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!