What is the Long Tail? Why is it Important to Your Business?

What Is “The Long Tail”?

The long tail in terms of keywords for your business represents the total accumulated mass of keywords that relate to a given niche area. That niche can be large – for instance, Sports. Or, that niche can be small – for instance, Badminton Raquets from Fiji.

Let’s talk about the short-tail first. The short tail for “Sports” would include keywords like: Football, basketball, running, hockey, college baseball, and others. These keywords have hundreds of thousands of searches in the search engines. These terms are general, unfocused, and may not lead to a good return on investment if you’re in a Pay Per Click program and targeting them. But, if you managed to get in Google’s top 10 for one of them you’d enjoy so much free traffic that some of them would convert for your offer – or click ads you have displayed, bringing you some income.

The short-tail keywords are quite hard to grab a top 10 result for in Google. If your niche is large it might prove impossible. For small, focused niches it might be possible. The short tail for a business website selling “badminton raquets from Fiji” might consist of 1 keyword. The long-tail might have a handful of keywords (phrases) like “kevlar badminton racquets from Fiji” or “extra long badminton racquets from Fiji”.

If you were targeting long-tail keywords in a Pay Per Click campaign you would be able to pay less for them (less competition) and you’d convert better because they are very specific phrases that people are razor targeted for. The person is telling you exactly what they want to see, opposite of short-tail keys where you’re not quite sure what subtopic they’re interested in.

Short tail keywords make up the first group of general keywords related to the niche. There are fewer keywords in the short-tail, and they are highly competitive because they drive so much traffic. They are general and unfocused. Their value is in the sheer numbers of people using them to find information about a topic they’re interested in.

Long tail keywords are those that make up the vast bulk of the keywords about a topic. They are the 90% of keywords that make up focused searches about subtopics within a niche. These are the keywords that can convert very highly in a Pay Per Click campaign, but usually there is small volume of people searching on them.

How can money be made with long tail keywords then?

In the case of search engine marketing – if you focused your site on the long tail keywords – many of them, you would be able to grab a subset of people that were interested in very specific things you have information about – and maybe sell them a product that would help them do something. If you wrote a lot of content that used long tail keywords in the articles you would enjoy a tremendous amount of traffic arriving at your site looking for info about those long tail keywords.

Long tail is a pure gold mine for search engine targeting – but, to get it you need to have a high number of content pieces (articles, product pages) that have these long-tail keywords in them. It makes a whole lot of sense to

In the case of pay per click campaigns… If you focused your campaign on accumulating thousands and thousands of long tail keyword phrases that are highly focused you will be enjoying high click through rates, sales, and high return on investment. There are numerous Pay Per Click players that have hundreds of thousands of keywords in their campaign and they make a very good living off the long tail.

As you start your online business website and you are trying to decide which keywords to focus on as you develop your site – what should you do?

Consider your business model. Do you want to target short tail keywords that you might be able to grab top 10 Google spots for in 3-10 years? Or, do you want to make money in the short term too? If you need money anytime soon you’re wise to target long-tail keywords and start building content that will get you recognized by Google for those long-tail keys.

If you have more questions you might want to have a look at our online training courses about various internet marketing topics like Pay Per Click, Affiliate programs, and Google SEO.

7 Online Business Models

When you make a go at an online business you’re going to have to choose a way to format your website and onlien business so it makes money and supports itself… and hopefully one day – supports you too!

Here are 7 online business models you might choose from, or mix and match from:

1. Ecommerce Website

Setup an online catalog and some sort of shopping cart or button ordering system that meshes with your payment system – PayPal, Google Checkout, whatever you wish. This is basically the online store model. You can create your own site from scratch or have an EBay store, Yahoo store, or other ready-made solution.

One advantage of using the ready-made online store systems is that the website hosting, domain, checkout system and payment ability is built into the system. For as little as $50 per month you can have this tried and true system work for you.

