Perfect Keyword Tool for the Recession

You'd think that after four years, the incredibly actionable HitTail keyword tool would start losing it's appeal, but as it turns out, the tough economic conditions are actually just opening Marketers' eyes to the wisdom of targeting the long tail. It's an easy and systematic method of bringing in well qualified prospective customers and audience to your website without spending a dime.

Well, technically it's $10/mo and your time writing.

But that's the perfect way to spend your money right now. Dig in and fortify by producing copious perfectly optimized content. It will likely produce some new customers today, but when economic conditions improve, you will have performed the content-build already, and be positioned for a real take-off!

Our competitors know this, and are bidding in AdWords on our keywords. Ha Ha Ha! It's nice to be acknowledged as the leader. Unfortunately, try as I might, I can't find pricing on their website. I bet THEY'RE not $10/mo.

So stick with the actionable keyword tool leader, who is also the best priced. We want to be your best friend during this recession.

Best Keyword Tool

HitTail is worth checking out if you're looking for the best keyword tool, but it takes a decidedly different philosophical approach to website optimization than other tools. It's based on the premise that on any given website, something is almost working for you. If only you could give it that extra little nudge to push it from, say, 3 pages into Google results to the first page. HitTail examines the traffic on your own site to determine where these sweet spots are using techniques that no one else in the industry uses--period. There's always a few people who say you can get what HitTail is giving you through your own web log files. But the truth is that your log files are going to report the same hits over and over, distracting you with stuff you historically know and should be filtering out by now. HitTail handles this by turning your historical keyword hits as a filter against current keyword hits, making the list that gets shown to you only the new stuff. So even for high traffic sites with tons of traffic from all sources, HitTail is the most capable software at zeroing in on the all-important tiny details. Such a detail may be, this is THE FIRS TIME this particular word combination EVER led to your site, and you're positioning terribly on it in search results, and merely by adding some content to your site about that particular topic, you will be able to catapult yourself onto the first page of results, and pick up several thousand times more traffic on that word combo than you are currently.

Sweet, no?

Is HitTail the Future of Marketing?

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.

Stay tuned.

Active VS. Passive Online Marketing

Now that I'm active blogging again, I want to point out exactly how effective HitTail has been at doing nothing--and how effective "nothing" has been as a strategy between major announcements. I'm reading Seth Godin's Purple Cow, and he offers numerous examples of how if you don't have something brilliant, its better to do nothing than to do forced or contrite promotions to keep the Marketing department busy.

Like everything else we do, we've broken the model by NOT inundating our userbase with permission emails. Free HitTail users keep getting it got free even though we're been out of beta for a year, and paid users are getting their writing suggestions via email. We diligently collect HitTail quotes off the Web, and answer all questions (no matter where they're posted). Besides that, all's quiet on the email front.

Yes, even though we're a company with roots in public relations, and certainly have the gift of gab, you'll find no email newsletter from us with forced topics for the sake of keeping some artificial schedule. Instead, we put our resources put into providing a superior service, and planning a future for HitTail users that will surprise and delight you as much as our first go-around.

But what if you're hungry for more?

We keep an active forum and blog with RSS feeds, and for the truly HitTail-hungry, they get their extra fix. For everyone else, we just gently reach pit by email when we REALLY have something to say, thereby letting you know its something to actually pay attention to, and not just noise.

The concept of "active" vs. "passive" online outreach comes to mind. Such concepts exist in sonar/radar (submarines sending out pings vs. just listening) and even in keyword position monitoring (querying Google vs. just analyzing your log files). Well, the same exists with online marketing.

A brilliant passive system is best, because its less spammy and obnoxious--putting particiants at ease because they SOUGHT YOU OUT. You reading this? Chances are, you found me-- which has a little something to do with HitTail being awesome.

The Future of Marketing

For over a year now, HitTail has been talking to its audience about one aspect of the future of marketing--the long tail, where smaller more agile companies can live in "niches" left behind by larger competitors. It works perfectly online, because inexpensive "word of mouth" marketing is intensified through the ability to forward links in email and the use of social networks. But marketing hasn't completely changed. There still are plenty of companies with large budgets, able to shape popular perceptions through saturation TV, print and radio campaigns. These days, those companies are simply adding online banner ads and keyword campaigns to the mix. But it's all still basically just advertising.

Now, the practice of taking advantage of how Google arbitrates traffic to use it to your natural advantage has evolved into the field of search engine optimization. But it's a field that continually shifts, just as the search results do. It only comprises a fraction of what we call marketing. Pay-per-click (a.k.a. Google AdWords) makes this process a bit clearer and more accessible to the mainstream, but even with that added in, it only accounts for maybe $10 billion of what is maybe a $500 billion industry. To really divine the future of marketing, you have to look at how a "long-tail" or niche advertising campaign picks up momentum, and how the company intelligently leverages its revenue to go back into more creative marketing, and how the snowball effect can kick in.

