The other day I wrote a post showing my CTR's for my Facebook ads for Hurricane Irene. This was a campaign where I took advantage of trends and the TV and radio hype. In the past I have taken advantages of trends and made campaigns which made me money. For example I made a post about the Jonas Brothers and how I created a marketing campaign around their banned Youtube account.
Taking advantage of these quick small trends can result quick cash flow. These trends can last a week or might last just a couple hours. It depends how you want to market around these trends. Is there a CPA offer I can promote? What promos can I run that is relevant to the trend? How can I make an affiliate offer or product relevant enough? etc
One big question is spotting trends. There are several sites out there which watches search results, social streams, and popular news. The importance among these sites is what is repetitive among all of them to find a good topic to promote around. Below are 5 sites I use to spot trending topics.
Google Trends is a great place to start since it is the biggest search engine. There are great trends which you can pull and do more research on. The best art about Google Trends is the fact you can search historical data on your keyword or topic. This gives you more insights about that specific topic, helping you create a new campaign base on historical and trending topics.
Youtube trends is a great place to be if you want to know what is going viral. Videos rapidly can go viral within minutes. Taking advantage of these small trends, which can last 48 hours to a week, can help you create the right campaign about topics the Youtuber is talking about. One aspect I have used Youtube trends is finding popular videos and watching to see if they go viral. If they do I create a campaign targeting that specific video only.
Blog Pulse is a great place to compare trending keywords. They have several categories where they organize trends. Organizing by keyphrases, websites, videos, blogs, etc. It is almost like a single huddle for all things trending. I like to use their keyword or topic comparison tool. This way I can see which trend will do better over all or which topic will last longer over another.
Yahoo Buzz is a great tool to find what is happening in the Yahoo search engine world. You can see there is a big difference from search terms when using Google Trends. One thing I do like is the Decliners section of Yahoo Buzz. Decliners are trends that has started falling off. This makes for easy campaign creation that is still somewhat trendy but I bet no competition.
Trendistics is more of a tool comparison. Providing you historical social data on your topic. This is important because you want to see or estimate how long your topic will last. This is more of a research tool, but it does have trending social topics from #hastags to topics. So it does show you what is trending and you can definitely use it to find popular social topics.
There are other popular sites out there to spot trends and popular news topics. You have to wrap your head around that trend and see if you can create a good campaign which users can interact with or better, take out their credit card. There are a lot of questions you can ask yourself to see if a campaign will work. The most important part is finding a relevant enough offer to promote and compelling enough for users to engage with.
--> What trend tools or sites do you use to spot trending niches and topics?
