The long tail is a buzz word you’ll hear a lot about these days if you are paying attention to internet marketing. What exactly is it referring to and what does it mean for you?

The long tail refers to a key phrase that is relevant to your products or services with low search volume. It probably also has low advertiser competition in search marketing and low search engine optimization competition. For example, let’s say you sell baby clothing. Tons of people sell baby clothing which is bad news for you. It’ll be damn near impossible to get your website to come up first when people search baby clothing on Google. It will also cost you a pretty penny to get up top on Adwords results for “baby clothing”.

This is just as well, it’s a very generic term and you don’t need it to work for you. Instead, you focus on the long tail. Let’s say you sell baby clothing with bicycles on it. Your key phrases might be “bicycle onesie” or “bicycle baby clothing”. Parents who are cycling enthusiasts who want to outfit their kids with bike clothes are more likely to use this phrase to search, and they are more likely to want your products.

The good news is that there are very few pages on the net with those phrases in their title tag or URL (you can search the following in Google to find this out allintitle:bicycle baby clothing or allinurl:bicycle baby clothing). You can probably get this phrase for very little money if you do an Adwords campaign for it. What’s even better, if you create a page on your site with these phrases in the title, H1 tags, url and body content, your page has a good chance of coming up first when people search for bicycle baby clothing. (You make your chances even better if you get a cycling blog to post about your product line, since inbound links give you search engine optimization points.)

How do you go about determining the long tail for your website?

First, do a keyword analysis on your website using Google’s Keyword tool. See which phrases the tool finds on your site that have low advertiser competition, those are usually a good starting point.

After you find those phrases do a check to see how many other sites have those low competition phrases in their title tags and URLs (use the allintitle and allinurl attributes to figure this out on Google).

Once you’ve identified your list of low competition phrases, make sure pages on your site are well optimized for those phrases. This means you have them in your title tag, your URL, your H1 tag and in the body of your page. If at all possible, get a site that’s relevant to what you’re selling to link to your pages. Inbound links boost your page’s credibility and increase its chances of ranking higher in searches.

As you add new products and services continue with this process so that you can optimize for all of your offerings. The long tail won’t bring you scads of traffic over night, but the idea is that it will bring you some very well targeted traffic that is likely to convert. This is actually better than scads of traffic any way. One visitor that buys what you’re selling is better than 1000 visitors who don’t.

If you’re a small business owner, the concept of branding may be a somewhat nebulous thing. You might have your marketing strictly focused on your bottom line. Big companies care about this too, but their way of going about achieving their goals is a little different. They don’t expect to trace every sale back to the highway billboard sign you drive by every day, nor do they expect that the first time you see it you’ll make a purchase. The goal is to get their brand on your brain so that when you are in the market to buy what they’re selling, you’ll think of them.

What does this have to do with the small business owner? Last week I wrote a post about how to maximize your cost-per-click spending. While I am all for this highly traceable form of marketing, I am firmly against companies relying on it entirely. Cost-per-click marketing needs to be supplemented with branding efforts so that your company’s name can become familiar to your target demographic. This familiarity will bring your target demographic to shop with you rather than bothering to explore the web for your competitors. This type of marketing is what makes t-shirt companies like Palmer Cash and Noisebot premier destinations for t-shirt lovers. These two t-shirt companies have their names plastered all over pop culture websites like Perez Hilton and Cute Overload. Can consumers find better or cheaper t-shirts elsewhere? Probably. They choose these companies because they know them.

To maximize the effect of your branding campaign, be sure to really analyze your target customer demographic. Who buys from you and why? How can you reach these people in large numbers and in a cost effective manner? The more accurately you target your audience, the better your results will be.

A great way to research targeted branding opportunities is Google’s placement targeted ads. Two things I like to try are keyword suggestions and URL suggestions. Let’s say I want to run ads for a independent music record label. The first thing I might try is searching for the keyword phrase “indie rock.” This search will give me a list of URLs I can advertise on where this topic is discussed. I might also do a search for popular indie music website pitchforkmedia.com to see what URLs Google suggests that are similar to that site. My searches will yield a list of websites I can market my record label on that are visited by my target audience. Google accepts both impression-based bids and cost-per-click bids for these types of campaigns, so you can experiment to see what works for your needs.

If a branding campaign is too pricey for your budget, consider a co-branding venture with other companies that share your target customer demographic. A great example of this is ishopindie.com. This site enables small boutiques and artisans to all contribute to one large ad budget, and this budget advertises ishopindie.com. The companies contributing to the site’s budget all benefit from the marketing efforts because everyone who discovers ishopindie.com through its branding campaigns discovers the site’s member companies. When visitors to ishopindie.com have to buy birthday gifts or want to treat themselves, ishopindie.com comes to mind and the site’s member companies reap the benefits.

