My favorites are:

How to read minds - as if Google could tell the answers to that.

Better than google – as if Google would tell the answers to that.

How does google see my site - Yes, as a outlet for Adsense ads of course.

Now, some gems from my own site:

Blog nightmare – really my site isn’t that bad is it? I can explain. I posted about this cartoon by Dilbert.

First time buyers picky picky – almost like a James Bond movie from the 60′s

Close encounters of third kind sound bites – well, I know blogging is alien to some people but come on, it doesn’t bite. It is strictly vegetarian. : )

I had the opportunity to hear CC Chapman expound on audio recording devices and pod-casting techniques. He is one of the first pod-casters I followed with his excellent Managing the Grey. I used to live in Boston for a few years and his show came out of Babson Bentley College in Waltham. The very first podcast I became a fan of was The Hobson and Holtz Report. Another podcast about public relations. I guess PR people excel at talking in an engaging way.

Later at the after party at Victory Brewpub I had a chat with another early pioneer, one of the first video bloggers, Steve Garfield. His original show is The Carol and Steve Show which is a travelogue roundabout Boston with his wife. Very gracious and down to earth. That was a thrill. I tiped him off to using HitTail for tracking long tail terms searchers used to find his sites. Maybe he will discover interesting insights.

Check this video by Steve with Kathryn Jones about 35, her “compelling, character rich, plot driven, scripted webisode to be broadcast LIVE (starting Sept 19) over the internet” at Synchronis.tv. Kathryn is full of energy and is excited about this production that will be filmed with three Panasonic DVX100′s and switched live with a Tricaster Studio.

The session Thinking Like a Producer by Joel Mark Witt from the Maryland Zoo was informative and humorous. Especially filming the camel rides. [Does the Philly Zoo have that?] Take aways: tell a story, create a cinematic moment(change in style), know your audience. You will need release forms for on camera people. He pointed out that 95% of video pod-casting is in getting quality audio. People can put up with varying video quality but if they can’t make out what you are saying you are done for.

Chris Penn spoke at the session Social Networking 101. Social networking sites are software tools where people are the network. FaceBook is still mostly college students with strong collaboration groups. 300,000 new people a day! Be sure to read the terms of service agreement. Most state that they have rights to whatever you upload, so don’t put original artwork that you want to sell elsewhere.

The goal therefore is to get people to visit your own domain where you are in control. Get an email address, sell an ebook or seminar etc. So SN sites should be written with slant to entice the click. For branding reasons, keep your name tag the same at all your SN sites. People may just look you up on the same term at different sites.

People on mySpace are taking their network private so can’t access unless know one of the members. Twitter is good for interaction, get known.

Spoke with Larry Genkin, publisher of the excellent new magazine Blogger and Podcaster. You know an industry is coalescing when specialized trade magazine appear. Every attendee got a free copy of the glossy print version. Read it online.

Attended a session by Apple system engineer Michael Wolf on the new version of Garage Band. When I get my next PC, those gorgeous 24″ iMac’s, the first thing I want to delve into is Garage Band.

Oliver Picher, a PR expert I met recently before PodCamp, won an iPhone at the closing session raffle. Check out his report.

Whew! And I missed the live Best Damn Tech Show,Period production on Sunday.

Other wrap ups: Indy Hall , Flicker group, Search marketing Gurus

Day 2: bliptv

One of the amazing trends I’ve discovered in watching the HitTail discussion on the Internet is how Google Analytics and HitTail so often get invoked in the same breath, such as comments from The-Secret and shopgirl.

While Google analytics is statistics, which gives you the typical top-10 lists, HitTail is on the other hand, based on anecdotal and empirical evidence –working much like a private eye piecing together clues. Recently, I was slammed by a HitTail user accusing us of not really being a longtail tool, because we stop 350 keywords in, and the long tail hardly even starts at that point. I humbly reminded him that the “My HitTail” tab was only one of five –and actually the least-important one at that.

That’s right!

We only made that long tail graph to demonstrate to people how things JUST START TO GET INTERESTING in the tail, and how much attention is improperly spent on the head, where you’re already performing well! So, I added some text to the bottom of the chart to make sure people get the subtle message of how the data displayed in the chart is actually UNIMPORTANT!

The fact that we’re not Web analytics software, applying statistics to the data is what makes people so addicted to HitTail. We’re not insulating you from the data or interpreting it for you. We’re merely zeroing in on serendipitous events that happen to be handing over competitive intelligence. It’s not some derivative of this event that’s important. It’s the event itself–that someone found your site on such-and-such a term, but they worked really hard to find you–usually deep in the results.

