What is Long Tail Marketing?

If you do any kind of Internet or Affiliate Marketing, you may have heard of
the term "long tail". There's a print hardback book and a website where the
original discussions on this started, but in general it's similar to a "low
hanging fruit" marketing strategy.

Now just in case you haven't heard that term before either, let me try to
explain, because this is the same thing as targeting a "niche"
market as well. Let's say you decide to target the weight loss market with
your internet or affiliate marketing efforts. Maybe you plan to make an
information based website to generate income from AdSense, or maybe you plan
to create a weight loss ebook to sell outright, or maybe you want to create
an affiliate product shopping site to sell weight loss products.

No matter how you plan to make money with this market, you probably know
from the start that it's extremely competitive. And that's because it's a
very broad market. Weight loss can mean any number of things. So if you know
a little bit about marketing online, you might quickly decide to tackle just
one small piece of that market to start with. So you'll start looking for
smaller niches within that bigger one. Losing fat, Losing ten pounds, or
Lowering calories for example.
These are smaller niches within the weight loss niche, but they have less
competition.

Now to get the "long tail" or "low hanging fruit", you need to zero in even
further. Something like "lose ten pounds in ten days" for instance. This
phrase is longer, thus it's likely to have much less competition than
"weight loss". At the same time, it's not likely to get nearly as many
searches each day either. But that's where the long tail, or low hanging
fruit strategies come into play.

In short: You try to generate traffic to pages and websites that have very
small searches each month. And you try to make as many of those pages and
sites as you can. This way, you have a better chance to rank well for each
page, and you can combine the power of the trickle effect.

For example, let's say you create a product shopping site using affiliate
datafeeds. Almost by default, these pages are optimized for the long tail
marketing strategy, because they're optimized for very specific phrases.
When someone searches for a specific product name, your website or page is
more likely to come up in the search engine results above a general or
related topic page.

Using broader marketing strategies, you might create a page designed to
generate traffic from an overall niche. And while niche may get searched on
100,000 times each month, you'll struggle to get even part of one percent of
that traffic.

If instead you zero in and target a tiny specific area of that niche, you'll
have much less competition to deal with and your page or site will be lazer
targeted. And the specific page phrase you target might only be searched for
10 times each month instead, you're more likely to get a much larger portion
of that traffic straight to your page.

So if you create 1000 pages all designed to specifically target one
individual phrase that isn't searched for too often, that adds up.
1000 things being searched for 10 times each month is the equivalent of
10,000 searches. And if your site or page comes up in the top 5-10 results
in the search engines, you'll be much more likely to get a large chunk of
that traffic.

In other words: Targeting tiny little, seemingly unimportant words or
phrases can add up to a lot more traffic and income than targeting large,
popular markets.

© 2006, Kathy Burns-Millyard. Kathy has worked online full time since
1997, and the bulk of her income is generated using affiliate datafeeds. Her
web-based software: <A HREF="http://www.gurugazette.com/WPAPS/">The
Affiliate Datafeed Profit System</A> (http://www.gurugazette.com/WPAPS/),
helps almost anyone create a fully automated affiliate datafeed product site
using standard WordPress blog software and The Share a Sale network.