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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