Researching and Trending - The Digital / Search Marketing Wiki

Researching and Trending

Contents

Initial Areas to look for Researching & Trending

First, use the SEOMoz Popular Searches tool.

To mine eBay for the true gold, you have to dig a little deeper into their online treasure chest. Let's begin our search at eBay Pulse (http://pulse.ebay.com/), where you can get a daily snapshot of current trends, hot picks, and popular search terms.

Don't take eBay Pulse for granted. They are basically handing you a proven business model on a silver platter. From this one page, you can find out exactly which products are in highest demand.

Within each of their 35 product categories, there is a Top Sellers tab at the top of the page. You still need to do your own testing and research to see which products sell best on your own site to your unique audience, but the Amazon top sellers can certainly give you a very strong starting point.

One of the best places to start on Amazon in order to find an untapped niche is in the magazine section. Here, they list over 80,000 magazines.

Magazine topics are profitable by their very nature because they only exist if a large number of people are willing to buy them. Therefore, just knowing that there is a magazine on a particular topic shows that there is a particular group of people that are passionate about that topic and are willing to spend money on their interests.

Once you find a magazine that appeals to a certain sub-culture, order some back-issues. Thumb through the older versions and find which advertisers have been advertising their product in multiple issues. By doing this, you'll know which products your target audience is buying. If you're like me and like to save money, you could just go to your local library and look through the back-issues there.

Amazon.com can also be used to tap into a wide range of trends. Simply check out their top-selling magazines, which are updated every day. Using the Amazon movers and shakers tool, you can tap into the latest trends before the rest of the online marketers ever think about catching up to you.

Our last stop online is at the Learning Annex (http://www.learningannex.com). This site is a comprehensive list of adult education classes that are available online. As you probably know, information is one of the hottest selling products online. In fact, information is the number one reason that people even go online. By finding out what people are paying to learn about, you can uncover a multitude of profitable niches.

It is a free marketing magazine called Direct Mag (www.directmag.com). Every month, this magazine contains a feature known as List line, which shows announcements of mailing lists, their number of subscribers, and what and how much of a product they are buying. Directmag.com will show you exactly what people are buying and how much of it they are buying.

The many in-demand products and keywords that you find during your search can transform into hundreds of different web sites, info-products, and ebooks. They can also lead to successful SEO and pay-per-click campaigns.

Look to GoFish and YouTube (as well as other video sites) to get ideas, to see what's going on. They show me not only what people are posting, but also what people like.

Finally, sign-up for e-zines which match your prospect niche, A great place to look for e-zines is The eZines Directory --> Also, compile a list of keywords for the e-zines and your future site(s) --> Go to your competitor websites and subscribe to their newsletters/e-zines.

The Following was Taken from Aaron Wall’s SEOBook blog:

Most searches occur at the main search sites and portals (Google, Yahoo!, MSN, AOL, etc.), but some people also search for temporal information, looking to find what is hot right now, or seeing how ideas spread. Not everyone can afford WebFountain, but we can all track what people are searching for or how stories are spreading using:

Feed Readers:

Subscribe to your favorite channels (or topical RSS feeds from news sites)

Blog Search:

Search for recent news posted on blogs

Blog Buzz Index:

Search for stories rapidly propagating through blogs

General Buzz & Search Volume:

Article Directories

Look up article directories on Google as well as the Article Marketing section

Product Feedback, Product Trending and Coolhunting

For other review sites, go to Del.icio.us

News Search:

Test Ad Accounts & Test Media:

  • Google AdWords
  • Yahoo! Search Marketing
  • write press releases and submit them cheaply to see how much buzz & news search volume their is around a topic, using sites like PR Web or PR Leap: --> post on a topic --> see if it spreads --> check referrer data
  • Sometimes stories emerge out of the comments. The Save Jeeves meme that spread originated around the time the person who created that story commented on a post about Jeeves getting axed.
  • Don’t forget to have friends tag your story on Del.ico.us and submit it to Digg.
  • Use the spamdexing social bookmarking sites (where you pay people to bookmark your site - Search Del.icio.us for references - I will add these references to this site in the future).

Tagging:

Some are busy tagging what information they think is useful.

Track Individual Stories, Conversations & Trends of a Blog:


Bloggers typically cite the original source OR the person who does the most complete follow up.

Blog Trends:

See if a blog is gaining or losing market-share and compare blogs to one another

Overall Most Popular Blogs and Stories:

Earlier stories from the SEOBook series:

Extra (Sort-of Related to Researching & Trending)

A few companies use a form of "design for response" or versioning in marketing their wares. They several similar offerings with varying attributes and then see what sells the best (e.g., some software companies have contemporaneously put out various versions with different functionality). They look at what people actually buy—how they behave in the real world.

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