Despite its fairly obvious vulnerabilities to nefarious online buzz gaming schemes, Google Trends has a lot to offer webmasters.  In particular, it gives first mover advantage for webmasters looking for new domain niches to buy and new keyword clusters to capitalize on.

Trend domaining

Domaining is probably one of the few recession-resistant (notice I used the word “resistant” as opposed to “proof”) online money making opportunities available.  Stock portfolios may drop, commodities options may slump, but domains (at least type in domains) keep chugging along.  Unfortunately, many inexperienced observers would probably say that “all the good ones” have long been taken?  O really?  I argue that domains are essentially memes–they convey a set of ideas.  Of course, some ideas are more ‘durable’ than others–just like regular words, they are susceptible to fashion and fads.  That said, you can easily figure out what new ideas have buzz using tools like technorati and twitter.  However, the crown jewel of this trend hunting troika is Google Trends.

Google Trends is a great tool for checking the spread of an idea.  People are searching for the term.  Validate its latency and persistence using Twitter’s search functionality.  Study the niche it falls under–what is the aggregate commercial value of this niche, among a host of other fine tuned analytical steps.   Study the commercial depth of the term to see how quickly it can be monetized.  If it all checks out, plunk down that $8.95 (or lower) and buy and store.  Trend domains can quickly blow up in value if the niche is hot enough.  Don’t have the time, tools, or methodologies to do all this?  Outsource it for dirt cheap.

Trend Blogging

When a new trend starts getting real hot, it always pays to be in on the ground floor.  First mover advantage is key.  No wonder many blogs “pounce” on the latest trends spit out by Google trends.   These blogs range in sophistication from The Inquistr to many MFA (Made for Adsense) blogspot.com blogs.   One thing I’ve noticed though–the more sophisticated blogs don’t focus on “definition terms” like “bilious” but on more commercial or newsworthy terms.  I guess this reflects a tradeoff between high bounce rate and temporary “trend” traffic and ROI.  I would think that same calculation should be at play for any serious online businessperson–always shoot for the highest ROI and return on effort you can find.  Not all “hot trend” topics are the same.

Photo Credit:  Trevor Manternach