reblogged from: Michael Phipps
Interesting Google Tools For Watching Trends
Thanks, Michael, for the great list. You’re right… this business is a lot like playing the stock market =) We should expand this with other trend monitoring resources and techniques.
Yesterday, I had the urge to explore the viability of marketing to trends. It appears that some of the tools Google provides to watch trends have changed recently, so here’s a quick list:
- Google Zeitgeist - this list used to contain the most popular searches for each year. It seems this has been replaced by some new tools
- Google Trends - A broad look at search query data. You can enter up to five search terms and see their relative popularity over time. This great for deciding which keywords you want to use in your advertising, and can show you if any terms are increasing or decreasing in popularity.
- Trends for Websites - Shows traffic data for a website. Type in a URL to see visitors by region and related sites visited. Great for selecting what websites to advertise on, because it shows ACTUAL performance data. Looks like it uses Alexa data in the background.
- Insights for Search - This is a big like Google Trends on steroids. It offers the ability to get more specific information on the search terms you are interested in, including most popular and fastest risng queries.
- Hot Trends - Top 100 fastest-rising search queries in the US right now. This list almost changes before your eyes. Yesterday it was quite a good cross-section of the web. Today it is dominated by searches on one particular topic (someone famous died)
I believe if you can move REALLY quickly it would be possible to watch the Hot Trends, and push relevant advertising out directly aimed at those trends. The fact that the trends move SO quickly mean that if you are selling a product it really needs to attract highly impulsive buyers.
Most of these trends are from people seeking more information, so assembling as much information on the topic of the moment, and then publishing it to a website with impression based advertising is probably the smartest and easiest way to make money.
I think it is less likely you could use the trends to sell a product quickly, however, in the past I have seen a quick thinking individual use trends and link them to matching products via an affiliate program.
Trend marketing could be highly lucrative, provided you have the ability to move with the trends as quickly as they change.
What do you think?
