Long tail content marketing was one of the first lessons I learned in business.
Initially coined by Wired magazine editor Chris Andersen in a 2004 essay, The Long Tail subsequently became a book of the same title.
In short, the long tail means that products with low demand can collectively build a better market share than rival products, assuming the distribution is large enough.
In the original article, Andersen mentioned Amazon, Apple and Yahoo! as three businesses using this strategy, selling many different items in relatively small quantities.
How does the long tail apply to content marketing?
Your business can successfully apply the long tail to your content marketing through search engine optimisation.
The ideal search phrase combines high search volume and low competition.
Stumble across one of these unicorns, a relevant search phrase for your niche, and you can drive a significant number of target customers to your website with well-optimised content.
But unicorn search phrases like these are few and far between.
Instead, a long term content marketing SEO strategy allows you to target a significant number of low search volume and low competition phrases.
Because those search phrases are low volumes, in some cases attracting only a handful of searches each month, your competitors are unlikely to devote any time to target them.
If you can create a sufficient volume of well-optimised content for your website, each pulling in a handful of target visitors each month, that effort soon adds up.
Doing high-volume content marketing
The challenge with a long tail content marketing strategy is doing enough volumes to make it pay off.
Building a long tail of SEO optimised content on your website requires time, patience and a well-oiled process.
The famous Chinese proverb says: “The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.”
In the context of long tail content marketing, this proverb recognises that you can’t turn back the clock and start your blog, podcast or YouTube channel in the past, but you can get started today.
Nobody is an overnight success. It takes time.
If you commit today to create an original piece of content a week for the next five years, you can place yourself in a strong position in the future, where your website dominates hundreds of low-volume yet valuable SEO terms.
So, how do I create a lot of content?
Of course, creating one piece of content a week, consistently for many years, is only one way to skin this particular cat.
Instead, you could commit to creating a LOT of content every week.
Becoming a content creation machine requires a great deal of organisation and energy. It might be cliched to say you need to work smarter, not harder.
One of our favourite ways to become a beast of a content creator is to make pillar content and then repurpose this into multiple other forms of micro-content.
Other approaches include outsourcing the bulk of content production work (for example, outsourcing the editing, uploading, and optimising video content on YouTube).
You can create more content by batching your content creation, combining similar tasks such as brainstorming titles, writing scripts, and recording videos or podcasts.
Setting aside a day for content creation every few weeks means the hungry content creation machine doesn’t interfere (too much) with your daily tasks.
You could even harness the power of AI to assist you with your long tail content marketing.
Quality vs quantity
Something we preach at Bear Content is the importance of delivering both quality and quantity when it comes to your content marketing.
It’s no longer enough to create the occasional piece of high-quality content; the world is far too noisy a place for that approach to succeed.
At the same time, it would be unwise to sacrifice quality so you can push out a much higher quantity of content marketing.
Delivering both quality and quantity requires sufficient resources.
Assuming you have linked a successful content marketing strategy and business success, bringing in more resources to help you create and distribute your content (whether written, audio or video) will be a solid investment.
What next?
So, how will you create more content to build your long tail?
It takes time and a commitment to high-quality content creation, but the payoff can be considerable.
By creating a variety of content focused on specific topics and phrases, you can attract more visitors looking for exactly what you have to offer.
And that’s good news for any business competing in today’s crowded online marketplace.
