the actuals. The collective guessing-power of the world dwarfed any groups ability to brainstorm all the keywords that are important. But likewise, ignoring the underperforming, but promising keywords--actuals that were not positioned well--was leaving money on the table.
And so nearly 8 years later, the concept of optimizing the actual keywords leading to your site (albeit underperforming) has finally come of age. And it's getting associated with the economic concept called the long tail, as it is being popularized by Chris Anderson's book of the same name.
Now, what's the keyword I need to target today in order to find our audience?
Long Tail ??? !!!
A term that's being targeted across the blogosphere? A term that's used in the title of a best-selling book? A term that's suddenly in a hailstorm of competitive chatter? Granted, it's not a keyword like mortgages or Brittany Spears. But it is competitive none-the-less, and much more similar to the type of challenges faced by businesses across the world.
Well, we're not at the top of Google for longtail or long tail yet. But we're at the top of page 2 of results for both terms. That's from-scratch, in under 10 months. The site has a Google PageRank of 6. Combined with all the buzz that surrounds HitTail, these are strong indicators that we'll be on the first page of results before long.
And we will have again demonstrated Connors Communications' ability to systematically target, and work to the top of natural search results, difficult keywords.
And this is with little-to-none link building. Did we link bait? Well, you be the judge. More importantly, we wrote well on the topic. We made a viral video. We chose the correct publishing platforms (for our own sites).
So much for targeted benchmark keywords that are critical to the company. But what about all the rest of those keywords that matter too? How about systematically working ALL keywords that are both important to a company AND possess search traffic to the top of natural results?
Well, that's not merely a key part of my offerings.
But, we also made HitTail so that the world can do it too. And don't forget to check out yesterday's post about the XML transformation SEO capabilities. We've got the big guns.
Now for a totally off-topic post for the HitTail blog: managing distractions and ensuring professional effectiveness. This post itself is such a distraction. One of the biggest dangers to productivity is media. I both AM the media (in my blogging activities) and user of media in my ceaseless consumption of news and blogs. In fact, I'm at the end of a one-year self-imposed moratorium against TV, as it is the worst time-wasting offender, and I needed it out of my life in order to help create and launch HitTail. But I just ended that moratorium by becoming the latest Triple Play sucker. But also, I'm in the third month of a 3-month Connors Communications client engagement with perhaps the most ambitious goals yet--nothing short of changing the DNA/Religion/Culture of a media company to have a sort of fierce online competitiveness.
It takes nothing less than my full focus.
But HitTail's going on, and it's hard to let my baby grow up on its own.
But I have to!
And to achieve that, I need to shut down distractions with extreme prejudice. And I'm just too weak willed. Even now I feel the pull of the Search Hits tab, which is more addictive than caffeine. We didn't win the PRWeek PR innovation of the year, so I'm trying to make the best of that, with a congratulatory post, so that maybe some people will see that the third runner up is at least as innovative as opening a transparent PR firm in a virtual world--OK, that's pretty cool. You have to love the symbolism. And finally, I'm deliberating over not getting into the early beta of SpotPlex. Spotplex, if you can hear us: "please let us in!" And one thing leads to the next, so it starts an endless vicious cycle of online promotion addiction. Yes, you can actually be addicted to carrying out an online public relations campaign.
So, this blog post is about my journey in getting these distractions under control, so I can get back to 12 hour days.
The first step to my eliminating distractions is confidence in my people. I have to ignore stuff that my detail-oriented mind wants to delve into. But I invested a lot in my people, and I have to trust them to make good decisions. The HitTail DEV team rocks. I can turn off all distractions and not worry about disaster striking.
Second, I identify all the distraction vectors, and there's a lot in this new online and wired world of ours. Distraction vectors include phone, PC and drive-by's. The phone and drive-by's are easily dealt with by turning off the phone and isolating myself as best I can. It's not enough to physically isolate yourself anymore. Now, you've got to turn off IM, quit out of email, turn off email pop-up notifications, remove extra icons from the task tray and the quick-launch toolbar, and clean up the desktop. If using a web browser is part of your work, you have to turn off StumbleUpon and any other silly distraction magnets that got plugged in. This line of reasoning has led at least one software developer to come up with a distraction-free word processor. And now, I'm inevitably doing all my work through remote desktop, so I have my full development environment wherever I am, so I have to make sure the connection is fast enough so that the terminal server latency isn't too distracting (it always is--but the benefits far outweigh the cost).
My ideal work environment would be an isolation sensory deprivation chamber with one and only one application running in front of me, taking up almost my entire field of vision, but for a keyboard and mouse. Whenever I needed to venture into the vast wasteland of longtail garbage that is the Internet, I would need the online equivalent of horse blinders to induce the sort of myopia that prevents even the opportunity for distraction from occurring. I don't know what's worse: Google or the CrackBerry. Both are supposed to be profoundly enabling, but turn out to be profoundly derailing. Wait until the iPhone hits, and you can have all your information addiction in one pocket-sized package.
