Capitalize on the Long Tail
Greetings Blog Family,
It is time to get down to business. There is so much I want to share with you, but this is what has been on my mind this week, the Long Tail. Before we get into the concept and information, let me just say that I am excited because I know how to brand and position my blog out here in the blogosphere and having a solid direction is a tremendous start to success. I will share the details in my Sunday’s Goal Setting post this week. Just know that it is going to be beneficial and we are going to have some fun. No, I am not ditching the motivational theme that I have running at all, just adding some much needed relevancy and focus.
The Long Tail
If you are not familiar with the concept of the Long Tail by now, then I will politely ask you to choke yourself. How could you be a blogger in late 2008 and not have heard of this concept? Ok, ok, ok, that is harsh and I shouldn’t fault you for that, but assist you with a little education.
It’s a Book, Concept, and Phenominon
Well the concept is an intriguing one that was developed or popularized by the author, Chris Anderson. Hats off to this individual because he is onto something that can make you some serious money. The blogosphere has been saturated with information about this piece and yes, I am going to add one more piece of analysis.
What is the Long Tail?
According to Wikipedia:
The phrase The Long Tail (as a proper noun with capitalized letters) was first coined by Chris Andersonin an October 2004 Wired magazine article[1] to describe the niche strategy of businesses, such asAmazon.com or Netflix, that sell a large number of unique items, each in relatively small quantities.
A Little Explanation
In the book, Anderson uses Amazon.com as the major example in the book because they are the first Internet business most people think of and is a perfect example because they make the majority of their money from the Long Tail.
Ok, the Long Tail is represented by this curve that is prevalent in sales of most business that have products to offer, like Amazon. (Thumbnail taken from Wikipedia’s website)
The vertical or X axis of the graph is for the number of sales. The horizontal or Y axis of the graph represents the multitude of products being sold by the retailer. Notice how most sales occur in the green section of this graph. This green section represents the major hits or best selling products. The yellow section literally stretches into towards infinity in Amazons business and represents many obscure products that Amazon sells, but makes a profit on.
Because Amazon is a virtual retailer, they don’t have to have the physical on site inventory that a typical retail might have to have. Therefore, they can list thousands even millions of products for sale in just about every conceptual niche imaginable. You will have to read the book to get all the facts and figures, but know Anderson has a ton of research and information for you torture your eyes with, ….but it’s good info and he really drives home the point that it is all about the Long Tail.
Now for the Amazing Part
Amazon actually makes more money from the sale of these obscure, niche items than there best selling, mega hits as you might expect. In the book, Anderson goes into great detail about these facts and figures, but that is not what I want to bore you with today.
I Didn’t Even Finish the Book
LOL! That is wild right. This guy is giving an overview and didn’t even read the book.
Yes, I am, but allow me to explain. See I came into contact with this book because I stumbled across a website called Hittail.com, that I recommend you not only look at, but put the script on your site. Anyway, this Hittail.com website really gave some great insight into how this all works, but I rushed out and got the book thinking it was going to build my understand.
Well, it did, but it went wwaaaaayyyyyyyyyy beyond what I need to understand to take this concept and apply it back to my Internet Marketing business. And if you read my post on urgency, you would know that I am trying to make it happen NOW, not later, so I needed to get to work and apply the information to my business. So, I ditched the book in favor of action! Not always the best decision, but hey, I made one and moved on. Let’s deal with it?
The Long Tail and Internet Marketing.
Actually, it is quite simple as soon as I mention it you are going to be like, “Yeah, yeah, I can see that being very beneficial.
The Long Tail in relation to Internet Marketing has everything to do with the keyword phrases that are being searched for on the search engines like Google. If you would think of the most highly searched phrases being like Amazon’s top selling items and the more obscure search phrases as their niche products that they only sell a few, you should be able to understand the comparison.
In line with Anderson’s thinking, more traffic is actually delivered to a website from the Long Tail keyword phrases, than the mega hot keyword phrase that you might be trying to position your business for. These maga hot phrases or best searched terms have an enormous amount of competition and may be difficult to rank on the first or second page of Google. Not impossible, but difficult to gain placement in front of the most searched terms.
