Yea, right!!! - If that was your first reaction when you saw the headline for this article, do not worry you are not the first one. In fact when I recommended Hittail as must to have tool for every real estate website, I have received somewhat similar reaction by some one from SEO Web Design:
Erm… still requires money? The features work exactly the same as Google Analytics and Webmasters Tools. However, i think Google is far better because it allows us to set goals to track our landing page conversions, shows the query terms that your website appears in, search terms that get you visitors and much more. It is free and has no limits on the number of visitors. Isn’t it better? I don’t know, it is up to our friends here and i am just sharing. Cheerz
I am not going to argue that Hittail is better that Google analytics. However, it was Hittail and not Google who brought me through their “suggestions” to a point when I can say without slightest exaggeration that with Hittail I am better off by about $1,725 each month.
As they say pictures are worth more than words, so I have taken some snapshots from my Hittail Account to demonstrate to you how much Hittail really helped me. The images below are the snapshots from the “Keywords” tab. If you are using Hittail you can find that info just above the list of keywords under the “Keywords” tab. That info changes from day to day depending on the search hits to your website. As you will see from the snapshots below I am currently tracking 5 websites with Hittail. All of them are listed under the “free account”. All of the websites below, had virtually no natural traffic from the search engines wen I started to use Hittail.
Website #1
Website #2
Website #3
Website #4
Website #5
It is true, the figures in the above images are calculated on $0.50 per click basis. It is also true that if you optimize your lading pages well you can maintain $0.10 per click. However there are niches, including real estate, where even well optimized PPC campaigns can cost you a $1 or $2 per click. Sometimes even more. So at the end of the day Hittail’s calculation is not that much off after all.
One very important part that Hittail users may miss is that by using Hittail suggestions it is much easier to maintain those coveted $0.10 per click campaigns. Hittail has helped me not only to increase natural search traffic. It also helped me to keep my PPC nice and clean with hundreds of keywords at $0.10 per click.
Am I saying you should abandon Google Analytics? Absolutely not! Hittail and Google Analytics can work with different data providing different analytics and you can benefit greatly from both.
In my next article I getting down and dirty with showing you how to make use of Hittail Suggestions. So please, stay tuned and subscribe to my blog.
Participating in online forum can benefit you on many levels. You can network with other real estate agents and even can bring some extra visitors to your website. I have compiled a list of five real estate forums that you can not afford to ignore. I will later explain who it can be used on occasions while working with Hittail. However there is one very important thing to remember when joining an online forum. You will benefit form online forums by contributing to them. If you join a forum only as an opportunity to leave links back to your websites, soon you will earn a reputation of a spammer and no one will take you seriously.
Many online forums reward active users by offering a signature which can accompany every post you write on the forum. Some use this signature to promote their websites. Many forums will require to write certain amount of posts before allowing you to use the signature. Some forums grant you this opportunity from the time you join the forum.
Forums in the list below are particularly focused on real estate. If you are not member of any forum on the list consider joining them. Should you be already a member of some of them feel free to leave your feedback.
Real Estate Webmasters Forum- probably my favorite forum. You can find there great webmasters tips for your real estate website. Bigger Pockets- Real Estate Investing Forum- another great website to network not only with real estate agents but with potential clients as well. As an expert real estate agent you can really shine on this forum and earn good reputation. Real Estate Forum- is another highly recommended forum for real estate agents. With over 13,000 members it is a busy place. You can find and/or share your expertise on anything from web design to mortgage and loans. Agents Online- another “must join” forum for any real estate agent. This forums is more exclusively focused on real estate and everything that comes along. There are 9,333 members on this forum today. Why not to join the crowed? The Pro Real Estate Network Forums- although this forum has only 457 members today, it deserves credit for the outstanding efforts in SEO and marketing. I will not be surprised that the forum will have few thousand members by this summer.
There are many other online forums that real estate agents can benefit from. Especially if they are looking for webmasters, SEO, PPC and other tips. I will write about those in the future. The above forums were chosen specifically because they are closely related to real estate. I hope you find the above list helpful.
To continue with the series of articles on how to use Hittail effectively to market your real estate website, I highly recommend to take a closer look at the article marketing websites and directories in the list bellow. Article marketing is an effective way to establish yourself as an “expert” in a particular niche or industry. Article marketing can also help you to gain inbound links from other websites and send your way some visitors. Out of the few dozens of really good article marketing websites and directories the directories bellow were chosen for two particular reasons:
Each of the website below has clearly defined category for real estate articles.
All four article marketing websites in the list below do very good job to market themselves which is evident by how they rank across the search engines and by the amount of traffic each websites receives.
1. EzineArticles- is probably one of the most popular article marketing websites. It is currently ranked at PR6 by Google and holds an impressive 696 position in Alexa’s ranking system. 2. Article Dashboard- is another PR6 article marketing website and currently ranked by Alexa at 11,899. 3. Go Articles- is another fast growing article marketing website. Google has ranked this website at PR3 while Alexa is ranking 8,358. Go Articles have integrated a widget from a social network called PlugIM which probably is bringing them additional amount of traffic. 4. Finally Content Spool. The founders of this website have come up with Content Spooling Network, which integrates the data from Hittail Plus account and offers very unique solutions in article marketing.