So, this is enough writing to get me back on track for today. Having voiced this issue helps make me hyper aware. This article IS my horse blinders. It will now lurk in the edge of my consciousness, reigning me back in whenever a distraction starts to take hold.
I can also take proactive measures to cut distractions off at the pass. For example, I go in through 3 layers of computers to do my remote desktop work: local PC, NAT'ed office work PC, and finally, the DMZ'd servers. And each one threatens to let the distractions of the prior level leak through with ziggurat of Window taskbars. So I use the version of remote desktop that can open full-screen (not the MMC snap-in), and remove the "pin" to make the remote desktop yellow bar go away. So, it looks like I'm in just one PC.
And finally, I fed by blogging addiction, knowing that this will carry me for a few days.
The Future of Media & Business / What HitTail's REALLY About
There is so much I'd like to talk about, I hardly know where to begin. Ironically, I'm someone who doesn't need HitTail, because my stream of consciousness provides me with an unlimited number of writing topics on which I'm fairly confident that search traffic exists to be intercepted. In this way, I plan on building myself into sort of an Aaron Wall of SEOBook, whom I respect immensely. So, I'm following my instincts right now, instead of the HitTail suggestions. However, that doesn't stop me from smattering some blatant hittailing through this blog. I would like to add traffic to my site after all. Ahemm, but let me move on...
I'm not done seeding "core content" of this site that fuels the hittailing workflow, allows me to engage in the circular process that leads to the self-fueling and self-sustaining snowball effect. Previously, Connors Communications, the brilliant PR firm that I work for, would have charged a client at least $5000/month for an SEO engagement consisting of this sort of advice. But with HitTail, we're really going to change the world again, the way we did once by helping the quintessential long tail business, Amazon.com, and later overhauled the very field of marketing by aiding GoTo.com clear the way for pay-per-click search results, which in turn illuminated the way for Google AdWords and changed the world. And if we're going to change the world again, then we've got to be a little less tight-fisted with our advice.
HitTailers are our marketing disciples, and the process of HitTailing is our gospel. The lessons are difficult, and we find ourselves continually having to re-explain many aspects of business, economics, programming, and even history and human nature. People hardly even understand the 3-parties that are ALWAYS involved if you're trying to make money on the web: the buyer, the seller and the middleman. And unless you're publishing for complete altruistic or vanity reasons, then you're a middleman. It's hard to imagine that publishers who attract readers and sell advertising don't always get the idea that they're middlemen. But this up-for-grabs ad revenue being divvied out by companies that control traffic is quickly transforming our world into one where the only necessary seller is the manufacturer, and the only necessary buyer is the end user. Cutting out the middleman is a process called disintermediation. We can see disintermediation everywhere, and the occasional reversal of disintermediation with support companies such as RedHat, where the middleman's justification is completely support. Why that's still a direct buyer/seller relationship is a separate story. Finally, certain goods and services that are hard to order and deliver online will always be immune to disintermediation, such as restaurants. But nearly everything else is vulnerable and being bullied by a new breed of online middleman--ones that can arbitrate Internet traffic.
So the boyz of Wired Magazine make it much easier to explain HitTailing. First, John Battelle, spelled out how this middleman works in his description of arbitrage in The Search. Without understanding the lines that connect buyers and sellers, and how companies like Google insert themselves in the middle, then get out of the game. You'll never control the flow of traffic and thereby be an effective middleman. Later, Chris Anderson, had his turn in the spotlight spelling out how the difference between finite shelf space in your local store is different from infinite shelf space on the Web, and how this enables new business, the pursuit of more personalized tastes, and basically changes everything forever. Of course, that's The Long Tail. Yep, these two guys kick sand in the face of the digirati who love the irony of saying Wired is Tired. It's not. These guys are as fundamental to educating tomorrow's businessmen as my heros, Demmings and Drucker were in the past-- um... OK, maybe not THAT important, but important none-the-less.
With all that foundational educational crap out of the way, HitTail is instantly understandable and even obvious in hindsight. But it divides the world into two groups: those who get it, and those who don't. You can also frame this discussion by dividing the world into the "who-you-know" folks vs. the "what-you-know" folks. It's an eternal battle, like between cats and dogs. The what-you-know folks have a tough time with the long tail and the notion that people can come up through the trenches, eat their lunch, and change the world forever. Although Bill, Sergey and Larry all came up through what-you-know channels (it's the double-whammy advantage of door-opener-schools like Harvard and MIT), they embraced what-you-know methodologies. And the world's a different place. Who-you-knower's tend to fortify, while what-you-knowers tend to change the game into something where they can more easily win (did I mention Steve?).
