Robert J F Kennedy

Trend Tracking
Originally published on September 22nd, 2008
Hanging on to the coat tails of the latest trend could be your ticket to success, but how do you go about discovering what are latest hot trends? Google offers several tools that you can use at Google Zeitgeist.
Other sites have Zeitgeists as well such as 43 things a site where people list their goals.
Yahoo’s Buzz index reports on popular news as rated by readers and top overall searches. Technorati lets you see what people are blogging about.

There is even software that makes trend tracking easier by putting some of the main sites used for analyzing trends in one place; Read the Trend Cockpit Review to find out more.

Another way of keeping up to date with what is going on in specific industries is to subscribe to rss feeds related to your business; Then whenever a new product or new news comes out you will know about it right away.
So how do you use all the information you have gathered during your trend research? It takes some intuition and lucky guesses but if you track trends on a regular basis you will find you are able to position yourself in a way to profit from popular topics in a variety of ways such as creating niche websites, or products related to todays trends. By staying informed you may be able to fill a gap that has been created by a recent trend.