Long-tail Marketing and the Related Posts Plugin

Are you using the Related Posts (aka, Related Entries) Plugin? If not, you should! As much as we would like to think that blog visitors are interested in anything we write, the majority of visitors are looking for something specific. And, unless you’re lucky enough to be one of the top 10-20 bloggers, most of your visitors probably ended up on your site by searching a long-tail keyword.

If the post they land on gives them what they are looking for, you win. If not, they have the choice of looking around, doing a search, or leaving straight-away. Leaving straight-away is all to often what they do. That’s where the Related Posts Plugin comes in. It will output a series of “related” entries based on keyword matching.

After you download, install, and activate the plugin, you will find a Related Posts Options page to configure the plugin. Then, you need to put a snippet of code into the Single Post or Main Index template of your theme. If the plugin outputs entries not to your liking, you can teach it by adding one or more keyword suggestions to you post with a simple tag.

If you don’t think providing related information is important to the success of your blog, read this article in Wired magazine on how e-commerce sites such as Amazon.com are using long-tail marketing techniques to boost sales. If you use the Amazon.com website more that once, you will notice how good they have become at tempting you with related products on subsequent visits. Amazon’s skill at doing this was the subject of a recent parody published by the Onion.

Do the same and give your blog some juice!