Using Google Trends, Hot Trends
Google has unveiled a new feature of their “Google Trends” software that will allow webmasters to cash in on search trends on a seemingly immediate basis.
Basically, Google has an algorhythym that removes factors such as the “always on top” keywords like “Myspace” and “Pamela Anderson” as well as editorializes risque adult topics to confine the results to one group of keywords: those seeing a strong enough surge in searches to be identified as a “trend”. Google also has a running list of the 100 Hottest Trends as identified by their software. So how does this help web developers? Well if you can’t figure it out, you’ve got some serious issues.
Here are a few ways you can begin applying the Google Trends and Hot Trends information to your web endeavors:
- Use the Hot Trends to register new domain names based on popularity speculation. Either plan on reselling or develop into a niche website.
- Scour the list daily, and if any keywords fall under the umbrella of a forum/blog/site that you have, immediately make a post and ping in hopes of capturing searches for the quickly growing keyword.
- Research the types of things people search for and HOW they search for them to better understand how to create and develop your PPC keyword lists.
- Use these “Hot Lists” to immediately start PPC campaigns using them, and driving them to related Affiliate offers. You’ll likely get “in” before your competition and enjoy a relatively cheap cost per click until the others figure it out.
- When deciding what your back link anchor text should be, when link building, perhaps it would be a good idea to not only consider the “historical data” but also take into account the trend moving forward… so you’re on top of the link pile before others focus on a similar keyword.
Everyone is making a HUGE deal of this - probably mostly because it is Google. In reality, this feature has existed for awhile. Lycos has been running a list of it’s 50 hottest keywords each week that also includes a “biggest increases” and “biggest decreases” to show trends. You can find the list at http://50.lycos.com. But after sifting through google’s list I’m eager to see how powerful the tool is… it’s results seem to be a little bit more “different” and not quite as “obvious”.
For example, I would have expected both Lycos and Google to report the “David Hasselhoff Video” and “Jerry Falwell Funeral/Death” as top trends. But, “NNN Realty Advisors”, a New York Stoch Exchange Comapny, was number 92 on the list at the time of this writing… why? Trying to uncover the answers to that may lead us to some big opportunities. The searches for these terms are likely coming in response to news on Wall Street or elsewhere… possibly an hourly trend that Lycos would never have the opportunity to dissect.
Another great feature of Google Trends is the ability to analyze the geographical data they supply. For example, suppose you have a website that is based around the topic “weight loss”. Let’s take a look at any trends for this term:
The first thing we might notice is that, broken down by year there is a very obvious consistency. The keyword skyrockets at the beginning of the year… HELLO New Year’s Resolutions. It then gradually sags until the end of the year and the cycle starts again. It appears that 2007 has not been as strong as 2006 for the term.
We then see several news events which may provide more insight… two of the most recent are “5 techie weight loss tools” and “implantable pacemaker”. Off the top of my head I’m thinking the techie weight loss tools could be great link bait and affiliate opportunities and the implantable pacemaker sounds like a great news story to post to our weight loss blog.
It looks like “Baltimore, MD” is the top city for “weight loss” searches but the United States ranks only fifth as a country. Actually, all 10 Top Cities are in the United States. Perhaps we should geographically target these “fat areas” in our adwords campaign.  I can also see this being a TREMENDOUS opportunity to identify keywords and such for other languages and focusing campaigns on the Spanish language or others.
Below I have posted the Top 100 Trends as currently found on the Google Trends site:
Feel free to share your thoughts and ideas on taking advantage of this tool.
An Attempt to Get Dugg
I’ve tried a few times to get dugg to the front page but have yet to experience success. My most recent comes to promote a forum that is literally unpopulated thus far. I heard somewhat of a “breaking news story” on the radio and immediately posted my own take of it to a new political forum I’ve started.
To appeal to the “techie community” I gave it a creative title - Assistant Principle: “All Your Bus Are Belong To Us”.  If you like it, I hope you’ll digg it for me. To sum it up, an Assistant Principle and Teacher staged a Terrorist attack on a bunch of Elementary Schoolers to teach them a lesson about preparing for events like the Virginia Tech Massacre…. how bad is that?
I kind of “ripped” the title from a recent story dugg to the front about the Venezualan president taking governmental control of the banks. It was titled: Chavez: “All Your Banks Are Belong To Us”. I’m kind of trying to “emulate” that success. Hopefully it will get dugg and people will comment on the forum.