HitTail prescribes a particular formula that helps small to medium sized companies master that process of generating consistent, reliable small successes. When enough of these small successes compound on each other, they fund more aggressive and expensive campaigns. It's very possible, for example, to have completely free natural search produce your first dozen customers, who can fund you to start your first pay-per-click campaign.

Now, if this all sounds very entrepreneurial to you, well then, you got the point. The future of marketing is not about the large, established and complacent organizations. It's about the little guy with enough creativity, determination and patience to get that snowball rolling... rolling... rolling... straight at that stationary competitor.

Harbinger of a Marketing Revolution: The HitTailing Flowchart

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!

Get Traffic for Your Website

So, drinking our own cool-aid turns out to be quite tasty.

I blogged the other day about taking the HitTail writing suggestion of "NY SEO". Sounds reasonable. We provide SEO services in New York City, and never put those words specifically together, but someone found us on it regardless. Finding us on that term, buried tons of pages in (yes, those SEO's are competitive), they tipped their hand to us that we COULD be found on that term, so I put it in our "To Do" list--sort of like an editorial calendar for competitive webmasters and bloggers.

Look where we are now:

Within 2 days, we were on the fourth page of Google results--nice but not spectacular. Today, we're on the first page (5 days). This is sometimes known as the "Google Honeymoon", and many SEO clients are disappointed within a few weeks of getting such spectacular results so quickly. And yes, dealing with the Google Honeymoon is a serious HitTailing issue. Don't misrepresent your capabilities to your client. It could backfire.

Instead, keep yourself from getting over-exuberant, but know that you can produce reliable short-term organic search success. Go ahead and impress your clients or boss with these short-term results, but qualify it. Tell them about the Google Honeymoon, but also tell them that these results can "set in" and become a permanent qualified traffic-generator with the right love and nurturing--ANOTHER reason HitTail isn't obsoleting traditional SEO, though on the surface, it sometimes looks that way. You still need to know how to make your body of HitTailing content take root. But merely keeping the content creation up over time, and always have a "Honeymoon" going on somewhere in your site keeps Google constant stimulated. Perhaps all results benefit? Hmmmmmm.

So at any rate, HitTail is a spankin' awesome way to hit the ground running with SEO and demonstrate to your clients the wonders to come if they stick with you for the long haul.

In taking our own advice a year after we've built up our critical mass of content (we're at about 450 optimized pages just over a year after website launch). We have a superior product and a message that we're proud of, making HitTail itself perhaps the best method of marketing HitTail. People are noticing this, picking up our message, and repeating it throughout the Internet.

We can now demonstrate the efficacy of our own product (drink our own cool-aid), using our own product in posts like this. If we keep that up, we're going to fill a very large space in the online marketing circles within one more year. I mean think about it, us getting top position on everything we write about with reliability that only HitTail can provide.

Was the example an anomaly?

Well, I went on a HitTailing binge there for a few posts. How reliable was it?

On another term I did August 15, Blog Marketing, HitTailing didn't seem to do a blessed thing. I went over 30 pages into the results, looking for my page to no avail. Makes me wonder how the suggestion got issued in the first place. But with 320 million competing pages and Seth Godin's own blog being 7 pages in, I think I ran up against the big head of the long tail of search. There are a lot of Marketers using blogs to... well, market. And their favorite topics of discussion? Marketing and blogging! So it stands to reason, I bit off more than I could chew by taking this suggestion. Perhaps we'll sharpen our filters to eliminate writing suggestions that "can't be easily conquered". We had the same issue on terms like Britney Spears.

But how about other terms?

Well, we did "Public Relations VS. Advertising" for which we're on the first page of results (without quotes, of course!).

I also did another 4-word term, "top pr firm in nyc", which one would think would be too long-tail to be worth it. Well, not only do we now get a regular flow of traffic on this (for which we should), but we're in THE #1 POSITION in Google in under a week.

Rinse and repeat.

Think how effective HitTailing can be when sustained over time. Yep, we've truly got an alternative to AdWords when you're discussing ways to acquire more qualified customers and audience to your website.

OK, how about the very latest? "Boutique PR Firm", which I just did on Saturday wasn't picked up yet. So, there are limits. We encountered TWO just in writing this post:

1. Some terms are still just too competitive, EVEN IF HitTail recommends that you write about them. While we COULD filter out these suggestions based on the difficulty you might encounter in pursuing them, they are by far the minority (we find), and leave them, because although you may not grab a top-spot instantly, it will still fortify your overall site, and stimulate subsequent serendipitous hits, albeit by the most determined searchers.

