Keywords Forever
Tuesday, March 13, 2007
The HitTail premium service is rapidly approaching. But don't worry. HitTail as you know it today will remain a free public service to bloggers everywhere seeking to amplify their voice in the noisy Web.
We will reserve announcement of the detailed feature list until closely before release. But there is one I want to talk about today in order to get you thinking about why and how HitTail works so well...
Keywords Forever.
Such simple words, and so much competitive advantage for HitTail users. This is the fundamental reason we're a writing suggestion tool, and not an analytics package. We record the keywords that have lead to your site--forever. And this makes other features of HitTail (like the writing suggestions) all the more powerful.
That's right. We have a growing list of keywords for each website using HitTail. And this long keyword list begins to act as a uniqueness filter. By this, we mean that we use the old list to filter the new list. That's why the keyword tab works like a first-time keyword radar system. We can tell the first time a particular keyword combination has led to your site--ever! (or at least since you've installed the HitTail code)...
And that's REALLY cool.
This sounds somewhat simple, but it makes all the difference in the world. No other service that I know of keeps the list of keywords leading to your site forever, so that you might zero in on the new words most quickly. The new keywords under the keywords tab are filtered based on all the words that have led to your site in the past. So everything there is TRULY new, and is keyword gold ore. That keyword gold ore is where the HitTail algorithms kick in and refine keyword gold--in the form of writing suggestions. So, everything you're looking at is new, and not the tired old stuff that you've looked at in your analytics software for years.
So when we say "Keywords Forever", we're talking about our ability to warehouse every keyword that ever led to your site, and use it as a real-time filter for new hits coming in. It's sometimes hard to wrap your mind around, but this saves you incredible amounts of time in your keyword research.
When choosing an analytics-like tool for deriving blog writing suggestions and alleviating writer's block, be sure to check if it's got the Keywords Forever feature, because without it, you're going to be considering the same terms over and over. We de-duplicate these terms early on, and respect your time.
While we will be attempting to preserve the Keywords Forever feature for our free users, we can assure it for our premium users. It's a subtle difference, but it definitely provides a one-of-a-kind advantage to online marketers worldwide.Labels: HitTail, HitTail Plus
Thursday, October 19, 2006
Connie Connors, and HitTail's Mike Levin
Ever wonder what we look like in person? Meet Connors Communications' founder and president, Connie Connors. Also meet Connors' in-house inventor of the new HitTail website optimization product that's starting to get a lot of attention in marketing circles.Labels: Connie Connors, Connors Communications, HitTail, HitTail Plus, Mike Levin
HitTail.com: PageRank of 5 in 4 Months
Friday, October 13, 2006
So, the HitTail.com was registered on June 6, 2006 and we're only at mid-October. In one third of a year, the PR firm of Connors Communications brought a site from a Google PageRank of 0 to a PageRank of 5. Not that PageRank is all that important in long tail optimization, but with all else being equal, if two sites target the same keywords, the one with the higher PageRank will win. So, it's nice to see it go so high so quickly.
This is also a testament to the marketing approach of saying to heck with link building. Just put out a superior product that everyone loves, and make some portion or version of it free. We have no affiliate programs. We haven't asked to trade links. People are just spontaneously linking to HitTail.com throughout the blogosphere. This is yet another reason why search engine optimization is really just a subset of the public relations industry. It's just that no one in PR or SEO really accept this fact yet.
Sure, one can argue that HitTail has been such a success organically because it appeals to the online-savvy crowd predisposed to linking. But that is only particularly true of HitTail because we are so early in the evolution of the new online media of citizen publishing. Give it a few more years, and the "superior product gets rewarded" strategy will work in just about every industry as those audiences go online. And link-building campaigns will be so last-century.
