Online Home Based Business: Long Tail Keywords Are Much Easier

For online retailers and affiliate marketers it increases the potential for product sales and referrals commissions. For bloggers, it means a larger audience which could potentially lead to greater long term profits from third party or private ad modules.

If the mission is solely to receive more traffic, then any keyword would do. But because webmasters are (or should be) focused on driving targeted traffic to their site, the long tail theory should be employed by all who seek to drive more buyers to their online home based business site via search engines.

The phrase, Long Tail Keyword, was first coined by Chris Anderson in a seminal 2004 article in Wired Magazine. It is a socio-statistical theory which suggests that the collective sales of products in low demand can exceed that of popular products and bestsellers.

Anderson, using Amazon as an example for his theory, suggested that because there is now less of a need to lump products and consumers into one-size fits all containers, catering to minority tastes and making low-demand products consistently available will allow small businesses to achieve higher profit margins, than if they were to focus solely on high-demand/popular mainstream products.

Now, this theory goes against our immediate instinctive process of selecting or developing products. For most of us, we're taught to think big, and narrowing our niche markets would ultimately eliminate potential visitors. However, the mistake a number of webmasters make is simply to try to attract visitors. Your goal is not to attract visitors. You want serious buyers to your online home based business.

What are long tail keywords?

Simply put, they are multiple-phrase search queries that a visitor uses to arrive at your site. They are more targeted and they are used by visitors looking for specific information.

For example, kiwi and kiwi fruit are general search terms a user might use. But the long tail keywords within that niche may include:

-health benefits of kiwis

-nutritional benefits of kiwis

-benefits of kiwis for the skin

-how to pick kiwi fruits

By doing long tail research you can then provide answers to these more specific search queries.

Here are some other benefits to long tail keywords:

1. It is easier to rank well for long tail keywords in search engines because they are lower in competition.

2. They provide more visitors to your website via search engines because you'll have more pages indexed for specific phrases relating to your website or blog. This means more visibility in the search engines and more traffic to your online home based business.

3. Long tail keywords lead to higher conversions. Visitors who arrive at your site using a long tail search query are more likely to make purchases, click contextual ads, sign up for your ezine, or convert on affiliate programs. By using long tail keywords you are targeting a market of potential buyers.

Long tail keywords are instrumental to attracting search engine traffic. The research required to find them may seem time consuming but if you are serious about growing your online home based business for the long term then do the research, use long tail keywords.