This tells you two things:

1. You CAN be found on that term. Hence, the value of identifying the first time anyone ever found your site on a particular term. It demonstrates POTENTIAL–like surveying for new oil fields.
2. There’s a bunch of crap ahead of you in the search results that likely did not satisfy the searcher, or else they would have stopped sooner.

So, merely by virtue of using HitTail, you’re simultaneously surveying for new fields of website traffic “oil”, and you’re verifying that no one already has a strong claim to that property. There’s no waiting for the polar icecaps to melt to claim your Internet gold. You don’t have to battle Russia, Canada, the U.S. and Denmark for North Pole natural resource rights. All you have to do is choose an already-search-optimized publishing platform, such as Blogger, SquareSpace, TypePad or WordPress, and take HitTail’s writing suggestions.

It’s that easy.

Highlights: Business Week survey says executives believe investments in search marketing has the best ROI of all marketing activities.

Blogs are the “human voice of marketers”.

Long tail optimization. David shows us HitTail. I’ve come across this too, and want to implement it as soon as I can. It monitors your search terms, and mines the fragments…the search phrases with one or two hits…and identifies the trends in these aggregated, unique phrases. Looks very useful, and last time I looked it had a free basic version. I expect it is much easier to use and more effective than the Excel app I built last semester to aggregate and categorize keyphrases from my AWStats.

Search is more than having good keywords and site structure. The “inter” in internet is becoming a powerful force, and behaving in ways that we didn’t see just a few years ago. It’s an evolving, rich area of challenge and opportunity that warrants a little extra homework creative experimentation on the part of marketers and business owners.

Social media integration. Possible linkups could be search, to the official site, to the blogs, which goes back to the site. The site may lnk out to social networks, which link back; likewise with the video sites…and they ALL go back to the search engine. Did you get that? The point–there is no single path to you, and no single source for your information. Tie it all together and increase the chances that people will find the things you want them to see.

Think outside the search box!

Good food for thought. That reminds me. Have you set up your LinkedIn profile yet?
Read this tip sheet from Guy Kawasaki on how to maximize the traffic to your site with a properly set up LinkedIn profile. Hint: it’s all about the anchor text.

If you want some link love let me know. I have 1.3 million in my network. I’d love to hear your experience with LinkedIn so please comment away.

A key aspect of long tail success is piggy backing on the hits. Hits are not going away. But they are not the only game in town anymore. Chris uses examples from Amazon showing how they use analysis of buying patterns to recommend other books or songs you may like.

IF YOU LIKE BRITNEY, YOU’LL LOVE…Just as lower prices can entice consumers down the Long Tail, recommendation engines drive them to obscure content they might not find otherwise.

What does this have to do with business blogging?

A key maxim of Internet marketing is to tap into what people are already searching for. Let the “MSM” or “mainstream media” generate the awareness and inquiries. That is their forte. The business blogger can find out what is hot related to their field by monitoring an alert created in Google News. If you can tie into a general news item all the better.

See, you have a secret weapon. While other SEO’s are sweating over optimizing static pages for past historical high volume keywords you are in instant karma mode. Read the news that morning, write a post in your blog about it and the relevancy to your business. Be sure to title the post using the same keywords that would bring up the original article.

Wham! By afternoon you post is intercepting the same keyword searches.

Even better, use HitTail to monitor the long tail search traffic this post generated and use its suggestions for another round.

Free organic traffic, at your beck and call.

Well we all shine on
Like the moon and the stars and the sun

John Lennon

The days of passive Internet use for basic information and day-to-day research have been eclipsed by an active Web that can be used to drive traffic, build awareness and establish credibility.

Mastering the intricacies of this new generation of the Web, and the even more detailed intricacies of search engines, are critical elements for creating, maintaining and growing your presence online.

The key to overcoming this terribly difficult process is effective search engine optimization (SEO).

Having your company or service atop the search engine rankings of Google or Yahoo! is akin to being the first plumber listed in the phonebook—your site will be visited most often, when users are in greatest need of information and their interest is highest.

There currently exists a unique confluence of PR, advertising and marketing efforts all seeking to reach an already-engaged audience via organic (i.e. natural) search.

With the wider-than-ever reach of the Internet growing broader by the second, the Web is the undisputed future of these industries.

Because of this, no amount of coverage garnered through traditional PR, or attention generated by marketing and advertising, can compensate for a company lacking visibility on-line.

