Ryan Jerz :: Reno Blogger, Reno Blog

Misc: Epitomizing the Long Tail

Part of being someone who runs a blog is being obsessed with what people do while they visit your site. You look through your stats, figure out what brought people to the site, figure out where they went when they were here, and wonder if they got what they wanted while they were here. I do that almost obsessively. And knowing what I know prompted me to make some changes on the backend, then change the display somewhat a little while later. Doing all of that enabled me to get a much better read on what goes on for the visitors here.

It has made me realize that some of the things I want to accomplish may not be possible without way more effort than I’m able to make. But it does indicate that I fit right in where I supposedly should, as the perfect example of The Long Tail.

In short, The Long Tail represents the content that is interesting to very few people, but interesting nonetheless. In an older marketplace, the information you see here would never have been presented or found because there just wasn’t a place to put it. But in today’s marketplace, it’s readily available for people looking to find it, thanks largely to the proliferation of the internet and the lower cost of entering the media market.

It finally all hit me when I took a look at my analytics recently. I get hits from some obscure things I’ve posted through searches, so I usually look at the link back to the search results to see where I fit in. The biggest example of this is when I wrote about the Angora Fire last Summer. It hit the front page of Google while the fire was still raging and I got hammered by hits from searches. Today, it ranks well considering the other sources that covered it, and hits still come in frequently.

Another example is former UNR soccer coach Terri Patraw. It’s an obscure topic, but the hits are rolling in on searches for her name. And they come from all over the place. As her lawsuit against UNR makes more headlines when decisions are handed down (and it could be a landmark case when it’s all over) more people look for information on her. I have remained on the first page of a search for her name almost since the day I posted about her, so it appears prominently. In fact, the post on her has surpassed all others since (arbitrary date) November 1, 2007 in hits and it’s just a month old.

Product reviews and book reviews have also been big, even if they kind of suck. The Nike Plus iPod review I wrote ranks on the first page for that search, and sends a few dozen hits this way each day. By the way, I still absolutely love that thing. I also get hits daily from several popular books I’ve reviewed. And if I could get my act together, I’d have more. I’m currently two books behind.

Basically, what prompted this is that I realized I’m probably never going to be a nationally recognized blogger or blog. It was always something I hoped would happen, but I never took much of an interest in the topics that tend to garner that recognition (namely, politics and being a serious sports freak), so I’ll keep doing the things that have worked for me to this point. The changes I referred to in the first part of this post have had a major impact on these new findings. I seem to have figured out how to get some of the more obscure items appear a lot more prominently.

And then I’ll post about everything I’ve learned with a popular book title in my headline to get more hits from people who search for the concept that I now claim to epitomize. Until something truly remarkable happens here in Reno and I happen to be on the scene, like I’d love to be, then I’ll hang out in obscurity doing what I like to do, and that’s talk about things that go on here.

tags: 89509, angora fire, blogging, blogs, book reviews, lake tahoe, nevada, nike plus ipod, product reviews, reno, terri patraw, the long tail
posted by Ryan Jerz on 03/15/2008

Comments

Commenting is closed for this article.