There are many resources to dig up trends available out there, but what can separate you from the rest of the pack are by using additional resources and ideas outside of the “norm”.
Let’s have a look at some not-so well-known resources for spotting trends:
According to Alltop, the purpose of the site is to tell you “what’s happening” within your favorite topic.
Alltop.com is a buzz / trend search engine of sorts that can be customized to display the information you are interested in (if you create an account). The cool thing about this site is that you can just take a look at their main page and get a quick snap shot of what the hot topics are on some of the more popular blogs…
BlogPulse.com is a trend discovery platform / search engine specifically for blogs, and is brought to you by the Nielsen Company (the same peeps who do the TV ratings and such).
It offers several functions including a search engine, blog tracking, trend watching (real time trends and also a trend search) / buzz tracking, as well as tracking and statistics of blogs and conversion tracker (if you choose to use their site for this).
IceRocket.com is a “real time” search engine that has a very useful tool for spotting trends in your specific niche (this tool has some similarities to the trend search function of BlogPulse). The draw back to their tool is that it will only track data for the past 3 months…
Another useful function of this tool is that you can also see what the most popular blog posts, videos, movies etc. are at any given time (measured by links added within the last 24 – 48 hours to specific sites such as YouTube and IMDB) .
SpringWise.com is a little bit different type of a site and isn’t a “tool” you can manipulate… however, it can be a very useful resource to see what people (entrepreneurs) are currently talking about.
I’m subscribed to their daily newsletter, and they send out interesting business ideas every day.
This is really cool!
The Wall Street Journal’s Most Popular list is an interesting resource to find the latest news / ideas (if you have business / tech / political blogs).
Here you’ll find the most viewed news on their site (also viewable by section), as well as the most ‘emailed’ news stories. These are searchable by the day, week and month, which can be helpful if you have a blog that is updated on a weekly basis (or perhaps only a few times per week).
These are just five of the resources I use to check for trends (and also get ideas for new blogs and content). In a future post I’ll share with you some additional resources you can use for “trend spotting”.
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