The Long Tail & Google
Power laws–those flipped logarithms–are the new rule for web traffic. Even Wired ran an article about the long tail of e-commerce. Guess what–this doesn’t just apply to Amazon.com or Ebay. The “long tail” argument is useful for bloggers and small internet publishers.
What is the “long tail?”
The “long tail” refers to access patterns of a particular website or online resource. It notes that while there are several content providers that serve massive amounts of traffic, there are many smaller publishers who serve the rest of the traffic. In the case of Amazon.com, its most popular books account for the top sales–but the thousands of obscure books it carries which are bought infrequently account for an even larger amount of the sales. The more miscellanious content you create, the more you rake in those random, infrequent hits. Over millions of bits of content, a hit or two on each smaller one really adds up.
Take a concrete example. I am blogger A and I have 1 article that gets 10 hits / day. Now, blogger B is not as popular, but he has 6 articles. Article 1 gets 5 hits a day, but articles 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 only get 1 hit / day. Altogether bloggers A and B have the same readership–even though blogger A has an article that is twice as popular as anything blogger B has produced. It’s the quantity of readable content that matters, not just its popularity.
How can I take advantage of this trend?
Write specific, detailed content and write lots of it. A lot of bloggers want to post a link all by itself. Well, I’ll tell you this: the floating link is a sin. Never post a link by itself without surrounding text to elucidate its content. Google won’t know what to index without some text. Compare:
with
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000103&sid=ajpGdGaFGOBY&refer=us
“Steve Hadley’s background is more Cheney,” said David Rothkopf, who is writing a book on the history of the National Security Council. “He will be supportive of the vice president’s agenda.”
Which of the two is going to maximize the long tail effect? The latter of course. At least it mentions two proper names, one council, and the term “vice president,” which is much more than can be said about posting a link by itself. Citing an article summary only takes a few seconds and greatly heightens the readership of your post.
Don’t forget original content, either. Write about that Microsoft interview you had. Write about how you fixed a compiler error that was nagging at you. Write about anything you can create. The more original content, the better. If the original content you write is in high-volume and resonable demand, you’ll see the “long tail” effect kick in as people start mysteriously reading your week-old posts. There’s always a lag between you write and when a search engine indexes your page.
Who’s the target?
Who is the target of this campaign? I can think of a few possibilities:
- Other bloggers
- Friends and Family
- Internet Users
- Any Other Target Audience
The answer is none of the above. The purpose of a blogger’s “long tail” campaign is not to pitch content directly to readers. Rather, it’s trying to produce content that Google will index. When you have thousands of pages aggregated in Google, the traffic comes to you. Don’t worry about attracting anything, or anyone. Just write posts and blog to your hearts content. Write good content. Update often.
Then, just kick back and let Google do its magic. You’ll slowly start seeing more and more traffic, until one day your long-tail is bringing in thousands of hits a day.
In conclusion
The “long tail” argument provides a solution to the age-old paradox:
“How does a new blogger get recognized?”
It’s quite simple, if you have the patience. Just blog, be true to your heart, and make sure that there is a page somewhere on the internet already in Google’s index that links to you. That’s all you need–content and one link. I’m not going to lecture you about how to write good content. Write well, follow the style of good English, use well-formed markup, and a nice design. Fill it with posts, and wait for traffic to come–you’ll get your fame eventually.
| This entry was posted on Thursday, November 18th, 2004 at 3:23 am and is tagged with david rothkopf, national security council, internet publishers, steve hadley, obscure books, ebay, google, amazon, concrete example, logarithms, massive amounts, writing a book, web traffic, popular books, content providers, readership, cheney, apps, pid, rocks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback. |
One Response to “The Long Tail & Google”
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Good article. When you blog, you can do it with a wee bit of competitive intelligence, knowing that you’re chosing a topic that CAN produce more traffic for you. Check out http://www.hittail.com. It’s very relevant to this.