The Long Tail and

Affiliate Marketing
Linda Woods, President of PartnerCentric, Inc.
 Inspired by the book by Chris Anderson,
  Editor in Chief, Wired
Summary
 Whatis the Long Tail?
 Emerging trends using the Long Tail
 Unlimited distribution, expanding brands, creating
niches
 How major retailers are leveraging it
 What affiliate marketing has to do with it
 How affiliate marketers utilize it
 Niche marketers
 Search marketers
 What other opportunities exist?
 The future is in fattening the tail
What is the Long Tail?
 Following the Pareto Principle of 80/20 rule, most companies
say their top 20% best-sellers make up 80% of their revenue.
 That’s the Body. The Long Tail is the other 80% of products
and sales. The Body represents majority tastes, and the Long
Tail are the endless variety of minority or “niche” tastes or
desires.
The Changing World of Media
 Thephysical world
has limitations
 Average movie theater
needs 1,500 people
for a two-week run
to break even
 Average record store
needs to sell at least
two copies of a CD per year to carry it
 Same goes for DVDs, video games and
newsstands
Enter Internet Distribution -
Unlimited Shelf Space
Growth of products for minority tastes
 Rhapsody captures a larger part of market
by carrying way more titles than Wal-Mart
ever could, and it’s growing – no limits.
 Wal-Mart, the largest seller of CDs
in the world, has 35,000 titles, and 50%
of sales is the top 100 artists. Rhapsody, an
online music store, has 735,000 titles with
only 25% of its business being
the Top 100.
Growing number of brands
 Anheuser-Busch has hugely expanded the
number of beers, coolers and other
alcoholic drinks it offers, from 26 brands in
1997 to ...
Growing number of brands
 ...80 brands in 2007! Today it makes
organic beers, drinks for women and a host
of microbrews such as Bare Knuckle Stout
and ZiegenBock (available only in Texas)
and the first ever gluten-free beer.
Exploiting the Long Tail
 Zappos has 855,465 unique shoe SKUs,
which is far more than the largest
warehouse shoe store coud have. They
even have a category for “Vegetarian
shoes,” - shoes without leather or other
animal products.
Exploiting the Long Tail
 The bestselling brand in this category is
Converse sneakers, which as you probably
know is the cool shoe of the moment (and
not just among vegans). In an era where
consumers are socially conscious and
green issues drive taste, being both cool
and kind to animals is a good thing.
End of the super store – niches rule!
Developing niche brands
 Niche Retail LLC ranks 300 in
2006 Inc. 500 List of Fastest
Growing U.S. Companies
 Just a few of the sites owned
by Niche Retail:
 joggingstroller.com
 suuntowatches.com

 victorywatches.com

 highchairs.com

 bicycletrailers.com

 waterbounce.com
Affiliates extend the Long Tail

Great reviews
drive sales

NicheRetail's

Adsense further
leverages the tail

BabyGaga has sold more $20K in strollers for NR

in Q1 at a nearly 6% conversion rate!
How search affiliates profit
How search affiliates profit

 “I'm happy to go on record that we mine the long

tail of keyword (the 70%). This simply means that
we are tapping into new customers for merchants
that they wouldn't get out of their existing PPC
campaign, necessarily.”
-Vinny Lingham, Founder & Chief Strategy Officer, incuBeta.

Clicks2Customers, an incuBeta company, earned over

$10 million in affiliate commissions in 2006.
Affiliate opportunity in search

 Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Watch

has to explain the Long Tail of Search
in his talks. In San Jose, Danny asked
how many audience members knew about the
Long Tail. Practically no one was. The same thing
happened in Chicago. He remarks: “Of about 300
people, maybe 10% of the hands went up when I
asked how many knew about the long tail."

Example: Sunglasses/Oakley men's Monster Dog

Tips for a Tail-driven search strategy
 Merchants
 Let affiliates expand your SEM budget
 Provide keyword lists
 Affiliates lock out competition
 Creates friendly win-win partnership
 Affiliates
 Focus on the “little” terms (multi-word phrases)
 Create content-oriented sites
– match keyword strategy
 Coordinate efforts with merchants
 Don't break the rules
Opportunities for affiliates
 Mine the niches:
 Glutenfreebeerdrinkers.com
1 “gluten-free list of foods”
Keyword Effectiveness Index
or KEI – 324*
 8 “budweiser beer gluten free”
KEI - 135*

* Note from Wordtracker:

The keyword at the top of the list - "gluten-free list of foods" - has a
KEI of 324.000 and is therefore a very good keyword to target (its
KEI is between 100 and a 400).
Opportunities for affiliates

Get ChocoAddict.com
Chocoaddicts.com
Vegetarianshoes.com + Zappos = 15% per sale!
Join

ChocoAddict.com + Richart-Chocolates.com =
15% per sale

DocumentaryUniverse.com, 50sDVDs.com
+ Netflix = $9/subscriber
Fattening the Long Tail to profits
 Fuel demand for “long tail” niches
 Netflix created incentives for reviews to sell more
“tail.” New content brought more rentals for
cheaper movies
 Develop more brands; create new niches
 Hershey has just launched AllChocolate.com,
which is built around the high-end boutique brands
of its
Artisan Confections subsidiary, such as Dagoba
Organic Chocolate, Joseph Schmidt, Cacao
Reserve and Scharffenberger
Fattening the Long Tail to profits
 Break up Super Sites into Niche Sites
 JoggingStrollers, MyWeddingFavors,
SpareBeds, MantlesDirect,BathroomFurniture,
BirdCages
 Affiliates
should create content, reviews
and comparisons for every niche
 Optimize for detailed multi-word phrase search
Thank you!
 LindaWoods
President
PartnerCentric, Inc.
(805) 569-8750
linda@partnercentric.com

Visit us online
at www.partnercentric.com