Tale of two new Web 2.0 apps that wowed me in 24 hours
Posted by Pat Kitano at 9/28/2006 9:36 PM 
Categories: Technology, New Business Models, Thank you, How-To's, Cool Web Tools, Blogging
Categories: Technology, New Business Models, Thank you, How-To's, Cool Web Tools, Blogging
Blogs by definition are topical and timely... my conversations with Mike Simonsen at Altos seem to be dominating my most current posts (yes, this will be the last for now)... Over coffee Tuesday, Mike turned me onto RealEstateVoices and Hittail. Mike was excited about REV's launch and I immediately saw the appeal of REV as a Digg for the RE community, like ActiveRain is to MySpace... (I was reminded of the old 1999 dot.com parlor game we used to play - repurpose a hot site concept to a vertical...)
Well, REV has been one of the topics of the week so far with lots of good reviews everywhere... I don't have anything to add yet...the launch surpassed my expectations, so let me continue my story...
About Hittail
I'm still figuring out web traffic tools (I think this is Blogging 202 in the Blog Newbie learning curve I've been discussing lately) now that I'm getting some sort of traffic... Mike really seems to know SEO and I told him my business site Save on Closing Costs uses Google Adword keywords like discount title insurance, cheap closing costs, no ysp and they all cost, like .25 per click and our ads are so persuasive we'll get an inquiry about 25% of the time on that click. Mike thought that since our ad campaign is so effective on the fringe element keywords and we're not competing for the biggies like home buying and mortgages, I should look at Hittail.
Hittail's professed power is in the analysis of how website visitors come to the website not only via the "biggie" Adwords which cost a lot, but also by fringe Adwords - keywords a website owner may be unaware of that contribute significant traffic at a much lower cost. Aha, I thought, let's see what fringe words are popping up in search for my site so I can add them to my ad campaign.
Well, I've only used Hittail one day and realized the free real time website/blog monitoring tool is exactly what I needed - a free real time website/blog monitoring tool. I'm completely sold, I had been waiting all day for Google Analytics to give me a daily snapshot and here Hittail does it spontaneously (albeit without analytics, but that's what Google does). Hittail does offer some solution tools I haven't played with yet.
Now here's the end of my story:
How Hittail confirmed the Power of Real Estate Voices
This is a snapshot of the resulting hits recorded by Hittail (btw, I still can't figure out how to cut and paste this snapshot directly into the blog post, I had to email it to myself, pardons...) You'll see how much traffic my first post ("Three Tech Guys") on RealEstateVoices generated over a 5-hour stint on its second day. In the early life of my blog, it's the most I've received from one source.
Two great web 2.0 apps... I'll be using them and offering any support I can to make them successful... thanks Mike...
Technorati tags real estate voices altos research blogging hittail
Interesting tool!
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