So the message here is that Connors practices what it preaches. We bring our own sites from brand-new unregistered domains to PageRank of 5 and search engine results out the wazoo in under 1/4 of a year, without even asking for a single link. Often, companies are guilty of the "cobbler's children have no shoes" effect. I'm here to tell you that my PR and SEO teams at Connors are as effective in garnering publicity for its own internally incubated technology as they are the handful of emerging technology companies that we take on as clients. And that will serve as one impressive modern PR case study.Labels: blog, Connors Communications, Google, HitTail, HitTail Plus, pr, seo
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posted by Mike Levin |
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High Tech Public Relations Savvy
Monday, September 18, 2006
I made a post on the HitTail site about high tech public relations savvy, and thought it appropriate to cross-link it here. Excerpt:
This technique can be quickly activated on your old system today, so you get all that traffic in the meantime that you would otherwise be leaving on the table. We're a PR firm that can discuss your Web strategies down to that level of detail. We have employees on staff who have programmed entire enterprise systems. Labels: HitTail, HitTail Plus, pr
The Buzz About PR 2.0 Firms & Technology
Sunday, July 23, 2006
It seems that PR companies "getting it" either consists of partaking in online dialogues via blogging, optimizing press releases, or word-of-mouth buzz. I went to a conference recently, and any time I would introduce myself as being from a PR firm, people immediately thought I was going to talk about the "buzz thing". Some of our peers out there that have done a very effective job of positioning PR as word-of-mouth bumble bees, real-time bloggers or press release optimizers.
While we believe in and partake in these practices, the PR industry has been so successful in getting these messages out, that it makes the challenge even more difficult for PR agencies that are technological innovators. Its one thing to be experts at using online tools, such as blog software or newswires, but it's an entirely different thing to have the insight and capacity to invent wholly new technologies and marketing methodologies.
And PR agencies such as Connors are doing exactly that with applications such as HitTail. And now that we have defined a new category of software, tools to help you write for the long tail of search, we have to get over the hurdle that we're branded as buzzers and bloggers and blasters... oh my!
HitTail fosters a decidedly softer sell that's more aligned to the true mission of PR--to get you publicity that you could never have paid for at any price--usually in the form of editorial coverage. You generally pay less for PR than large advertising campaigns, but the pay-off can be much greater. The favorite saying is what is a mention in The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal worth? Today, the equivalent is saying what's a top position in Google, Yahoo or MSN worth? PR and SEO are the same. And brilliant editorial coverage is what happens when the client's prospects FIND THEM in the due course of their research, vendor selection process, or the like. In other words, that taboo acronym: SEO, but made palatable to the mainstream marketers of the world.
So, the question is how does a PR agency formulatize the process of SEO? It needs the intimidating luggage that goes with that horrible acronym removed. And it needs to be executed in a reliable, confidence-building fashion, similarly to how the traditional process may involve positioning & messaging, SWOT analysis, pitching news to journalists, and staging newsworthy events.
PR's answer to online marketing is not merely making those same press releases more effective through search, though that helps. PR's answer is not just in opening a corporate blog and entering the online discussion, though that helps. And PR's answer is not merely in chatting it up online or off, though that helps. The answer is in incrementally and systematically dominating an entire conceptual area on the Internet. And since some conceptual areas are so difficult to penetrate in natural search, the answer is in finding the right starting point, carving out a niche, and continuing digging out from the niche in concentric circles until it grows into a crevice, then a cavern, then a canyon. This is not theory. It actually works. You can control a lot of quality traffic in your space this way.
HitTailing works because there's easy pickings out there in the long tail of natural search. If you pick a phrase that's at all off the beaten track and write about it in blogging software, you're almost assured a strong position in the search results. And it may pay off. The difficulty is in knowing where to begin and improving your odds. And a PR agency has the answer. A PR firm has such a deep strategic understanding of natural search that they were able to break out just a tiny piece of the SEO offerings that they offer to their clients, with that alone, potentially move the entire state of online marketing a large step forward.
The technology is necessary, filling a major missing hole in online marketing tools. Why? Because, if you begin in the wrong part of the long tail of keywords, you're going to be doing a whole lot of writing for nothing. But if you start in the right place, then you're going to start growing traffic and improve the accuracy in your decisions of where to go next in that endless long tail of potentially lucrative, but mostly time-wasting long tail of search. This technology is 50% automation, and 50% hard work, because you can't automate the craft of writing original content.
But I find myself constantly having to knock down the buzzing and the blogging and the news blasting hurdles, which were the first PR attempts to master online media. It has actually given the some SEM firm counterparts a lot of ammunition to discount PR agencies as limited in technical capabilities. As practitioners of warm & fuzzy relationship building, there's no way we can consult about search on a strategic level, some say. In fact, they plan on making the search discussion so technologically intimidating, that they scare away traditional agencies, and reduce the competition in the new media agency space.
Connors has actually made the deliberate decision to deliver paid-search through partners, and to focus instead itself on genuine editorial search coverage. This is the proper domain for PR, and is ever more widely acknowledged by industry observers as the most valuable company asset. Those who master natural search--especially ACROSS engines--are not beholden to anyone. As engines come and go, their asset and very strong posture will remain. With properly executed public relations, a strong presence in search is not the result of an advertising campaign that only lasts as long as you're buying the media. Instead, it persists, just as with the genuine reputation that comes from repeated exposure from trusted sources.
