People use web analytics, particularly keyword lists, to determine 'what worked?' last month in terms of blog topics resulting in traffic from organic longtail searches. Boring (but useful). A little more interesting is how to derive new topics that you haven't really thought of, and feel out the outer depths in the abyss of long-tail keyword territory.

Well, I've been seeing a bit of 'crossover' or 'crosstalk' between topics, resulting in entirely new ideas - mashups? - that are essentially presented by consumers (through Google queries resulting in an inbound click to the blog) and are intrinsically very, very long tail and under-served by any other site on the Internet. How do we know that? Because no site came up covering the topic in question. My site did instead. Confused?

Here's an example (needs a picture?):

A Manhattan Luxury Homes Blog we run has a writeup about the Macy's Thanksgiving Parade and owning a home on the route and how it's such a charming place to be. In a separate article they talk about renting. Well, there was a huge rush of traffic right before Thanksgiving - for people looking to rent homes on the parade route.

Now, I'm not from NY, but in my limited real estate experience hadn't thought that people would rent out properties for one week for people/companies to host parties in. But it makes a lot of sense. It's a new micro-market vertical I hadn't thought of yet. Well - if there's someone in that real estate office who has any access to anything like that, a half hour spent writing a blog about it next summer would surely get a ton of exposure; considering that the market was under-served with web sites.

This is also an example of how blogging can be great for micro-micro niches that you wouldn't want to set up a whole site for and maintain all year. That wouldn't be practical. But with blogging you can be strategic, feel out and plan for the timing of hitting certain verticals and topics.