How Can Internet Marketers Use the Long Tail
1) Target Niche Keyword Phrases
What ever your blog or website is about, I can garentee there are an abundance of keyword phrases that don’t have very much competition that you could position your site to dominate and gain the organic traffic from this positioning.
It doesn’t matter, there are all types of search phrases available out there that you can have. Maybe medicine is difficult to get on the first page for, but natural healing organic toothpaste (made up phrase) might be fair game. You will have to do a bit of homework to do to identify these niche keyword phrases, bu they are out there and easily identifiable.
2) Build Niche Sites Around Phrases
- Taking this concept into your business. There are opportunities to build completely new websites around these words that deep in the long tail of search phrases.
This is the technique I am going after with my new niche sites that led to this post here. I want to discuss the things that I recently learned and am putting into practice with you on a weekly basis. That is one of my goals. I am not giving away my niche, the concept is up for grabs. Use it!
3) Continuously Dig for Keyword Phrases
If you decide to take this course of action, which only makes sense to me. You should constantly be on the search for more and better keyword phrases that you can target. There are a variety of option to choose from to help with identifying more keyword phrases that can work for you in your business. They are out there and can be quite profitable.
We will get into many of these ideas at another time. As mentioned in the video, I have a wonderful script to help you with this process that I will go over in the future.
Share with the Group
If you go down this route or are already using this in your business, share some of your insight with us. I am sure many of the readers would love to hear from you and so would I.
Until next time, know that I am building niche sites that are Adsensed up and constantly looking for more obscure niches to dominate and gain the organic traffic from to build my business and achieve my goal of becoming a full time Internet Marketer!
21 Comments
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1:31 am on October 4th, 2008
Freddie –
Great post and a nice clear explanation of the way to get to the top of search with the longtail!!
There has been quite a debate about whether the longtail will be dying off with recent google search changes… the autocomplete features in their search fields tend to shorten the phrase length, which of course hurts us who DO target the longtails.
With a great niche, you can nail the heck out of longtail pretty easily!!
Mark
Mark – The Niche Store Builders last blog post..Another Free BANS WordPress Theme from Ben!
2:32 am on October 4th, 2008
Hey Mark,
Thanks for dropping by the site and contributing. Glad to hear you liked my breakdown of the long tail and how it could work.
I can’t imagine the long tail being destroyed, even by Google. The reason being is because it is just a concept that there is value and meat in the tail. I would imagine they could truncate the the tail as you referred to, but stop it seems impossible.
I guess we will have to follow this development, but it is definately a great way for Internet Marketers to build niches and revenue streams.
Hope to see and hear more of you in the future around these parts.
3:28 am on October 4th, 2008
Hey Freddie! Good to see you jumped onto Viddler. They’ve got the whole tube sharing thing on lock right now with the features available.
You have a great presence for sharing on video. Love it!
Dude…this threw me off in your post:
…..”politely ask you to choke yourself”
I wasn’t expecting that from you. LMAO.
Nice.
Very informative explanation Freddie. Great job!
Keep it up man!
Cheers!
Jay
SuiteJs last blog post..SuiteJ Vs Bryan Clark: Why The Blog Flipping Blueprint Review Didn’t Happen
4:11 am on October 4th, 2008
Suite J – I am loving Viddler! I got there because YouTube wouldn’t take my video because it was 124MB, bums, so the evolution of Freddie Taylor begins. As soon as I get a logo and understand how to put it in there, I will have it on the videos as well. That is for another day.
LOL! I am not as straight laced as you thought, huh J? I think I may surprise you a bit, but I have to admit hanging out with you and Joe in the Blogosphere has really loosened me up. I think it is this business background that has me thinking that everything has to be professional.
Now if my wife catches onto this, she may just flip out, so no one tell her that I have a site going here and my be saying things out of pocket.
Thanks for the encouragement and the support. More is on the way! Just remember that you asked for it, right? LOL!
5:42 pm on October 4th, 2008
Great analysis of the long tail.
The long tail to me encompasses the idea that lots of little wins can be better than one or two big wins.
Danny Coopers last blog post..Technorati – A Good Measure of Link Popularity?
7:02 pm on October 4th, 2008
Thanks Danny. I like that, “lots of little wins”. That does it for me, but a few big wins never hurts, right?
