Texas GOP
Long tail effects on Texas Republican & Democratic Politics
This is a domain I registered to test ideas for putting politically related information on the Web. I used it during the 2004 campaign to test the idea of a free web site evaluation service for candidates. This met with a complete lack of interest.
For the 2006 election cycle I planed to explore the concept of long tail search as it applies to the political process.
The 2008 election is now in progress and the impact of the internet on the political process is still hard to see. I am not a political junkie so I am sure there is a lot going on which I don't see. What I do notice is that domain names related to political personalities and events don't seem to show the marketability and appreciation which domains related to products do. It's interesting, because we get so used to dealing with how fast things change in the online world it's easy to forget that other parts of the system move much more slowly.
2006 Election thoughts: Never heard of the long tail? It's a relatively new concept that says much of the most relevant and interesting content on the web can be found by doing searches for longer search phrases. These searches will bring up websites optimized for these very limited topics. Long tail search marketing principles say a business, political party, or special interest group with a small budget can make themselves visible on a multitude of these terms. Each one will have very little traffic, but put them together and the exposure can be significant.
Spammers figured this out a long time ago. Use automated software to put up hundreds or thousands of sites targeting long tail searches. If the trickle of visitors to the sites click an ad every once in a while the income can be huge. How does this apply to Texas politics?
Lets say your special interest group believes it has a solution to the problem of corruption in government, but is having trouble getting the message out. Newspaper ads are terribly expensive, television is out of the question and the postage costs to mail flyers that no one reads are high too. Lets suppose you have a nice website where your solution is clearly presented, but it isn't getting the traffic needed to move your agenda forward.
As I write this, the most famous name associated with corruption in Texas is Tom Delay. Do a Google search on that name. Now look to the right side of the results page and see how many sponsored ads you see. There was only one when I did it. So what, you say. The lack of ads tells you almost no one is bidding for that search term. Your organization can open an AdWords account and begin bidding to have your website displayed whenever someone searches on this term. The bids should be low because there is almost no competition. You don't even pay unless someone actually clicks on the ad and visits your site.
You can probably test the idea for less than $100.00 which should look very cheap compared to other advertising venues. It may take some tuning and tweaking to get it right, but once you know how the process works and what the conversion rates are, you can start looking for other likely terms. Have fun.
I presume the political use of websites will improve, but I have the feeling candidates are used to waiting to the last minute and then pouring resources into advertising. This doesn't work so well if you want to take advantage of organic search. It takes time to build websites that rank for your important search terms. Using the process described above just might make quick effects possible. The long tail concept provides an interesting way to generalize approaches to website marketing. It's application to politics will be interesting to watch.