However, most stories that are actually dugg are from pretty stable and polished sites. This is a fresh vBulletin install with literally zero other posts. I’m hoping people don’t just see that the entire forum sucks as a whole and wander away.
I haven’t gotten dugg to the front yet but I’m telling you… I will eventually!
My First Podcast (Beta)
Take a listen… and your comments are greatly appreciated.
Falling Short… Again
Well I made a good run at the intended article and post writing but fell short of my original goals. Saturday I had to spend a couple hours searching for an appopriate gift my younger sister and all of Sunday was spent with my family. If I’m going to fall short because of time constraints, having it be because of family is perfectly fine with me.
On Friday night and Saturday I did get a decent amount of work done and it although I didn’t get as much as I’d hoped done - I’m content. This week I’ll be working hard at night writing more content. For me, “Location, location, location” has become, “Content, content, content”.
It’s funny how submitting to article directories is always mentioned as a great way to build back links. I’ve never done this before and why not? I’ll write an article, finish it and think, “Screw that! I just spent time writing trying to write a quality article, why am I going to post it on someone ELSE’s site?” I have enough trouble keeping up with fresh content for my OWN sites.
But, an approach I was thinking about that might be worthwhile: why not write more of a “general” article about a topic that encompasses several posts or articles on your given site and link appropriately to all of them within your submitted article? You could kind of regurgitate some of the information, summarize it and paraphrase it so to speak from a different point of view. I need backlinks so this is a tactic I might try… but not until I’ve got my own sites in line.
What are your top 5 ways to create backlinks, listing your best methods first?
Workfilled Weekend Prepared
In the last two days I was able to dust off some projects and get them ready to be worked on. I made about 10 timestamp posts in the past two days and finally, it’s Friday which means I’ll be able to get a decent volume of work done, if things go my way for once.
I’ll be staying in Friday night, all Saturday and Sunday morning doing work. It will mostly consist of timestamp posting one blog, article writing for my location based site, setting up the structure for my first real affiliate based site and creating and advertising a contest on a new forum.
On Sunday I have a family function so I likely won’t be able to do any work after about noon. I might just take the day off if indeed I’m able to get a fair amount done before then.
In other news, I totally forgot that Net Income is back up and running on Webmaster Radio. If you didn’t know, that’s the radio show put on by Affiliate celebrity “Shoemoney”. It’s a mix of information and entertainment, skewing one way or the other depending on the guest(s). I think it’s gone slightly downhill, which is illustrated by the most recent show.
The guest was Amy Armitage from Lunar Pages. Don’t get me wrong, she seems like a great person. But, Jeremy even points out that one of their commercials plays during the commercial break and that they “Just started their relationship with Webmaster Radio”. The choice of guests seems like a case of “scratching the advertisers back” rather than a programming or editorial decision. The show started with hard hitting information and insight directly into the world of affiliate marketing as it pertains to Shoemoney. This became a Lunar Pages case study… and a rather boring one at that.
It’s a shame because, at it’s best, Net Income is truly a great show that provides something you can’t get anywhere else on the Internet. I’m hoping he brings the show back to it’s origins. Either way, I’ll keep listening hoping he does.
Nonetheless, poke around the site and you’ll find some good shows with helfpul information. The SEO Rockstars are a good listen, too.
I Miss You, Blog
Wow, I really do miss this blog. The last REAL post before this one was on April 5th - nearly a month ago. Earlier today I climbed up onto the ledge of my 10 foot windows hoping to grab an Internet connection from an unsuspecting friend. No luck. The technicians finally came and hooked up my Internet… the one of many hurdles I’ve faced in the past month.
April was one of the worst months I’ve had in a long time. Problem after problem, issue after issue, irritating dilemmas and annoying inconveniences riddled my everyday life, sucking dry the free time I usually apply to Internet endeavors. When people asked me, “how are you doing?” in everyday passing, I would respond, “Ehhh, okay.” Not the usual response. “All I’ve been doing is putting out fires,” I would say.
I thought “putting out fires” was a common term, but perhaps it’s more business jargon than anything else. At least four people responded with questions like “Did your house burn down?” or, “I thought you were in sales, you’re a fireman?”
Regardless, to use a common cliche that I KNOW everyone can relate to, there is finally light at the end of the tunnel. Please don’t ask me if I’m a miner, tunnel maker or locomotive driver (forget what the latter are called).
Here are examples of how I’ve spent my time in April:
- Looking for a new apartment as our lease was expiring, one roomate was moving out and the owner was selling the house. You’ll find it is not only more economical to live with three people (2 others), but there are also more dwellings available and you get more space for your money.
