Long Tail Blogging and Outreach

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By: Matt Clark

To create a steady growth of brand awareness and traffic to your site, the best approach is a sustained campaign rather than a buzz campaign. A Buzz campaign will create a strong initial spike in traffic and brand awareness that dies out almost as quickly as it grew. For Buzz you want to reach out to A-List bloggers, the “head-of-tail”. A sustained word of mouth (WOM) campaign creates true brand loyalty and a consumer-driven conversation about your brand. For this we need to turn to the long tail of online marketing, specifically blogs.

Leveraging “the tail” on the blogosphere long tail (the 80-90 percent of blogs that are low-or medium-traffic generators) has two main benefits. The first is the potential to reach the huge collective audience that is the tail. The second is the potential for a greater impact than the major blogs can offer, as these blogs focus on niche topics. Smaller blogs tend to be visited by people who know the author and therefore place a high degree of trust in the content. About 83% of consumers rely on the opinion of a friend while making a decision on a purchase.

If you were trying to reach out to moms, you wouldn’t go after top consumer blogs or even 5 Minutes for Mom and GNM Parents (well you would, just not in this example – you always want to go after top blogs at some point, you just wouldn’t focus on them). You would want to focus on online communities, forums, social networking groups, and blogs such as Susie J, Izzy Mom, An Ordinary Mom and Suburban Oblivion.

In The Long Tail world of blogging and niche marketing, 100 small wins is much greater than one big win. Small markets are passionate and deal greatly with what you do and your brand. Smaller markets increasingly have influence on how companies behave and what they produce. Panasonic’s digital camera group are more interested in online communities and groups of enthusiastic Panasonic digital camera professionals (niches include indoor, outdoor, animals, motion, different camera types) than general photography users.

This is only the tip of the iceberg, for more read Chris Anderson’s Blog and check out his book, The Long Tail.