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

Hi Saiah,
Thanks for a good question. You can go about it in both ways: estimate the ROI of your project and if it sounds promising, start small to test water instead of going all in in the beginning.

There is no accurate way to calculate ROI and I cannot say if my way is the best way. ROI depends largely on the channel to reach your target audience and how well that audience converts.
Let's take a simple example: you want to ride on the Harlem Shake trend to sell a video dance course which costs $49, earning you an affiliate commission of $25/sale. You get a deal with a Youtube influencer to feature your link in and under one of his popular videos on Harlem Shake. Your cost is $200 for 40,000 video views. And let's say it takes you 4 hours to set up the link and communicate with the influencer, your labor cost would be $80 at $20/hour. I assume that the conversion rate is 0.05%, a bit pessimistic rate as your product is not directly related to the Harlem Shake.

So your ROI for this simple project is (200+80)/(40000*0.0005*25)=56%, which is not a bad rate considering you don't have to do a lot of work.

Based on the calculated ROI, you can decide if you want to test water to see if the actual ROI is close to your estimated one to invest more money or labor.

Hi snackmemory... Timing, being able to identify that the trend will be profitable and quick execution are indeed important. I have not mastered the process but have had some success doing this.

I spoke with another marketer tonight however and their view was it's a waste of time as they preferred more stable income modules

Hi Janice Sperry... thnx for your input.

Thnx for sharing your view from a different angle. Indeed when you have set up and are promoting a stable quality product or service you can benefit from these trends by incorporating them into your marketing campaigns. Using one of the examples of a short lived trend that I mentioned... the harlem shake... I guess one could have participated in the harlem shake trend and incorporated product placement or anything related to your business in your participating material and get some exposure. The traffic would not be as targeted as offering a user something related to the harlem shake concept but it could create product/service awareness..

As you mentioned however, you don't always have to participate in the trends so you could look out for trends that would best fit your business model.


Good point on the impact it can have on people and the comparison to holiday occasions. I guess you know it's only for a time but has the potential of generating lots of revenue just like the holiday season would.

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IMO, short term trends should be a part of most Internet businesses. There are ways to take advantage of short term trends beyond selling tee-shirts and launching trendy web sites.

Mentioning trends and how they may impact your niche is a smart move for bloggers and should help them to get more notice to their posts.

Including trends into pod casts, reports, and videos will often help them to be ranked higher than they otherwise might.

Being able to discuss trends and their affect on your subscribers should help to get your emails read.

By being conversant and knowledgeable about the latest trends shows your audience (and subscribers) that you are an active, engaged, and concerned about the current state of affairs.

Yes, it's difficult sometimes to ride the crest of the initial wave of a trend, but that is an enviable position to be in very often.

Steve

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

Asides from using "Google trends" where do you go to spot on "upcoming trends ?" And no, I'm not talking about hashtags that are trending for the day but something that you see is trending over time.

For instance,
How did people know ecigs were going to trend back in 2012-13? Asides from word of mouth? Is there a site you go to? etc.