he "mass market" and then a long trailing tail of smaller niches with correspondingly smaller populations. However, if we look at our graph, we'll notice that the long tail actually contains just as many, if not more, potential consumers than the bigger “body.” Additionally, we should recognize that most sales efforts are concentrated on the body. Thus, the competition for the interest of the body is much more intense than is the competition for various points along the long tail.

You can see where that's going, right? Niche marketing. Long ta

It used to be that I would tell clients, "The more content you have, the morel likely you are to generate search engine traffic from longer searches. Although you might be targeting one or two of the more popular keywords, more content will allow you to start collecting hits for longer search strings that aren't as common. Those add up and provide a great deal of residual value to the content."

Although those statements are true, coming from a freelance content writer, they have a tendency to sound a lot like "way #29 for this guy to sell his service." I could almost hear potential clients thinking, "Sure, if I have enough content I might get occasional hits for 'left-handed widgets for tired children in Monrovia,' but I want 'left-handed widgets' traffic. I can SELL to those people."

Since 2004, there's a growing discussion about this whole issue and what it really means in terms of site traffic. Fortunately, those involved in that discussion have started using a pithy name for the phenomena, the "long tail."

It's my belief that the current research and analysis on the long tail of search traffic is a great argument in favor of hiring a content writing pro.

Let's start at the beginning of all of this.

Wikipedia's discussion of the long tail provides a nice summary:

"The long tail is the colloquial name for a long-known feature of statistical distributions ... The feature is also known as "heavy tails", "power-law tails" or "Pareto tails"… In these distributions, a high-frequency or high-amplitude population is followed by a low-frequency or low-amplitude population which gradually "tails off". In many cases the … long tail…can cumulatively outnumber or outweigh the initial portion of the graph, such that in aggregate they comprise the majority."

Chris Anderson from Wired has a great book about the long tail, and created a public diary about his tome that included a post called “The Long Tail of Design” that I think serves as great place to develop an understanding of the whole idea. It's a nice "1 minute primer of long tail thinking" for those who aren't familiar with the concept.

If we graph a market, we have a body, representing the "mass market" and then a long trailing tail of smaller niches with correspondingly smaller populations. However, if we look at our graph, we'll notice that the long tail actually contains just as many, if not more, potential consumers than the bigger “body.” Additionally, we should recognize that most sales efforts are concentrated on the body. Thus, the competition for the interest of the body is much more intense than is the competition for various points along the long tail.

You can see where that's going, right? Niche marketing. Long ta

service." I could almost hear potential clients thinking, "Sure, if I have enough content I might get occasional hits for 'left-handed widgets for tired children in Monrovia,' but I want 'left-handed widgets' traffic. I can SELL to those people."

Since 2004, there's a growing discussion about this whole issue and what it really means in terms of site traffic. Fortunately, those involved in that discussion have started using a pithy name for the phenomena, the "long tail."

It's my belief that the current research and analysis on the long tail of search traffic is a great argument in favor of hiring a content writing pro.

Let's start at the beginning of all of this.

Wikipedia's discussion of the long tail provides a nice summary:

"The long tail is the colloquial name for a long-known feature of statistical distributions ... The feature is also known as "heavy tails", "power-law tails" or "Pareto tails"… In these distributions, a high-frequency or high-amplitude population is followed by a low-frequency or low-amplitude population which gradually "tails off". In many cases the … long tail…can cumulatively outnumber or outweigh the initial portion of the graph, such that in aggregate they comprise the majority."

Chris Anderson from Wired has a great book about the long tail, and created a public diary about his tome that included a post called “The Long Tail of Design” that I think serves as great place to develop an understanding of the whole idea. It's a nice "1 minute primer of long tail thinking" for those who aren't familiar with the concept.

If we graph a market, we have a body, representing the "mass market" and then a long trailing tail of smaller niches with correspondingly smaller populations. However, if we look at our graph, we'll notice that the long tail actually contains just as many, if not more, potential consumers than the bigger “body.” Additionally, we should recognize that most sales efforts are concentrated on the body. Thus, the competition for the interest of the body is much more intense than is the competition for various points along the long tail.

