While I am writing this I am on a cruise ship and ankered in the pacific Islands at an Island called Lugaville. I must admit, life is pretty nice at the moment and being on a cruise is really one-stop-pamper-shop. Talking about cloud living!
Have I made thousands of dollars while I am doing nothing, I wish. Hundreds not really. Tens of dollars yes, that is been happening but that is not really the essence of this blogpost.
The good thing about a holiday is that you have zero distractions of things that have been on your to-do list. Mine was reading a few books. One of them was called “The Long Tail” from Chris Anderson (no affiliate link). It is an old book (few years old) and probably known by a lot of people or just the principle of the long tail is known. But the book goes so much deeper than “That Amazon example”.
I won’t dictate the whole book but there are a few key elements that are so worth mentioning. The long tail is all around us, it has been used by NASA to discover / track metiorites. Even the discovery and explenation of a supernova has been done by the long tail. I won’t spoil the reasons behind this as I was just stunned by how this all worked.
We know that Amazon uses the long tail as their business model (even if they didn’t really knew it at the time). Google uses this very well in their Google Adwords business where they are able to find very long tail advertisments for a very large range of websites. Another great example is Rapsody, where their model really starts after the hits are no longer bought.
Just to explain what the long tail really means, and then how you can get your piece of the never ending pie. In the book, they use the example of the music industry and hits. The hits are the top sellers and are bought by the millions. Which is a huge spike in the graph below.
Source: http://www.aurorawdc.com/ci/000340.html
Then you have a songs which are not just hits but (they make the top 100 but not all the way to the top). Then you have the songs that are being sold which are not even the top 1000 and so on. To visualise this in the graph you see that there is a big spike and then a long stretched line which never reaches the zero. This is called the long tail. The further down the tail you go, the nicher you get.
This is where it gets interesting for all you internet / affiliate marketers. As you may know, popular topics surrounding the internet are also high in competition. So you want to move down the tail where there is less competion. This is where you enter the rhelm of niche marketing.
If you want to start with online marketing / affiliate marketing then your best bet is to start in a market where there isn’t much competition. This sounds simple but sometimes might be harder than you think as many topics are already established. This does not mean that you cannot try to make your website work, but it might take a while before you can completly become an authority website.
It is easier (and I tell this from experience) to start with a topic you know a lot about and a lot of other people don’t 
. This just makes it easier and faster to see result. If you are really new to the online world then I would recommend checking out cloudblogging, this course will take you through the basics.
The more you know about an exclusive topic the more chance for you to make some money without worrying too much about competition taking your place. So find your spot online and just go for it and make your cloud living /cloudblogging come true.
All the best,
Ralph
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From what I know the reign of long tail keywords is gone as google decided to lower the importance of keywords bigger then two words.