2. Sales Pages

Simply long pages all focused on selling one product or service. These pages can be hundreds of pages long and are almost like online infomercials you’ve seen on TV. These pages pitch the product and show potential customers the benefits of the product, testimonials, offer bonuses, and basically do everything and answer every question about the product or service so the customer purchases.

Sales pages basically incite emotion in the customer, backed up by evidence that purchasing this product will change the customer’s life for the better. Internet marketers use these pages often -but, recently a few of the best have decided they will use a video instead of the long page. For some it’s working – this could be a future trend.

3. Auction Model

You don’t really need a website at all. Use EBay or some other auction site to sell products you have or products you can get for a set price. Auction them on auction sites and test the market. Many entrepreneurs find products they later build a whole website around – leading to another form of online business.

4. Blog

Blogs are relatively easy to get up and running and can provide a soapbox to get your message out. Once you attract enough people on a daily basis you can pitch offers to them or run advertisements on the blog – like Google’s Adsense program or Text Link Ads or something similiar.

WordPress, Blogger, and Moveable Type are 3 good blog platforms to look into.

5. Service Business Website

Focused on what a person can do for the visitors to the website usually. Basically this site is a large portfolio and advertisement for an individual or group of people that provide a service.

The skills of the people you’re hiring are showcased and backed up by references, portfolios of past work, and testimonials of past customers.

6. Information Website

Information in some niche is given. The site seeks to become the portal for information on the particular niche. About.com has a business model like this. The site is filled with content on specific niches and they monetize the site through ads and selling products as affiliates.

These sites are typically fueled by the search engines and high volumes of niche-specific content shows up well in Google and other search engines.

7. Affiliate Website

As site owner of an affiliate website you’d sign up to be an affiliate at many companies that offer their products on an affiliate sales basis so you can make some commission from the sales you are responsible for sending to the parent company. This works by tracking unique links that come from your site – or your efforts and that arrive at the parent site and turn into sales.

Site owners that use this model are good at marketing and building traffic in many different ways as there is wealth found in numbers usually.

These are 7 of the most common types of business websites. More are being born all the time. Basically the world is coming to grips with how to go about best

Easy Online Business to Start: Selling eBooks

The best way to get started in a new online business is to sell something easy to create – and something that you created. If you created it – you’ll be able to get higher margins than you would acting as an affiliate for someone else. That’s not to say being an affiliate is bad in ANY way, but, by creating your own products you’ll be getting as much money as you possibly can through your new online business.

Incorporate your business as a first step. You’ve got to protect your assets and save money on taxes – incorporating is the best way to do that and avoid double taxation using Subchapter S or LLC type incorporations.

EBooks are easy to make and easy to sell online because you can just give your customers a download link after they pay for the ebook.

EBooks can be made in Microsoft’s Word program, edited there – photos added there, and turned into a PDF file with one of the online – free PDF makers, or, if you want to have a higher quality end-product you should get a copy of Adobe Writer which integrates very well into Microsoft Word – and allows you to create a PDF file while in Word.

EBook length can be 30-70 pages. Anything longer gets to be a bit tedious to read on the computer screen. Even using Amazon’s Kindle eBook reader – most people tend to like ebooks at 70 pages or less, so say the surveys. I believe them – as I’d have a hard time reading a 200 page ebook on a computer screen. Maybe it’s just getting used to it. Maybe it’s because online use is typically short and sweet. So, when faced with the daunting 200 page ebook – it might not get you all that enthused about the idea.

Keep your eBooks short and sweet, packed with photos, graphs, and other graphics to keep them interesting. You can offer a preview of the first 3-5 pages or the first chapter of your ebook so future customers of your new online business can see what you have to offer.

EBooks typically sell for between $5 and $40. A friend of ours is selling her Thai Food eBook for $39 with some bonuses and is having good results. Bonuses are key to inciting visitors to become customers.

EBooks can be sold on your site – and, coupled with a Google Adwords campaign or some other pay per click campaign can produce steady, and long-term results.

As you build your product list you can eventually have a full-time job in just creating and selling e-books.

If you do create your online ebook business – please don’t forget to incorporate and protect yourself and earnings.