Earn Money Online Blog

Google Hot Trends as a Big Source of Traffic Ideas

Most of what I’m focused on is long term establishing of sites so that I have a stream of income that keeps giving. I don’t necessarily chase after the latest greatest news. I did that once upon a time and had some big earnings days from it, but it wore me out. I was writing dozens of posts on a particular site each day, anything that looked like it might have some traction in the “latest news” for the niche that site focused on. I will say again, I did make a fair amount of money off of it, but it was exhausting to keep up with. In fact, I doubt it was worth it at that time because I was blundering around in the dark not knowing which topics would provide some good traffic.

However, these days it is possible to have a pretty good bounce in traffic (and income) by keeping up with what the hottrends are at google. You may take a couple things as examples: Remove Windows Police Pro and Green AV Virus Remove – that first phrase I’ve targeted exactly as it shows up in the hot trends summary. The second one I’ve combined a couple of the hot search trends related to it. It turns out they’re both hot search topics in one of my areas of interest.

In a matter of 12 hours, due to articles on those two topics my primary site has received approximately 3-4x the daily average traffic. Earnings have been fairly good as well. I don’t expect it to last long, because these are basically rogue antivirus applications and it seems as though there is a new name coming around every week in that category, but it’s not a bad way to end a month.

I had forgotten for some time how powerful following hot trends could be until I was reminded by it in a post over at Grizz’s site. He managed over a million visits on several sites over a 15 day period on some celebrity style breaking news. There are a lot of interesting things to take from all of this. Traffic can essentially equate to money if you find the right angle. The early bird catches the worm! Nothing lasts forever…. the longer a term like this is in the hot trends list, the more competition you will see for it. There are a number of ways to try and keep near the top of the stack, but for hot news items google tends to be biased towards new links and fresh content. In other words posting often may help keep you on top of something like this.

Of course, not every hot trend item is going to be open for use this way, you may find the top 10 are too competitive. I managed to pick up the kind of traffic I have though just ranking in the bottom half of the top ten for the two search phrases I targeted. As for staying in the top 10? I’m not really interested in a long term strategy, but am doing what I can to stretch this out for a bit longer if possible.

So, how is something like this monetized? CPA, CPC, Affiliate marketing? Really you could go any number of ways, Adsense (CPC) is a good general possibility as long as your traffic is targeted well to the content your providing. For instance, I saw several people shooting themselves in the foot by stuffing the “windows police pro” words into their header text and the landing page had nothing to do with that piece of software, or antivirus, or frankly anything close. They were getting a ton of traffic, but it’s kind of like sending 1000s of buy one get one free invitations to a bunch of vegetarians for a pork barbecue. You’ll be scratching your head wondering why you didn’t make any money. If you pull a bait and switch like that you’ll have ads targeting whatever your page is about, traffic looking for an answer to a rogue antivirus product, they’ll click and you’ll be smart priced real quick too. Not a good long term approach for your adsense account. When I say that I’m not expecting this trend to last for the long term doesn’t mean I want my adsense smart priced, it just means this specific search will probably not be as high volume next month (although who knows I may still manage to get some search traffic from it.)

Anyway, I complemented the main articles on the topics with some quick work on a couple other sites just to try and widen the net a bit and today, I don’t know I may make a few of those articles rewritten to work their way around to a few other sites and see if it’s possible to squeeze any more out of the trend. I have been fortune that my primary site has enough authority that a new post there can be snapped up pretty quickly by google. I don’t think I could have managed the same effect with a brand new domain thrown up last night to catch the traffic. (At least not as easily.)

So, remember to check the hot trends from time to time. Especially if you feel like you’re spinning your wheels and not making big progress in other areas. if nothing else it can give you a bit of a confidence (and earnings) boost that may help your perspective on your other projects.

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