Today there will be no video blog post, just some good ole fashioned writing FLUFF! Oh, yeah, fluffy important fluff! LOL
Anyway, I am writing about longtail keywords today. This is obviously nothing new or Earth shattering, but I need to convey it anyway. This is because I have about a dozen friends from the “real” world who are just starting up their internet marketing careers: this post is for them… but it never hurts to review… and, of course, you guys are welcome to add in your thoughts as well cuz I am sure to miss something.
What Is A Long Tail Keyword?
Longtail keywords in internet marketing are those basic/primary “search words” that are modified in some shape or fashion using adjectives, mostly, but sometimes verbs or points of action, or states of being. I am not a grammar nut, so I think it best to just give you examples.
Here is an example of a primary keyword: “vacations”
Now “vacations” is a major keyword and if you can rank your site #1 for it, I can promise you an easy $50K+ in revenue per week, probably more. But there are a couple problems with this thinking.
1) The term “vacations” by itself is very vague. That means you’d need a mega site serving all types and kinds of “vacations” in order to truly cover that search term and get any kind of conversion. And guess who owns that term? Check it out here. Yeah, the big boys, Priceline, Travelocity, Orbitz, etc.
2) You will NEVER beat those guys for the term “vacations” so don’t even try. They have the money and the power to command those rankings and they will keep them, all the while trading places in the top 3 or 4. There is no room for us there, believe it!
So What Can The Small Time Marketer Like Me Get A Piece Of The Action?
Here are some positives and negatives in regards to longtails:
1) the longer the long tail, the easier it is to rank for it (positive)
2) the longer the long tail, the FEWER searches there will be (negative)
3) most times, the longer the long tail, the more TARGETED the searcher is, ie: buying mode!
Classifications Of Long Tails
Adjective Modifiers
cheap vacations
cheap all inclusive vacations
cheap last minute all inclusive vacations
best tropical vacations
Predicate Long Tails
vacations for couples
vacations for honeymooners
vacations on cruise ships
Geographic Long Tails
vacations Cancun Mexico
vacations Clearwater Florida
Club Med vacations Cayman Islands
Question Long Tails (my favorite for $30K websites)
where is the best place for a getaway vacation?
what is the best place to visit in the Caribbean?
when is the best time to vacation in Greece?
who has the best vacation deals online?
Generic Product Long Tails
14 volt cordless drills
1 megabite Mp3 players
broadband mobile phones
Product Specific Long Tails
Craftsman 14 volt cordless drill
Craftsman 14 vold cordless drill model CFN78
RCA Jet 1GB Sport Media Player
Blackberry Storm model 7656 smart phone
“Review” Long Tails
Carnival Cruise vacations review
Carnival “Glory” Cruise Ship Vacation review
Craftsman 14 volt cordless drill review
Date Driven Longtails (people do search by month/season/year)
best lawn mowers 2010
cordless drill reviews 2010
January vacation deals
summer vacation ideas
Mis-Spelled Long Tails
all inclusive vacations cankun mexico
craftsmen drill reviews
Combinations (where the fun starts!)
cheap all inclusive cruises for couples cancun mexico
who has the best deal on all inclusive vacation cruises to mexico?
Carnival Glory 2010 Caribbean reviews
cheap honeymoon vacation destinations in February
Considerations:
1) not all longtails are “buying terms” … some are “informational” terms only. But when I build a site that I plan to use for Adsense, or flip for profit, informational terms are just fine IMO.
2) to target the terms, you need to BOLD them in the post, use them in the post tags, and most importantly, have the key words anchored and pointing to your post in the form of LINKS!
3) because of the lower traffic on some longtails, you should plan to target bunches of them in your niche. You can target one longtail per post, or if they are related, you can hit a few in the same post.
4) some longtails get mega searches and if you can, use one entire site dedicated to that long tail… Court called this a “sniper site” back in his Cowboy days.
So there you go guys, and in case you are wondering, “yes” I am taking my family on a cruise this year on the Carnival Glory and some of those terms are pretty real to me. And that is what I want to leave you with:
You need to learn to think like a real person and not an online money making internet marketer. I mentioned this in my recent video about “writing long posts” and I am mentioning it here again because of how important it is.
Amidst all of your scramble to be a Twitter Expert, you should realize that there are millions more people using Google everyday, and they are buying, not Twitting. If you think like a Google searcher, you will make money. If you think like a Twit, well, you know! 
comments? additions?
