Wouldn’t it be great to ride the wave of the next trend? Or how about the next 100 trends? Because there is always an opportunity if you know where to look.
Back when Bin Laden was killed a few years ago a young man raced home from work with an idea he’d had. He spent the night building a website to sell t-shirts having to do with Bin Laden’s death, and within 24 hours he grossed $120,000!
Even if only $10,000 or $20,000 of that was profit after he paid for the shirts to be made and shipped out, that’s still a dynamite return on one night’s work. And that of course doesn’t count the sales he went on to make in the following days. Whether profiting over someone’s death is ethical or not is incidental. The point I’m making is this guy saw a trending niche and went for it..
But the evening news isn’t always the place to find the latest trends, nor is it practical for most of us to race home and build a website to sell t-shirts. So how do you find what’s going to be hot next?
Frankly the resources out there at your disposal are unlimited. Never before has it been so easy to keep your finger on the pulse of the latest and hottest trends. I’ve compiled a list below of websites to consult, and would recommend one word of caution: It could be easy to get overwhelmed by this sheer volume of information available. Thus, when you find a great idea, I suggest you immediately stop looking and begin optimizing it.
There’s a tremendous advantage to those who are first to hit the market with the information or product consumers want – for one thing, it can be surprisingly easy to score high in the search engines. For another, you can become part of the story, generating free publicity for your website and product.
But if you bounce from one idea to the next without taking action – well, you know what will happen. Nothing, zilch, zero So look to your heart’s content, but when you find a winner, stop looking and start moving.
Here’s the list – I’ve divided it between Search and Twitter. Enjoy!
Search:
Google Hot Trends – What’s hot on Google right NOW?
Google Insights – Includes graphs, regional interest, comparisons, etc.
Google Blogsearch – All the latest and most popular posts
Google Zeitgesit – Based on the aggregation of billions of search queries people typed into Google
Yahoo Buzz – What the world is searching for
Bing Social – The hottest social topics
Trendy!bing – Google trends meet Bing results
Topsy – Real time search for the social web
Twitter:
Twitturly – Twitter URLs (Now you can remove the celebrity Twitpics)
Trendistic – See trends in Twitter
TwitterCounter – Great for following your own Twitter stats as well
Twubs – Twitter groups built around content aggregated from #hashtags
WhatTheTrend – Hot topics from around the world
Monitter – Real time twitter search tool that enables you to monitor a set of keywords on twitter
Hashtags – Search by any hashtag you choose
TweetMeme – The hottest stories on Twitter
TweetingTrends – Trending topics that hit the top 10
Let me know if you can think of any more…
