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.

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.

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:

1. Each of the website below has clearly defined category for real estate articles.
2. 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.

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.

Plano, TX (PRWEB) December 29, 2007 — Blitzproperties.com (A Licensed Texas Brokerage) debuted in DFW this week with an overwhelming positive response. With the support of local DFW media companies, Blitz Properties will enter the market with a very aggressive marketing campaign for both agents and home buyers.

They feel that many real estate agents are being micro-managed by the established big brokerages. Many agents MUST attend Monday morning meetings as well as make hours of phone calls to friends and family asking for leads. Well the real estate industry is changing. This is why Blitz feels their business model will be ideal for the agent that is looking for a company presence in the industry along with a non-corporate feel.

Blitzproperties.com Debuts in DFW with an Overwhelming Success Among Real Estate Agents and New Home Buyers

Pay per click advertising for real estate website may be the quickest way to bring visitors. It also maybe the quickest way to loose money. Bidding on keywords in real estate can be very competitive and may cost you $20 or more . If you think you are spending way to much money on the pay per click campaigns, this article may just give you some useful tips.

One of the major reason why the prices for particular keywords are so high has nothing to do with the actual “demand” for that keyword. Rather it has to do with website design itself. If we were to look what kind of websites occupying top positions for some of the most desirable keywords in the Google sponsored search results, you may notice that many of those websites are designed in flash. It is hard to imagine that such a website can pass Google’s scrutiny when it comes to the “landing page” quality.

Whenever you start a pay per click campaign, Google releases a bot that checks your page. As part of of that check up Google looks whether or not your lading page contains the keywords on which you are about to bid.

If you are a real estate agent or broker and have outsourced the maintenance of your website to some one, ask them if your website is created in flash or if there is extensive use of java-scripts in your website. If the answer is yes, you probably need to look for some one else to manage your website.

Another obstacle that you as advertiser can face is that in real estate transaction do not take place right on your website. Therefore there is no simple way to calculate your ROI (return on investment). If you have to way to capture your visitors by offering the a sign up for your newsletter.

Well, you might say, I am not sending any newsletters via e-mail. If it is true you maybe giving away leads to some one else. Most Realtors get into a habit of sending out quarterly or monthly newsletters. It is not so difficult these days to turn those newsletters into a format deliverable via e-mail. If you think that is a good idea, then you should incorporate some sort of sign up form on your website, and even place that form on every single landing page that you are driving traffic to via pay per click campaigns.

However managing big e-mail lists can be a task on its own, but that is a subject for another post.

Some times paying a higher price for the keywords is a “necessary evil” and there may not be a way around it. However if you pay the price without attempting to capture your visitors, you indeed maybe spending your money foolishly.