Each of the above directories have their straights and weaknesses. However if you use these websites in combination, you can achieve some impressive results. Article marketing does not cost you money (except if you decide to use Content Spooling Network) but it does require your time. Make sure to familiarize yourself with guidelines of each of the directory, it will save you a lot of time and spare you from frustration in the future.
Stay tuned for the future articles about Hittail and how it can help you to bring more visitors to your real estate website. Make sure to subscribe to this blog so you don’t miss any of the articles.
In hopes that my previous post about Hittial, has generated some curiosity on the part of the readers of this blog, today I would like to just briefly write and explain a few things about statistics that you will see in your Hittail account.
Once logged into your account you will the following tabs towards the top of the page:
Depending what statistics you would like to see you have a choice to look at: My Hittial, Search Hits, Keywords, Suggestions and To Do list. I will write briefly about each and what to make of these statistics.
My Hittial is designed to “graphically” illustrate the so called “long tail” of keywords. Although the info from “My Hittial” is not as important, there is some useful information to be found there. Depending on how many keywords Hittail has analyzed, it gives general idea of how the flow of traffic is generated to your website or blog. Here is what Hittial had to say about this blog- the keywords and traffic associated with them:
As you can see Hittail analyzed 1300+ keywords that have generated traffic to this blog. Top ten of those keywords are responsible for only 22.9% of all traffic. While the rest of the keywords are responsible for 77.1% of all traffic. For me this information was an “eye opener”. Some of the top ten keywords are very competitive keywords for which this blog ranks quiet well in the search engines. The combined traffic from less important keywords found in the long tail is almost 4 times bigger comparing to the traffic from top 10 keywords.
Search Hits. If it was up to me I would name this tag “Life Hits”. Because that is exactly the kind of information you will find under that tab. It shows you the live hits to your website from both search engines as well as from other referring websites.
Keywords. The information in this tab is reduced only to keywords that were used across the search engines to find your website. The hits from other websites are filtered out.
Suggestions. Now we come to what I think is the most important info that Hittail is offering to it’s clients. Analyzing your website’s long tail, here Hittail offers your suggestions that, if acted upon, can bring your website to the top of the natural search results. For me as well as for many other bloggers and webmasters this information can be compared to a “gold mine of traffic”. However the keyword here is “acted upon”. If you just going to end up looking at these keywords and do nothing, you will be missing great opportunity to increase the traffic to your website.
To Do is the last tab were you can store Hittails suggestions for the future work. The To Do list is particularly useful when Hittail begins to offer several “suggestions” a day. When I initially installed the code on my website, I would act on every single suggestion. However over the time I have noticed that some suggestions from Hittail are the misspellings of the certain keywords. While a smart marketer can make use of those as well. I have become some what picky. When I have a choice to act upon a keyword or it’s misspelling, I generally chose to act on the former.
In the future articles I will be writing about using Hittail keywords in article marketing as well as press releases, so please stay tuned and subscribe to my blog.
If you are a real estate agent or a webmaster working for on a real estate website, you are probably concerned with the traffic generating strategies. You maybe working hard on optimizing your pay per click campaigns as well as trying to bring visitors through natural search results from across search engines. You know how expensive pay per click campaign can become on Google if your landing pages are not optimized well. But you also may know that the traffic resulting from neutral results in the search engines is the best, not only because it’s free but because internet users seem to trust natural results more. You have probably used countless tools to analyze your traffic and its sources. But if you have not tried Hittail yet, it is probably time to give this service another look.
Hittail, developed by a team at Connors Communications, is a peace of software that analyzes the source of the traffic to your website as well as keywords used by the internet users to find your website. In the process Hittial filters out the keywords and offers your suggestions (keywords or key phrases) that if acted upon can bring your website to the top of the natural search results. You can also use the information provided by Hittail to improve your existing pay per click campaigns.
At this time Hittail offers two different membership levels: Basic and Plus. If you are not sure which plan suits you the best, I would recommend to subscribe to Free Basic plan first. This plan will allow you to track and analyze up to 100,000 visits per month. If you think your website receives more than 100,000 visitors a month or you would like to use other advanced feature available with paid plans, you can always update your account at the later time.
Hittail is probably one of the easiest to use solution out there. All you need to do after registering your website is to place one piece of javscript code on each page of your website or in the common file (preferably footer) of your website if the pages your website generated dynamically but every page uses this common file. This will save you time if you have a website with hundreds of pages. After you install the code your job is done (well almost- stay tuned to learn more) and the rest is done by Hittail.
I will be writing more article in the future to show you have you can use Hittail and other marketing tools such as PRWeb, to maximize your results. So please subscribe to this blog. For now I leave you with the following YouTube presentation by Mike Levin:
January 23, 2008
Posted in Articles, Internet Marketing, PPC, Pay Per Click, Real Estate News, SEO 
4 Comments »
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