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When the long tail is underwater

Guest post by: Seth Godin

Article Overview: There are millions of songs on iTunes that have sold zero copies. Millions of blog posts that get zero visitors each day.

When the long tail is underwater

There are millions of songs on iTunes that have sold zero copies. Millions of blog posts that get zero visitors each day. The long tail is real... given the ability, people create more variety. Given the choice, people seek out what's just right for them to consume. But, and there's a big but, there's no guarantee that the ends of the long tail start producing revenue or traffic. And a million times zero is still zero.

Sometimes, the best strategy isn't to to head farther and farther out on the tail. No, you don't have to make average stuff for average people. But it also doesn't pay to brainwash yourself into believing that super-extreme is the same as profitable.

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Related Forum Posts
Re: Keyword Selection - Hi Jack, Great post and yes it is so important to use long tail phrases and not just the obvious ones. If your site is about work from home ideas for example then it will take you a long time to get anywhere because that is a very popular phrase so what would you rather do, get no hits for a very popular keyword phrase or get a few hundred hits for a long tail keyword phrase. Do your keyword research on Google and make a list of all the long tail keyword phrases that are applicable in your niche and go for them. Write articles using the long tail keywords and eventually as your site becomes more popular then you can use the more popular ones but it takes time and effort. regards, Mal.
Re: Niche Marketing for success - The beauty of long-tail marketing is that it does not take a huge amount of effort. I actually do very little to promote my Japanese games website. But the little I do builds up over time. I was having success with the website before I knew anything about "long tail keywords", they just cropped up naturally in the course of writing about the mahjong and mahjong sets on the site itself and on the blog.
Re: How To Pick Keywords To Rank For - I think you should do both. Go for the less competitive (long-tail) keywords while you are working your way up on the popular ones. If you get enough of the long-tails you can do well. But it only takes one or two popular ones to make a lot of money. Personally, I like to go for the gold and do everything I can to rank for the big time keywords. However, not everyone can do that so going for the less competitive terms is good too.
Re: How To Pick Keywords To Rank For - You could try killing two birds with one stone by finding a top ranking key phrase and then search for a series of long-tail keyword phrases that include the top ranking key phrase in it.
Re: Traffic! How do you get it? - I agree, [i:1z2pskgt]"The solution before getting traffic, is RESEARCH"[/i:1z2pskgt]. "Keywords" are the source of traffic and its completely true that we should do a bit of research before crafting an article. Now a days, i see like its quite easy to rank well for long tail keywords esp. on Google because of the "freshness" in serp. The newly indexed articles are placed above the older articles to show fresh content to the user. Its advantage too but the question is, how long you stay in top position ?


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