Blog Tails

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Sometimes you have all the pieces you just need to figure out how to put them together, and make something of value. I read a thread on the Yahoo blog a week ago On the Trail of the Long Tail. Now why is this important to a Search Engine Marketer like myself? Well I come across the long tail all the time. In fact if you run a commercial website many times you can have more tail than anything else.

How do you increase your blog tail? Well first you need to integrate a blog into your existing website. One of the easiest way to do this is with a “widget news” or “widget events” similar section. Using Google or Yahoo News set up an alert for your keywords. When your alerts trigger, blog about it. If it’s a big event do some research and make a full post. If it’s small then a few sentences will do. Websites like Gizmodo and Engadget do this really well. I’ve also found it’s really helpful to choose a keyword centric title as opposed to an artistic one, but to each his own. If you’ve linked out to other blogs be sure to send out a trackback ping. Depending on how big your industry is, or how important the news is there may be others blogging about this news item. Go ahead make some comments. Remember on topic comments are not blog spam. If you can get your blog comments out first or fast, and if you are profound (either profoundly smart and insightful or profoundly stupid or contrarian) you increase your likelihood of being linked to by other bloggers. The more often you blog the more tails you’ll have. Here’s the payoff, track your referrals, see what people are looking for, and how they are finding you. See if you can establish a pattern and or formula for success or failure. Once you do look for ways to monetize your tail.

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