Connors has developed technology to do exactly that. It's different from the type of software you'll find in the SEM world, such as bid management tools, because it's not a media buy. It's a media seize--but in very small, smart increments. Results will be completely measurable, and over time, you can grab bigger and bigger pieces of the editorial media. Eventually, such small grabs will build enough critical mass within your site that making the big keyword grabs becomes possible.
What do I mean by that? Well for example, search for PR firm in any major search engine. Connors was not able to achieve the first page position across all major engines over night, even though it's the subject matter of the main homepage. We first had to start with smaller concepts. We used HitTailing to build up the content of our website and our blog. And over time, the concept of PR firms kept coming up, and natural links started to occur to us from people discovering our site, and they would reliably refer to us as a PR firm, without any prodding on our part. It's a 100% organic process that led from obscure HitTailing to spot-on cross-engine top positions on a paydirt primary keyword that PR firms much larger than us would kill for.Labels: blog, Connors Communications, Google, HitTail, HitTail Plus, MSN, outreach, pr, SEM, seo, Yahoo
Putting Your AdWords into Stealth Mode
Thursday, July 06, 2006
With the recent Yahoo settlement of the click fraud case, the flurry of follow-up news is coming out, including a study just announced by Outsell, Inc. Their survey states that 37 percent of marketers reduced their click-based advertising, and that the money paid in fraudulent clicks is about $800 million... compared to the $7 billion size of the industry, that's a sizable percentage if it is to be believed.
Are you planning to cut back your paid search spending? Perhaps we can recommend an alternative. If you want to get high-quality click through and conversion, advertise on keywords other than the obvious "benchmark terms" known by you and your competitors, then switch from broad matching to narrow matching. In this way, you keep running your PPC campaigns, but they go into "stealth mode" in the long tail of search.
But how do you choose such keywords? Well, Connors just happened to develop a tool for natural search engine optimization which is proving to be an invaluable asset in improving AdWords campaigns when you import the natural search keyword list. How is this possible? Your cost per click is driven down in Google as your relevancy is deemed to be improved. This is why you have to remove terms that are underperforming in order to "fine tune" your campaigns. We have HitTail users reporting campaign improvements doubling, from 3% to 6% click-through. Using your long tail keywords in your paid campaign appears to trigger off some sort of "relevancy" magic that both improves performance and drives down campaign cost.
So, use HitTail for a few weeks, and export the natural optimization keyword lists using HitTail's new export tool. Plow them into your AdWords campaigns. Switch from broad to narrow matching, and watch your PPC campaign go into stealth mode, and confound your competition who probably doesn't have the time or resources to monitor on more than a fixed list of well known benchmark terms.
This of course has the secondary advantage of helping you start to fix your state of natural search results. The same terms that will fine-tune an AdWords campaign are often excellent subject matter for new blog posts, which will in turn improve your natural search results and further reduce your exposure to click fraud risk by simply making a larger portion of your clicks into the free variety. It's a form of hedging your bets.
And this answers the two notions that have been nagging at the back of the minds of online marketers for some time: is click fraud happening on my site? And isn't doing well in natural search a better online initiative? If you answer Yes to both of these questions, then the time is perfect for you to check out the new HitTail tool that is advancing the state of online marketing.Labels: Adwords, Connors Communications, Google, HitTail, HitTail Plus, Yahoo
Getting Your Site Indexed in One Month
So, the HitTail domain was registered only 1 month ago. Yet, it is already at the top of Google on some limited keywords, such as longtail marketing. Sure, it's obscure, but obscure keywords that actually are searched-on and convert are exactly the point of HitTailing. But maybe more significant is the fact that today is July 6th, and the HitTail domain only became active on June 6th. And yet, we're included, and indeed at the top of results, on many Google searches already. This flies in the face of conventional SEO wisdom, that you should expect up to a 6-month waiting period, especially on brand new domain names. What's going on here?