The small business owner is strapped not only for cash but also for time. Running your small business often forces you to wear a lot of hats: sales person, customer service department,accountant, etc. It’s easy for marketing to take a back seat when it comes to your time. There are only so many hours in the day. The beauty of cross-promotion is not only that it saves you money and hooks you up with customers you might not reach otherwise, it also saves you time.

When you plan your cross-promotion activities with a partner think about all the steps involved with making the campaign a success for everyone involved. Maybe you’re co-sponsoring a sweepstakes with another company. While it’s fine for each of you to just tell your own customers about this promotion, you’ll both benefit a lot more if you and your partner make an effort to tell the whole world.

Now, telling the world is quite an undertaking so your first order of business is to decide exactly how you’re going to get the word out about your campaign. Are there bloggers who might write about this sweepstakes? Are there places you could advertise the sweepstakes, either in print or online? Can you use social media to spread the word about your sweepstakes (message boards, Myspace, StumbleUpon, etc)? Identify all the ways you can get your campaign exposed to potential customers and then make a list of who is doing what.

Maybe your partner has stellar banner design skills and can design ads to promote the sweepstakes. Maybe you’ve got in an with a popular blogger who might mention your campaign to her readers. Maybe you’ve just got a really good media list you regularly correspond with when you’ve got a promotion going on. The idea is to pool your resources, time and skills with another company to get your mutually beneficial campaign seen by your audience.

Whatever you and your marketing partner decide you’re bringing to the table make sure you clearly define roles and responsibilities and stick to them. Establish time lines for activities to take place. If you’ve promised to tell 100 bloggers about your promotion make sure you follow through and get it done by the date you promised to do it. When it comes to cross-promotion you and your partner or partners are counting on one another to ensure mutual success. Failure to deliver on promises you make hurts your campaign, your business, your partner(s) and your credibility — not to mention your karma.

It’s also important to make sure you and your partner or partners have evenly distributed the tasks involved with promoting your campaign. There’s no better excuse for slacking off than feeling like you’ve been given an unfair share of the work to do.

Lastly, make sure you and your cross-promotion partners check in when tasks are completed. Let each other know when that ad arrives at the magazine for press or that blog editor promises you a write up. Keeping each other on track means keeping your campaign on track and enjoying terrific results.

Here at Brand Torrent we spend a lot of time and energy encouraging small business owners to work together to build their brands. Lest you think that co-branding is beneath your company, check out this popular Geico commercial that uses Mrs. Butterworth pancake syrup to simultaneously build both brands.

The humorous ad builds a positive association for both Geico and Mrs. Butterworth pankcake syrup. The ad’s humorous nature has also given the commercial some viral power, scoring over 18,000 views on YouTube.

Even if you don’t have a big budget for a viral video, sharing the cost to produce an entertaining viral video with another brand is a marketing option within reach for the small business owner. If TV air time is too pricey, with sites like YouTube at your fingertips you can still make use of a video marketing campaign.

Print advertising can be both expensive and tough to track. Earlier this week I wrote about how to track the success of a marketing campaign so this leads nicely into exploring print advertising as a means to market your brand. I’m most in favor or print ads for brick and mortar businesses but whether you want to advertise in print for your online or brick and mortar business, advertising with partners is a great way to save some cash.

One group I admire for their print-based cross-promotion activities is Indie Finds. This group of independent artisans and designers buys print advertisements in national publications. For each advertisement, several of the designers chip in to cover the cost and all the participants get a product from their shop featured in the advertisement. Although this group focuses on independent designers, there’s no reason other types of companies couldn’t form a coalition to advertise in a local publication or another type of special interest publication.

Indie Finds’ placements in magazines have a stylish design but they probably wouldn’t be mistaken for content from the magazine. While their eye-catching design work is likely to attract eyeballs, another way to pull off the print-based cross-promotion would be to employ an advertorial format. If companies selling products for new moms wanted an ad in Fit Pregnancy, they might consider framing their placement as an “article” on top five must have items for new moms. Of course each of these must-haves would be picks from five companies splitting the cost of the placement.

However you frame your print marketing. Be sure to supply a unique URL, phone number or coupon code for the ad if possible so that you can measure the ad’s success. It’s also important to keep in mind that print placements usually become more effective over time. If you’re not prepared to invest in several placements to see a return you may want to reconsider investing in this marketing medium.

We’ve recently noticed the proliferation of businesses on Brand Torrent that sell food based products so today’s post is about how to market edible items online. To begin with, you have to recognize the challenges of selling edibles online so that you can develop strategies to overcome them.

