What Is “The Long Tail Theory” And Why Should You Care?
The long tail theory is a cool but misunderstood theory. At least, most home marketers don’t understand it. For example, yesterday I was helping a guy in the essential oils business to understand how a blog could help him. He couldn’t get his head around the concept that the term “essential oils” was just too competitive, how could he possibly go after it? It is searched over 300,000 times per month, and there’s already some very skilled marketers dominating the front page of the search engines for the term “essential oils.”
The answer, of course, lies in the long tail theory. The long tail theory simply states that there are always “big hits” and popular products, music downloads, key terms etc., but that there are thousands more “long tail” products, music downloads and key terms that are individually searched much less, but by ranking for many of them, you can have tremendous success. Check out this graph:
So the “head” of the graph represents popular products or keyterms, like “essential oils” or “network marketing.” But the tail represents less popular products or searches, but it’s much longer than the head. So there are many more items in it.
For example, this blog caters especially to the network marketing industry. But the term “network marketing,” a popular term, is also searched over 300,000 times per month on Google. But if you enter the term “online network marketing” my blog consistently pops up on the front page of Google, usually in the first or second position. By adding the word “online” we turn a difficult term like “network marketing” into an attainable term, “online network marketing.” It’s a long tail key term.
A great advantage of long tail key terms is they are also more focused. For example, when somebody searches for “network marketing” what are they looking for? It could be any of the following:
-They have heard the term and want to know what it means
-They hate network marketing and are looking for dirt on the industry
-They have been introduced to the industry and are looking for credibility pieces
-They are already in the industry and looking for graphs, images, or other credibility pieces for a powerpoint show…
Do you see how unfocused this search is? So even if my blog did rank for it, it wouldn’t attract good quality prospects to my blog. But by focusing on long tail key terms, my blog can attract targeted traffic. The person searching for online network marketing is very specific, and my blog caters directly to them.
A great side effect of the long tail theory is that it opens up thousands of new opportunities for the home marketer. For example, just within the network marketing industry, there are thousands of derivatives of the key terms. For example, some people call it mlm, or multi level marketing, or multilevel marketing. See the difference? It’s subtle, but powerful. Then there are suffixes and pre-fixes that can be added on, allowing for virtually tens of thousands of high quality, targeted key terms available.
So stop going for the home runs in your marketing, and instead shoot for many long tail key terms, and your blogging and other online efforts will not only be more successful, but they will attract the right people to your offering.
