“Long Tail” from the guy who coined the term

Posted on April 19, 2007
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Whether Chris Anderson coined the term “long tail” isn’t the point of this post. I don’t care if he did or didn’t and neither should you. But because of my stance that this long tail phenomenon is simply a waste of time, if focused on, for most ecommerce marketers, I get a fair number of folks pointing to Chris’ book “The Long Tail”. They argue that the numbers presented on Amazon’s book sales are proof that long tail is the future and that Internet marketers better be paying attention.

Hmmmn, Did I miss somthing after all?

I don’t think so - and neither does the book’s author.

Look, the long tail as Chris describes it applies only to businesses with a ton of products. By a ‘ton’ I mean a product inventory in the hundreds of thousands, not just the hundreds like most ecommerce retailers I know. Not even in the thousands like a few select Internet retailers I know. Hundreds of Thousands.

That’s a lot.

And Chris apparently agrees. Here’s what he said in a recent post on his blog: “The big money in the Long Tail is in aggregation, as shown by the likes of eBay or iTunes. For the individual producer who’s way down there in the weeds, the forces that created the Long Tail market in the first place–democratized access to market and powerful filters that can drive demand to niches–certainly help, but even doubling a small number still leaves a pretty small number.”

Thanks Chris!

Enough said?

MSN Labs vs. Google Labs (YOU win!)

Posted on February 20, 2007
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MicroSoft wants your patronage BIG time! A new tool Keyword Forecast (still
beta) is a direct assault on Google Trends.

The graphs below are based on the keywords mp3, ipod, and zune

 Keyword Forecast tool ( http://adlab.msn.com/ForecastV2/KeywordTrendsWeb.aspx) provides slightly different information than Google, with an obvious slant toward marketing.

Demographics is the big differentiater here. While Google Trends ( http://www.google.com/trends) gives you the events and geographic locations that shape traffic, MSN focus is on Gender and Age groups patterns (very cool).

One more feature of Keyword Forecast, as the name implies, is a short range prediction of traffic (also pretty cool)

So which tool do you use?…

BOTH

Why not get data from two different sources? Both absolutely free and
a great addition to your arsenal of keyword research tools.

God Bless the Geeks ;)

The often overlooked importance of viral marketing..

Posted on December 31, 2006
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I admit that I occasionally spend too much time trying to crack the Google algorithm (or at least try to figure out which components are most important) and not enough time on other Search Engine Marketing (SEM) activities.  I had the importance of this brought home to me recently while rummaging through my site statistics.

Over a week ago, I happened to notice that I was getting more entries onto my golf slippers page on TheGolfCollection.  At first I thought perhaps I had moved up naturally on the search engines but a review of the referrer showed that many of these visitors were coming from GolfBlogger.com.  I didn’t know the owner nor had I ever heard of the site before so with a few clicks on the keyboard, I dropped on by. 

To my amusement, the owner had selected our golf slippers as his ‘rediculous golf item of the week’.  He copied the picture of the golf slippers and made that a link to our site along with a text link.  So his golf site was sending qualified visitors to my site.  Free of charge to me - what a deal!

Bob and I started a relationship with the site owner and we’ve now had our second item showing as a product pick.  More products - more visitors - more sales. 

This got us thinking.   Had we been missing the obvious all along?  Well, yes we had.  The next think I knew, Bob was logging into golf forums and searching for threads that would relate to products we sell and causually make a reference.  Now we get more qualified traffic and the cost is a little time and effort.

BTW, in case the SEO types are wondering, the text link on GolfBlogger.com was a “rel = nofollow” link so it was not doing us any good from a rankings perspective with Google.  However, the image link is a real link.

The final kicker is that today I noticed that GolfBlogger.com is starting to rank for golf slippers naturally in the search engines.  So we are, by the good graces of GolfBlogger.com getting more placements that will eventually send us,

yes, you guessed it,

MORE traffic. 

I guess that’s why it’s called viral marketing.

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