- Helping my one roomate move out and across town in the city.
- Finally finding a new place, having my roomate check our credits before applying (he’s in the mortgage field) and finding out mine has completely gone to shit from hospital bills I never paid in 2002. They were sending the bills to the wrong address… my college address instead of my permanent address, when they had both addresses. The hospital gave the wrong address to the credit bureau/collectors and they never tried to contact me. So I’ve been accumulating bad credit for 5+ years.
- Trying to get my credit issues cleared up, I had to pay in inexorbitant amount of fees which I did not plan on incurring. I’ll be getting a couple thousand dollars from my tax refund, but since I had not received it, I had to borrow some money from family to cover these expenses. I did not want to get rejected on my apartment application for this reason - I would have had nowhere to live since we only signed the lease a week before our other one ended.
- I am the first person to ever recieve a bad fortune cookie. After all these credit issues, I buy a 6-pack of beer and some delivery chinese food to relax myself. Wonderful. I open my fortune cookie and it reads, “Think your life is bad? Try missing a few car payments.” Great… I just realized I forgot to pay my last 2 car payments.
- Moving out of our old place was a tremendous pain, squeezing my $1,300 bed up a staircase that is the size of a mouse hold, we basically had to bend it in half. Really nice wear on the springs and coils.
- Tried to clean the old place spic and span so we can get our security deposit back. Although general wear and tear of everyday living isn’t deductible from the deposit, our landlord is a lawyer and I’m pretty sure he’s going to jerk us out of our money.
- Moving into the new place we found that our dishwasher does not work. So much fun getting it fixed.
- Bought a washer and dryer because the laundry room here has 2 washers and dryers which could each fit about 2 shirts and a pair of boxers. And it costs $1.75 to wash and another $1.75 to dry. Yeah right.
- The delivery people messed up our delivery time and when they finally came, they couldn’t install it because it didn’t have any of the appropriate parts. What the heck. This is the first time I’ve bought a washer and dryer so how am I supposed to know when you buy something brand new and it comes with delivery and installation that you have a ton of extra stuff you have to buy on your own. Sears is a bunch of idiots.
- Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that Sears gave you a great deal if you used their Sears Credit Card but the application wouldn’t work online. I called and they said I should go into the store. I did, and my application for a Sears Card was denied because of my credit because of the idiot hospital and collection agency. The sale was 1 day so I had to get my parents to come buy it on their Sears card and I paid them the money.
- My roomate and his dad bought the equipment and tried to install it themselves, seeing as how his dad is a “handy man”. They made a minor miscalculation and the dryer kind of “caught on fire’ and our fuse box blew.
- In between all of this going on, I’ve been going into work early and leaving late because I really have to start making some big sales… things are slow and my paycheck shows it.
- About 4 different clients in a two week period had an issue with cancelling their orders, but the spots ran on the air anyways and then I had to explain all this to my manager who not only was pissed at me, but I get charged that money back on my commissions.
There you have it… all these things, and more, are the reason I have been M.I.A. for the past month. Now that I’ve got a internet connection and a nice big room to get organized and work cleanly, I’m breathing a sigh of relief. I have SOOOOOOOOOO much catching up to do it is completely ridiculous. I don’t know where to start.
In the car today I was listening to a radio program on ESPN Radio and the host was talking about how 10% of the people at any company are successful because they are “go-getters” and smart people in general. Perhaps they are successful in sales but they would find a way to be successful in whatever they did.
He was basically describing the 80/20 rule where 20% of the people in most settings account for 80% of the numbers. So 20% of the people account for 80% of the sales. Or 20% of Internet Entrepreneurs makeup 80% of online revenue. Describe it how you may… I want to be in that 20% in whatever I do. I’ll be putting more of a focus on my day job AND increasing hours for my online business.
How can I increase both? I think it will be simple. Remove the distractions. I purposefully did not subscribe to television service as it’s a huge waste of time and I only watch a few programs anyways (Entourage, The Office, MLB, NFL). If I miss Entourage and The Office it’s not the end of the world. MLB is easy to follow online and well, the NFL might be a problem. I have to watch every Ravens game and I like watching it at home where I can see every single play while listening to commentary and drinking beers that don’t cost $5 each. We’ll see how that goes….
Alright, now that you’re caught up let me apologize again. Trust me, it’s not like I planned for this! Too bad this isn’t my full time job because I never would have had to skip a beat. One day… one day… hopefully soon… time to get to work so I can make that happen!
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