3:14 pm on October 5th, 2008
[...] Capitalize on the Long Tail – FreddieTaylor.com [...]
3:24 pm on October 5th, 2008
You lost me at greetings…haha just kidding. I already knew about all this stuff but good video and I still listened to it nonetheless.
5:26 pm on October 5th, 2008
Wow!
Great video Freddie!
That was awesome! I’m done choking myself now because I actually never heard of this. I did hear about long tail keywords, which are keywords that are longer than the usual 2 to 3 words and get searched pretty well, but I never heard of this concept.
This is definitely going to be useful to me for some of my endeavors.
Thanks for sharing!
7:15 pm on October 5th, 2008
@ Bryn
Thanks for listening anyway. Appreciate it. It is a solid concept to remember and practice in your business.
@ Luis
Good you got that choke in, but didn’t pass out. That is what I was hoping people would refrain from…LOL!
You are welcome, dude. Keep building on the concept and putting it into practice in your business.
10:48 pm on October 5th, 2008
Great job on the thorough coverage of this topic.
I’m definitely a fan of long-tail earnings potential. My biggest blog (which these days earns enough for me to make a living on) gets something like 95% of its traffic from the back pages, the pages that come up when people do searches on those “long tail” phrases.
Lindsays last blog post..Blogging Economies of Scale (or why one site is more practical than many)
11:35 pm on October 5th, 2008
@ Lindsay
Thank you for the kind words and for stopping by the site. The long tail seems to be what it is all about. I am growing in this business and appreciate people like yourself that are willing to share.
Hope to see much more of you around here!
6:34 am on October 7th, 2008
Great post my man… you accidentally switched the Y axis and the X axis (x is horizontal), but I’ll let that slide for the awesome lesson. Definitely learned something with this
Jims last blog post..The Net Fool’s Hosting Bonanza RESULTS!
1:05 pm on October 7th, 2008
LOL! Jim thanks for straightening me out! I cannot believe I messed that one up. My old professors would beat me with a stick for blowing that one. LOL! Man, has it been that long since I have been in school and used this stuff. I know now that I have to get serious with my presentations because the readers are on point!
Glad you enjoyed the post and got something of value from it. Loving your site, by the way, and I will be back often.
Be sure to drop by here as well.
9:27 pm on October 7th, 2008
[...] Freddie Taylor – Capitalize on the Long Tail [...]
11:03 pm on October 8th, 2008
Jim is a schoolboy! And a graph fanatic! Of course he would catch that! Great post Freddie, very illustrated and you presented it perfectly. I loved it, I learned a lil bit more than what I knew, especially about Amazon. And I will be trying more to target the long tail…even though that’s what I do now.
I switched to viddler for the same reasons, size, plus the quality seemed better.
2:04 am on October 9th, 2008
@ Joe – Yeah, Jim is a sharp guy. Amazon is a monster company, but you would never think they are really making their money from smaller, obscure items. The same is true for the movie business for Netflix. Think they are making their rentals for the blockbusters, but it is really for the obscure and average movies that rake in the dough.
Interesting stuff for sure!
Viddler is awesome, even though Tubemogul is acting real stupid on me right now. I will get it together on the other side of my weekend.
1:03 am on January 2nd, 2009
I will politely ask you to stop being so motivating because at 1am I have to start thinking about sleep, and your videos make me want to stay up and get moving!
lol – great post man, SUPER informative, and also I’m interested in that book.. so I might just go and grab me a copy!
Elijahs last blog post..In The Blink Of An Eye
1:18 am on January 2nd, 2009
@ Elijah – LOL! Glad you are enjoying it man. Grab that book, definitely worth the read. One day I will get right and start using affiliate links on the stuff I talk about….that day is coming soon!
4:37 pm on January 21st, 2009
The great thing about the long tail coverage is that it takes the “hugeness” out of the initial fight scenario for anyone just starting out. You can pick a niche, target a (relatively) obscure longtail phrase, and see some results (hopefully) early — giving one some confidence to get further into the game. Thanks for the research and breakdown.
4:52 pm on January 21st, 2009
@ Matty – Thanks for dropping by. Glad you enjoyed the breakdown on the long tail. Your analysis is dead on. It really gives someone new to this business a chance to have some immediate success. You got to love it.
Looking forward to building and growing with you.