You can see where that's going, right? Niche marketing. Long ta

tail of search traffic is a great argument in favor of hiring a content writing pro.

Let's start at the beginning of all of this.

Wikipedia's discussion of the long tail provides a nice summary:

"The long tail is the colloquial name for a long-known feature of statistical distributions ... The feature is also known as "heavy tails", "power-law tails" or "Pareto tails"… In these distributions, a high-frequency or high-amplitude population is followed by a low-frequency or low-amplitude population which gradually "tails off". In many cases the … long tail…can cumulatively outnumber or outweigh the initial portion of the graph, such that in aggregate they comprise the majority."

Chris Anderson from Wired has a great book about the long tail, and created a public diary about his tome that included a post called “The Long Tail of Design” that I think serves as great place to develop an understanding of the whole idea. It's a nice "1 minute primer of long tail thinking" for those who aren't familiar with the concept.

If we graph a market, we have a body, representing the "mass market" and then a long trailing tail of smaller niches with correspondingly smaller populations. However, if we look at our graph, we'll notice that the long tail actually contains just as many, if not more, potential consumers than the bigger “body.” Additionally, we should recognize that most sales efforts are concentrated on the body. Thus, the competition for the interest of the body is much more intense than is the competition for various points along the long tail.

You can see where that's going, right? Niche marketing. Long ta

cases the … long tail…can cumulatively outnumber or outweigh the initial portion of the graph, such that in aggregate they comprise the majority."

Chris Anderson from Wired has a great book about the long tail, and created a public diary about his tome that included a post called “The Long Tail of Design” that I think serves as great place to develop an understanding of the whole idea. It's a nice "1 minute primer of long tail thinking" for those who aren't familiar with the concept.

If we graph a market, we have a body, representing the "mass market" and then a long trailing tail of smaller niches with correspondingly smaller populations. However, if we look at our graph, we'll notice that the long tail actually contains just as many, if not more, potential consumers than the bigger “body.” Additionally, we should recognize that most sales efforts are concentrated on the body. Thus, the competition for the interest of the body is much more intense than is the competition for various points along the long tail.

You can see where that's going, right? Niche marketing. Long ta

he "mass market" and then a long trailing tail of smaller niches with correspondingly smaller populations. However, if we look at our graph, we'll notice that the long tail actually contains just as many, if not more, potential consumers than the bigger “body.” Additionally, we should recognize that most sales efforts are concentrated on the body. Thus, the competition for the interest of the body is much more intense than is the competition for various points along the long tail.

You can see where that's going, right? Niche marketing. Long tail theory, by that name or any other, has been one of the driving forces behind internet marketing for some time now. People in the IM community have been doing their market research in hopes of finding potentially lucrative smaller markets that one can mine for profits more efficiently than the massive area of the body.

Yes, running a series of "boutique sites" can be more profitable than trying to take on eBay or Wal-Mart.com. No kidding. What does this have to do with hiring an SEO content writer?

Good question.

Here's the thing: We can apply long tail theory to search engine results, too. If you take a popular keyword, log the searches made containing that keyword, and graph the results you are going to get something a graph similar to the one we just discussed.

There is going to be a mass of searches just for the keyword and obvious 2-3 word phrases using the keyword. Then, you are going to have a precipitous decline for searches using other strings that will result in a long, flowing tail.

So, you can fight for that traffic in the body, but it's going to take some work. There's a lot of competition in the body. You can also start mining the long tail for traffic.

How? One of the best ways is content--and lots of it. If you hire someone to handle your SEO content writing and to generate a series of pieces on "widgets," that content is assuredly going to produce strings containing the very kind of things for which those long tail searchers are looking.

Here's an additional perk--even if you are not sold on the long tail idea, the content itself still helps with respect to marketing to the larger body. There is no forced compromise. Well-written content will serve both needs simultaneously.

An entry at a popular SEOMoz.org blog noted:

"In the long tail of keyword searches, the great value comes from having hundreds or thousands of unique, valuable content pages written on a niche subject. The millions of completely unique search terms that hit the engines each day help to bring in traffic that a purely 'designed' strategy could never receive."

Blackbeard SEO said that having a nice long tail the "hidden secret of bloggi