I wrote an essay on MyDD last Thursday called the power of the long tail blog. It represents some new thinking I've had about blogs.
Rather than reprint that essay here I'd like to encourage anyone interested to go to MyDD and read it.
Instead, with this diary, I'd like to discuss long tail blogging by lifting up the hood on my own blog, k/o, a bit...
the story of k/o
I have, since mid-2005, kept up a little blog on Blogspot called k/o. My blog never developed that large of a traffic footprint or volume of readers. That's okay. Over the years hundreds and hundreds of you paid a visit and dropped a comment or two, many of you blog rolled me. Thank you.
In the fall of 2006, however, I decided that the best thing I could do with my blog was to change my focus to reporting on local blogs. Basically, I tried use my blog to highlight the good work hundreds of local bloggers were doing all over the country. I formed a group called Blogs United.
I linked to local blogs and wrote stories about them in the lead up to the election. I knew, having gone through it myself, how valuable those links and eyeballs could be, not so much in monetary value, as in terms of keeping one's spirits up and adding to one's interlinkage for search engines and in Technorati. However, after I lost the front page link here at dailykos, (ironically, due to Markos, as is his right, changing his focus to local blogs on his blogroll after the election)...I was left with my own post-election question: what should I do with k/o?
Maybe, I thought, since I no longer had much of a community of daily readers or commenters and it wasn't really sustainable to write my "good stuff" in that environment, I could start to write more for the people coming to k/o through searches...I decided to try to remake k/o as a long tail blog.
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making k/o a long tail blog
In a nutshell, the long tail when it comes to blogging is about the readers who come to your blog or website through searches. These are people looking for information more than community or news.
I have been experimenting with writing for them. To do so, I've changed my writing on k/o a bit...I work more with mashups from the news. What I'm doing is trying to reshape the news of the day. It's not that different from writing a diary here at dkos, except with a different audience in mind. Let me show you an example:
I recently wrote an article about Rudy Giuliani's firm, Giuliani Partners.
I followed a series of links from an authoritative news source, in this case, some excellent reporting in the Washington Post, and then added to those links with information from other sources and my own, brief, commentary. In effect, I made a mash-up of one day's news about Giuliani with a whole bunch of other really useful information about him. I tried to appeal to a more general audience, but from my point of view. I titled the piece: Giuliani Partners: Secrecy and Shady Characters.
Now, when you google Giuliani Partners my story appears somewhere between entry 8 and 20. That's a big deal. It doesn't happen every time I write a piece. Far from it. But it does mean that there is something to this idea of long tail blogging. People looking for information about the career of a GOP presidential candidate will have a chance to check out a counter-weight to his own PR.
You can write for what seems like a small audience on any given day, but on a topic that you cover...if you cover it well, and write in a way that readers find persuasive and convincing and provide quality sources...you can have a cumulative effect on many further readers who visit your site through searches seeking information. Long tail blogging is not glamorous or instant, and the titles have to be informative and somewhat literal, but it works. It's not that different from writing a diary on dailykos, but there's no instant feedback...it is like blogging in slow motion.
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more examples of long tail blogging
Let me share a few more examples of recent articles I've written that will show you what I mean:
I recently wrote Iraqi Parliament: Oil Law spurs debate on role of US Oil Corporations
In this article I did a mashup of two Christian Science Monitor articles and the work of prominent oil writer Michael Schwartz to discuss the production sharing agreements that are the real subject of debate behind the "Hydrocarbon Law" that keeps getting talked about when we debate what's next in Iraq. Basically, neither CSM article highlighted the debate about production sharing agreements or US oil companies in their lead or title even though they had powerful quotes to support that focus. My mashup helped bring out the real story, including a powerful quote from Joe Sestak that I think buried the lede of the piece. The Google search result, btw, is here...
are you starting to see what I mean by the power of the long tail?
Without further ado, here are a few more recent story examples:
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an invitation to you
If you are interested in what I'm doing with k/o, please put k/o in your browser's favorites bar or subscribe to my feed....and feel free to pay a visit and comment as much or as little as you like. Better yet, if you have a blog or a diary page here, I'd be honored if you'd blogroll me.
But beyond that, I'd like your feedback on this concept and my experiment with long tail blogging. Hit me with a comment below, or, if you're a blogger and want to discuss this or the group I'm involved with called Blogs United, email me at kidoaklandactivism@comcast.net.
While k/o is a generalist progressive blog, if anything, the concept of long tail blogging is even more apropos for local bloggers where traffic is not so easy to come by. If you are a blogger and this concept really excites you, by all means, email me, send me a link to what you're trying to do.
I want to leave you with one simple realization I had.
My blogspot blog was no different than many other peoples. It had been around awhile but my traffic had slowed to a trickle and was headed down. I could have easily just chucked it and thought, this isn't any use to anyone.
I'm glad I didn't, because that just wasn't true.
Thinking about this issue...long tail blogging...has taught me some new lessons. I hope they can be uesful to you.