I’m constantly on the lookout for new resources and tools that can simplify my tasks (or at least make it a bit easier and/or faster).
Now, you probably already know that one of the ways you can capitalize with affiliate marketing is by looking out for the latest trends in your niche OR to spy out new trends that you can create blogs or campaigns (PPC or otherwise) around.
So, in this series on Trend Research Tools for blogging and affiliate marketers, I’ll cover many of the known and less known research tools available to us… so, if you’ve ever wondered how to find trends to write about be sure to pay attention to some of my future posts about this topic.
One of the common tools out there is Google Trends (formerly called Google Zeitgeist).
While Google Trends is a great tool to discover what is trending RIGHT NOW (as far as search goes), it’s not as useful as it once was, because it now only lists the “Top 20″ sites (while in the past it used to display the top 100 trends at any given time). However, it is still one of my favorite tools for discovering trends, and it should be a part of anyone’s trend finding repertoire.
Another useful resource by Google is the Google Insights for Search.
If you’re not familiar with Google Insights, I recommend you check out the videos by Google here.
With this tool you can compare search volume for a specific keyword phrase (over time – it goes back 3 years in time) as well as other relevant popular keywords. I personally use the “web search” and the “product search” filters the most, but Insights offers a plethora of search filters, so play around with it…
A similar tool to the Google Insights tool is Ice Rocket’s Trend Tool:
This tool allows you to search for what is popular out there (and talked about) by bloggers and is a great resource for seeing the “supply and demand” for a given keyword phrase. One nifty feature of this tool is that you can compare up to 3 keyword sets at a time (which can be very useful). The Ice Rocket Trend tool will only allow you to go back 3 months in time (as opposed to Google Insights, which shows you the trends 3 years into the past).
In the next installment we’ll cover three more resources for discover trends.
All the best,
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