The Long Tail, the Long Term and Your Blog

A lot of people starting blogs today are looking for quick results. The definition of "results" really depends on what your motivation is. In this case, I am talking about using a blog as a business tool for marketing and public relations.

Sometimes, this occurs. For example, Neil Patel's Pronet Advertising Blog has fast become one of my favorite reads. It's new, but it's clear from the myriad of daily invaluable posts and his sustained presence on digg, Neil gets it. However, more often than not, if you're starting a business blog, just as with stocks, you're best off taking a Long Tail and a long term approach.

Blogs are built to capitalize on the power of the Long Tail. First, you need to focus your blog on the segment of the conversation you care passionately about - and stick to it. If your blog gets 100 regular readers a day and it's the "right" 100, then it's a success. The key is to add value to that dialogue. Find online gems that this audience is likely to miss and share your perspective. Write compelling op-eds and tutorials.

Second, and here's where the long-term approach factors in, be patient and blog for search. An executive for one of the biggest blog companies on the Web once told me that it takes a year for a blog to build substantial Google juice. Judging from what I've seen from the various projects I've worked on, he's right.

Blogging for search starts with a good statistics program, like Google Analytics. Start tracking where your traffic comes from. The Google Analytics blog has a great set of tips today just for bloggers. These include:

• Finding out what posts readers liked the most by looking at daily visits
  
• Comparing new vs. returning visitors      
• Finding out how people exit your blog
  
• Monitoring how long readers spend looking at your content      

Comments

[Neil Patel]

Steve, good points about blogging, the long tail and using a blog as a business tool. I am flattered that you used Pronet Advertising as an example. What I can add is that you have to work hard at writing quality content and focus on specific topics that you think appeal to your existing and future readers. For Pronet Adveritsing, I know that the majority of the search traffic does come from "long tail" keywords, but it ended up occurring naturally based on the focused content that I write on.

[Wayne Smallman]

I have to agree whole-heartedly with all of these points.

Why? Because I've just rattled off almost the same thing in a recent article submission to Ezine Articles.

I had a personal 'blog (yeah, I know!) which I've since 'parked', but I'd got to that sweet spot of 100+ posts, which meant I was getting some natural traffic coming through.

My current 'blog is an off-shoot of the personal 'blog which I'm trying to move more towards being an adjunct to my business website.

Currently, I'm at the 60+ posts mark .. but I'm not in any rush to get to 100.

Quality comes first and that takes time...

[Mario Vellandi]

Very good points Steve. I was telling a client (new product development consultant in health care), that blogging (writing & commenting) is a long term branding strategy to build awareness. The more specific the content is, the better. Being a web developer and avid RSS reader, there are SO MANY interesting blogs that it's overwhelming in the beginning. But as time passed, I began weeding out sites adding greater relevancy to the tags I was creating and creating more time for myself. Now I'm in a mindset, that as a particular blog's posts get more generic, off topic, or even mundanely diary-like....that blog will get the axe. nothing personal, but my time is valuable since I already have trade-specific magazine subscriptions to read, and work to get back to!

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