Refocus

What's on your agenda this year? I'm looking at things differently in terms of long term strategies, having seen firsthand the benefits or community driven markets.

I've changed focus, not being in finance, and enjoying the virtues of consulting and multiple gigs. Most recently I've been working with a client that has a site which is essentially a forum, and found it interesting that even though they rank for next to nothing besides their name, for common search terms, they also do well on the long tail for things like model numbers because of their internal linking. This site sees upwards of 300,000 visitors a day, and almost 2/3's is long tail traffic like A72342 (made that model number up).

The take away is they've created a community, and the strength of that has proven to be incredibly powerful. Even though 99% of the inbound links are their brand name, they dominate their market. Kind of interesting really. I had a chance to see some Hitwise info on this market and the ones that are ranking are also spending a lot on ppc, but they barely have 1% marketshare. I'm sure things were different when they started, but its sure paid off for them.