Take advantage of The Long Tail with your blog

Seth Godin wrote a post the other day called Needle in a Haystack Marketing. It’s a good post: the idea is that if you solve specific problems for small groups of people, and you do it often enough, you’ll have a repository of really useful information.

I remember reading The Long Tail when it came out and trying, the entire time, to figure out how exactly blogging fit into the equation. I refused to think that there was no long tail here.

There is one. The long tail of blogging happens with your archives. If you answer one question thoroughly and well, it will turn up in Google when people search for it. You’re getting the ten or fifteen people per day who need the answer on your site. And that’s true for every post like this that you do.

You do it enough, and you’re going to get a steady stream of exposure from search. Forever. Pretty good return for a one-time investment.