DISQUS

Zoli Erdos · 3 years ago

Dennis, I agree with you, it was funny to read this  10 minutes after your post though:-)

hugh macleod · 3 years ago

I doubt Thomas of englishcut.com has checked his T-rank, or even his web stats in the last 6 months.

Instead, he measures the amount of new customers that send him e-mails, wanting appointments. Not to mention, the number of suits he needs to get cut by next Tuesday ;-)

michael arrington · 3 years ago

Phew! I'm tired after reading this post. Long.

But good. I agree. And I also think, though, that the big problem with reputation is that it takes one to get one, so to speak. Once you are popular, you tend to get more popular because people flock to what other's recommend. We need a better way to establish reputation. Maybe someone will make a lot of money doing so.

Peter Cooper · 3 years ago

My blog is only around the 20,000 level, very rarely gets links from other blogs, and 99.9% of traffic is from Google or regular readers. Yet.. it does extremely well (in terms of business, especially) and a lot of people in my niche read it.

Other bloggers certainly aren't the ones giving me business :)

Niel Robertson · 3 years ago

Good stuff. I have been an avid student of the Long Tail for a while. It is interesting because the profusion of blogging is similar to the profusion of digital music (I am involved in a digital music business that aims to drive the number of available tracks from 1.6MM to something over 5MM over time if we can). How the long tail content gets found, promoted, etc.. is a very interesting point that we know very little about yet (as in the global "we", not the business I am involved in). If you look at the music side of things, there are emerging technologies to try and aid this. First and foremost is categorization (not tagging, but built in music genres that catalogs like Rhapsody adhere to). You like Adult Alternative, great, navigate sideways through that content. Second, there are built in recommendation engines. It would be interesting to see a blog that had something at the bottom that said "People who liked this blog/post also liked XYZ". I suppose tagging is sort of like that, but we're really talking reverse tagging here (it's not about the tag but the tagger). Third, content analysis engines like Pandora are taking music recommendation to a new level - understanding content itself (musical dynamics) and not just categories. Imagine something applied to blogs as well. It's all very interesting and we're only at the tip of the iceberg right now. The Long Tail might be caled The Long Climb until we figure this out. Perhaps I will create a myspace page for my blog and try to use the same techniques that innovative long tail bands used to get attention on MySpace before it became standard marketing. Writers are now doing it with their books (a book is a MySpace page, not the author). I am also syndicating my blog through a local newspaper here soon so we'll see how that affects my climb. More to come.

Dennis Howlett · 3 years ago

This is an interesting take Niel and one I should have thought through. I use podsafe music for podcasts. Apart from discovering and introducing me to some really cool (and bloody aweful!) music, podcast tagged search is giving me alternative music led intros that I can use to create different moods or for different styles of podcast (news, analysis, interview, conf call discussion.) In effect it allows me to develop multiple 'brands' for myself and clients.

I am then using these in new and different ways to get client customers to tell anyone who cares to listen, how the client is fulfilling their requirements. From that, we've reflected that back into the client company to see if the things customers say is reflected in the company's DNA.

That way (starting with discovery in the Long Tail), we get the chance to combine social technologies to achieve a completely fresh way to market. And chop out a number of steps in the sales cycle.

How good is that? But yes - we're at the beginning of all this.

Rich Westerfield · 3 years ago

We look at new referrers to see what's being said about us, but the Technorati ranking is pretty meaningless to our goals, which, as Hugh pointed out, are more along lines of "how to keep up with increased business."

In fact, for this post we just looked at our rank for first time this year... 85,089. Good enough for a little coffeehouse in Pittsburgh.

We can probably count total Technorati referrers in past year on both hands and feet. In addition to regular customers and readers, our audience is more likely to come from local blog aggregators and specialty coffee industry and home barista forums.

Just by being a "small business blog" we've picked up considerable traditional print and online press coverage which has driven boatloads more traffic to the site than has the random blogosphere.

Marketing is still about targeting.