I don’t really get why y’all are
sometimes callin’ content here
FLUFF. This is *great STUFF*!!!!
good stuff – vacations is a tough one to tackle I would recommend a 4-5 word+ or more for the beginner
such as
vacations south side saint pete Florida
@JL– hey, watch it, I have a reputation to uphold ok?
@dwep– or “vacations to 23rd Ave and 46th St N St. Pete, FL” where I grew up, LOL
Gee if this is fluff – I can’t wait for the real information – actually your vacation search example is a classic for localisation – here Down Under the first 3 are http://www.newzealandvacations.co.nz http://www.luxuryadventures.co.nz and http://www.luxuryvacationsnz.com then some bikini clad image results which you would probably appreciate!
lissie´s last blog ..Andy Black’s Index Checker Review – Do You Need to Check If Your Support Article is Indexing?
Man, this is really great information, Allyn. But I do have one bone to pick with you: how am I supposed to use this to create fluff e-books to flog to my unsuspecting victims (readers) so I can actually get rich like all the A-listers say? LOL – just kidding, the sarcasm comes from my mother’s side. Great post, and especially appreciate the examples that you use in breaking down the keywords. Will definitely be sending some friends to this URL. And congrats on the success – it’s good to the see work paying off for some of the good guys!
Shane´s last blog ..50 Things Beginning Writers Should Know
Another great post by you, thank you! I have been reading here for some time and finally decided to give some credit where it is due, thank you again.
Hey Al,
I’m in the process of converting my old “local” Hawaii blog into more of a general travel site … your examples have gotten the creative juices flowing. Thanks … I’ll send you a commission if any of them end up proving terribly profitable
Todd Morris´s last blog ..Do Drink The Water
I would say that you don’t need much help learning how to target the long-tail in Internet marketing. ha. I think that is a pretty good example of the different types of long tails. Keep up the good work. It wont be long before people are using your site for reference on what to do.
The Real Josh´s last blog ..Ideas on how to double your income in under 6 months
That is the clearest and most useful explanation of long tail keywords I have ever seen, Thanks.
Ralph´s last blog ..Happy Australia Day
In a way Long Tails is similar to narrowing down your blog niche. Having a blog niche of Vacations is not as good as Cabos Vacations. Ideally you may get a ton more visitors to a vacation blog, but in the long run everyone that visits Cabos Vacations blog is a more potential buyer. That is why I made my niche Blogging tips for gaming blogs, instead of trying to compete with everyone who uses Blogging tips for blogs.
Brian Inman´s last blog ..Gaming Blogs are Like Garage Sales
Something I always do is target longtails that are a form of a more competitive term that I am really after so I can at least get some traffic going as I work on the more competitive term that lives within the longtail. This has worked for me as I am building a site up.
There are many pros and cons with longtails, but I think the fact remains that if you do your research there is money to be made with them.
Keith´s last blog ..Comment Links Are Advertising
Allyn,
Top advice here brother, I’m learning that your way of doing and introducing it to my site.
Great job brother
TheInfoPreneur´s last blog ..Are All These Products Too Expensive?
HI – I’d like to thank you for this post. I think it may have helped me a lot but I’m not sure yet.
I’d like to ask you and your readers how they’d go about using your adjective modifiers to set up a site.
If no one other than a few shopping sites came up in the results for
“cheap last minute vacations ” where destination could be almost any town country you wanted would it be better to make one site for cheap last minute vacations to a lot of different city country cominations or make several sites dedicated to cheap vacations to various countries with that countries city’s as the posts.
The long tail I’m considering is definately a buying phrase and adsense suggests anywhere from $2.00 – $9.00 depending on the “destination”. None of the long tails have many searches but all the … destinations in it could actually be a lot in total assuming I’m up to the work that I think will be involved.
I’m just curious how someone would start from scratch and get it set up if they had the opportunity.
Thanks,
Josh
Ok, so I am not gonna be able to reply to all these comments, sorry about that, I am not playing faves… just swooping in here real quick…
But three quick things:
@Ralph—someone Akismet’d you and your comment was stuck in the spam que, FYI… but I dug you out buddy! LOL
@ Joshua– you could go either way man. Just don’t buy new domains. keep watching here and i will teach you the best kind of domain to buy. sorry so vague, but hey, this shiz is for free.
@Todd– lemme know if you need an onsight reporter for that hawaii site… I have always wanted to meet Dog The Bounty Hunter LOL
I would like to add that “long tails” definitely don’t have to be “long”. Some long tails will have just 3 words (i have a few sites that target 3 word keywords, have more than 5K exact searches per month, and were super easy to rank for). But I guess in this 30k series ur writing about for a bigger site you would be better off targeting more of the long long tails.
