I’m writing from the road… on vacation in eastern North Carolina! Been driving most of the day… 🙂
I wanted to point out a very interesting new tool, HitTail, that I came across somewhere–somebody’s blog, but I can’t remember which! I’m going to have to start taking notes… If you haven’t head of the Long Tail by now, you might as well skip reading this article. Just kidding! Keep reading. But, if you have, go read Chris Anderson’s seminal work, The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More.
HitTail takes the concept of the Long Tail and applies it to the keywords used in search engines to find your site. By focusing on the less used terms, and more of them, you can build more traffic because you have less competition. Thus your site shows up closer to the top in the search results. See Vlad’s post, Example of HitTail Effectiveness. Be sure to follow the link back to the original post he has about HitTail.
The reason I’m so excited about it’s possibility, is that it helps me write! It gives me a clue as to what I should be writing about. I can write on most anything, as long as somebody points me in the right (write?) direction! Of course, preferably in my area of expertise. 😉 Vlad said he has been running it about three months and has several hundred suggestions. I’m barely getting any yet… but, I’m just getting started. As the flow chart on the HitTail site shows, I need to get more posts out to ‘seed’ the work. So, here I am writing when I should be sleeping. I’ll probably be up early tomorrow pounding out some words for my readers just to feed HitTail… and you! It’s motivating!
Be sure to checkout the HitTail blog too! Mike Levin really gets around keeping up on the comments in the blog world about HitTail. I expect he’ll even show up here. I’m looking for to the possibilities HitTail will bring.
Hi Dan,
Just wanted to clarify. I have over 700 keywords collected by Hittail. As you will see in the future not all of the keywords reported by Hittail are automatically made into “siggestion”. I will follow your blog to check out how is Hittail working for you. For me personally Hittail is a great find! Good luck with it and thanks for the link!
Takes me a few minutes. And usually I DON’T comment until a week or so, so some unbiased input can accumulate. I’ll make an exception in this case, since it spices it up in this case. Yes, my phone alerts me within minutes, if not seconds, of new posts in the blogosphere about HitTail. And I’m flattered you would take time from your traveling to make this post. And I really appreciate your writer’s block angle. We’ve been hoping more people would pick up on that.
Vlad- Thanks for the clarification. I really look forward to the possibilities that I see in HitTail. I’ll be sure to report on my results regularly as I start seeing more traffic.
Mike- I was just teasing you into commenting you know. Seems everywhere I found posts about HitTail, there you were! Hot on the trail… I didn’t pay attention to the timestamps too much, but I do recall seeing at least one other case where you had posted within minutes of the original post! This explains how. Great marketing, I can tell what business you are in! Keep it up. The writers block angle seemed to be such a natural application. Of course it doesn’t help me now. But, it will help me focus later.