I'm particularly interested, because a story got pushed to the front page of Digg yesterday about getting your site indexed before you launch. The Digg crowd immediately lambasted the poster for putting up common sense information, being self-promotional, and generally spamming Digg. This is in marked contrast to the over 700 diggs the story received by the time I read it. There seems to be some disparity between the information that general Diggers value, vs. those who take the time to post comments. Because they're at a "democratic" news site (not really), they seem to already be interested in new ways of propagating news. Yet any story even touching on alternative online marketing methods, especially SEO, results in the geek game of pile-on the spammer. It appears that spam is only permissible if your agenda is the furthering of the Linux cause, in which case no story is too small (I got Debian running on my wristwatch, etc.)
One particularly unenlightened commenter had this to say:
"Hmmm. Maybe the highly intelligent person responsible for this article needs to find out about the Google Age-Delay feature. This prevents any new domain name being indexed and listed with any authority in the first 6 months of going live. This is to prevent domain spammers from using multiple domains to span a single site, or to create so many links between "fake" domains that the google PageRank is spammed into providing BS rankings. So - no - this doesn't work with Google unless your domain is already 6 months old - by which time it will be well and truly indexed. Kinda stupid really.
It's like these SEO companies that charge $70,000 to do a job which takes one guy about 2 days work, and none of it technical. [Deleted] useless. And the people who hire them: [deleted]." This commenter's notions are so incorrect, I don't know where to start. First off, brand new domains can receive top Google rankings in under 1 month. We've proven and documented that. Whatever "age delay" feature there may be in Google is merely a dampening effect to slow down the influence of suddenly appearing sites. It follows the same "crawl-to-crawl" iterative process documented in their patent applications from last year, meaning that brand new sites are diluted in their influence merely by virtue of not having built up any momentum.
There was some fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) introduced based on the large number of chances wrought by the updates nicknamed Jagger, then BigDaddy. But the core principles of BackRub are still as intact today as they were during the earliest days of Google behind the walls of Stanford. We know that through constant monitoring. The commenter's opinions are some speculative notions that were espoused around the time of these updates to explain why so many people were having difficulty getting new domains indexed. We had the same issue, and overcame it in the 6-month period the user stated. But the 6-month delay rule can not be used as a generalization.
A website's inclusion and positive standings in the results can be jump-started by sudden worldwide organic linking to a site in a way that is impossible to fake, such as happened with HitTail. I'm sure this is Google's way of not excluding sites that become significant suddenly in a very short timeframe. Were Google to not include such sites, it would itself appear not relevant. The Google default search is in itself a news source driven by the wisdom of crowds. And the crowd can accelerate relevancy and natural inclusion.
The point the commenter makes about 2-days of work for one person to do non-technical work... well, I'd like to see the commenter fix such a site with 10,000+ pages run by enterprise content management systems that never had search friendliness as a criteria in the first place. This is often the case. In fact, in addition to the sites being hopelessly broken from a search perspective, the organizations themselves are often riddled with politics--particularly between the marketing and the IT people. SEO is highly technical, sometimes requiring coding and implementing completely new "presentation layers" in existing systems, and sometimes requiring rapid and intelligent tagging of thousands of resources. On top of the technical projects, there is an equal amount of finesse in building consensus among all the stakeholders, so that the projects actually can get done.
Domains can be registered and brought to the top of Google results in under a month. It's easiest to do this when the website itself is graced with sudden worldwide popularity, and the inevitable globally dispersed organic linking that accompanies such popularity. It is also easiest to accomplish when the targeted keywords are not of the most competitive sort, but rather are long tail keywords, such as those recommended by HitTail. If you're looking for the edge in online marketing, ignore the conventional wisdom, especially if it's coming from Digg commenters. And that's a generalization you can count on.Labels: digg, Google, HitTail, HitTail Plus, seo
PR Firm Makes it to Museum of Modern Betas
Monday, July 03, 2006
That's right, a product created by a NYC PR firm has reached Saurier Duval's clever and popular Museum of Modern Betas site... twice! Thank you, Saurier for recognizing the value of re-listing us since our name change. It will help us a lot in getting established.
For a variety of reasons, we changed our name from MyLongTail to HitTail. And in doing so, lost some initial momentum. The MyLongTail beta site was becoming linked-to at an increasingly rapid rate. The domain acquired a Google PR of 2 within days of the beta announcement--rare for a brand-new domain. So it was with this sense of urgency that we wanted to get the renaming over with as quick as possible.
Thankfully, we are rapidly regaining our momentum, and just about everyone who blogged about us during our beta release in June has made follow-up posts with our new name. It's in this spirit of gratitude that I'm making this post, to acknowledge the important role that Saurier and site's like his play in giving new beta sites their fair chance in the new Darwinian landscape of Web 2.0... whoops, Web Infinitiy Plus One, betas. Now, if we could just show up in O'Someone's Radar and Michael Arrington's blog. All in due time, I suppose.
