Monday 1 June 2015

Do you invest time / money / resources into short lived trends?

I think that short term trends are more usefully described as fads, while in themselves they may not be profitable because of their limited lifespan, they might be more useful as indicators of an overarching theme that's is becoming more prominent.

Example - No MSG & No Aspartme are all fads, but they point to the theme of people being concerned about what they consume and put into their bodies and their childrens bodies.

So the theme is eating healthy, what are the emerging fads that may be profitable that you can get ahead of and build up your site as an authority?

Now if we were to look at all the stuff that goes into food, we could probably come up with other things that shouldn't be in it that has dubious health effects. Now say we were to create a few simple sites outlining the ingredients that have potentially bad health effects, and laying it all out, we build a simple facebook and twitter accounts linked and we write a few articles, set up the analytics and then watch what traffic comes your way (this could be done in a couple of hours for each site and over time you look at the analytics and see what bites with the public interest).

I like to think of the process as a form of natural selection, just as a virus looks to mutate to adapt so must our thinking, look for themes that are in your area of interest (this helps if you write your own stuff, it is really hard to write engagingly about something you aren't interested in).

Build, test and scale successful sites, the real challenge is in finding products that tie to the concern, need or fear.

There are still a lot of gurus recommending watching trends and getting ahead of the emerging wave, not easy to do and unless you have a very rapid deployment model for small sites, this grinding out of sites can become very soul destroying.

The best of luck and the real trick is finding where to watch for fads/trends emerging

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