The Long Tail Trap
The long tail of search is a nice concept. While the search professionals keep focusing on the fat head, we new bloggers get maximum of our traffic from the long tail i.e the large number of 3 or 4 word search queries that generate small amount of traffic each but generate a substantial amount of traffic taken together. I love the long tail because that is what keeps a large number of bloggers going. Unlike a typical website that get hardly any traffic, new blogs start getting a good amount of traffic thanks to the long tail.
What is long tail trap
The problem is when people forget that the long tail is well just a long tail. So you can go to 2000 visitors a day counting upon the long tail. But if you intend to be a pro-blogger and your entire strategy is centered around the long tail, then I can only pray for you. If each post gets 5 visitor on an average then you will need 2,000 posts to reach 10,000 visitors per day.
Long tail and the issue of time decay of post
The concept of time decay of post is so important to blogging success that I shall post a separate post about it someday. However simply put, it means what is the life time of your post. My post about gmail proxy keeps getting me users even 1 year after I had posted it. However my post about sharukh salman fight got me a lot of visitors for small number of days. So a post like gmail proxy has a life time of 3-4 years whereas lifetime of sharukh salman fight was less than 1 month.
So when I say you need 2000 posts to get to 10,000 visitors a day, I mean you need 2000 active posts. If your entire strategy is based on writing about current news that have a life time of 7 days…then only god can help you.
So if your target is to get to 2000 visitors a day and earn may be 1500$ a month from your blog, then long tail is great. But if you intend to be a problogger someday then make sure to target a number of high trafficked keywords like difference between intel core 2 duo and dual core and start writing about them. Get some focused links to them and keep reading to binaryday regularly. 
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Good concept. how do you find out long tail keywords though. any insight on that.
@Tarun,
I intend to do a post on this topic soon. Your website is going to be one of the examples about how to target long tail keywords effectively. I really like the way you target different keywords through tags.
Nice post… but somehow I feel…
It get mixed with two post…
1. Short term post & long term post
2. Long tail keyword vs Short tail keyword.
Though long tail keyword doesn’t last for few days in all the cases, you can target good number of visitors for long with long tail trap.
Though talking about current topic..it will not last for ever even with short tail or long tail keywords…..
Though with long tail trap…chances of your post appearing on search engine result are much better…
but in that case too..people have to use your strategy of backlinking which you mentioned on earlier post.
Meanwhil I will appreciate a detailed post on How to do keyword research for new posts…..
And how to implement your kryword finding in a post…
Such post will be useful for me and others..
regards
Harsh Agrawal
Cool dear, You said that.. U know what? In one of my sites, am still getting traffic on key words i didn’t even thought off!
A small issue is that some of those traffic aren’t well targeted andthey don’t have anything to do with the posts.
i have a blog on shirdi sai baba and i get atleast 10-20 visitors . there is no chance that i can write 2000 posts as i have atleast 65-70 posts active . how do i get atleast 100 visitors you can tell me.
I am a lil confused here. Did I just read 2000UV’s and $1500 pm? Is that just an example or blogs with 2000uvs a day really make that much? just a doubt…
@Annkur,
Great to see you on my blog. If you play your cards right and target the correct words then you shall not be surprised.
That is what explains why I write about seo, making money, technology and gossip on this blog. Basically I get traffic through gossip and technology pages and monetize it on my seo and make money pages.