Incubating HitTail inside of a New York public relations firm has been an interesting experience, balancing the needs of clients against the desire to extract and abstract a tiny piece of the secret recipe that gives us our edge--then, altruistically giving it away to the world. We're doing this in great part because it is going to be a big public relations win, in and of itself. But we're also doing it with great care, so we do not upset either our Clients, to whom we provide a far greater superset of services, or the search engines themselves, for whom we wish to make their jobs easier and not harder.
The process has also been an exercise in intellectual acrobatics. The connection between PR and SEO was absolutely clear in my mind when I joined Connors. But the way to turn it into a universally appealing product that was not too techie, and which could also scale to meet the potentially massive worldwide demand was not. That took some thought. But we're there now.
Almost everything about HitTail is innovative and counter-intuitive. It hearkens back to the days when Google first started making the rounds outside Stanford. Remember your first reaction? It was probably "so what". It definitively took a few open-minded tries to understand why this stripped-down, seemingly rehash site was indeed something special. It was a culmination of simplicity, relevance and performance at a time that AltaVista and others left an opening so big you could drive a GooglePlex through.
And so it is with HitTail. But instead of the opening being made by anti-search Portal-centrism, the opening is made in the broad divide between the disciplines of natural search engine optimization (intimidating even just to say) and pay-per-click search engine marketing. In other words, the gap between SEO and SEM.
This gap is colossally larger than the chatter on the Internet would lead you to believe. One field is full of technical and editorial projects with built-in inertial resistance. The other field is becoming more like media-buying every day, as analytics increasingly tie back into the campaign / bid management software in order to auto-optimize campaigns, thereby removing the once-technical barriers; in other words, easy!
Are you following? SEO, the free and natural part, remains difficult and rife with politics and inertial resistance. SEM on the other hand, the $7 billion industry part, is becoming easier and more automated due to the financial incentives to make it so. In between lies the void. Atmospheric pressures collide, and there, inside the tornado, lies HitTail.
It is with this level of strategic thinking that we created the HitTail product. It is with the desire to fill this void that we named it with a noun, a verb, and a present participle. You use the HitTail site, therefore, you HitTail. This makes you a HitTailer engaged in the practice of HitTailing. And it is neither the intimidating uncertainties of SEO, nor directly paying homage at the alter of G/Y/M.
And because HitTail is solid, delivering on exactly what it promises, and is adding features with the same cautions "stay close to core" approach as Google, we're not getting shoved into the crowded analytics space (the "portals" of today). Also, similar to Google, our service is so radically different, without seeming so at first glance, due to something very analogous to PageRank that lurks behind the scenes--something that makes our writing suggestions super-charged for natural search effectiveness.
We are effectively taking a practice that many of the most advanced, top-of-their-field SEOs have long engaged in, and making the average marketing Joe able to do the same thing. But this is the nature of all technologies. They are arcane and difficult-seeming at first, but then someone comes along and cost reduces, improves ergonomics and markets it for the masses: like Henry Ford. Or like Prometheus bringing fire to the people. It's a recurring theme, and is inevitable.
But we are not simply making a high-end SEO method as it existed available to everyone. We are adding our own special formula. Just as Larry Page realized that hyperlinking was the equivalent of academic citations, and was a key indicator of relevance in what was to become PageRank, so have we come to understand the key indicators of what is bound to work in terms of natural search.
And THAT is what makes the HitTail data so special, and using HitTail such a source of competitive advantage.
So, on this note, we'll end this blog post that started as a simple thanks to Saurier Duval and the Museum of Modern Betas. It's a real sign of the times when a PR firm in New York City can incubate one of these puppies itself, from idea to execution, instead of waiting for it to come in as a Client.Labels: blog, Connors Communications, Google, HitTail, HitTail Plus, pr, seo, The Long Tail
PR Isn't Adapting, It's Leading
Sunday, July 02, 2006
Where does Public Relations' ability to embrace new technologies and business models come from, where traditional advertising channels are struggling to hold onto their piece of the global marketing budget pie? I think the ability to adapt and jump on unorthodox approaches to generating publicity is just part of the DNA of public relations. Let me explain.
