I just finished reading The Long Tail which is a book I heard of about a year ago but just got around to reading. It’s worth reading if you’re interested in making money online. It will give you some things to think about in regards to opportunities for making money online and why long tail keywords are important.
The subtitle is “Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More.” And it goes on to explain how the Internet has changed the playing field using Amazon, iTunes, and NetFlix as examples. Since these are online businesses, they have advantages over traditional bricks and mortar stores that sell similar items.
Basically, in a physical store there is a cost for shelf space and any item that doesn’t earn back that cost isn’t worth selling. So traditional retail stores will only stock items that sell in large volumes. When the sales volume declines to a certain level, it’s not worth the cost of carrying that item. But that’s not the case online. For example, the incremental cost for iTunes to add more songs to it’s music store is negligible and any purchases can be downloaded electronically. That means they can offer a much wider selection than any physical music store ever could by a wide margin.
It turns out that while there are not many purchases of any individual long tail items, when taken as a whole the sales of long tail items are actually quite large. So maybe the top 40 songs sell in huge volumes but the next several thousand songs (the long tail of songs) will also sell a large volume as a whole. And it also seems that the demand is virtually endless. Anytime songs are added, they almost always sell at least a few copies.
This is all being driven by three factors but I can only remember two and I’ve already returned the book to the library. The two I remember are the democratization of tools and the democratization of distribution. For example in the music industry, it is no longer necessary to rent an expensive studio. I’m not a Mac user but apparently there is a program called Garage Band that comes with every Mac that is easy to use for recording music. And then for distribution, it’s easy to set up a website or to upload the music to social networking sites like MySpace. You’ll have to read the book if you want to know the third factor.
Tags: Copywriting, Success
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