Make Your Content Evergreen and Simple.

If you are an online video content creator who believes in the "Long Tail" then you should really think long and hard about the type of online video content you are producing and stay away from content that will be of no interest to viewers two months from when you post it.

After spending this past weekend at the Podcast and New Media EXPO, Podcast Academy and popping into Podcamp for a few minutes I realized that there are a lot of people producing video content that is "of the moment" and that "of the moment" content has little or no long tail value at all. Sure CNN.com can make money aggregating a daily audience with news but I don’t think independent content producers should create current affair video programming because you need to make money every way and anyway you can. To do that you are going to need long tail search.

(For those of you who haven’t read the book The Long Tail you should at least get your head around it and understand the concept because I’m not the only one who talks about it.)

Hayden Black from Goodnight Burbank has launched a new video series entitled Abigail’s X-Rated Teen Diaries and while I think the title of the series will get him some interesting traffic I also think it will make advertisers pause before placing their brands next to something that has “X-rated Teen Diaries” in the title. I also think there could be some issues with the type of traffic that finds Abigail through search and becomes very disappointed with what Abigail looks like and that they don’t get to see any naked teens having sex. I could be wrong but I do know from first hand experience with French Maid TV that those types of concerns are real. I’ve mentioned this to Hayden and I hope for his sake I’m wrong. Now that said, I do think that Hayden has been very smart in making this content evergreen much like what Sarah Atwood of Nontourage is doing with her new project Dear Addy May. Sara plays Addy May, a white trash character that gives advise to viewers in a trailer park trash kind of way. This is Dear Abby with a new media spin much like what Ask A Ninja has done.

Ask A Ninja, Addy May and Abigail’s X-rated Teen Diaries are all evergreen, simple to produce and emotionally engage viewers with spectacle and story that take place on screen and in the theater of the mind.