The notion that a company can announce its own activities as newsworthy is in itself a radical and relatively new notion. It brings up church and state issues in journalism. None-the-less, there is no denying that the activities of companies impact society, current events, and even our personal wealth with how more people are invested in stocks. And where high-tech is concerned, it is all the more so, because it reflects upon the overall human condition. The constant flow of nanotube news comes to mind, and how we're inching ever-towards manufacturing on the molecular level. Pure science and industry have never been so closely coupled.
And it is this technology itself that is disrupting traditional media businesses. As data flows more freely, and distribution barriers fall, special interest channels rise, and reaching your audience becomes simultaneously cheaper and more challenging. It's cheaper, because your information is just bits that fly over the ether at virtually no cost. It's more challenging, because anyone can do this, and audiences are organizing and reorganizing themselves into ever-shifting ad hoc communities. Targeting them is more like programming an intelligent missile rather than aiming an arrow.
It is in this environment that public relations shines, and the "old formulas" of press releases and pitching transform into new formulas of blogging, email and social networking. The three big networks of ABC, CBS and NBC are forced to co-exist with countless cable networks, and now even user contributed content over sites like YouTube. Print has undergone similar fragmentation, and additionally has to compete with free RSS feeds that are readable now on the average mobile phone. There is no equivalent today of the ABC, CBC and NBC... well, almost no equivalent.
Search has elevated itself into a mainstream media, and today's giants are Yahoo, Google and MSN, constituting an eerily similar "big 3" resemblance to TV networks. In the runners up, you've even got the media mavens of QVC fame in Barry Diller of Interactive Corp and Ask, and Rupert Murdoch of Fox and MySpace. While you can't achieve similar saturation with a simple media buy as you could on the big TV networks 15 years ago, you can be sure that virtually your entire audience will be visiting Yahoo, Google or MSN some time soon. And you can "rig" the system to deliver your message at exactly the right moment... when... they... search!
It's like today's equivalent of the big-3 networks have an ultra-efficient method of delivering advertising, where you the advertiser never has to pay until the moment you know your intended audience is actually interested and predisposed to your message. And this form of media is competing for the same global marketing budget as TV and print. It is more like a redistribution of these fixed marketing dollars than it is growing or shrinking of advertising budgets. And public relations is uniquely suited to deal with these shifts.
While public relations does have a "formula" per se, involving press releases and pitching, it has always had a more versatile word-of-mouth and publicity aspect that revels in unorthodoxy. It is the unexpected or the extreme that can make a grab for the "free" editorial space that exists in all media. On TV, it's the equivalent of news spots and guest appearances. In print, it's usually the subject-matter of the main articles. And on the Internet, it is both the viral word-of-mouth thing, AND the "natural" results in search.
This is contrary to much of the message that the "inner circles" of the public relations industry are repeating these days. Much of the talk centers around how the traditional formula involving press releases is changing, or how blogging is such a powerful method of engaging in the public dialogue. While I wholeheartedly agree with these notions, I also think that they are missing the big picture by such a broad mark that I had to develop a product by way of responding.
And the HitTail product is Connors Communications way of throwing its hat into the ring. The field of public relations is not merely adapting to these media changes; it is leading. Public relations is not merely keeping itself relevant, it is educating the rest of the world on what it means to be relevant in the new media landscape. Public relations is not merely struggling to reproduce the big viral marketing wins of years past, it is creating brand new methods of virally disseminating a message.
Indeed, HitTailing is like solving simultaneous equations in a way that produces results already described by detractors as "too good to be true." It provides your corporate blogging strategy and your free search hit strategy in one master stroke. "Too good to be true" is quickly becoming the strongest argument among HitTailing naysayers. Think about that. The only things standing between us moving forward the entire state of Marketing are keeping pace with demand, and convincing users that "too good to be true" sometimes IS true.
This is an admirable accomplishment indeed, both for Connors Communications and the field of public relations as a whole. The very companies that stood by and watched as new businesses incubated from operations like Idealab are now able to become their own incubators, their own Angels, and their own Venture Capitalists. For Connors, it was the culmination of about two years of providing these services as a public relations value-add, realizing they had something that could only achieve its fullest potential if let lose in the Web 2.0 ecosystem, and so it has.
So, where multimillion dollar media buys can still allow you to achieve saturation of a sort on today's equivalent of the big-3 networks (PPC campaigns on Yahoo, Google and MSN), the equivalent of getting onto the Ed Sullivan Show or American Idol is HitTailing. It costs you nothing more than the work of putting yourself in the right place at the right time to be discovered, doing it by piecing together the minute clues left for you by your past website visitors.
