If you have been blogging for sometime and especially if you have been reading some seo blogs, then I am sure that you have heard of the term “Long Tail”. Before I proceed with this post, I will let you on one secret. I can almost guarantee that you can take your blog to at least 1000$ per month by followin the advice listed on this one post alone. Hence even if this is the only post of mine that you are going to read, so be it. But read it very very carefully.

This is going to be a long post. I shall be discussing the following topics in it.

  1. What gives me so much confidence that my advice can be used to easily take any blog to 1000$ pm earning
  2. What is long tail of search
  3. Why is it easy to succeed by targetting the long tail?
  4. The steps to succeeding with the long tail
    • Setting up the blog
    • Identifying long tail keywords
    • Writing a post targetted to long tail keywords
    • Monetizing the long tail
    • A strategy that will increase your chances of success
  5. Improving the performance of the blog post

What gives me so much confidence that my advice can be used to easily take any blog to 1000$ pm earning

I have talked about many seo topics and monetization tricks previously. However I doubt if I have ever sounded as confident as this blog post. It is quite simple though. I am confident because I have done it myself. If you have been reading my blog for sometime, then I am sure that you must have been irritated by my posts about Ron Pratte, Intel core 2 duo and dual core, Catherine Gomez Boxxy, How to format USB drives etc. The fact all those posts as well as my recent posts about Abraham Biggs Suicide Video, Melissa Huckaby and IPL 2009 are all part of my experimentation of getting traffic by taking advantage of the long tail of search. And I have been successful at it beyond my imagination to say the least.

So what exactly is the long tail of search

Many of you must have heard of the 80-20 principle. It basically says that 20% of your customers/product bring in 80% of your sales. 80-20 is the basic rinciple that every large organization runs on. You see if I am a large book store then I need to concentrate on 20% of the titles that bring in 80% of my sales.

The concept of long tail was made popular by Chris Anderson in an article in the Wired magazine. The basic premise is quite simple. The remaining 80% will be good enough for you if your cost of production is low. I will not get into theoretical detail as this is not a post about long tail but rather about how to attract traffic to your blog using this strategy of targetting the long tail.

Why is it easy to succeed by targetting the long tail?

The basic premise of this strategy is quite simple. If I have a new blog, I will find it very difficult to compete with more established blogs for a given keyword. Think of a new blog trying to compete with Digital Inspiration on a technology related blog. It does not matter how great a post you have about twitter, Amit’s post about he forgetting his twitter password will outrank you on Google in all probability. So what do I do?

There are 2 types of blog posts that you can write to take advantage of the long tail.

  1. A detailed post about a very specific topic that target search terms with 3 or more keywords. So since I can not compete with existing websites on the keyword virus, usb or virus usb I write a blog post titled how to remove virus from usb and  Everything you may need to know about how to fix errors in USB Flash drives and how to Format USB Flash. Those long titles are there to target search terms that are 3 or 4 words long.
  2. A post about a topic that established websites have not already written about: Google gets to see around 30% of search terms for the first time on a given day. Many of those are search terms that have become popular only recently. Typically these are news items. However do not write about news items that are going to get coverage from big websites. Rather focus on smaller issues like Melissa Huckaby and  Princess Kemeria Abajobir Abajifar that are going to have a decent amount of interest and not mch competition.

The steps to succeeding with the long tail

The idea of this blog post is not to tell you that you can succeed by focusing on the long tail. Rather I am going to reveal my secret of getting traffic and money by focusing on long tail. I strongly believe that all the steps that I list down below are essential for succeeding with the long tail strategy.

Timing is the most important aspect of success: We shall be removing competition from established websites and blogs by using this strategy. However keep in mind that you still have to compete with 1000s of other blogs for your success. That makes it quite important that you are amongst the first few guys to write about a topic, especially if you are targetting the hot words for your traffic.

Setting up the blog: When I say timing is important, it is not the time of you publishing the post. Since we shall be focusing on Google to get much of this traffic, it is actually the time when Google finally indexes your blog posts. A well designed wordpress theme with some essential plugins like sitemap plugin, all-in-seo plugin will normally do the trick. However to get the maximum benefit your theme must take care of many other issues including avoiding duplicate content issue, ensuring good internal linking etc. Do not worry if you are not too good at SEO. I am working on a wordpress theme that will take care of all these issues. But it will be available to the members of my how to make money with blogging ecourse. The course is absolutely free. So go ahead and signup with your email id alone.

Identifying long tail keywords

I think this is the single most important trick to succeeding with the long tail strategy is to find out keywords that have decent amount of traffic and not much competition. The simplest way to do this is to monitor google trends. Just go through that page and you will find 100 keywords that you can blog about. You can even target country specific google trend pages. However if you read that last line carefully, you will realize that I said Google trends is the simplest method and not the only method. Some other tricks that I use to find hot keywords includes analyzing submissions to social sites like digg, propeller, indianpad etc and Predicting what keywords will go hot on google trends in 2-3 days hence by going through event calendars like movie schedule, movie releases, valentines day, bloggers’ meet etc. Keywords identified by above methods are not targetted by many other sites. Hence you may use the above tricks to find superior result.

Another method to find long tail keywords is to use google adwords keyword tool. Let us say you want to do a post about seo. Enter the keyword in this tool and it will throw up a large number of terms related to seo. Depending on the level of competition for the keyword, you may choose a particular topic to create your blog post.

Find out low competition terms: It is not enough to identify terms that will have a lot of searches. You need to identify terms on which there is comparatively less competition to worry about. And the number of search results is not an indication of competition. Rather use the methods suggested by me to find out the level of competion for a keyword.

Writing a post targetted to long tail keywords: Ranking on Google is decided based on 2 types of factors off-page factor and on-page factor. Off-page factors include backlinks to your blog, age of your blog etc. While on-page factors include stuff that is on your page like keyword usage, formatting of your post etc. If you have a comparatively new blog you will have a disadvantage in the off-page factor. Hence it becomes extremely important that you make the most of the on-page seo factors. I have covered this topic in depth in my post titled The best way to use keywords on blog post for maximum impact.

Some exclusive tips to increase chances of success dramatically

  1. It is difficult to get links to a blog targetting long-tail keywords. Start your blog on some other topic like make money online or technology, get good number of links and then migrate to long tail keywords.
  2. Alternatively you may mix these posts with some other linkable topics like I do.
  3. Read my Beginners guide to building free backlinks to get free backlinks
  4. Hire me as a consultant to kick start your blog. :) On a serious note I am ready to work on other blogs on a revenue sharing basis.
  5. Avoid the issue of duplicate content by all cost. Never user ctrl+c and ctrl+v. Read others’ posts and then rewrite them in your own english. Do not reproduce the entire post
  6. Make use of images on your posts.

Finally become a member of my how to make money with blogging ecourse. The course is absolutely free. So go ahead and signup with your email id alone. Trust me I shall be revealing at least 3 more secret tips about how to find super hot long tail keywords in the ecourse.

If you found this blog post then please help me reach more people with a digg/ stumble/ twit or link from your blog

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