Archive for long tail
10 Million Songs That No One Bought
Posted by: | CommentsIn a recent Seth Godin post, he quotes a statistic that says “of the 13 million songs for sale online last year, 10 million never got a single buyer and 80 percent of all revenue came from about 52,000 songs. That’s less than one percent of the songs.” From this Seth concludes that the likelihood of you selling 0% of your products is quite high. It’s easy to put stuff out there and so the long tail is pretty crowded these days.
In a related post, Derek Sivers talks about a guy who just wanted 1% of the viewers of his advertisement to buy his cd. He pressed 10,000 copies ahead of time but only got 4 sales after a few weeks. Another depressing statistic outlining the fact that it is possible you won’t sell any (or much less than 1%). His point is that the math can be deceiving and difficult to achieve in reality.
If you’re trying to sell music or any other product or service, these statistics can be extremely discouraging. So what can we learn from this?
Sell what people are buying. Millions of people are buying things online every day. Find out what those things are and sell those products. Check the Amazon best sellers list for your category, check the better selling products for your favorite affiliate network of choice. Use your content (music, blog posts, tutorials, etc) to sell these popular products rather than try to sell your own products at first. Use ‘free’ to gain attention and draw traffic to your site.
Focus on a small niche. The long tail is crowded. Part of the battle will be just getting enough traffic to your site. Pick a really specific niche, find keywords that you can reasonably compete with and target those lesser competitive keywords. By lesser competitive I mean keywords that have around 10,000 pages in the search results, but still get enough daily searches. Find the cost per click for your keyword and multiply it by the number of daily searches to get a relative sense of the value of the keyword. If people are spending money on ads then it is a good indication that there is a market there. Market Samurai is a great tool for this type of research.
Be Your Own Long Tail Aggregator
Posted by: | CommentsWhen Chris Anderson coined the term ‘The Long Tail
This is great news for Amazon, but how can the long tail benefit us? The common wisdom is to have a niche, and find 1,000 true followers which is great advice. But you can also be your own long tail aggregrator, selling hundreds of products to your following. It’s certainly less sexy than selling millions of copies of your new CD, but is much more practical.
For example, I teach rock guitar lessons and am building my own following of guitar students. While I attempt to get them to sign up for my online guitar coaching program, I also use Amazon to build my own long tail of products related to the topics I teach. People are buying from Amazon every day, so why not get a piece of the action for recommending quality products to your following? Instead of just focusing on broad terms like ‘teaching guitar’ or ‘learning guitar’ there are so many smaller niche products within the guitar lesson niche such as:
- -books/DVDs for specific keywords such as ‘chord tone soloing’, ‘CAGED system’, ’soloing over changes’, ‘fretboard mastery’, ‘guitar scales’, ‘pinch harmonics’
- -music gear – guitars, music software, amps, effects
- -backing tracks or drum/bass loops for sale
- -third party lesson products – eg. Jamorama, Learn and Master Guitar (be an affiliate and earn commissions).
Imagine having hundreds or even thousands of products for sale and making just a few sales of each product to hundreds or thousands of website visitors!
