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.
With the shift from one-size-fits-all mass markets to self interest niche and mega-niche markets, many companies are now recognizing the value of reaching out to existing and potential customers online. An increasingly popular way to engage these emerging markets is through podcasts and viral videos, which are now part of good marketing practice for winning new business. But too often companies become frustrated with the process of web analytics involved in targeting these important niche customers.
Whether you’re an analytics professional or a non-technical marketer, HitTail is a tool that makes log file data everyone always had anyway suddenly useful. HitTail shows the Long Tail of your hits and works as a filter for all future hits. The result is a small set of data showing you what you need to better target your audience and potential customers. HitTail is differentiated from other web analytics tools because it can extract keywords and issue suggestions for future website content.
Podcasts and video face a unique dilemma being found by search engines because the content is not predominantly text. HitTail can help by making suggestions to optimize the titles of your podcasts and videos which can help to boost visibility online. Use HitTail to add specific text, like accompanying introductions, that helps your site get found without compromising the look of your site.
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.
TechMeme over the last few days has picked up stories about the alleged demise of print media. And a SEO/SEM manager from India recently linked to HitTail with a story about the decline of SEO and SEM (search engine optimization and search engine marketing, respectively), in favor of social media optimization (SMO?). He also acknowleged HitTail as the best refuge of search optimizers.
Meanwhile, Viacom is suing Google/YouTube for a billion dollars, 2/3 Google's original purchase price. Some think it's a showdown between old and new media, planned by Google while their publicly capitalized war chest is deep. It's better to get it out of the way sooner rather than later, and force some clarification on copyright laws and fair use. TV Shows are increasingly doing tie-in's with their Web audience. Cast aside any doubt that the very nature of media itself is changing. New lines are being drawn (blurred), and definitions and business models are up in the air.
Chris Anderson appeared to some as the harbinger of doom for the blockbuster hit, with his book, The Long Tail. Declaring the blockbuster dead was great for the book launch, and many were quick to point out the irony of The Pirates of the Caribbean 2 being the all-time weekend earner. But Chris himself was quick to point out, even at the launch itself, which I attended, that he was not predicting the death of big media, but rather a a recalibration. Blockbuster successes may never reach the proportionately high watermark of ages past (when adjusted for inflation and world population growth), and smaller, independently published works will reach a much wider audience.
Chris Anderson would characterize this as the long tail demand curve moving towards its true shape, representing the actual diversity of tastes in the population. And to navigate the formidable choice that exists, we need better "filters". For the past many years, the filter known as Google has reigned supreme. In those same years, the searches built into Amazon and eBay are the unsung hero's of long tail product searches. And today, we see specialized product comparison and opinion searches on the rise, rife with social networking features. The book, The Wisdom of Crowds taught us that sometimes collective wisdom is smarter than any single person, and real-world examples, like Wikipedia is bearing that out. The founder of Wikipedia is now planning a wisdom-of-the-crowd-powered search engine to compete with Google! Isn't that to be trusted more than some anonymous black-boxed relevancy algorithm?
So, is "Search" dead?
Already?
Just as with the premature proclamations of print's demise, so it is with Search. Search has at least evolved into a large centralized, undisputed authority (Google, of course). While not a pseudo-governing committee like ICANN or a decentralized distributed system like DNS, Google has indeed claimed this mantle.
And in social media networking, no one has. Not MySpace. Not eBay. Not Amazon. Not Digg. They're all walled gardens. They're all incomplete ecosystems. And by the very visibility of this global social-search-filter as the big brass ring that every company wants to grab, no one has the surprise advantage that Google enjoyed in its day. So, the chances of someone somehow reigning supreme are very slim. It's going to be a knock-down, drag-out battle the likes of which we haven't seen since the portal wars.
And during all that time, the only truism that will remain is search. Search will be standing in the wings saying "Come back to me. I work so well. And we're making changes to keep pace with the social nature of the Web. Just click 'more' and see."
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.
Looking for long tail keywords? You found them. As our friend Jack Humphrey stated it well, keyword tools are useless for the long tail. Most analytics packages want to show you top-this or top-that. Well, once you're "top" there's really not much room for improvement, is there? Would you examine your top sports team performers to see where your team needed the most help? And if you sent out scouts, would you waste their time one every high school kid on the field? No, you need a logical method of zeroing in on just the most promising candidates.
Most important, you need to do it faster than your competitors, and hopefully in a fashion that your competitors can't breathe down your neck with access to the same data. If you're using any keyword suggestion tool or inventory tool that aggregates content from many sites, there are two things wrong from a competitive standpoint. First, everyone else has access to those same keyword suggestions. And second, these words are not specifically chosen for their ability to perform well fast on your particular site.
How well can an automated keyword talent scout work? Well, HitTail suggested that I write about finding long tail keywords. It's sort of dumbfounding that I didn't think to bring people into the HitTail site on that particular word combination. But I didn't. And HitTail pointed out that blunder. So now, I'm targeting it. How well did I do? Well, give it a couple of weeks, then search on the aforementioned term. I bet I'll be in the very first position in Google. If not, it'll be Jack, which is pretty much just as good.
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!
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