This visibility is determined by how well a site is ranked when consumers turn to a search engine and begin a search with the intent of finding products, services or information provided by your organization.

The good news is small business now have the means to compete effectively against the mega corporations by selecting their niche and using blogs and HitTail to gather those page 1 organic search engine results (SERP).

HitTail’s been chosen by BusinessWeek as one of the best ideas of 2006, has been mentioned on John Battelle’s Search Blog, has been covered by CNET and TechCrunch, and most recently in Larry Chase’s newsletter. Oh yeah, it’s up for PRWeek’s PR Innovation of the Year.

HitTail is an example of the truely inovative services that I bring to the attention of my readers and use myself and with clients. Stay tuned for ongoing reports about HitTail and how it levels the playing field for the small business person. Yea! Isn’t the Internet great.

Google is a powerful company through arbitrage. They arbitrate which sites are found on which terms, and this is power. It’s the oil of the information age. It determines who gets what business. They are the ultimate middleman, taking their cut. It’s almost as good as the Credit Card business who gets their 3% on every transaction, then payments against interest. And it’s quite a bit better than protection rackets.

To live in the world of SEO means getting one over on this middleman. But they need you to get one over on them. They just want to make sure that those doing it are not intentionally trying to do so, thereby gaming the system, and unintentionally insulting the power broker. If everyone can game the system, the system is ruined. Gaming the system is a matter of getting the right sort of visitor traffic (potentially qualified customers) without paying for it.

Therefore, if you wish to get your traffic for free, you must game the system without overtly doing so. You must be a good neighbor, respectful of the system, and still win at the edges. No one will begrudge you staying in business through your own hard work, so long as that hard work doesn’t cut into their interests. And if your hard work happens to result in getting more potentially qualified visitors to your website without paying for it, you win. If you produce truly quality content, that the power brokers actually NEED to keep the system stable, then everyone wins.

There is no product to let you live in this edgy moral high ground. No product, that is until HitTail. OK, this diatribe on the state of search instantly deteriorated into self-promotion. But people need to know that if you don’t get your traffic for free, then you have to pay for it. And all the paths leading to getting your traffic for free are full of pitfalls laid by big media companies, designed to make you pay anyway. So, you either need a pre-existing reputation to leverage, or you have to reach escape velocity on your own. Reaching escape velocity can be an expensive proposition if you pay for the fuel (advertising). But you can also take the slow and steady tortoise route, and reach orbit through a relentless series of strong platforms (blog posts). Some of the blog post topics are chosen with HitTail. Others are chosen as a result of your own strategies.

But in the end, you reach where you want to go. You’ve built an effective long tail marketing strategy, with one post standing on the back of the next. It’s turtles all the way down.

That is the penultimate endorsement of the blogging approach I have been advocating for a while. Now the exact next steps are clear. Thanks Mike.

You are using a blog? Yes.

If not, why put yourself at a disadvantage when most small business sites can easily be accommodated by a blog-centric web site. Not only can the static pages be easily updated or expanded but the Google stickiness of a blog is right there.

I recommend WordPress for many reasons (especially the abundance of plug-ins) but today’s topic will apply to any toolset you use.

What is the secret weapon? Let me point you to HitTail. This is a free service that applies the Long Tail concepts developed by Cris Anderson, the editor of Wired Magazine. His revelation is absolutely brilliant and seems to apply to more industries all the time. Basically, Internet niche markets are now profitable to reach and thousands of niches total a bigger market than the market previously only met by hits (products with huge volume sales). Companies finding success with this model are Amazon with millions of titles versus 300,000 for Barnes & Nobles storefronts. Shelf space is no longer the constraint. Netflix is another vs Blockbuster. This is a very disruptive strategy.

Well Mike Levin at Conners Communication, being the technical whiz he is, ran with that concept and came up with the Holy Grail of organic search.

In a nutshell, the long tail of search terms, the ones bringing only a few visitors each, can in total contain more traffic volume than the “hit” term that every webmaster in your market segment is striving to score with. Rather then focus on that very competitive game, Mike suggests going after the long tail terms. Neat idea but how do you do it in practice.

That is what the HitTail service solves. It provides a REAL time look at term that are being used to find you site now. Using proprietary algorithms it suggest terms that would be good to blog about. The idea is to capture more of the traffic for that term by writing about it more. Since these are long tail terms there is not much competition, so with a little effort you will dominate that term. Repeat for next term and so on.

Brilliant. Now you have guidance on what to write about to attract more of your target audience. Since you are providing targeted fresh content Google rewards you with more traffic.

The world is a nice place after all.