What do you do if your product is stuck way down in the long tail? Try hitching a ride up to the short head.

A week or so ago, I read a little article in the New York Times about how obscure musicians are promoting themselves at Apple’s iTunes Music Store. They’re recording cover versions of hit songs. That way, when someone searches iTunes for the hit, the cover version also pops up in the results, giving the unknown artist a jolt of free publicity. Earlier this year, the article reported, “Derek Sivers, the founder and president of CD Baby, the largest distributor of independent music on iTunes, noticed that many of the firm’s top-selling songs were covers, and over all, the albums with cover songs were selling the best. ‘The cover would become like the beacon to that album,’ he said. So he sent out a message to his clientele recommending they find their own slice of music history to record … Mr. Sivers said the response to his idea has been overwhelming.”

When I read that, I started thinking about how this sort of practice – let’s call it “head-faking” (or maybe “head-phaking” would be hipper) – has broad applications as a sales strategy for long-tail markets. You simply give your product (whether it’s a song, a book, a DVD, a software program, or whatever) some tie-in to a hit product. You might, say, incorporate the hit’s title into your own product’s title. Through the magic of search technology, your product then becomes a barnacle that the hit carries along with it as it cruises through the limelight.

Of course, a lot of long-tail merchants already use variations of head-phaking to suck in some extra fee income. Through Amazon.com’s paid placements program, for instance, a publisher can pony up some greenbacks to have one of its titles appear as a twofer (“buy x, get y”) with a bestselling book. What’s that but head-phakery? Come to think of it, Google’s AdSense program is really just an elaborate form of head-phaking – a way to get your lowly long-tail link up among the short-head elite.

But paying for a head phake seems like cheating. A free phake is far more satisfying. Achieving success, though, requires considerable artfulness. If you’re too obvious, you’ll just get crowded out by fellow head-phakers. As Derek Sivers told the Times, “The key is finding a song that hasn’t been done to death.” For instance: “Nobody has covered anything off Alanis Morissette’s ‘Jagged Little Pill.’ ” Ah, that’s the glory of the digital realm. It’s full of angles.