I’ve found a new niche for PlugIM thanks to Hittail… puberty. Go ahead, see for yourself. Google “puberty what do you do” and you’ll see PlugIM is the obvious authority on such things.

Thanks to Hittail, I have an abundant supply of under utilized keywords from the PlugIM long tail, most of which being significantly more relevant to the internet marketing related content of the site. If you haven’t heard of the long tail before, Hittail has a great explanation of the concept here.

Hittail doesn’t only track visitors coming in from the long tail, or from searches in general, it also tracks regular hits from good old fashioned links. “Big deal” you say? “There are hundreds of other services that do that.” True, but I haven’t gotten to the best part yet… The stats on Hittail are tracked in real-time! I have a couple of analytics programs built into my hosting package, but the results are only complied once a day; even Google’s Analytics is generally four hours behind. Using Hittail, I’ve been able to find out where the latest surge of PlugIM traffic is coming from as it’s happening which is part of the reason why I log into my Hittail account at least 2-4 times a day.

Here’s a great example. Just last week Divya Uttam posted a story to her blog “Blogging to Fame!” which contained a link to PlugIM. Her post was submitted to Digg and made the front page and as a result, PlugIM started getting flooded with traffic. I happened to log into my Hittail account while this was happening and saw dozens of hits coming from her post in real time. Thanks this Hittail I was able to join the discussion on her site and on Digg while the iron was hot, rather than finding out a day later after traffic had died down.

Mike Levin and crew at Connors Communications have built an invaluable service. I highly recommend you try Hittail on your site. It’s completely free and all you need to do is insert one line of code in your template. Give it a few days to let some keywords build up in your long tail before you jump to quick judgment. I think you’ll soon find yourself logging in to your account several times a day as well.

Have you heard of Social Bookmarks Manager yet? If not, now’s the time to familiarize yourself with it. It’s a freeware application developed by SoftLogica which automatically generates social bookmarking code for your website. All you need to do is enter a few pieces of information, such as the URL and title of the page, check off which social bookmarking services you want buttons for then copy and paste the code to your site. It’s that easy. From their site:

“Social Bookmarks Manager is designed to simplify the process of bookmarklets creation for your blog posts, articles and any other web pages. The program comes with 60 profiles of the most popular social bookmarking sites and generates ready-to-use HTML code. You can manage appearance by choosing between text-only, icons-only and mixed links, adding prefix and selecting separator.”

The software currently supports button creation for 60 of the most popular social bookmarking services including, most recently, PlugIM! Of course I’m honored that PlugIM was selected to be a part of this software package alongside with such heavy hitters as Digg, del.icio.us and Furl and I want to say a quick thank you to Sergey Petrov, the CEO of SoftLogica, for making it happen.

You can download your free copy of Social Bookmarks Manager right here:
http://www.socialbookmarksmanager.com

From now on, whenever you submit a story to PlugIM, the site automatically registers your vote for the story as well.  This eliminates the extra step of clicking the ‘plug’ button after submitting a story.  I noticed several people were missing this step and as a result we had quite a few stories being submitted with zero plugs.  Obviously if someone’s taking the time to submit a story, they feel it’s worthy of their vote, so we just eliminated that step altogether.  The result is a cleaner, faster and more intuitive story submission process.  Enjoy!