Posts Tagged ‘long tail’

Posted by: Beau Blackwell, Marketing Coordinator

There’s an interesting article on MarketingSherpa touting the benefits of “nano-niche” marketing. Just about everyone involved with online marketing is well aware of the need to market products to well-targeted niches, but this idea takes things one step further and states that if you really want to stay recession-proof and get ahead of your competitors, you need to get laser-focused.

Tapping in to a highly motivated audience with little competition, and taking steps to gear your message towards them, can result in extraordinarily high returns on your investment. We talk a lot about the Long Tail here at ClickBank, and this idea is a perfect example of making the Long Tail work for you. You don’t need to drive a lot of traffic or spend a lot on advertising if you can achieve much higher conversion rates on the small amount of traffic you do have.

Nano-niche marketing is a perfect fit for affiliate marketing, since all that matters is how many visitors you convert into a sale, not your overall number of visits. Needing to drive huge amounts of untargeted traffic to your site is the old way of making money online. It used to be the case that using impression-based ad networks or programs like Google Adsense was the only way to make money, but that model doesn’t make sense for the vast majority of Internet marketers out there. In fact, at the recent BlogWorld conference I attended, these old monetization strategies were referred to several times as “webmaster welfare,” and the same experts instead recommended affiliate marketing and creating and selling your own products as the best ways to monetize a blog. The same holds true for just about any other type of website.

My recommendation is to take MarketingSherpa’s advice and start spending time identifying and targeting “nano-niches” in your area of expertise. The time you spend marketing to people in these ultra-focused niches will bring a much higher return on your efforts, giving you more time and resources to dedicate to finding other profitable niches. It’s time to think small!

Posted by: Bob King, CEO

I have to laugh as I follow along with all the debate and controversy regarding the Long Tail Theory of marketing and retailing. For those of you unfamiliar with the Long Tail Theory, several years ago Chris Anderson from Wired magazine wrote a book advancing the theory that the Internet is going to fundamentally change consumer buying habits. His theory was that online commerce will allow larger, basically unlimited, assortments of product to be made available. This would be a big shift from the limitations of brick and mortar stores, where space constraints limit the number of products to just the top-selling items. Now the consumer is free to buy whatever niche product they want via Internet commerce, without being limited to only what is stocked in the store.

I have to admit, when I first saw this theory, I was new to ClickBank and the Internet business and I said, “Wow, this is great!” Every time I talked about ClickBank to my friends or anyone else, I somehow worked Long Tail into the conversation.

Now a Harvard Business Professor, Anita Elberse, has come along and said, “Hey, wait a minute, this Long Tail isn’t really that revolutionary.” Her argument is that even though more product assortment is available, we are creatures of habit and we still mostly just buy the most popular items. She uses movies and music examples to support her argument.

So maybe it’s time to drop the Long Tail from my conversations, so I don’t have to get into a senseless argument.

But when I think about ClickBank in the context of the Long Tail, we are the Ultimate Long Tail. Not many businesses could be as niche-oriented as ClickBank. If you have information or advice on virtually any subject that you can put in digital form, you can find out if anybody wants to buy it by using ClickBank.

Granted, we have a modest number of products that are our best sellers, just like any other business. But we have a vast amount of product out there on the “ClickBank Long Tail.” Because of that Long Tail, it can still be profitable to create and promote an e-book or software program that doesn’t sell millions, or even thousands, of copies.

All it takes to get started is a little work on your part to get it ready and $49.95 to list it. It exists in digital form, so there are no warehouses, no trucks, and no further expense until it sells. Then you just pay the commission to the affiliate that promoted it and a small transaction fee to ClickBank for processing the order.

So, the Long Tail, with the blockbusters and thousands of other products, is alive and working here at ClickBank. That’s good news for everyone.