You know about long tail keywords don’t you? No. Well sit right down here pilgrim and I will explain.

Chris Anderson first elucidated it in October 2004. He wrote a book about it. The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More (ISBN 1-4013-0237-8).

The idea is not to sell large volumes of small popular items, but to sell small volumes of less popular items to lots of customers. As Seth Godin put it, Small is the New Big

Another place to learn about long tail keywords is The Keyword Academy. But for now nark unto me, my friend.

A keyword, of course, is what you type into the Google search engine box or any other search engine for that matter. If you are familiar with statistics and graphs you may be familiar with the “Bell curve”. It looks like this:

A keyword, of course, is what you type into the Google search engine box or any other search engine for that matter.  If you are familiar with statistics and graphs you may be familiar with the “Bell curve”.  It looks like this:

It’s also called a “Normal Distribution” for you statistic buffs. It’s a statistical distribution showing the high frequency items counted at the top of the distribution. It looks like a mountain, doesn’t it? But it’s a mountain that we don’t need to climb for although the most money is found at the mountain top, we will mine for money on the lower slopes; the low-frequency population that begins to “tail off” as we slide down the slope.

Where it’s not so steep and perilous.

Most of the information is distributed at the top of the curve. Consider the sale of CDs. The most popular CDS are at the top of the curve sales-wise and as you slide down to the right, you find the CDs that are not so popular. They still sell, but not as many are those that are clustered at the top of the curve, the best sellers. It could represent the best selling books at Amazon.

Or it could represent keywords collected by Google. Google collects them by the millions. Now we are getting to the heart of the matter. The real meat. Pay attention now.

The most popular keywords are those distributed at the top of the curve. But as you slide down the right side of the curve you encounter those keywords that are not so popular. The same could said for the other side of the curve, but we will stick to the right hand side for now. Those keywords that are found to the right of the curve are what is called in Internet Marketing as long tailed keywords. But they still get lots of hits (visitors). And we can extend the right hand side of the curve way out to the right. The keywords clustered at the top are the hardest to rank for and when you are just beginning to try a niche market, the most popular keywords should be avoided; the ones at the top of the mountain.

Why? Too much competition. We want our web pages to make it onto the first page of Google. That’s where the most hits occur, but it will be very hard to achieve that first page rank with a single keyword like, say Travel, Health or gardening. Most of the one or two word keywords are already taken and you cannot use them for a domain name. This is where the long-tail keywords come in. Here is what it looks like graphically:

As you can see, it extends far out to the right; where it gradually tails off. This is where the long tail keyword phrases hang out.  They are the phrases, not just onesies and twosies.  Some can be up to 10 words long, or even longer.  I have no idea what the longest long tail keywords is.  Maybe it will be in the Guinness book soon.

Even though these keywords are not the most popular ones, they still get picked by selected groups of visitors that are interested in a not so popular category or topic.  The question is how do you determine whether the topic is hot enough to produce a profit from Google AdSense or from an affiliate?

Hah!

Google will tell you.  Yep.  They lay it out in spades.  How is this possible?  Why would they give away the keys to the kingdom?

Listen up.  It has to do with Google AdWords and its mirror image in Google AdSense.  When you use Google AdWords, it costs you money to buy space on a Google page.  You see those Google AdWords on the right hand side of the page. 

Do you see all those advertisements on the right hand side of the page?  Good for you.  Now all those ads cost someone money.  And some advertisers go as high as $50 or more a click.  Every click will cost the advertiser $50.  They are usually selling high ticker items like Life Insurance or Auto Insurance so they can afford to pay $50 per click.

However, many ads can be had for as little as 5 cents per click and many of them are long tail keywords.

In order for Google to make more money, Google uses AdSense to advertise the AdWords advertisements.  So you see, Google is just one huge advertising behemoth.  – the 800-pound advertising gorilla. The elephant in the living room. . 

If you have a website, even a blog, a Hub Page or a Squidoo lens, you can sign up for Google AdSense and Google will analyze your website’s content and place relevant advertisement on your website.  You do nothing except grab a modicum of Javacode from your AdSense account and copy it to your website.  Then when the Google bot (software robot) crawls (indexes) your website, blog, Hub Page or Squidoo lens, it will place appropriate advertisements on each page of your website where you have indicated that Google can place AdSense ads.

Now listen to this.  This is where it gets interesting.

Every time that someone visits your website, Hub Page, Squidoo lens and clicks on one of those Google AdSense ads, you will get paid by Google. No questions asked. It happens automatically because in that snippet of code that you placed on your page is your Google AdSense account number. That’s how Google knows to pay you. Pretty neat, eh?

So what does this have to do with long tail keywords? I was afraid you were going to ask me that. The answer is that by selecting the right long tail keyword and turning that into a domain name, if you select a high paying keyword, money will begin to flow from your website into your bank account from Google. It may only be a tiny trickle at first but if your write posts to your website that contain other long tail keywords related to your main long tail keyword, Google will respond by adding more AdSense ads to your web page, et cetera, et cetera.

Some smart people make thousands per month. And it’s mainly because they have found a long tail keyword or phrase that pays a lot. Now don’t get me wrong here. Not everyone makes thousands of dollars per month. Most only make a few dollars a month.

So how do you find out if a long tail keyword is worth the effort?

Use the Google AdWords Keyword Tool. Provided free by Google.

Just Google it up, enter your keyword or keyword phrase, fill in the darn chaptcha, click on the Get Keyword Entries and a bunch of keywords will appear.  Let’s try “Get Rid of”.  Wow!  Lots of stuff under that phrase including some long tailed keyword with lots of search volume.

We need to narrow it down so we change “Match Type from “Broad” to “Exact” to give us a more realistic picture of actual search volume.  You will find Match Type just above your list of keywords and to the right. 

The “Advertiser Competition” shows the volume of Google Adwords for a particular phrase.  We need to look for Monthly Search Volume less than 30K.

At the bottom of the first listing is a place to download all the keywords to an Excel spreadsheet or a CSV file so you have a record of what keywords were found.

But how do we know whether the keywords are good or not

Here is a simple way to find out.

Create a Hub Page for that long tail keyword. If the Hub page gets a lot of hits, comments and fans, then you know that it is a good keyword and the next step is to get a domain name based on that keyword. And start blogging. As they say, you run it up the flagpole and see if it flies. Others say, if you throw enough mud against the wall, some is bound to stick.

This is also known as trial and error. It is a test. You may have to try many tests to find a long tail keyword that pays off but let me tell you, it will be well worth all your hard work.

For a more detailed introduction to keyword analysis you need to go to The Keyword Academy. They have a trial program that only costs a buck.

Just do it. Take action.

Don’t put if off

Get it done.

Remember, Someday is Never.