How To Make Money With: Google Hot Trends

This is post #4 in the "How To Make Money Series".

Google Hot Trends is an extension of Google Trends, a Google service you can use to analyze keyword based search trends. A list of 100 search trends are listed on the Google Hot Trends page and are updated every hour. The keyword trends are determined based on the change in search activity for each particular keyword.

Google will usually provide additional information on each keyword including a graph to show the change in activity, the geographical areas where the search activity is the highest, related searches, news items based on the keyword as well as blog posts and the organic search engine results.

Using the information provides on Google Hot Trends, it is possible to get giant rushes of traffic to your site and make money a couple of ways if you know what to look for. Below I'll show you how.

You will need:

A website or blog
Free article site accounts
Adwords Account
Affiliate programs
Adsense Account
CPA Affiliate programs
Autoresponder

Here are some ways in which to make money with Google Hot Trends.

>> Market Affiliate Programs

Capitalizing on Google Hot Trends can lead to a lot of traffic. We're talking thousands upon thousands in a very short time in most cases. Getting your affiliate links in front of this traffic can be very profitable.

But you have to move fast and you have to know which keywords will make you money. The key to finding money making keywords is to look for the ones that suggest some kind of commercial intent.

Examples of keywords with commercial intent are keywords about products and services that have an affiliate program or an easily identifiable niche market with similar products that may have an affiliate program.

If you're already doing niche marketing then you'll want to look for the keywords that relate to your niche market. This will give you the chance to introduce currently buzzing content seekers (a lot of them) to your website and what it has to offer.

CPA, or Cost Per Acquisition offers are another great way to take advantage of these hot trends. This is a type of affiliate marketing where the visitor doesn't have to buy anything in order for you to make money. The visitor only needs to supply his email address to get more info, sign up for a free sample or even put in his zip code in a form for you to get paid.

All you need to do is sign up with a CPA network and choose an offer that relates to one of the hot trends. These offers pay anything from about $0.50 to $10.00 generally but you will find that some offers can pay up to $100.00.

Tip: Pepperjam Network has great CPA and affiliate (Pay per sale) offers all in one network.

>> Build Your Email List

Another smart way to take advantage of Google Hot Trends is to build a list of subscribers. This way you can sell to them over and over again long after the buzz has died.

For this to work you'll have to identify a specific niche by analyzing the keyword you chose. This will help you to choose or create an appropriate incentive for them to give you their name and email address. This will also help you to find affiliate offers you can promote in order to earn money from your subscribers.

You'll need to have your own website and hosting although a blogger blog will work as well as a free Weebly site. A quality paid autoresponder software like Aweber or Getresponse is recommended for creating your optin form and managing your subscriber list and emails.

Learn more about email marketing with Inside the List. You can get this book free and learn other affiliate marketing strategies when you sign up with Wealthy Affiliate using this special link.

>> Make Money with Adsense

Making money with Google's Adsense program is actually a very popular way to monetize the Hot Trends. There are many sites that do 'reports' on the various keywords with hopes that they will catch the wave of visitors.

Some work and some don't. Most of these sites don't offer any kind of value and I would think that they fail almost everytime.

One of my favorite ways to earn with Adsense using Google Hot Trends is to use revenue sharing sites that accept submissions like Hubpages and Xomba. I've had some Adsense successes with these sites before and still continue to use them occasionally. The reason I like to use these sites, especially Hubpages, is that they usually get indexed quickly (which is something you want) and they rank very high in the search engines.

Another way is if you have a niche site with a blog, then you can add Adsense to the blog and post about any trend that directly relates to the topic of your site. Do this for trend topics that don't readily lend themselves to more profitable forms of monetization ie. if you can't find an affiliate or CPA product or build a list.

Tip: Build links and make money from Adsense by using revenue sharing sites like Hubpages.

>> Find brand new keywords to dominate

Be on the look out for these gems especially if they are of very high commercial value. If you haven't already guessed the benefits of finding these types of keywords then you're about to discover why Google Hot Trends is worth taking a look at.

How does a keyword become 'brand new'? Ideally you will be looking for product keywords or keywords with high commercial value. These keywords become brand new whenever a product is released or made aware to the public. Eventually, if they hit Google Hot Trends you will know about them.

Let me give you an example and how I made money from a 'brand new keyword'.

Before January 2008, a "Buzz Cuts Cd" was non existent. Then MusicSpace.com released the alternative music cd and marketed it on television. This created a wave of traffic looking for track listings and reviews on the cd creating a hot trend that made it to #1 on Google's list.

I saw this search term - "buzz cuts cd" - and did some research on it.

How could we make money from a search like this?

Well, my research on the competition for this keyword yielded less than 250 initial competitors in the SERPS. Much of those were spammers and scrapers and so on. Getting content was easy - all I had to do was give the people what they wanted - the track listings from the Buzz Cuts cd.

How was I going to monetize that?

Well, I decided to post the article on Hubpages so at least I would make some money off Adsense. The cd wasn't on Amazon at the time but I did find that the company that sold Buzz Cuts had an affiliate program on Linkshare. I signed up, got denied, emailed the company and got approved. I placed my links and it was off to the races.

The Results?

The days that followed got me at least 1000 visits to this one article per day sometimes up to 3000 visits a day. The commission on the $26 product was only something like $2.60 but I made a lot of those. I sold $14,000 worth of cds for Musicspace in 2008 and well you can guess the commissions - it was only 10%. I also made my first $100/month with Adsense.

And I used this example to show what a new hot trends search can do if you get on it early. Remember I told you the competition was less than 250 for the search term? Well today "buzz cuts cd" has over 700,000 listings on Google! And guess who's #1?

You can see the hub here - Buzz Cuts CD.

The thing about taking advantage of these 'brand new keywords' is that it allows you to get a spot in the search engines before most marketers catch on. If you present good value and you're one of the first to provide the information people are seeking then you will get linked to and therefor won't have to do much link building.

And since the competition would be very small, its better to do this with your own site than to use other web properties. Doesn't mean you can't leverage the power of sites like Hubpages and Squidoo though for link building purposes and you can even try to dominate Google's first page for the search term.

>> Resources

Further reading: