AnswerHero^™ - The Journey

One thing I forgot to mention when talking about our rationale for choosing a Q&A site is “The Long Tail“.

In ye good ole days you could create pages for fairly competitive keywords and you would have a reasonable chance at getting some fair rankings for them if you got all the elements in place to please the search engines. Unfortunately, with so much competition on the web, those days are gone.

One of the biggest mistakes new affiliates make is trying to create a site that targets highly competitive terms such as: “digital cameras” or “credit card comparison“. I see this time and time again and the end result is always the same – a demoralised affiliate who can’t understand why he/she can’t get any traffic to their website.

So What is This Long Tail?

Think about all the types of searches you have done when using a search engine. If you are looking for a leather case for an Iphone you don’t just type in “iPhone“, you type in “leather case iphone” or even “where can i get a cheap leather case for an iphone“.

Take a look at this graph:

The left side of the graph is where you will find keywords like “iphone” and “digital camera“. You can see the the number of searches for the competitive keywords is extremely high but then so are the number of sites that are trying to reach the top of the organic rankings for these keywords.
As you move to the right of the graph the keywords start to contain more words and therefore a lower number of searches are carried out each month however the more words they contain the easier it is to get them ranked on the first page of the search engines results.

Greed can often overtake at this point and many affiliates might think “what’s the point in getting a number one ranking for “blue rabbits in silk pyjamas” (I have no idea where that came from but it is a Sunday and I’m blogging on the patio, in the sun, so please forgive me!) when I will only get a handful of visitors and make diddly squat from them?“.

There is ONE VERY GOOD REASON – MOTIVATION!.
– If you can see a page on your own site rank on the first page of Google for ANYTHING then you will feel motivated to continue.
– If you spend a year fighting an uphill battle trying to rank for a competitive keyword and get nowhere you will just feel frustrated.

Now the key with the Long Tail is volume – to get decent levels of traffic and make a reasonable income you will need thousands of pages. At this point you have three choices – pay someone else to write the content, get it from somewhere else (but run the risk of a duplicate content penalty) or write the content yourself and be mindful of the fact that you will only get a small amount of traffic in the early days.

Once your site is established then you can start to work your way to the left of the graph and target more competitive keywords as you will have hopefully gained a lot of links to your long tail pages.

Luckily for us the questions that are flowing into CompareStorePrices.co.uk provide us with a constant stream of long tail keywords and all we need is additional content in the form of answers to those questions. More on that last bit as we move forward.

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