2. HitTail takes time. While you sometimes see HitTailing work its magic in only 2 days, don't bank on it. And even if your results DO get a top spot quickly, expect significant movement in that position over the following days or weeks. And HitTailing may not be enough to fortify those top positions. Think about making your content so link-worthy that you get those external links genuinely, without link-trading solicitation during the Google Honeymoon.

So in choosing the topic for today? I just took another HitTail suggestion of course. But I wrote the entire article first! Then, I went back to look for the best headline suggestion that matches the article. And even them, I did a quick bit of research to make sure the traffic was worth it, and that it didn't look unachievable.

Happy HitTailing! I'll try to put more concrete posts like this out there to counteract the marketing push I've been doing lately.

SEO, VC & Blogging - Comparing Events, Crowds & Comfort Levels

I attended Darren Rowse's ProBlogger meetup in NYC a few weeks back, and met almost everyone in the room. And he took over almost an entire floor of a popular New York City bar. I was totally comfortable and in my element, as folks like Keith Levenson of Vibrator.com went around popping promo stickers on people's shoulders. I was like "yeah... I can personally meet everyone in this room." Keith pretty much set the tone.

Then a few weeks later, I attended a Venture Capitalist event at a prestigious Union League sponsored by Red Herring. It was the Monday before Search Engine Strategies, and I was trying to get into social mode (sometimes difficult for me). High on ProBlogger, I felt it would be a breeze. Brrrrr, was I wrong. The button-down'd VCs were decidedly NOT the same profile as the rabid blogorati of the NYC area. And my education into how to work dramatically different crowds began. Not that it was bad. Just that it's not "me". I guess if it was, I'd be a VC and not one of the Web developer / executive cross-overs types that they like to fund.

I struck it off very well with the cross-over crowd, such as Laird Popkin, the CTO of Pando, a P2P torrent-like file sharer, with whom I could talk tech. Equally engaging was Angelo Valenti, an Executive and Entrepreneurial Coach, who immediately identified me as someone needing coaching, and gave the invaluable advice to play the "billionaire card". Those who look most out of place are often the ones with the best ideas and most money. They don't know you from a Web 2.0 billionaire. Use it. And if you wanted to play the Sesame Street game "which one of these is not like the other," there was the aventurista, Sarah Tavel, who turned out to be a VC AND a blogger. So, there were some nice highlights.

And of course, the host, Alex Vieux, the publisher of Red Herring, was an absolute pleasure to meet. But the majority of the room was an inscrutable mystery to me. I guess that's why I've hitched my apple cart to Connie's wagon.

And finally, there was SES, which while I only attended one day (Thursday), turned out to be one of the most auspicious events I ever attended. It's amazing the difference between being someone and not being someone can make. If I was a nobody at the VC event, and I was a pseudo-celebrity at the ProBlogger event, then I was half-way in-between at Search Engine Strategies. Fortunately, Danny Sullivan, Lee Odden, and a few of the other panelists knew me. But this mainstream marketing crowd curious about how to use search most decidedly doesn't know the "in the know cool sites."

Working the SES crowd was harder than ProBloggers (really our sweet spot), but WAY easier than the VC crowd. There's no intro like: here's a tool to build your natural search traffic. Oh yeah, it's free. The auspicious part was that I was meeting people left and right who I worked years previously to meet. I coincidentally met Neil Patel, "blogmaster" behind Guy Kawasaki's sites, who I've been in touch with on and off for years. This was from a random walk-up intro to a panelist, who in-turn recognized my name! I'd love to go on and name everyone, but let me just shout out to Stan Barett and Marshall Sponder, the look-alike's who don't know eachother, but whom I see at the same events, and sometimes have to wait until I hear an English accent before I say "Hi Stan" or "Hi Marshall".

Bottom line lesson of this blog: every event is like a life form manifestation of the event's host and their audience. Some you take to, as if they're old friends. Some are just tough to figure out. And some just take a little warming up to.

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.

TechMeme featured HitTail and I didn't know it

I just realized that HitTail was featured on TechMeme. That explains the popularity of that DownloadSquad review of HitTail. So, happily, we can add TechMeme to the likes of CNET, TechCrunch, BusinessWeek and PCWorld, all of which covered HitTail. It has been strangely resistant to SlashDot, Digg and WebMasterWorld. My theory is that the later sites are religiously opposed to big steps forward in the world of marketing, no matter how innovative and related to technology it may be. I would think they'd be interested in an AJAX datagrid that's handling stepping through billions of records in real-time. Or perhaps as the first real alternative to relying on Google AdWords for garnering publicity. It's all the more strange, since HitTail IS attracting spontaneous attention from the VC community, and the usual suspects of suitors who buy-out such start-ups. Perhaps it will not be until acquisition rumors are flying before the self-proclaimed "spin-adverse" social media outlets acknowlege HitTail. No worries. That makes all the more effective secret weapon for the rest of us.

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.