BTW, I like the questions long tail. Every single site that i own has visitors that find the site using a question. Back to the basics: Who, What, Where, When, Why, How, etc.
For the beginners, KW research will probably be the hardest to grasp, so here is my advice: Start with your basic KW (vacations). Use the kw tool and just search that…then just start adding terms like – best, cheap, cheapest, last minute, inexpensive, affordable, replacement, substitute, alternate……its really unlimited, I LOVE IT.
@eric– you are right man, those 3 word long tails are awesome! If you can hit 5 or 10 of them in a niche, you are doing well!
@ Sire– yeah man, I have entire sites based around common misspellings! I personally don’t care about being professional all the time, I care about getting paid. But keep in mind, I am an internet marketer, not a branded blogger.. big difference.
@ ray– you’ll be ok buddy! LOL
I’m glad you put in the misspelled section as I’ve unintentionally misspelled a word in a post and it brings a fair bit of traffic. I’m not sure though that it would be something that you would do all the time as it may make you look unprofessional which would certainly kill some sales.
I love also that you placed all the examples, so many people just write about something assuming that people know what they’re talking about. A wrong assumption.
Sire´s last blog ..Viddler And Why Some People Prefer To Use Them
Oh Oh…my head hurts. All that information and that’s just a tiny little piece of the SEO puzzle. Must…get…to…aspirin…and reading glassed….must read all of it.
Ray
Ray´s last blog ..How To Profit From The New Goldrush
Thanks for the mention. OpTempo is very long tail keyword city, almost like my own personal HubPages. I’m planning on starting up reviews again there soon, once I get through setting up my new crop of niche sites.
Frank C´s last blog ..Earn Online Cash with .Info Domains
@frank– yeah man, you are the master of the longtail product. If you have not noticed, I have been making huge efforts to connect with some newer bloggers (so I cam milk them later ! ha j/k) and I wanted them to see your site as an example of a great niche site that hits longtails with a hammer!
@Jumanji — not all keywords are good for adsense, and there are specific ways to target longtails but still trigger the add for the primary keyword, but it would take a long time to go through all that. Long story short, pay attention to the primary keyword’s payout and you will probably be ok.
@lee– glad you like my fluff! I plan to do a mega-giant post about domains here real soon
@matthew– there are lots of good tutorials on how to configure the seo plug, just google it LOL
@mark– i use Midphase and Hostgator and I always buy reseller hosting where each of my sites gets its own dedicated cpanel. If you plan on only ever having one site, then get the most basic Linux plan offered. I think Hostgator calls it the baby or hatchling plan or something like that. When I sold the site, the company that bought it took it all on their own. I gave them cpanel logins and they did the rest.. very much hands off for me. Any serious site buyer has IT people on staff to do all the work.
Honestly Mark, if you don’t even have a hosting plan yet, I would highly highly recommend you go join Court’s Keyword Academy. He is set up to help folks who are just starting out and I highly recommend him.
Hey Allyn, great post as per usual, its funny youve mentioned this because Ive been targeting long tail posts recently and found there to be a hell of a lot of clicks (if you get a good long tail. You the man!
As regards to adsense, when I use the google keyword tool it seems that those long tails such as “last minute hotel breaks amsterdam”Just dont pay well.
Is this true or does google just say this as an estimate (and the money per click is a lot more)? Thanks again Allyn
Good Fluff! Been doing research all day basically geared toward domain names. Thanks for sharing Allyn
lee´s last blog ..Frolicking Friday ~/~ Let’s Romp!
Hi Allyn
Id never thought of this. Thanks for sharing.
I have the all in one SEO Pack installed on my blog, but I’ve no idea what to do with it. Maybe I should be doing this.
Matthew Needham´s last blog ..Aliens have landed
I’d really love to learn the whole process of developing your 30k site in on of your posts. You don’t have to answer here. I don’t know much about web development beyond blogger.com and free hosts. What host did you use? which ones are best to you? what size plan would be good for just Griz style IM? I’ve got a domain pointing to blogger so I guess I could just sell the domain. When you sell a site how do you sell the content too? The process of the sale would help me wrap my mind around this stuff. thanks and keep up the good work.
Court did a great webinar last night
that he made available to everyone.
