Long Tail and Affiliate Marketing Business.

July 9, 2008 by Joseph

Long Tail and Affiliate Marketing Business.

This morning I posted an article titled is the long tail concept by Chris Anderson flawed in reaction to an article on the Harvard business review website. On this post I’d like to continue on and discuss more on how the Long Tail Concept can be beneficial and relevant to affiliate marketing business.

Let me start off by stating that if there is two thing that most of the internet affiliate marketers go wrong, then it could be the following two:

1.) Assuming or not carrying out and using the right combination of keywords.

2.) Failing to break down and organize their main site into niches inside niches.

As a consequence a lot of us fail to capture the optimal traffic leading to lost opportunities and sales. The advantage of using the long tail concept in our affiliate marketing business is two fold.

First of all, you get to target and attract traffic from the long list comprising of a wide range of niche keywords. And because you are using a broad number of key terms as opposed to just a few, chances are that you business will develop a higher degree of resistance from traffic fluctuations that is normally occasioned by changes in search engine algorithms.

Secondly, because you are attracting traffic from some of the most specific key phrases within the niches in you niche, there is a higher chance of more sales due to a higher conversation rate. The main reason being that someone typing those low searched keywords are people who already know the product they want and are probably on the last phase of the buying cycle.

It is therefore very critical that you understand this long tail concept and how you can use it in the right way in order to help you grow and expand your affiliate marketing business.

Because this concept is very important for you as an affiliate marketer to grasp, I am going to seek the help of two of the leading and most respectful internet marketers, namely Mr Ken Envoy President of Sitesell and Seth Godin Founder member of Squidoo. Both of these experts are going to address this concept from two different perspectives.

So let’s get started.

Seth Godin.

Most affiliate marketers are guilt of making this terrible mistake. They concentrate most of their efforts in trying to win over the most searched for and sought after keywords. Sometimes back, Seth Godin posted this very interesting post entitled small is the new big, it will warm you up for our next section below.

Ken Evoy.

Ken talks about three forces that you must understand as far as the Long Tail Concept is relevant to small businesses, namely: