Now Available: RSS Feed for Forum

For a while now, users of the HitTail forum have requested an RSS feed that they could subscribe to--one that would help them keep up with HitTail announcements and rapidly inform users of new posts. If you go to the forum you’ll now see an RSS icon, which looks like this:

By clicking on it, you’ll now be able to subscribe to a general feed which updates with new posts in any topic, along with the ability to subscribe to a feed for a specific topic.

If you use an RSS feeder, the Feed URL for the general feed is here. And that’s it. Now you can be updated on everything that happens over here at HitTail as soon as it goes up, in real time! OK, maybe not REAL time, but you get the point…

Blogging growth opportunity in niches

Danny Dover at SEOmoz recently posted a fascinating article on the state of blogs. There are great stats on who controls the top blogs as well as the gender breakdown and audience profile for high traffic blogs.

One of the key takeaways is that there is still a lot of room for growth, especially in non-Technology topics. In addition, there is a huge opportunity to develop new blogs targeted at women. The key here is to find a niche and develop a new audience in a unsaturated market.

Inspired bloggers out there can then use tools like HitTail to determine what are the hot topics people are interested in within a particular niche that will drive traffic to their blog.

Google Adwords Bidding Strategy

So, now that all you HitTailers are jumping on the AdWords bandwagon, what about a bidding strategy? Well, it turns out that the keyword lists generated by HitTail are naturally deemed relevant by Google, and therefore are able to get the ads to run even while lowering your CPC bid to ridiculously low levels. Sure, it might half or even quarter the visits you get compared to an unconstrained budget. But you pay a fraction per click. I've been able to lower my CPC level to .06 with great success on high volume sites. On lower volume sites, I might suggest the .11 level to get some traffic rolling. And of course, you can use the HitTail feature to flow these terms directly into your AdWords account without ever leaving HitTail.

Eventually, you'll want to go to AdWords and do some manual optimization of your campaigns. At this time, I suggest considering pulling your entire keyword list via the Export function, and import your keyword list en-masse into AdWords. AdWords will immediately deactivate keywords that don't meet it's criteria, or which exceed your CPC bid. That's fine, because it becomes something of an experimential churn campaign, where every day or every few weeks (depending on the volume of your site), you dump the keyword list in again. Don't worry too much about duplicates, as AdWords will automatically de-dupe. Over time, such campaigns become self-optimizing. But to really super-charge things, you start moving your best performing keywords into their own campaigns with more targeted copy in the ads, carefully selected landing pages, and bidding strategy.

Keyword Tool

The biggest change in the industry lately has been the dramatic rolling out of new features in the Google Adwords Keyword Tool, where they added monthly traffic volume estimates, the Google Trends tool, where they report website traffic numbers in uniques-per-day in an Alexa-like graph (log in for absolute numbers), and most recently with their Google Search Insights tool, which is like an interative Zeitgeist. To a lesser extent, some new features are rolling out in Webmaster Central. And contrary to popular wisdom, Microsoft has some of the best keyword research tools in the industry wrapped into Ad Center--but it's a pretty big learning committment to get to the point where you can use them. SpyFu remains the best tool, albeit expensive, for spying on your client's AdWords campaigns. And of course, HitTail, with it's new features including the rockin' feature where you can add new content to your blog directly from your To Do list (which I'm doing now) is hands-down the best way to identify the content-challenged sweet spots in your website, and the actual mechanism to publish the content. Of course, I'm biased.

Goodbye HitTail Basic, Hello TypePad and Blogger!

It's been a great two years so far and we want to thank everyone who has helped to get the word out. We can hardly believe ourselves that HitTail is already in use on over 35,000 websites worldwide. And with that success comes a new chapter in our service. As of Tuesday, we will no longer be accepting new sign ups for the free HitTail Basic service.

But wait! If you already have a HitTail Basic account, don't worry, because you'll continue to have access to the same service you have today. We're just putting up that velvet rope and marking off our early adopter VIPs. Only those who sign up after August 5th will have to pay for HitTail Plus or Premium. Of course, we hope our loyal users will also choose to upgrade too :)

Speaking of HitTail Plus, we would be remiss if we also did not mention our brand new feature. As of last week, paid subscribers have been able to blog about HitTail suggestions directly from the ToDo list interface. That's right, no more opening another window and going into Blogger or TypePad. Save your credentials and start blogging without leaving that addictive real-time HitTail dashboard. For those who are new to the service, feel free to try it out in the demo.

And finally, speaking of blogs, our own blog just surpassed 400 posts. Yes, we practice what we preach and you should too! So get blogging.

