William Charlwood

The Long Tail of Search is the myriad of unique searches done daily that add up to the vast majority of search engine activity.  The top 10, 100, 1000, 10,000, 100,000 or even 1 million searches done each day are but a tiny, tiny fraction of the total.

The sum of the obscure, esoteric and often quirky makes up the majority and is known as the Long Tail.

Part of your role as an internet marketer is to market your web pages to people doing searches on line so you need to understand the implications of the Long Tail and how you can use it to get free targeted traffic and clicks if you are to maximize your AdSense affiliate or direct income.

For example, one effective way of capturing traffic from unusual searches is to create niche content that targets a huge range of similar search phrases or keywords.  There are tools available right now that can automate this for you. They essentially take single articles or web pages and generate thousands of permutations by replacing words with synonyms and phrases with other phrases with the same meaning. You then publish these different versions of your articles on your site.

In this way, you can capture a much larger volume of search engine traffic whilst still delivering the same informational value to your site’s visitors.

Here’s a quick example scenario.

Suppose you have an article that ranks well for the keyword “bicycling in France”. What if someone searches for “cycling in France”, “bicycling across France” or “bicycling around France” instead? Will you rank as well for those?

The answer is that you probably won’t but you might if you replaced the phrase “bicycling in France” in your article with the phrase “cycling in France”, “bicycling across France”
etc. and published those versions of your article too.

That is what chasing the Long Tail is all about and don’t forget, it is where the majority of your potential free traffic lies.

But don’t forget other languages too. If you create content in English, why not get it translated too so that you can attract searchers who are using different search terms altogether. So The Long Tail Of Search could just as easily become

• Der lange Schwanz der Suche
• La longue queue de la recherche
• La larga cola de la búsqueda
• A longa cauda de pesquisa
• La lunga coda di ricerca

Simply by placing these phrases on this blog I am likely over time to get a few visitors who are searching for the long tail of search in these non-English languages.

If you are doing any sort of testing then you need to make sure you have enough data to make rational decisions. I recently ran a split test using my autoresponder. What I did was send out two different emails to a relatively small list (around 400) and measured the response rates.

It was a classic A/B Split Test in other words although the sample size was quite small.

Here’s Version A of my email

Hello Firstname

Recently I mentioned a free ebook that makes me good money.

I didn’t write it. It is free to read. You don’t need to supply
an email address to get access to it.

But if you read it you’ll discover something pretty neat.
The book is quite short and very punchy.

To make it work for you here’s a very simple idea: put your
link to the book as a signature in your emails.

You can copy the example below if you want.

With best wishes

William Charlwood

PS Discover the ultimate online super tip.
http://www.supertips.com/ultimate/x/?id=104

And here is Version B

Hello Firstname

Recently I mentioned a free ebook that makes me good money.

I didn’t write it. It is free to read. You don’t need to supply
an email address to get access to it.

But if you read it you’ll discover something pretty neat.
The book is quite short and very punchy.

To make it work for you here’s a very simple idea: put your
link to the book as a signature in your emails.

You can copy the example below if you want.

With best wishes

William Charlwood

Discover the ultimate online super tip.
http://www.supertips.com/ultimate/x/?id=104

.

Spot the difference!

Actually the only difference was the use of “PS” in version A.

Initially I was intrigued to see that Version A was significantly more successful in terms of click through rates. At one point there was a 91% likelihood that its relative out-performance would be repeatable. In other words, statistically it looked as though a similar exercise done again would show that Version A generated a higher click through rate 91% of the time.But as data dribbled in, the relative response rates got closer and closer. At the moment Version A has generated a click through rate of 23.5% and Version B a click through rate of 22.7%. These click through rates are quite high for emails and often one problem you face is getting people to read them in the first place.

The figures themselves are too close to separate and suggest that the results of this particular split test are neutral which is a shame! I rather enjoyed having made what looked like an interesting discovery, namely that using PS as opposed to not using PS made a difference.

But I was wrong to leap to this conclusion too early.

Just for completeness, the subject line of both emails was the same:

A Quick Suggestion

There’s a key statistic you need to know if you are going to read Harvey Segal’s little ebook called The Ultimate Supertip. It’s what proportion of your buyers are likely to buy the upgrade.

If you know this, you’ll know which version is right for you.

So here’s some current data. It’s not hugely reliable from a purist’s perspective because the sample size is a bit low but I’ve just looked at the last few sales. The results are as follows:

13 sales since 13th July of which 11 were for the upgrade version and just 2 for the normal version. So the higher priced version which pays a bigger commission is outselling the lower priced version.

The book is free to download and you don’t need to provide your name or your email address to check it out.

The Ultimate Supertip