The towering Tail of Blogging: Why composition is King

In that post Eric from Photography Bay examines the towering Tail as it applies to blogging.

Content is king. Yawn . . . right? You know that tired phrase is the gospel of blogging, but did you ever wonder why composition is really king? You spend your duration developing and massaging your posts to create the next bit of killer substance. It’s the post that hits the front page of Digg, gets Stumbled to death or even Slashdotted. That’s why substance is king, right? Wrong.

Content is King considering of the towering Tail of Blogging.

In 2004, Chris Anderson coined the term “The lengthy Tail” in a Wired Magazine article, which he followed up with a <a href=”“The lengthy Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More” (Chris Anderson)“>book and a blog on the subject. whether you’re not familiar with the phrase or its meaning, here’s a very brief summary from Chris himself:

The theory of the faraway Tail is that our culture and economy is increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of “hits” (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail.

(Picture by Hay Kranen / PD - via Wikipedia)

Example - Amazon.com

One of the best examples is Amazon.com, which provides consumers with access to the latest and greatest hit products, books and more. Sales of the bestseller books, however, pale in comparison to sales of the many obscure books in Amazon’s catalog. Hence, the expanded tail of the book market is where the majority of sales are coming from - and it’s growing.

Hot subject matter vs. Archived Content

Apply these same principles to your blog. That killer super-dugg post is great . . . for a day or two. Granted, the super-dugg post is sometimes great for added readers, linkbacks and helping your blog grow. It’s the enlarged tail, however, that keeps your blog alive and thriving. While that traffic spike is great, whether you adhere to publishing solid substance as ProBlogger encourages, soon after your old, quality subject matter overshadows even that super-dugg masterpiece.

Eyes on Photography Bay Stats

For instance, have a gander at that recent Photography Bay post on a new patent from camera manufacturer Canon, which covers some crazy new iris scanner for a photographer’s eye. that post turned out to be extremely popular for a few days, producing 5,839 pageviews on Wednesday, Feb. 13 - thanks to being Slashdotted and coverage by several tech sites.

The total page views that day were 14,721. The lesson here is that even though the killer post for that day was miles above any other traffic, the rest of the subject matter on Photography Bay bettered the killer post.

Some of these posts are several months old. whether you look further down the list of traffic-generating posts (470 different pages that specific day), you would see that some posts are closer to a year in age. That’s pretty cool to me considering Photography Bay is only about 15 months old now. Now, think about 2, 3, or 5 years down the road . . . the enlarged tail gets much longer and becomes a lot more significant.

The distant tail matters considering of Google, linkbacks, readers and other requisite traffic-generating resources. whether it weren’t for that catalog of niche posts that we build everyday we blog, posts like the Canon iris patent post might never take off.

Caveat

Please note, however, that that theory may be more true for some blog niches than others. Tech blogs often need that fresh subject matter coming in to keep reader interest, since new gadgets and technology are more interesting than older gadgets (e.g., Googling for HDMI cables versus S-VHS cables). On the other hand, a niche blog on the healthcare industry will still grab Google traffic for the search “medicare anti-kickback laws” regardless of the age of the post. The topic has been around for a couple of decades and isn’t going anywhere in the near future.

The Right Analogy for the towering Tail

Contrary to what Read Write Web may say, the towering tail is where the money’s at. Rather than analyzing a given blog’s posts and income, Read Write Web applied the expanded tail analysis to the blogosphere as a whole. While the details conforms to the distant tail, the analogy and, thus, the conclusion, are flawed. Applying the principals of the distant tail in the same manner as the Amazon example above, the expanded tail analysis properly demonstrates that a blog requires a significant amount of niche composition to fit the model. With the substance in hand, the towering tail will wag the blog.

Conclusion

Google regularly accounts for more than 50% of Photography Bay’s traffic, which is why I must strive to continue to form that towering tail longer. Today’s killer post is part of next month’s expanded tail traffic - and I want a longer tail! Regular, quality posts ensure that there will be a faraway tail tomorrow and that, my friends, is why subject matter is king.

What are your thoughts on the distant tail of blogging? Have you seen the distant tail wagging your blog? How can we leverage these principals to assemble our positions in our niches even stronger?

Eric is the author of Photography Bay, which covers digital photography news, techniques and gear reviews. You can subscribe to Photography Bay’s feed here.

Orginal post by Darren Rowse