6 Ways to Use Long Tail Marketing in Your Content Strategy

小时候，我曾经在圣诞节早晨跑下楼梯。当我们等待父母时，我和我兄弟姐妹的第一件事就是看我们的长袜。这是我年复一年地发现的：牙刷，袜子和橘子。

These are all fairly low-demand Christmas products. Yet, they were something my siblings and I looked forward to every year. Having said that, my parents unintentionally set a tradition and always had to have those items in our stockings come holiday season.

This is a small-scale example of long tail marketing — essentially, my parents "sold" us many low demand products to "make money." Simply put, my siblings and I were the consumers and my parents were the marketers.

Although my parents didn't make money — instead, they swapped gifts for their children's happiness — this concept still applies in the marketing world today.

下面，让我们回顾一下尾巴营销是什么以及如何在内容策略中使用它。

The long tail is like力量(yes, as inStar Wars). It permeates everything you do online and binds all facets of your internet marketing. Well, perhaps that is a bit farfetched, but it's a very important concept and relevant for anyone trying to create an online presence for themselves or their business.

For those who came in late, the term "long tail" was coined by克里斯·安德森to describe the business strategy of e-tailers such as Amazon that sell a high volume of thousands of popular items (the head portion in the graph below, in red) and low volume of hundreds of thousands of niche or unique items (the mustard tail portion in the image below).

According Anderson'slong tail blog, over the course of time if you grow the tail portion of the graph, "the potential aggregate size of the many small markets in goods that don't individually sell well enough for traditional retail and broadcast distribution may someday rival that of the existing large market in goods that do cross that economic bar." The tagline ofhis bookis aptly termed "Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More."

Long Tail Marketing Examples

Long tail marketing is a strategy that's typically used by online companies, such as Amazon and Netflix.

However, the same theory can be used for content strategy. For instance, when coming up with your list of target keywords, you could include many长尾关键字with smaller monthly search volumes in addition to the higher monthly search volume keywords. This way, the combined traffic of the lower monthly search volume keywords will add a nice cushion to your views.

Below, we'll review some top examples of long tail marketing in action:

• Netflix:尽管Netflix携带了许多受欢迎的节目和电影，但它也带有同样多（如果没有的话），那么受欢迎的标题也很少。它刚刚结束4,000 movies and 1,500 shows。The less popular titles contribute to the overall watch time and attract niche visitors.
• Amazon:Amazon sells more than350 million products。我愿意打赌，低需求产品的数量等于或超过高需求产品。
• HubSpot的博客：Not only does HubSpot target long tail keywords in order to gain traffic, but it also produces a lot of content in order to attract more unique visitors.

Now that you know a bit about the long tail, here's how you can leverage it in various parts of your content strategy:

1. Optimize your site for tons of keywords.

SEO is an important part of your inbound marketing strategy and you should optimize your site for hundreds, if not thousands, of keywords, especiallylong tail key phrases。For example, "internet marketing for lead generation" would be a good long tail key phrase, compared to just inbound marketing.

长尾钥匙短语可能会导致流量较低，但是如上图所示，尾部部分中所有关键字的组合流量很重要。另外，以我的经验，从长尾键短语中访问您的网站的访问者在寻找非常具体的东西时往往会更好。

Avinash Kaushik, an analytics guru, recommends that you use SEO to tackle keywords in the head of your long tail graph and use PPC to drive traffic for long tail keywords. Here's a gritty butawesome article by him。

2. Create a lot of content.

Is it a surprise that sites with the most content also attract the most visitors? Craigslist, ebay, and Amazon are great examples of sites providing a hugevariety of contentthat help them attract millions of visitors.

Above is a snapshot of popular pages from the HubSpot blog. The blog home page and a couple of articles that made it to the Digg and Reddit home pages continue to drive a lot of visitors.

但是，请查看随着时间的推移，所有其他页面都能获得多少页。即使是长时间的远端，最后20个左右的内容来源也驱动了1000多个页面浏览量。

3. Grow your followers and fan base.

你的一部分r strategy should be to gain more followers and fans on various social networks and sites. In the example below,Dan Zarrellashows us this incredible distribution of retweets per follower.

Image Source

Here you can see that there's a core group of most engaged followers (the head) that does a lot of retweeting. At the same time, the sum of the retweets by people who only retweet occasionally is also a force to reckon with. Please bear in mind that the key to getting retweets is more about engaging people on Twitter and sharing valuable content, and less about gaining sheer numbers of followers.

4. Invest in a link building strategy.

现在，我并不是说您应该出去付费，链接到您的网站。我衷心希望的是，每个人都积极致力于尝试发布良好的内容，以便其他人链接到您的网站。

其中一些站点会吸引您很多交通和访客。但是，如上所述，有许多网站每天都可以吸引您一点交通，如果其中一些站点推动了质量线索...您可以花费时间和精力来与他们建立关系，以便您可以种植那个漏斗。

5. Spread your content around.

In the first graph below, you can see the traffic HubSpot gets from all the social media sites where we actively share or upload content. If we didn't share content on all the sites in the tail, our site stats would be lighter by at least a few thousand visitors.

Taking that a step further, below are the leads we generated from the above sources. What would you give to get an extra few hundred leads?

6. Maximize your website footprint.

HubSpot offers a lot offree toolswhile spending time growing the traffic on those sites. It's like investing in real estate for investment purposes. Over time HubSpot's portfolio of web properties grows.

Agreed, it is not easy for everyone to build lots of tools and manage multiple sites. But you couldinvest in a blog您可以构建具有类似目的的微型物体。这种活动的结果是下图 - 每个站点驾驶合格的交通和潜在客户back to your main hub.

Long tail marketing isn't just a strategy for online retailers. It can also be used to broaden your content strategy. You can maximize your opportunity by writing content for niche areas and sharing it widely. By diversifying your keywords, content, and web asset portfolios, you'll yield better results.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in May 2009 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.