This unorthodox thinking is something that has always been characteristic of the public relations industry. Sometimes it has taken the form of glitzy stunts that capture the news cameras. Other times, it takes the form of stunning acts of generosity and altruism by PR clients. Very often, it takes no form at all, merely being an invisible influence over what companies and stories are favorably covered. When PR is at its finest, you don't know it is there at all. And so it is that the free and practical alternative to paying for search hits was born in the offices of a New York PR firm, and is now suitable for use by every marketing department in every company in the world.Labels: blog, Connors Communications, Google, HitTail, HitTail Plus, MSN, Myspace, pr, Yahoo, Youtube
Friday, June 30, 2006
HitTail - A Practical Alternative To Paying For Search Hits
Welcome to HitTail, a practical alternative to paying for search hits--and a free service to all low-to-medium traffic sites.
Connors Communications, the company bringing it to you is the PR firm that launched Amazon.com and Priceline. We worked with GoTo.com in the early days, helping to establish the pay-per-click industry. And now, we're doing it again... but this time through the long tail of natural search.
What is The Long Tail? It's a notion popularized by Wired Magazine Editor-in-Chief, Chris Anderson, implying that less popular items collectively account for large amounts of business. Here, the items in green outnumber the most popular items in red.
Initially, this concept was great for online music stores with no physical inventory, so their library was impossibly large, compared to their retail counterparts. But soon, the concept was equally embraced by pay-per-click firms, managing massive keyword campaigns.
But a dirty little secret is that long tail strategy is even better when applied to natural search than PPC... where all the less popular search terms already account for the largest amounts of traffic. We just take it to the next level.
What's natural search? It's the portion of the search results that people come to the search engines for... shown here in green. It's the equivalent of editorial content... while sponsored pay-per-click results are the equivalent of advertisements. This advertising / editorial mix is characteristic of most media, maintains trust, and we expected to continue.
And as a PR firm, we believe that natural search is better... because it's the equivalent of real world reputation. Securing a listing HERE is the best deal in marketing, with the lowest possible cost of customer acquisition--even lower than PPC. It's like landing free editorial coverage in mainstream media. Every visitor is partially pre-qualified and in is in a receptive state.
The mission of our new HitTail service is to lower your reliance on paid ads while increasing your qualified visitor traffic from natural search... in a sustainable, long-term, cross-engine fashion.
The problem was that until now, no product has been able to deliver this without incurring some sort of penalty... keeping it out of the world of mainstream marketing. HitTailing changes all that. By knowing what’s “almost working” for you, you can grow the mouth of your opportunity funnel while respecting the search engines, and being good net citizen.
The technique has already been used to help many Connors' clients create "super-niches". For any journalists listening, we may be able to get them to talk.
So, whose a candidate to become a HitTailer?
• Anyone who wants to stop paying to acquire visitors
• Anyone who currently has a pay-per-click ad campaign
• Basically, the marketing departments of every company in every country of the world
It's an easy value prop: Use HitTail to quickly identify lucrative new topics, and apply all that saved energy to actually WRITING about the topic. You thereby help increase sales and lower marketing costs. This “formulatized” approach is safer and more long-lived than other methods. It's blogging with insight.
How is this accomplished? HitTail tells you WHAT to write about for growing an effective long tail of natural search...
Watch in real-time as the search hits come in... and get addicted to the black river of keywords that occurs in any healthy site. Learn which keywords HitTail suggests that you write about.
The HitTail site actually shows you the growing long tail of your site. Far into the tail, and for reasons that are not obvious, is the best and most often overlooked data. Connors has developed a unique way to identify these words and turn them into short, actionable lists! Using HitTail is like us doing all the mining dirty work, and handing you the gems.
By optimizing on these gems, you take results found many pages in and bringing them to the top--exposing much more of your site overall. Determined searchers are thereby cluing you into where you should locate yourself for each future iteration.
Each HitTail tab lets you quickly review and pair-down lists, until you have an editorial checklist of topics that will drive traffic.
The first three tabs are only there for their good looks. It's in the Suggestions tab that the HitTailing magic resides. Evaluate new words that appear under this tab, and choose to write about them... or not. Move only the good ones to the To Do tab, which simply works as an editorial checklist. Check them off this list once you've actually used them as the title topic of a blog post or other content on your site, such as FAQs or press releases.
It's that simple. That's HitTailing. It works.