Why real time reporting matters for PPC advertising

Real-time reporting helps PPC managers identify trends before they become costly. Instead of waiting for Google AdWords reports, PPC managers can use HitTail to spot abnormal activity in their paid search campaigns in real-time. Watching the real time report in HitTail often shows clicks for broad match keywords that advertisers should not be bidding on or shows a discrepancy in clicks that HitTail records compared to what Google reports. This discrepancy can sometimes be attributed to click fraud.

Here are some examples of both scenarios:

1) HitTail identifies negative keywords that drive up the cost of broad match campaigns

Example - Martin Kelley used HitTail to discover that Google was misdirecting his ads which ended up saving his client $20K.

2) HitTail can detect click fraud

Sometimes there is a discrepancy between the number of clicks Google reports vs what appears in HitTail's real time report.

Example - David Kyle discusses his experience with HitTail detecting click fraud for his AdWords campaign. Recently, Google reported 6 clicks and HitTail reported only one in the same time period. David verified that the additional clicks were from a Chinese IP address that was sending fraudulent clicks to a geo-targeted campaign for a city in North Carolina. See this forum discussion and thread for more details.

The best part about this is the fact that you can make these observations way before your AdWords or Analytics reports become available. With this data, PPC managers can log in to their AdWords campaigns and make the necessary adjustments, potentially saving money for their client in wasted clicks that could go undetected without the use of HitTail.

For that reason alone, Pay Per Click managers should consider trying HitTail Premium to stay on top of their paid search campaigns in order to make adjustments in real time that could save money in the long run.

How to use HitTail suggestions

One of our most frequently asked questions at HitTail is "What do I do with these HitTail suggestions?". We created an FAQ on this topic but I'd like to create a list of all the different ways actual HitTail customers use their keyword suggestions.

Feel free to add your own ideas in the comments.

• Create a new blog post using the suggestion as the title / headline


• Create new pages or articles on your website targeting the suggested keywords (utilize article writing services such as the Content Spooling Network)


• Add the suggested keywords to a Pay Per Click campaign (this is now made easy with HitTail Premium)


• Use the keywords on your advertising or landing page


• Use the keywords in your email newsletters to your readers or customers


• Incorporate the HitTail keywords in your title tags and meta descriptions of existing webpages


• Buy a new website domain using HitTail suggestions


• Use HitTail keywords to determine product suggestions and stock new products in your eCommerce store


• Use keyword suggestions to tag your YouTube videos or del.icio.us bookmarks

We'd love to hear how you use your HitTail keyword suggestions!

HitTail is now a PPC Product?

So there you have it. I've been dropping hints for a few days now, but HitTail's premium service for driving down CPC has just been launched... and HitTail is entering into the world of AdWords campaign optimization. HitTail is now a PPC product.

Yes, it's true!

But how can that be? HitTail lands firmly on the free and organic side of search engine optimization. Isn't this some sort of betrayal suddenly releasing features designed to encourage you to plow even more money into pay-per-click? Isn't HitTail--the kooky company that always advocated freedom from PPC--reneging on its word?

The answer is No.

This is the creator of HitTail speaking, and after many months of managing AdWords campaigns, I'm here to tell you that HitTail methodology rocks the AdWords world--to the point where you can get a deal on the AdWords side that rivals PPC--and additionally have the satisfaction of managing campaigns that today's SEM companies can hardly even compete with. In my recent experience, I set up a "longtail" campaign in AdWords, and systematically moved the best words into this campaign, knowing that there was already SOME traffic on these words, but we weren't coming up on the first page of results. The idea with AdWords is to get these awesome longtail keywords WORKING FOR YOU RIGHT AWAY without even having to produce organic content for your site.

And it paid off in a big way... a very big way... a big enough way that me--one of the biggest advocates of better search results through blogging--to now also be an AdWords advocate...

...but only conditionally... on the condition of getting one over on AdWords.

What happens if you take the super-charged keyword lists provided by HitTail, where you know traffic is already occuring on your site, but not on page one, then you plug it into AdWords? The answer is you instantly get page on of search results (albeit in an ad) on words where some determined searchers went many pages in. So you suddenly tap into the exponentially greater number of people who never make it past page one, and a significant portion of these people click on ads. With effective keywords in-hand, instead of just moving them to your To-Do list and allowing them to unacceptably age, put them to work for you right away.

And the actual goal here is to lower your overall cost of acquiring customers (audience, visitors, whatever) by eliminating (at least temporarily), the most tedious and unlikely to occur part of HitTailing--namely, creating new website content. Now we still do encourage new website content as your long-term road to PPC freedom. But until you get that content out there, put the super-charged keyword lists to work for you.