Blogging for Dollars and the Blogobubble (Part II)
So if the get rich quick schemes aren’t going to make you very much money from your blog, what’s left? The problem with most blogs, is that they all try to go after the same market segment. In October 2004 Chris Anderson wrote an article in Wired rethinking marketing techniques. Anderson showed that although there is a huge amount of demand for a few products, there is just as much demand if not more for the rest of the products out there. The breakthrough on his part was seeing that although you might not get the sheer quantity of sales for any one product you could make up for it by selling a lot of different products which appealed to different niche markets. Think Amazon.com or any of the online bookstores, they sell a large quantity of a few products, but an even larger quantity of all sorts of of other products. To better envision this wikipedia provides a graph(which is terrible if you’re colorblind, seriously who picked those two colors).
So, the key thing to take from this, is rather than jumping on the bandwagon and writing a blog about what everyone else is, find a few niche markets without that much competition. You might not make a ton of money on any individual market segment/blog but if you add up all the niches you wind up with a larger sum. Now onto the part about getting traffic to you.
Long Tail Advertising:
Ok, remember that Chris Anderson guy we were talking about. Well unless you are the guy from Momento I would hope so. Anyway, he wound up writing a book expanding on the Long Tail concept. He also has a blog. I suspect he might spend a little bit of time thinking about this concept so you might want to take a look.
After you’ve gone through those things, take a look at this article. The article argues that the long tail is actually getting fatter and opportunities are expanding for startups. Whether the tail is getting fatter or the market is fragmenting even more and lengthening is a matter of significant debate, but it’s still an interesting read.
There are also a couple of companies which specialize in connecting Long Tail…ers/ites with money. I want to take this opportunity to note that I don’t do paid reviews, ever. I just tell you what’s out there, you decide.
The Companies:
Hittail
What Is It?
“The long tail is an economic concept that says the collective demand for less-popular items … can exceed the all the most popular added together …. Online music stores are a perfect example because they can carry large collections of music just as easily as just a small selection. The product is digital and there are no inventory issues. So, the pay-per-click industry is now using this concept to encourage you to run ever-larger keyword buys. Their inventory of obscure, yet valuable keywords is inexhaustible…
HitTail reveals in real-time the least utilized, most promising keywords hidden in the Long Tail of your natural search results. We present these terms to you as suggestions that when acted on can boost the natural search results of your site. It’s that simple.”
103bees
What Is It?
“It’s a real-time online tool for webmasters, bloggers and internet marketers that is highly focused on natural search engine traffic analytics. It provides tons of detailed statistics and in-depth information on the search terms that drive targeted traffic to your websites.
103bees is an indispensable tool for search engine optimization (SEO) and internet marketing - everything you need to know about your search engine traffic in one place!”