Trend Marketing

What is Trend Marketing?

Trend Marketing (or trendmarketing) is to take advantage of what people are searching for.

You Will Absolutely LOVE Trend Marketing If...

If you're the kind of person that is particulary interested in current trends you will absolutely love to participate in trend marketing.

Trend marketing is all about buzz, and relate to any topic that has relevancy for a large group of people, such as...

• current stories - breaking news, politics, sports, celebrity gossip, weather, natural disasters, etc.
• recently popular products and services - new novelty item, gadgets, exceptional services in high demand, etc.

How To Make Money From Trend Marketing

There are several ways of making money from trend marketing. This step-by-step guide will help you to make money from trend marketing when used together with and affiliate offers. Other ways to capitalize or benefit from trend marketing is for example PPC arbitrage, branding, increasing traffic, and gathering new subscribers or members.

In the following we're going to focus on trend marketing used along with affiliate offers.

What To Do

It's almost always easier to follow the trends than to create new trends... Whether it's in the stock market, in fashion, in politics, in technology, or in any other area where trends are important.

This step-by-step guide will show you how you can start successfully and make money in trend marketing, today.

My prime focus here is to help you make money online. Thus, it makes sense that I look into how to spot trends on the Internet through search engines and Internet media, and next, how to exploit those trends for profit.

The Goal

The goal with this step-by-step guide is to help you make $1,000 per day from trend marketing. Don't expect it to be an easy job, but once you begin to make a couple of hundred dollars a day you will begin to realize how much it takes to reach the thousand dollar per day mark. Although it won't be easy, you will probably find that $1,000 per day is achievable.

What's Next?

This is what we're going to do in this trend marketing step-by-step guide:

1. Sign up with advertising networks
2. Identify trends
3. Select a trend
4. Find an affiliate offer
5. Connect the dots
6. Make a website
7. Promotion
8. Continue Until You Succeed

Don't expect to succeed at once. It may take several attempts before you succeed, so don't expect to make a lot of money in trend marketing right away. In other words, you will probably have to go through this step by step guide several times before you make a lot of money. However, for each new try you will become more experienced and gain valuable knowledge, so it's never a waste of time just because you at first are not making any money.

STEP ONE: Sign Up With Advertising Networks

Check out the list of advertising networks. Pick at least a few of these and create an account with them.

Here's a few advertising networks I would recommend:

• CJ.com - popular affiliate network, mostly CPA offers. Very good for U.S. and U.K. based sites, but has offers all over the world.
• Google AdSense - world's largest CPC advertising network

Other popular ad networks and affiliate networks and programs:

• Zanox.com
• AdCash.com
• AffiliateWindow.com
• MaxBounty.com
• Propellerads.com
• Shareasale.com
• Ayboll.com

Note that the CPA advertising networks above are focusing on different geographical areas. Select the ones that fits your site best.

STEP TWO: Identify trends

To make money from trend marketing you'll need to know know how to spot current trends. Trend marketing is all about "buzz", or Word-of-mouth marketing. It's about new stories and concepts that spread virally, like a virus.

There are several ways to identify trends:

• Search Engine Trends such as Google Trends
• Forums, Newsgroups, Chat rooms - scan for trends manually.
• Social bookmarking sites.
• User provided content and social utility sites such as YouTube.com, and Facebook

There are even many more ways to spot trends. The important thing for this guide though is to find what people are searching for.

What Are People Are Searching For?

So I want to find what people are searching for. I want to spot the trends. Here's the services I use to spot trends:

• Google Zeitgeist - interesting search trends and patterns; Archive of search trends; Search trends by country, etc.
• Yahoo! BUZZ - "What the world is searching for..." including top movers and top leaders.
• ASK.com IQ - Top Searches, Top Advancing Searches, Top News Searches.
• DogPile SearchSpy - See searches in real-time. Select between Filtered (family-friendly real-time searches) and Unfiltered (unedited real-time Web searches)
• Lycos Top 50 - top searches at Lycos each week (column at right)
• HotTrends from Google - (For the time being it shows searches from United States only)
• Hot Searches from AOL.com - see what's "Hot" on AOL Search
• Doubleclick.com Research Reports - Quarterly search reports with insights on industry trends, as well as performance metrics and benchmarks.

