Recognizing Future Trends

Posted by Lorren on January 1, 2011

I am entering my third year as a serious content producer (I have been writing product reviews for more than 10 years, but I didn’t try to make a living off of it). I have learned quite a few things in the last two years. One of the things that I have learned is to anticipate future trends.

Towards the end of the year, I looked forward to Christmas (as a content producer). Everybody knows that people buy a lot of gifts at the end of the year. I made a lot of toy and gift web pages, and had my best month ever – in both Squidoo and Zazzle, where I focused.

I also knew something that only experience could bring – on January 1st, people would search for information about the HGTV Dream Home.

I accidentally hit upon this trend in 2009, a couple of weeks after I started writing for money. I was checking Google trends, and noticed that people were searching for the HGTV Dream Home. So I decided to write an article about how the people who won the HGTV Dream Home didn’t always live happily ever after. I thought that it made an interesting story, so I wrote about it.

That became my most successful article ever. People read it a lot in 2009. Then, 2010 came around, and on January 1st, people started searching for the HGTV Dream Home again. Once again, I started to make a lot of money on that article. By the end of 2010, I made nearly $100 off that one article. If only all my work would do so well!

Knowing that people would search for this again on January 1st, 2011, I decided to update the article for the new year. I also decided to give it an extra backlink or two (although it was already doing pretty well in the Google searches). Sure enough, traffic has picked up today, on January 1. I expect that it will do well for the next couple of months.

I also know that people like to buy a certain t-shirt that I designed for father’s day. Although I designed it in 2009, I sold a ton of them in 2010. I decided to expand on that design for mother’s day. I think that it will do well.

If you know what has done well in the past and why, you can improve your success in the future.