Blogging for the Long Tail : Divide By Zero

If anyone has taken a business management class or a supply-chain logistics class, they’ve heard of, if not examined, the idea of the “long tail.�?

For those of you who aren’t familiar with the long tail, it is when companies provide products that have low demand individually but add up to a lot cumulatively. It’s complicated enough to warrant a whole book but that’s the idea.

As an example, digital distribution caters to the long tail because long-tail items don’t cost much different to keep in inventory than popular hits (i.e. pop albums vs. classical albums). That’s why a platform like Steam does so well, it’s able to keep old games for a long time.

So what do I mean when I say “blogging for the long tail.�? I am sure many bloggers have realized this but I’ve found it is better to blog about topics not many people blog about than to blog about topics lots of people blog about. More specifically, in my case I write how to articles for seemingly mundane things like LAN’ing someone’s favorite video game.

Here’s the thing, though. People like to find answers to problems. While many people can perhaps eventually find a solution to these problems by lots of Googling, if I write articles with a walkthrough and screenshots, I get more visits and readers. I do it, because as a user myself I search for problems with Google and it takes me awhile to find a straight answer. Now, I find an answer and then I blog the answer with an easy to follow list. Let’s take, for example, some of my recent popular articles.

Before I wrote the article on how to LAN Red Alert 2, I was maybe getting between 10-20 visits a day. Since that article came out (a month ago), I’ve gotten about 235 visits by people using keywords containing “red alert.�? That article is one of my top hits (362 page views). Since I released the Age of Empires III Hamachi article (a week and a half ago), I’ve gotten about 100 visits from people searching (178 views).

There are a few other examples of traffic increasing by writing some other articles (e.g. IPX on Vista). My point is that catering to the “small�? demographic with many articles can turn out to be your biggest traffic generator. I went from an average of 15-20 visits per day to now over 100 in less than a month. I have plans to write many more how to articles, since they seem to be very popular searches.

Even though it’s not on the economic side I think there is still a “long tail�? idea to blogging. Since a blog can keep posts indefinitely if you choose to, there’s really no limit to how varied you can make your articles. I choose to cater to the computer problems crowd because it’s a heavy hitter but there are many other small niche topics that you could blog on.