You may also find the Google Keyword Tool useful when researching trends. It's best to use it when you have a particular keyword or phrase that you want to research. You will get useful information about search volume, related searches and historic data for any keyword/phrase that may interest you.

What Are People Talking About?

I won't suggest any particular forum, chat room or news group, as there's so many of them out there. You probably know quite many already. Browse these online social places to find what people care about, what they ask for, what they discuss, etc.

What Are People Reading?

A simple way to find what people are currently reading about is to spend some time reading from the same sources as "everyone else". We've listed a few examples below:

• Yahoo! News (RSS) - News, rss feeds
• Current.com - Current news
• CNN - Cable News Network
• MSNBC News
• BBC.co.uk News - News from U.K. and Global
• Weather.com - People search a lot about the weather (most popular overall search term in 2007)...

What are people in your industry or in your country reading about? Find out by browsing Alexa.com > Subjects > Browse News for various sources of news, and Alexa Top 500 to find the current most popular websites all over the world. Alexa is a very powerful research tool that any trend marketer should use.

STEP THREE: Select a trend

Now, select one spesific trend. For the rest of this guide you're going to work with this trend, so pick one that you think will be easy to capitalize on. Don't think too much about it, just go with your "gut feeling" / your intuition. You will have to gain a lot of experience anyway to become a profitable trend marketer, so just pick a trend for now.

Continue to the next step once you've identified a spesific trend (a popular story, news, a popular product/service, a popular place to visit etc.) that people are searching for.

STEP FOUR: Find an affiliate offer

You now have selected a trend. Next thing to do is to find an appropiate affiliate offer to go along with this trend.

The key to success in trend marketing is experience. In other words, you may have to try many times over before you succeed. However, you will learn a lot for each new trend you work with, and even if you don't make a lot of money at first it's still not a waste of time.

A warning to beginners about hindsight bias: When picking affiliate offers don't put too much trust in common sense though. As scientists have proven again and again, common sense does just as often provide us with the wrong answers.

EXAMPLE: Say the trend you've selected to capitalize on is about a celebrity. More specifically, let's imagine that this celebrity was an actor, that had recently been feautured in a news story, where some sensational photos have been leaked to the public...

In such cases people are often searching like crazy for the leaked photos, in other words there are high search volumes, and often little advertiser competition as the story is still fresh.

So what you would want to do is to find a way to capitalize on this?

You could combine the story of this celebrity actor along with an affiliate offer where your users could buy his movies and other accessories such as posters etc. You could even promote clothing, travel, cars, and anything else, as long as you managed to associate the affiliate offers with the actor.

Find an affiliate offer that is related to the trend you've selected, and then move on to the next step.

STEP FIVE: Connect the dots

You now have selected a spesific trend that you wish to capitalize on, and you've found a spesific affiliate offer. Now you need to connect all the dots.

Three important components of trend marketing as an affiliate is...

1. The trend
2. Affiliate offer
3. The readers

The trend coud be a popular and fresh story, news item, popular new product/service etc. The affiliate offer could be anything you manage to associate to the trend itself. The people you are advertising to is your readers.

As a trend marketer and affiliate your job is to tie the three components together. Your job is to effectivly communicate to the reader that...

Here's a new story/service/product I like to tell you about (the trend)... and here's an offer related the trend (affiliate offer)... and here's why it's matters to YOU (the reader).

You've already found a trend and a related affiliate offer. Now you need to convince your readers (your users, your visitors, your members, the people you advertise to, etc.) to take action, and take advantake of your affiliate offer.

Before you continue to the next step you should be able to explain how the trend you've selected are connected with your affiliate offer, and how you plan to connect the offer with your readers.

STEP SIX: Make a website

You don't absolutely need a website to participate in trend marketing, but it's our recommendation that you build your own website for the purpose of promoting affiliate offers.

Remember though, this is trend marketing, and you will have to act quickly. Trends change: Many trends are fads, meaning they are only popular for a short time. However, some trends continue for months and years.

You will need a hosting account and a domain before you can make your website accessible to the public. I recommend you use Bluehost for hosting and domains. Instead of buying a new for each time you launch a trend marketing project, simply buy one domain that covers "everything", and use it over and over by creating subdomains or subfolder. For example, you could register DidYouHearAboutThat.com and for every new story you would create a new subdomain such as johnbing.didyouhearaboutthat.com or a folder such as didyouhearaboutthat.com/John_Bing.

