Hardware Upgrades Complete

Apologies for the downtime of the reporting side of HitTail. The tracking-file was still being served, and caused only minimal page-load pauses. We are at the end of most of the upgrade activity, and we very much appreciate how much our fan-base relies on (and is addicted to) HitTail. We are too! We tried to minimize the activity to Friday night and Saturday to prevent interference with business hours, and hope it was not too much of an inconvenience.

HitTail Undergoing Maintenance

HitTail is undergoing some unscheduled but necessary hardware upgrades. This will only affect the ability to log into the HitTail user interface, and temporarly there will be no collecting of data. It will not impact how your pages are served. We plan to have it up and running again by Sunday.

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.

Is Google Analytics Killing Your Website?

I don't know if I'd go as far as saying that, but here's an article that does. In short, it equates the walls-of-data and charts to passive "oh, isn't that nice" TV watching, as opposed to "here's what you should do to improve things" the way other software, such as, ohhhhh, I don't know... HitTail does!

If you want to follow Mike Levin on Twitter

I'm getting more into the Twitter thing, and am thinking through what my "next thing" is going to be, following HitTail. I'll be announcing it in Twitter first, but it'll be mixed in with the same pointless chatter everyone else twitters. So if you like, feel free to follow me. While you're at it, you can follow HitTail too.

Building a Critical Mass of Content for SEO

The Art of Writing Damn Good Blogs

The Art of Writing Damn Good Blogs: "Most bloggers have a topic in mind for their blog right from the start.

However, don’t just flail around wildly in the topic as you try to write your posts. You need to find out what your readers want, what they will respond to, and what will get them to take action.

Once you understand your readers, you will be able to provide them with something of value to them in your blog posting."

Another tip to gain from this article is to scroll down to to near the bottom, and take note of their "Tweet This" link... clever!