Long Tail Theory
Posted by Miles Evans
The Long Tail Theory was first coined by Wired Magazine Editor-in-Chief Chris Anderson. In a nut shell the Long Tail theory states that ‘our culture and economy is increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of “hits� (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail.’
Simple no? Actually there is a lot more to it. Chris has written an upcoming book on what it means for the future of niche marketing which I suggest you pre-order.
Without muddying the waters too much the point I want to get across is that LT theory has proven to be quite effective as many Blackhat’s have pointed out. If you have ever seen an adsense sblog, you know what I’m talking about. The problem is that discovering the long tail for your own website is not completely obvious. Take a look at this graph:
Long Tail theory says that the number of sales achieved in the yellow portion of the bar above is normally more than the sales achieved in the orange (where most of us are competing).
So how do you single out the keywords that are not overly competitive yet are still being searched? Until a few days ago I was using a combination of Awstats, Google Analytics, and some home brew PHP. Introducing MyLongTail (soon to be changed to a different name).
MyLongTail, currently free in beta, is produced by Conners Media - the PR guys originally behind goto.com, which became Overture and now Yahoo Marketing. MyLongTail is an AJAX based tool that pulls data from your website via javascript, much like Google Analytics. It is quite different from typical trending software in that it specifically analyzes your websites Long Tail.
For a much better description of how MyLongTail works check out their online demo.
Posted Jun 06, 2006 at 07:42 PM | Permalink | Trackback URL | Del.icio.us | DIGG!
Comments
Thanks much for the mention. We were actually just the public relations firm for GoTo.com in the early days. Bill Gross of Idea Labs was the brain behind GoTo.com. But it's important because of the huge shift in thinking that occurred. We bring it up only because this is going to require a similar huge shift in thinking for most marketers.
Posted by Mike Levin on June 7, 2006 3:26 AM
Oops thanks for catching that. Editted.
I'm looking forward to Chris' book in July to further drive this stuff home for me. It's certainly interesting:
'In a world full of endless choices you have to sell less of more'...hmmm.
Posted by Miles Evans on June 7, 2006 6:15 AM
Hi Miles. Thanks for the update. Our name change is complete. We feel we are becoming something more fundamental than MyLongTail implies. If all goes well, we'll be the first site of the HitTailing movement. I like how ProfitPapers is positioned as Organic SEO Demystified. In a very real way, that summarizes the challenge that we are up against. Even just verbalizing these concepts makes it sound to complicated for the average marketing department... which it's not!
Posted by Mike Levin on June 12, 2006 4:48 AM
Agreed.
Posted by Miles Evans on June 27, 2006 5:49 AM
So, further along those lines, we've simplified our own demo. The old PowerPoint had the ideas, but was a real yawner. We think this video http://www.hittail.com/demo/ brings it down a notch and makes it much more accessible.
Posted by Mike Levin on June 30, 2006 12:16 PM
New video looks very professional.
I will do a follow up once I have a good amount of data collected. Looks like hittail might be the most effective keyword mining tool there is. Well done :D
Posted by Miles Evans on July 4, 2006 4:37 PM