IM Mastery-6: Marketing Research Done Online

Okay, so you’ve picked some hot ideas that you are excited about. Congratulations, you’re almost home! Now it’s time for a bit more marketing research done online.

This is important because before you go writing sales copy and multiple articles you want to understand why the niche is interesting to others.  This will help you to narrow and define the hot spot in a much more precise way.

To do that, there are several places you can go to get some additional information on your hot topics:

Google Trends

This is a great tool setup by Google to focus on the trends happening in a particular segment. It allows you to see how the search volume is trending over the years. The best part of this tool, however, is the ability to put multiple hot topics in (separated by commas) and then be able to compare the volume trends per year in comparison to both. This way you can determine which one is actually the best hot topic, based on whether it shows it is trending upwards and how it compares to the search traffic of different hot topics. It is located at: http://www.google.com/trends

Yahoo! Buzz

This uses the Yahoo! Search engine functionality to return hot topics based on what’s being searched there. You will see some top searches displayed as well as up and coming hot topics. You can also plug in your own terms and see what people are saying about that. It is located at: http://buzz.yahoo.com

Technorati Blogger Central

This is a directory of blogs that also tracks the topics these blogs discuss. So, it can be an excellent way to initialize the brainstorming of topics of interest since they have an are where you can see the top blogs and also popular topics being discussed. It is located at http://www.technorati.com under the BloggerCentral tab.

Digg

This is a user-driven listing of hot topics. In other words, people vote to “digg” a topic or not and based on the voting system, the rating of that topic climbs in ranking. It’s a great social networking type of search engine and trend-spotting site all in one. Add your phrases there and see what topics of interest people “dug” for your particular niche. It is separated into categories that can also be searched separately. It is located at http://www.digg.com