If you have not heard about Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail, it’s time you checked out his blog at http://www.longtail.com. In fact, there is even a PDF download from ChangeThis.com or you can purchase the book from Amazon.com.

What is the Long Tail?

The relevance of the Long Tail to selling online is strong and apparent. In a nutshell, the Internet has changed the way we buy and sell things. In essence, the dynamics of supply and demand have also changed.

Products and services that have previously faced strong barriers to entry are now sold online as niche products. Before the advent of the Internet, floor space for product display was limited. Thus, only products with proven significant demand had the opportunity to be distributed and sold.

Today, diverse personal tastes have resulted in the emergence of niche markets. The beauty of this is that demand from these niches is met by smaller online sellers. In addition, improvement in postal and courier services, have made these products available to anyone, anywhere in the world.

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After reading Darren Rowse’s How to Create a Sense of Anticipation on Your Blog , I realized that I needed to create more direction and focus for What Sells Online! Later, Yaro Starak’s How To Write Great Blog Content - The Pillar Article, has also helped in defining blog content quality.

The purpose of this blog has always been to help readers find ideas, methods and products and to sell online. This also encompasses online marketing techniques, such as finding a niche market, search engine marketing, and also promotion techniques. While these are all good, they have never really centered round a specific theme, or a series.

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If you are finding it increasingly difficult to search engine optimize your site, you may want to check out your competitors.

To do this, Google your optimized keyword and see who ranks at top ten. Then, enter their URL into the search field and look at the number of results returned. Use the following format link:website.com, to determine the number of incoming links to your competitor’s website. Substitute your competitor’s URL with yours and check out the difference in the numbers.

Incoming links

Google uses the number of relevant incoming and outgoing links as one of their criteria for search engine results ranking. Therefore, a lower number of incoming links may also be the reason why you are ranked lower. Of course, the Page Rank of these sites where the incoming links originate from also matter in search engine optimization.

What is YOUR link strategy?

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