Anyway, these battles sometimes sound like a clash of the titans, in which us little guys could never compete. Not so! Lately, the MySpace couple jumped over. And you see it happening with Web 2.0 startups all the time. VC money helps, but is not necessary--it's really just an attempt of what-you-know people trying to insert themselves into a who-you-know success by providing something that really anyone can provide--the simplest and most pure of all commodities, money. The process can even be turned into an idea-farm, like Y Combinator or Idea Lab. A lot of good can come from these things, but if your ambitions are not quite changing the world, and all you want to do is what you love, then HitTail is all you need.
OK, so that really hits this post home. HitTail is not only a practical alternative to paying for your search hits. It's a practical alternative to raising VC money, because if you've got something to sell, and development isn't an issue anymore (thanks to rapid and agile development methodologies), then all you really need is low-cost exposure and publicity. And HitTail provides that for the great unwashed masses of bloggers. We've built a ladder that anyone can climb to the top. But like a video game, each level is not actually easy. There's a hunt/solve problem/reward, and repeat pattern in HitTailing that also characterizes the most addictive and successful of videogames. But all this addiction and energy that gets wasted on video games can just as easily be sunk into your passion.
Hunt for a problem that needs to be solved that no one has tackled yet. Tackle it, and let people know about it on your blog. See the traffic start to come in through Google and the occasional links constructed to you. Learn from these hits (and link), and repeat the process. Like a video game, this addictive process where you keep bringing to yourself to the next plateau, leads to amazing levels of achievement, which when viewed in the context of Office Space America, you appear to be nothing less than your own little Steve Jobs. OK, maybe just Guy Kawasaki. But the point is, you have purpose and habit-forming systems to keep you focused and on-track.
Again, you see that we are not merely building yet-another-analytics-tool with HitTail. We've got mission and purpose--which is to enable our users to pursue their own mission and purpose.
For those who haven't noticed yet, HitTail is now translated into Deutsch, Francias, Nederlands and Italien. Connors already has a reputation for international SEO, but now we're enabling millions of bloggers worldwide to optimize for the long tail of search in their own languages. So, you thought your long tail was long in English? Have you thought about the fact that if you have an international market for your product or service, you may have a long tail in the language of each?
Seems difficult? Yes. Yes, it is.
I'm not going to sugar-coat it. SEO becomes proportionally more difficult with each language you target. This is why PPC is such a good idea for international search marketing. You only have to naturally optimize your native language site, and a few landing pages. Then, you translate your keyword list and drop it into AdWords or Panama. The amount you have to translate is reduced, and you don't have to deal with the complexity of translating language-specific idioms.
So, is optimizing for natural search in foreign languages a hopeless task? Do you have to translate your entire website, and keep all the varying versions in sync?
Nonsense! This is yet another advantage of using blogging software for natural search. No one is going to expect you to go back and retroactively translate blog posts to keep them in sync. Blog posts are sort of an imprinted memory of what you were thinking at the time. It gets you off the hook. Your blog posts in different languages don't even need to say the same thing. Merely, the headlines should be rough equivalents of each topic you're targeting.
In other words, you only need the headlines to match in each language. And even that is a rough estimate, because the keywords you SHOULD be targeting could vary in each market, based on culture and nuance. So, how do you know which keywords you should target in each language?
Hmmmm, let's see...
You could use... HitTai!
That's right. Do you need a way to truth-check what your native language-speaking translators are telling you? Translate some initial "seed" content into each language. Make sure your most-important benchmark keywords are included somewhere in the copy of those translations. Then, ask your native language translator to translate your blogs into each language as you go.
There will reach a point where the data being collected by HitTail will give you new insights into the local markets. These insights may show you that you were totally off base in your initial translations.
Case in point: we refer to natural search as the elephant in the room of any online marketing discussion. Why? Because all roads lead you to "buying" your traffic. Some of the powers-that-be would love to close that lovely loophole whereby quality content producers still get their traffic for free. Who gets anything for free in this world? Who would make a product that lets you get something for free, and provides that product for free? We did it. And now we're telling you how we did it. But our elephant doesn't translate, because it's an American English idiom. What's an idiom? Shooting from the hip, I'd say it was an expression that makes sense because of cultural context. But then, I'd be flying by the seat of my pants. Our elephant in the corner of the room, somehow becomes a pink elephant in translation. So, our unspoken natural search friend becomes an alcoholic delusion. Anyone who has listened to the English-to-Japanese translations translated back to English knows exactly what I mean. If you haven't had this experience, it's a necessary experience for any online marketer dealing with language translations.
The bottom line is that, thanks to HitTail and long tail search marketing techniques, the actual copy on the page doesn't have to be long to be effective. Take advantage of that fact, and put your limited translation resources into culturally-correct headlines. Then, either translate very little on the page itself, or find yourself a native language-speaking blogger who can translate the essence of your posts. Do this for the first bunch of posts that you've already made, then see what suggestions start coming in. Adjust your new foreign language posts to make the most of HitTail suggestions and cultural context. Forget about translating the bulk of your main website into every language, unless you've really got that sort of resources. Let each language-specific blog take on a life of its own. This is like how Coke allows it's regional companies to adapt their offerings for each country.
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