Blogs Tell A Tale Of Tails

Bob Truett from Alabama wrote an interesting piece in his Mensa group’s newsletter about animal tails.  Truett cites five purposes for tails:

Balance:
As the animal runs, leaps, or climbs, the tail helps it stay in balance.

Temperature Control:
In cold climates, an animal covers itself with its bushy tail; in warm climates, the tail may be waved like a fan.

Defense:
Brush-tailed porcupines swat enemies with their tails, while garden lizards wiggle their
tails to distract their opponents.

Grasping:
Monkeys come to mind; they can hang by their prehensile tails.

Social Purposes:
You can almost read a dog’s mind, says Truett, by observing his tail.

"Did you ever wonder what our world would be like if humans had evolved with tails?" asks Truett. 

Well, at least in the marketing sense, we do, explains Chris Anderson in his landmark book The Long Tail, referring to the niche marketing that is so relevant to business blogging.

The concept of the Long Tail is based on the fact that, in the physical world, there isn’t enough shelf space to carry everything for everyone, and so a chart showing the demand for different products and services would "tail off" the end of the page. In the digital world, by contrast, there’s room for everything.  The Internet can offer the entire gamut of products and services by connecting consumers to providers.

So, while you have no tail, long or otherwise, "your small business itself has a long tail, one for you to mine and monetize," says Anderson.

Can a small business benefit from having its own blog?  Make that answer a definite "yes".  In the online world, you don’t need big numbers – or big dollars – to make a big difference.  The people who find your blog (and from there your website) are precisely the ones who were searching for your kind of product and service in the first place!