Challenge #1: Immediacy. When people get a craving for a chocolate bar they want it now, they do not want to wait a week and have it mailed to them. This means that for a lot of food items it makes more sense to market the product as a gift rather than as a food. People buy gifts online all the time so billing your gourmet tea or truffles as gifts makes it much more reasonable to wait for their arrival. This means you should go the extra mile with offering attractive packaging and even gift wrap.

Challenge #2: The lack of taste-o-vision. Food has to be experienced, it has to be sampled, there’s no way you can impress upon a website visitor how delicious your sauces, cookies or coffee is by description. Don’t get me wrong, description is extremely important, but what’s even more important is getting people to try your product so they can see for themselves that it is, in fact, delicious.

To make this happen my first suggestion is that you sell sample sized versions of your products on your website. If your product is that great your customer will be back for more. The other way to get samples out there is cross-promotion of course! Trade samples of your product with other retailers and get them to give your products to their customers. (You can do the same for them.) This is a great way to get your product into the hands and mouths of more prospective customers than you’d ever reach alone.

Challenge #3: Exciting the other senses. Ever notice how watching Food Network makes you hungry? Those bright red juicy tomatoes and the onions sizzling and turning golden in the pan. I’m starting to get a little hungry just thinking about it. To get your customer excited about your product you’re going to need killer product descriptions, descriptions that make their mouths water. You’re also going to need amazing product pictures. You’ll not only want clear, sharp, bright, well-lit pictures of your own products, you may want to stage them to make them even more appealing. If you’re selling honey apple flavored tea don’t just shoot the tea bags, create an entire still life of lush red apples and a jar of premium honey. You’ve only got words and pictures to get customers excited about your product so use them to your advantage.

My final thought on selling food online is that I strongly recommend you put an ingredients list some place easy to find it. People have all kinds of allergies and dietary restrictions so its important to know if your tea contains milk fat or if your hot sauce contains beef tallow. Personally, I enjoy buying certain types of non-perishables online but nothing sends me running faster than a site that doesn’t supply an ingredients list.

Got great tips for getting your edibles to sell online? What’s worked for you?

In my last post I talked a bit about the importance of tracking the success of your marketing campaigns. I mainly talked about how cookies can be used to help track conversions. Today I’m going to tell you about some more strategies you can employ to track the success of an individual marketing effort.

Analytics Programs: Analytics software such as Google Analytics (which is free), Web Trends or Omniture SiteCatalyst can help you figure out where your site traffic is coming from and what it’s doing once it arrives on your site. These programs are highly effective for measuring the success of an online marketing campaign. Especially savvy marketers often create individual landing pages for each marketing campaign. This means you can check the traffic on that one page and get an instant view of how much traffic your campaign generated. These landing pages also allow you to tailor copy to match your campaign.

Landing Pages: Landing pages on your website are not only helpful for tracking online marketing campaigns, they can be used to track just about any kind of campaign you run. Lets say you run a radio spot and you want to know how much traffic your radio spot generated for your site. Rather than announcing your company website during the commercial, you’d announce the landing page URL you set up for the spot. That way you’d know visitors coming to your site through this page found you from the radio ad. You could also cookie visitors coming in this way so that when they make purchases you’ll be able to track the conversions.

Dedicated Phone Lines: If you frequently deal with customers by phone, having dedicated phone lines for each of your marketing campaigns is an easy way to find out how the customer found you. You can have a special number for your ad in the local paper and another one for your radio commercial. Be sure that you’ve got a system in place to record the number of calls and sales you get from each phone line.

Coupon Codes: Coupon codes serve as double duty marketing tools. They not only give customers incentive to shop with you, they give you information about how the customer found you. Providing a special coupon code for each of your marketing campaigns means that when customers buy you’ll know how they discovered you.

If all else fails, ask. It’s low tech and not always the most automated approach but it never hurts to ask customers how they found out about you. This can be a drop down box on your website check out form or a question that’s asked when customers call or come into your store. You might also find out that word is being spread about your company from a source you didn’t even know about.

Whatever tactic you use to track your success, make sure you have plans to store and analyze this data. You’ll want to know what happened with each of your marketing campaigns so you can decide which ones to try again and which ones to ditch for the future.

I’m a big fan of promotional items like pens, key chains, and so forth. People rarely throw them away, and sometimes they even pass them on to other people, thus passing on your company name and phone number, address and/or web address.

Today’s Marketing Sherpa blog post on this topic reiterates the value of these types of items. If you haven’t had any made for your business yet, a quick Google search of “promo items” will turn up tons of companies who can make these things for you, often for just a few cents per piece. That’s cheaper than your average click on a search marketing campaign!

Since we’re all about cross-promotion here at Brand Torrent, I not only suggest getting these promo items made post-haste, I highly recommend trading your promos with other companies that share your customer demographic. Customers will love getting a
free useful item in their order, and you and your cross-promo partners will reap the rewards.