The Long Tail of an Idea

The long tail is a well-recognized term and concept. Chris Anderson’s blog is a great, insightful read and in many ways inspirational to the scrappy, little blogger that could.

I often think of how the long tail concept applies to ideas. What happens during the validation process to see if an idea is worthwhile, and beyond that, when you’re actively working on an idea is the realization of new ideas.

So one idea begets another, which begets another, and so on. Ideas are points on a chain (or graph) not points in space with no reference or connection to anything else.

The long tail isn’t just about one thing coming out of another. It’s the realization that many smaller things combined may be bigger than the most popular or biggest thing in that space. There are a handful of extremely popular blogs; the long tail is everyone else. At the end of the day, “everyone else” is much bigger (and more valuable) than the most popular blogs. That’s what Vernon Lun’s talking about with his site TheGoodBlogs. (Of course, that doesn’t stop many of us from trying to get into that handful of ultra-popular bloggers!)

When it comes to a killer idea, it may pay dividends many times over in terms of your success (regardless of how you measure success.) But its long tail could be even more successful.

Great ideas are meant to spawn other ideas.

Those ideas may be completely new businesses, or they may be corollary’s to what you’re already doing, smaller offshoots that combine to create even more success than the original idea. The blessed long tail.

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