The Big Companies Will Invade The Long-tail

Don’t you hate it when your business strategy stops being viable? For example, webmasters doing Adsense arbritage had their business model shut down when Google disabled their Adsense accounts.

I just read a blog post from Aaron Wall that made me reconsider one of my main business strategies, which is going after long-tail keywords. (Learn about the long tail.)

Aaron Wall wrote that a big travel publisher, John Wiley & Sons, recently published content from its books on the web. He went on to say that John Wiley & Sons will earn huge profits because of this move. He believes other big publishers will see John Wiley’s online success and follow suit by publishing their offline content on the web. When this happens, the big publishers will begin to dominate the long-tail SERPs because of their huge influx of content and the link strength of their websites.

What does this mean to small online publishers with lower amount of unique content and lower PageRank sites? Here are two statements from Aaron Wall.

If your strategy is entirely long tail keyword oriented and you don’t have a real brand your income will fall sharply in the next couple years.

The only way to avoid losing to big publishers is to create real brands, position them as self reinforcing authorities, aggressively monetized and reinvest in marketing, and get hundreds or thousands of subscribers to spread your message and do your marketing for you.

Read Aaron’s Wall whole blog post: Content Without Subscribers Will Become Worthless.

If you hate seeing Amazon or Wikipedia stealing your long-tail rankings, you haven’t seen anything yet. Other big players will be following their steps. They will begin publishing a huge amount of content that will rank for all kinds of keywords, competitive and non-competitive.

The big players will see the money-making power of the internet. They will realize that the web is becoming a mainstream consumer platform.

Now is the time to fight back by building an authority site that attracts links and draws a strong fanbase (aka subscribers).