Depending on your web developer skills, here's what you need to do next:

A. Don't know how to build a website

If you don't know how to build a website effectively

For general information about on how to make a website, read the article Developing Websites.

If you don't know anything about building a website, and if you prefer the easiest solutions (almost never the best choice in affiliate marketing), then you could simply create a free blog or a website using services such as Blogger.com, WordPress.com, Weebly.com.

B. To lazy to build your own site

If you don't want to build a website (for any reason), or if you don't bother to learn how to build a website then you could simply promote your affiliate offers directly through a PPC campaign (by using CPC networks such as Google AdWords and Yahoo Publisher Network). It's not nearly as easy to make money this way with trend marketing, so you'd better have some good reasons if you choose not to create your own website. Another option is to outsource the development of the website and the related content writing. If you're lazy you could also use free templates instead of creating your own design (for example, see Open Source WebDesign at oswd.org).

C. Already know how to build a website

As a trend marketer you will have to be innovative and adjust your website to the market you're targeting.

There are three types of sites that work really well with trend marketing. These are:

• Simple landing pages with affiliate offers
• Landing pages where your ask for the visitors e-mail address
• Websites with several pages, all about the same topic

Let's take a closer look at these three website types:

• Simple landing page: One thing you could do is to make a landing page and attatch the offer directly to this page. Remember, since you are promoting spesific affiliate offer and relate it to a particular trend, and aim it at a targeted group of people, your best shot is to create a custom made website. So don't just make a CPC ad and link it with your affiliate link and think that'll make you rich. Instead, create a nice looking site, make it user friendly, and make sure the affiliate offer is presented above the fold (meaning the users don't have to scroll, most web users use a screen resolution of 1024x768 or less [source]).
• Landing page, collect e-mail addresses: You could provide the offer only after the visitors have registered their e-mail address. If you don't know how to make scripts that collect the e-mail addresses of your users, simply use email services and newsletter services.
• Website with several pages: The benefits of creating landing pages as mentioned above is that you can make the sites quickly while the trend is still fresh and when there's little competition. On the other hand, if you spend less money on advertising, and more energy on generating organic traffic, then you probably would want to create a website with several pages, as this will help you to generate more targeted traffic. Make sure all your pages are covering just one nice, or one topic. You could even dedicate your website to just one trend (one story, one product, etc.) -- this will make your site very specialized and highly targeted (and targeted traffic is of course, what any website owner is longing for). (You may use the script from the Ringtones Website to effectively create your site).

Recommentadion for advanced users: For your first few experiments at trend marketing, try all the methods above, and see what works best. Remember to seperate your affiliate links with unique ID's so that you can identify your traffic and from which sources you generated revenue.

STEP SEVEN: Promotion

If you've created a website with several pages, and if the trend you've selected is more than a fad that will end before you've had the site up for one month, then you should spend some energy to promote your site for free using search engine optimization methods (see Traffic that converts) and social networks.

However, most trends, at least search trends, are not lasting forever. Most search trends have short life spans, and thus you don't have too much time for each new project. Maybe a few days is all you got.

Because trends are fads, you will need to act quickly. And how to you get a lot of visitors within the shortest amount of time? Answer: Targeted advertising. There's a dozen of various ways to advertise online, but I highly recommend contectual advertising such as Google AdWords

So when you've created your website (see previous step), you need to promote your website using contextual pay-per-click advertising, and Google AdWords is probably the best choice. AdWords is global, and is one of the best, but if you're promoting affiliate offers to a non-english market, then it's a good idea to search for other related services.

For insstructions and information on how to create a campaign, see the instructions on how to create an advertising campaign. For example, Google AdWords contains tons of information on how to create campaigns and how to make them work.

STEP EIGHT: Continue Until You Succeed

You will most likely not make a lot of money the first time you follow this step-by-step approach. However, we've made a lot of money from doing trend marketing, and so can you. If you fail several times over, don't give up. You will learn from each try, and since experience itself is the real secret of successful trend marketing, you shouldn't give up easily.

Maybe you will make a lot of money the first time, because you already have some strong skills that are beneficial in trend marketing, or because you have a talent for it, or simply because you got lucky the first time. Either way, the more time you spend at doing trend marketing, the better you will become, and the more money you will make.