I have written a few posts about using hot trends to your advantage, as they can be a crazy source and amount of traffic. Generally speaking, traffic that is related to hot trends, converts very well because the users are incredibly interested in the trend to make it popular in the first place.
I’m going to explain to you how you can not only find a hot trend, but monetize it to make a nice chunk of change and ride it out for as long as possible.
Finding a Hot Trend
While there are MANY tools available to find trends, I typically just think for a while, turn on the TV, or talk to friends. Right now, I can think of at least 5 ‘hot’ things going on in the world:
- World Cup
- Stanley Cup (although it’s over)
- NCAA Football Restructuring
- NBA Finals
- Karate Kid Movie Release
These are just trends that I came up with in a matter of minutes by thinking about what is currently going on, and most of them are sports related. You can even take a step back and look further down the line so you can build your site stronger before the event will occur, so you can drive more organic (SEO) traffic to your site when the event will occur. Either way, pick a hot trend (or future trend) and let’s monetize it.
Making Money on a Hot Trend
I will explain in more detail the method I am currently using, but there are plenty of ways to make money from this type of traffic/website.
My method goes as follows:
- Send users to an opt-in page, offering them something of interest. This may be coupons for clothing, tickets, DVDs, information about the event, polls or quizzes that may interest them. At this point, you are trying to generate interest and give them something at the same time.
- After they opt-in to your list, it’s about building a relationship. Whether you promised them coupons or discounts, or just information, I generally send them a couple emails per week. I find that 1-2 usually works best because they are still getting information from you, but it doesn’t seem spammy.
- After a handful of messages that do nothing but deliver them free stuff, it’s time to start making suggestions of products or services you think they would like. Depending on what you market here, this may be detrimental for your list, but it depends on the type of relationship and the duration you want to maintain it.
- For example, if you have been giving your World Cup list a bunch of information, coupons for clothes, and some fun facts, you could hit them with a fun World Cup IQ quiz, or a content gateway type deal that will allow them to watch the games from their computer. Again, depending on where you go from here, this can kill your list. To avoid that, you could mention some cost-per-sale items instead. It’s entirely up to yo
Depending on the size of your list, when you arrive at step 3, this can be a HUGE payday for you. On the other hand, if you are truly interested in creating a long-term customer base, I would advise against slamming them with an IQ quiz or rebill as that will kill their trust in you, and they will probably un-subscribe.
Think about it this way: If you have a Stanley Cup list, you could be offering them tickets, gear, coupons, and other random offers throughout the year, only to have it pick up bigtime again next year for the 2011 finals. If you have a site built around this list, you can turn each and every ‘trend’ into it’s own stand-alone business, and be generating a continuous amount of recurring income from your willingly and happy subscribers.
The Downsides
Building a business like this is not all fun and games though. First of all, you don’t really have any idea whether or not your customers will convert. On top of that, it costs you money up front to build the list, which may cause you to try to sell to your list too soon. Don’t do that! Be patient and build your list solidly so they trust you. At that point, getting them to open their wallets for your suggestions, whether or not you gave them a coupon, is rather easy.
If you have a budget to work with and the patience to properly build your customer base, I have found that this can be a long term, very profitable business model.
What do you think?
{ 18 comments… read them below or add one }
Good stuff
Thanks Raphael!
I agree this is a great way to leverage hot topics, but what would you recommend we use for getting traffic to our opt in pages? PPV, CPC, or free traffic like from articles and spam (lol)….?
Good idea.
I didn’t think about building a list with them. I usually just get them to a page and try to squeeze money out of them right away. A hot topic could be a great way to build a quick e-mail list.
Dino, you can find loads of inexpensive traffic through PPV. Depending on the trend, there can be VERY little competition!
Also, think about social traffic like Facebook and MySpace. The same idea applies, but you have to be a little more creative to get some ads approved.
Thanks Browie. That’s how I used to think as well. Another thing I failed to mention is that you could instantly redirect them (after they give their name/email) to an offer, or start sending them offers right away. It all depends on how you want to manage your list.
Nice comment
Great tips here, thanks for sharing…
Not a problem Emmanuel, thanks for stopping by.
Its good but you got to be careful you dont burn lots of time on this because its hard to create a sustainable income unless you automate it.
Exactly. That and combine it with other methods such as grabbing their email then redirecting to the offer or grabbing email and pre-popping it on a submit. On one particular campaign I’m testing right now, if I pre-popped their email, I would be profiting on that alone, on top of having their email to push offers too.
Thanks for a real comment Earl
In terms of finding a hot trend, I find that it’s also a good idea to stake some time/money on predicted trends.
As a quick example I have several sites that I did predicting trends in car related information and when the ideas of these things have been mentioned in the news or on large car websites I get large influxes of traffic from Google for them.
In terms of whether or not they all eventuate, it’s a risk, but if they do it means that I’ve also got the advantage of being ranked 1st for the terms and have long established sites.
Great point David. And I think right between taking a hot trend and predicting one, is building a site for a future trend that WILL appear – IE – Movie releases that are coming out that may not have tons of fan sites yet.
Great idea, thanks for the comment!
Excellent example for movie releases, it’s always great if you can get in early… as they say, the early bird gets the worm!
Exactly David! I have noticed that some movies convert MUCH higher than others as well, so building a list in those cases can be a significant long term income as well.
Thanks for the comment
Have you tried using ListMachine yet?
Is that what Shoemoney did a post about? If so, I downloaded it but haven’t used it yet.
He rewrote it and called it Good Karma List Machine. His version is a lot better. The software in general is great though, whether it’s GKLM or the original. I use the original, but only because I’ve been using it since before GKLM existed.
Well that’s cool, I’ll test it out for sure!