Have you heard about the long tail marketing strategy and how it’s effectively bringing more sales to online businesses by targeting specific keywords? Not just any keywords, long tail keyword phrases that are proving to be much more effective. These keyword phrases are often converting to online sales at a much higher rate than generic highly searched keywords.

Even though a generic keyword may get the lions share of the searches and traffic, long tail marketing goes deep to find the many keywords that convert. Many times these little searched keyword phrases add up to equal better results than having your website optimized for the most popular search terms.

It’s in the tail that you find the search queries where buyers know what they’re looking for with credit card in hand. If you’re there to target this traffic you can be the one who funnels many long tail searchers through your sales process.

This long tail marketing philosophy was first referenced by Chris Anderson of Wired magazine. He effectively demonstrated that the media, movie, book and entertainment industry has profited incredibly by what he calls the long tail. Here’s Chris Anderson’s article from Wired Magazine. Chris has got a book out on the subject that if you haven’t already, you should definitely pick up.

Simplified the long tail is the market demand for products that are outside mass appeal but are still in demand. Mining these long tail keywords frequently ends up earning as much money for those who effectively market them as those who have spent a great deal of time and money optimizing their site to compete for the most searched terms.

You’ll find targeting these search terms to be a much more productive way to spend your time with less competition and more potential profit. I’ve found that using a good popular search tool like the free Wordtracker tool or the one from Digitalpoint is very useful for finding these popular terms and drilling down to phrases I think will be beneficial.

Once you’ve compiled a list of relevant key phrases you can integrate it into your webpages. Make sure you’re careful to not over do each word and keep your title and description of your page limited to the main focus of your page. I use my phrases sporadically in the content copy and in the anchor text at the bottom of the content.

Here’s a long tail marketing video that will give you some ideas of how you can properly optimize your website to channel these searches into visitors.

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If you want to read more information on finding long tail keywords check out this post which has another video on how to use the free Wordtracker tool to increase your ability to find profitable search terms.