The most common challenge that many bloggers face is how to increase traffic. Seems that everyone offers you the same piece of advice: (1) Write great content (2) Exchange links and pump up your Technorati rate (3) Build a community (4) Use Social Bookmarking (StumbleUpon, Digg etc’). All these are indispensable if you want to make your blog a success. However, i have a slightly different view on a topic, and i want to share it with you.
We all know John Chow and think he is a smart guy. John has been preaching on SEO (Search Engine Optimization) importance lately. He actually ‘SEOd’ his site. He smartly picked a popular keyword , with not much competition and sticked with it. His blog header, all new incoming links and every post displays John’s new mantra ‘Make money online’ (i just gave him other link). John’s new target keyword is being searched 120K times a month, and thus is expected to bring to his blog around 8K visitors from search engines every single month.
The thing is that small bloggers aren’t able to find an army of reviewers that will do the “deep link” work for free, and make their blogs hit Google’s first page for a 120K monthly searches keyword.
The Long Tail is the small blog’s savior as far as getting traffic from Seach Engines. The idea behind the ‘Long Tail’ is that given a big distribution channel (in our case, the Web), products that are low in demand (in our case, not popular keywords), make a market that rivals or exceeds the relatively low number of blockbusters( in our case, popular keywords).
Let’s apply the ‘Long Tail’ principle on the same search term John Chow used (using the Overture Keyword Selector tool) :
As you can see, the two alternative keywords i highlighted, have a much lower demand, however it is expected that also a less fierce competition. Those two alternative keywords might suite a small blog (with no more of 10K page views a month). Let’s take the keyword ‘Make money online from home’. Given the fact that Overture represents around 25% of the entire Seach Engine Traffic, is it expected that around 8K searches are done on that keyword every month. Understand the idea? Now it’s the time to pick your right keyword, start SEOing your blog and make it to Google’s first page! 
Comments are more than welcome!
Feel free to look into these related tips:
- Revive some of your good posts :)
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- Drive more Social Bookmarking traffic with the Social Icon set
Posted by Gili
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Nice article, theres so many people chasing the make money online term at the moment.
lol seems like everyone is interested in making money these days .
This is a great article. Im not terribly into making money online, but the information on the Long Tail will be very helpful on the next sites I am going to monetize.
Cheers
That is certainely true. I’m one of those guys who make terrible money online
LOL Thilak, your site rocks man. I wish that when this one will be a year old, it will be similar to yours!
Interesting. What I’m wondering is this – People who focus excessively on this, how is it different from ‘Google bombing’? Just curious.
@lyndonmaxewell – Thanks for your question. Leveraging the “Long Tail” is IMHO different from Google Bombing. The “Long Tail” provides the small blogger with the ability to wisely choose a keyword with not much competition and make it to the Google first page. Google bomb is more suited to competitive keywords, in which you can make it to the first page only if you reach a critical mass of backlinks with anchored texts to your web site or by using more spam oriented techniques like for example redirecting all the subdomains to the main domain.
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[...] The Long tail keyword strategy [...]
Long Tail is a great way to increase traffic. Just look through your site analytics and see some of the phrases that brought traffic in. There might be four or five word phrases that you never thought of as being traffic generators. JMHO.