“I would highly highly recommend you go join Court’s Keyword Academy”
-I’ve read most of Griz’s make money for beg and I have assumed they just rehash his free blog. thanks for the host rec
@mark– I would not call it rehash. I would just say that Court’s academy first off is presented privately and in a “learning” format instead of a “blogging format” and it is all in one place, organized nicely, unlike Griz blog.
The concepts are similar/same, but COurt has his own way of doing things also.
Allyn,
I need your help. I’m having a hard time naming a url, blog title, and post titles for a particular niche.
The product is described with several different names, all with the same meaning. Many manufactures make it and they all use their company names to partially describe it. Each manufacturer uses generic and unique names on individual packages.
Product Name: Hot Product, Wild Product, Smart Product …
Manufacturers: Company 1, Company 2, Company 3 …
Unique Package Names: Green-o-bot Circles, Greenkaka Circles, Bluedoo Circles …
Generic Package Names: Red Circles, Silver Circles, Tan Circles …
Example 1: Red Circles Hot Product by Company 1
Example 2: Green-o-bot Circles Wild Product by Company 2
Example 3: Greenkaka Circles Smart Product by Company 3
I used similar combination’s in my post titles and confused the Googlebot. Very few targeted ads.
Could you tell me how you name your url’s, blog titles, and post titles when the niche is convoluted like this one?
Thank you very much for your help!
honestly, it sounds to me like you need to forget the adsense on this one and use it as an Amazon or Ebay niche. Then you won’t care about what Google thinks
Thanks for the reply Allyn,
I had amazon on it, got around 100 clicks and only one sale. That’s why I wanted to move to adsense. There are G ads for every type of name I described above. My site has 60 posts and each post describes a different package.
Griz says to put your keyword in your url, blog title, and post titles, but when there are so many different keywords describing one product where is it most important to put your keywords to get targeted ads (url, blog title, post titles)? I’m thinking “post titles”.
I guess I should focus on one name and re-write all of my post titles to see if the ads bot will deliver relevant ads.
No, don’t go rewrite everything, that would take forever.
If you insist on adsense, then you will have to use section targeting on each post.
Put this HTML code in front and behind the exact keyword on each post: (don’t use this code below as it won’t render right… see the link at the bottom of this comment:)
< ! -- google_ad_section_start -- >
< ! -- google_ad_section_end -- >
this should help. Also, be careful that you only place a single ad block on each page. The more adsense ad blocks on a page, the irrelevant the ads become down the page… this could also be causing an issue.
here is more on section targeting:
https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=23168
Allyn!
So what you are talking to “mr. fixed rate” about is the same thing as what you would suggest for me? If I want to suggest the adsense to google, that should be on my page. And get paid for the Main keywords in my niche (that google pays highly for) rather than being paid for the lowe paid long tail keywords that google would normally provide me with?
This is great info if it is? thanks a lot Allyn
Cheers
jumanji– you can try it and see how it shakes out. Give it about 10 days to decide. Section targeting doesn’t work all the time, but it does help most of the time
Allyn,
I’ll try it and let you know how it shakes out.
You are a wealth of knowledge. I have never heard of section targeting. Thanks for the tip
Allyn great stuff, ok will do mate thanks for that matey, even if it helps a bit will be great!
@fixed rate– alright, hope that helps you. tell your friends what a “nice guy” I am LOL I could use the good press
@jumanji– go after it man!
Allyn,
You are doing good things man. If I had any friends I would tell them about you. LOL
Keep doing these free 5 minute “How To MMO” videos and your going to open the flood gates. Be careful what you wish for
There are about two hundred IM topics I need to see videos on. By the way, how much do you charge for an all day IM conference call. Better yet, I could just come over next weekend. I’ll bring the Amstel Light 
Allyn,
Section targeting worked like a charm. Thank you!
Fixed–glad it did man! now go get some links!
Pretty cool. Ironic one of my sites is a Florida vacation rental site and wouldn’t dream of ranking up with the the big boys of VRBO and such for the broad keywords but choose like you mention to target the longtails.
Have fun on your cruise.
Danny @ FL Vacation Rentals´s last blog ..Where is the best Florida spring break destination 2010?
Whoa, that picture sure makes me want to take a Caribbean vacation!
-Jack
Hi Allyn,
I salute you for such an unselfish sharing of your knowledge and tips. This is really wonderful for newbie like me.
I have been struggling with my adsense income due to low CPC. Your idea in section targeting gave my a new idea to set the ads more targeted. I shall give it a try.
Thanks