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.