Keeping this up over time results in the snowball effect. A site that snowballs in size and quality over time is rewarded by nearly all search engines. HitTailing helps this happen at a faster rate than with blogging alone. Seeing the results takes much longer with Yahoo than with Google and MSN, but your patience will pays off. Overall, this strategy takes longer than PPC. But PPC is like paying rent, while at the end of HitTailing, you own the house.
How does HitTail know what terms are "almost" working on your site? Just like analytics software, we provide a snippet of code to be inserted into your template. The moment the tracking code is in place, you will see your search hits occurring. Notice the real-time black river of keywords.
This alone has driven many a HitTail user to detox.
So, how do you get started down this alluring trail?
Simply, go to www.hittail.com, click the login link and register. Put the snippet of code in your template, and volia!
It's important to remember that HitTail is NOT analytics software. We are not tracking individual users or conversions. We just do suggestions... bluntly stating: "If you write it, they will come" This deceptively simple process is off-putting to some who love pouring over analytics. That's fine. They're in the best position to see the results of HitTailing, as opposed to being the practitioners.
But for those who see the magic, we've provided what we think is the fastest way for you to feel the love. The sooner you get started, the better it works.
So, what's your next step?
You can give it a try by clicking the login in link and signing up as a beta tester.
You can spread the word... or keep it as your SEO secret weapon. You decide.
Thanks for listening, and we hope to see you join us soon.Labels: Connors Communications, Google, HitTail, HitTail Plus, MSN, pr, seo, The Long Tail, Yahoo
I HitTail, You HitTail
Wednesday, June 28, 2006
We chose a wonderful name for the new Connors Web 2.0 killer app, and the positive quotes being left all over the Internet are telling the story. And that's all while we're in the first few weeks of a very quiet beta soft launch. I only just announced the service at a few forums specializing in "search engine optimization" and registrations have been almost doubling every week ever since. We've got our scaling plan all worked out, and we expect to make a very big splash in the worlds of public relations and marketing.
Our name implies that we are a noun, verb and present participle. Visit the HitTail site where you can HitTail. You will be HitTailing, and that makes you a HitTailer.
Another major accomplishment was taking some very obtuse concepts and making them understandable to the world. Chris Anderson is doing a big favor for us by mainstreaming the Long Tail concept, which is one of the principles at work behind the HitTailing process. But also, we have been able to take our original PowerPoint demo and Flash-ify it for a much livelier, more engaging experience. At the end, you're like "oh, of course!" And THAT is a huge accomplishment for something that one could hardly wrap ones' mind around a few months back.
So in a few months, I expect a lot more folks will be joining us as HitTailers, looking at search hits that occurred on their sites as unique events to be learned from as assuredly as if someone slipped a note into a suggestion box. In a very real way, it is like W. Edward Deming's principles of total quality management (TQM) applied to website content. Who knows what keywords to target better than your most determined Website visitors who actually worked hard to find you?
Take their advice, and make it easier for everyone the next time.Labels: Connors Communications, HitTail, HitTail Plus, The Long Tail
Writing for Search Engine Optimization
I've written before about the importance of writing in an SEO strategy. Recently, I haven't been the only one authoring online content. As part of the latest Connors offering, HitTail, Mike has been busy blogging about its creation, progress and uses. He has worked on explaining the product and in the process, starting to show up on some very useful keywords.
I'd like to mention this because it's a great way to back up a launch. In addition to gaining top rankings for important search terms, it also helps to manage brand image. If you search Feedster right now, you will find articles from SEO Scoop and other sites mixed in with all the HitTail blog entries that Mike has been writing. Any issue brought up, like whether or not the site will always be free, is quickly answered by a blog post on the product site, with an official response. Any questions are either anticipated and covered or answered once they're brought up elsewhere. In this way, all feedback is encouraged and any concerns addressed, making it a very flexible, receptive, and active launch.
I just wanted to bring this up because I've been following Mike's blogging and think it's a great example of what we're working to do here with search engine optimization writingLabels: blog, Connors Communications, HitTail, HitTail Plus, Mike Levin, seo
Best PR Firm in NYC
Wednesday, June 07, 2006
Please excuse this VERY SHORT post. I'm making a point about PR 2.0, search engine optimization, and Connors Communications' new product "HitTail" (previously MyLongTail). I will link to an explantion of the point of this post in the comments section in a few weeks.Labels: Connors Communications, HitTail, HitTail Plus, pr, The Long Tail
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