There was a book that came out last summer titled The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More by Chris Anderson. I bought the book. I ended up reading a chapter or two and paging through the rest (to be fair, I do this with most books.)

The concept is simple: more niches and more choices for consumers mean more money for big sellers, aka aggregators. One of the given facts goes something like most of Amazon.com’s revenue comes from books that each sell a few copies. The reason it works is because there are so damn many books out there, it adds up to a huge number.

The author has a pretty good blog. He points out the various manifestations of the long tail, one recent post shows a picture of Anheuser-Busch’s line up from 1997 and then another picture from 2007. 1997 has 26 different beverages, 2007 has around 85 (I lost count.) Micro-breweries and alternatives have slowly been drawing away drinkers, they have chosen to compete.

I got to be honest, I’m a little annoyed. Chris plays down the ability of anyone but the big guys to make serious money off the long tail — “eBay, Amazon, iTunes, and Google.” An anecdotal post over at the Valleywag quotes some woman annoyed that Google keeps raising the payout limit right before she is going to get her first check.

The fact is I have been living off of the long tail for the past 2 1/2 years. Hmm, how did I manage that? Recently, I’ve been making quite a bit of money off it.

What Chris seems to completely miss is that automation, globalization, and commoditization (my favorite word) are making it brutally easy to get rich off of the long tail. Yes, aggregation is still important, but even long tail producers can aggregate.

As a publisher there is a straight forward path for you to follow — tons of content. 5 or 10 pages of content just aren’t going to cut it if you want organic traffic. Think about 500 or 1000 pages for starters. If you can’t be bothered to create (or buy) that much content then plan on not making a whole lot of money.

Here are my two rules of the long tail:

1. Saturation. Rather than perfect a single niche, cover all of its holes. There are an unbelievable number of underserved markets out there. Take your business process and replicate it to meet each one. There are many top ranking sites for business industries that have nothing a site in 1999 couldn’t offer.

2. Automation. In order to effectively saturate, you have to automate. The automation may come from cheap human labor, it may come from a computer program. What matters is you are not doing the repetitive and easily-learned stuff.

3. Globalization. The world is your market, or at least a big part of it. Tiny niches die when isolated by geography. Today you have a chance now to reach every potential consumer of that niche. The rapid spread of communication spreads and influences the offline world too — Finnish death metal in Dubai, anyone?

To luddites, isolationists, and religious extremists, this may be a chilling and scary world to live in. Too bad for them, the future will belong to smart entrepreneurs who choose to embrace it.