“To the moon! 🚀 🚀 🚀”
Before getting into the tools and how to identify business and marketing trends, it’s story time!
The whole GameStop short squeeze saga has been eye-opening to say the least.
You have a whole army of retail investors rallying behind a ticker, driving up the price in an attempt to squeeze the shorts. I won’t go into the mechanics of how a short squeeze works because:
- Sir, this is an affiliate marketing blog and,
- I’m not entirely sure myself*
But here’s what I do know: a bunch of average Joes jumped on the bandwagon at an incredibly terrible time, when the stock had reached unsustainable levels. Buying in at the literal all-time high, thinking the short squeeze was their golden ticket.
Then came the crash.
As brokers like RobinHood restricted the buying of GameStop shares, investors started to lose confidence and so the panic-selling began. Many were left, and still are, bag-holding their losses.
There are some investors who made a crapton of money off this whole thing.
The financially savvy investors who recognized the flaw in the system that allowed this to happen, and invested early.
And then there are those who identified the trend, both on the way up and on the way down, getting out before the crash.
There’s a saying in finance: “Don’t try to time the market”.
In affiliate marketing (and business in general) the parallel would be, “Don’t try to create demand.”
As a marketer, trying to create demand where there is none is a colossal waste of resources.
Time? Spent.
Energy? Depleted.
Money? Into thin air.
(As an aside, this is a huge reason for taking the required time and effort to find your niche.)
Enter, one of the most valuable business skills: identifying trends.
Being able to identify trends positions you to be a first mover.
It allows you to identify opportunities and threats at the most critical time: early. As you can imagine, knowing what is engaging your audience and what content/topic/product/idea is about to take off gives you a major competitive advantage.
As an affiliate marketer looking to get traffic for your CPA offers, capitalizing on current events can help bring visitors to your site.
So how can you spot trends in affiliate marketing, an industry that is just teeming with product saturation?
Here are some FREE tools to help you identify trends to get traffic for CPA offers
The OG: Google Trends
No list of trendspotting tools would be complete without a shoutout to good ol’ Google Trends.
With Google Trends, you can search for a term and drill down by location, time range, category, and the type of search (eg. web, image, video, etc). You can even compare multiple search terms at once.
Exploding Topics
Exploding Topics use technology to scour and analyze search, conversations, and mentions across the internet. Their algorithm then identifies topics that are poised for liftoff.
Sign up to their free weekly newsletter and you’ll get a list of rapidly-growing topics along with insight and analysis every Tuesday. For a more snack-sized version, follow them on Twitter.
BuzzSumo Trending by BuzzSumo
Technically not free, but they offer a generous 30-day free trial so you can play around with their features.
Buzzsumo makes monitoring your content feeds simple, aggregating trending content and articles on any topic across all social channels. To stay ahead of the competition, make sure you filter by time to sort content by recency.
Identifying trends with social media tools
Typically, by the time something’s hit social media, the trend has peaked. It may take a bit more effort to stand out and make a splash, but there are still opportunities to be had. Here are some social media-related tools you can use to uncover what people are talking about.
Pinterest Trends
Depending on the topic or product you’re marketing, you might want to take a look at Pinterest Trends. Each year, Pinterest releases their Pinterest 100 report, detailing the top trends for the year based on their data. The list shows what people all over the world are searching for on Pinterest.
Reddit Trends
Reddit touts itself as the “front page of the internet”. With a tagline like that, it makes sense that they reportedly have 330 million monthly active users.
Imagine if some of those GameStop bagholders were able to identify the trend in r/WallStreetBets before everything blew out of proportion. Well, they wouldn’t be bagholding, that’s for sure.
FrontPageMetrics is a useful subreddit tracker, giving you trending and fast-growing subreddits to jump into for research purposes.
In the past 7 days, you’ll see that the top subreddits for growth all relate to cryptocurrency and stock market trading. In general, this reflects what dominates the news and media outlets but once in awhile a subreddit will pop up without any big news surrounding it, and that’s when it gets interesting.
All of these tools are meant to help AdCenter affs identify business and marketing trends. Use them effectively and watch as you gain a competitive edge over competitors.
*if you want to read more, here’s an article from the New York Times about the whole Reddit vs Wall Street GameStop frenzy.
