Long term readers of this blog know I have a bunch of blogs besides this one and on several of those I practice trend blogging. I’ve thought several times of writing about trend blogging, but I always thought I should probably create a product on this topic. I’ve seen a couple of products on how to do trend blogging and I’ve even read some blog posts on the subject, but non of them have really encompassed the subject well to my experiences.
Some of the suggestions I’ve seen is to watch the Hot Trends and then create a blogger blog or Squidoo lens on the current topic. The main idea in these types of strategies is to hope Google comes along and ranks your blogger blog. Personally I don’t think this is a valid strategy. It can sometimes takes days before a new blog is indexed and by then the hot trend is normally over. I’ve also seen people who set up autoblogs with various plugins that will monitor the trends and scrap related posts from around the web. Well this sort of works, even though it does not really convey a moral attitude to blogging as you are basically stealing someone else’s work.
Now saying that I might as well confess that I’ve done this. It can pull in some traffic and you can make some money, but its not really anything to build a business on, not to mention you will either get a DCMA request for stealing content and eventually Google is going to deindex the site and you won’t make any money no matter how many posts you make.
The other way and the method I’ve been able to successfully use to create a stable income from Trend blogs is to have a generic domain name and then manually monitoring the trends throughout the day and then writing short or sometimes long unique posts on the subject. I’ve found this to be the best way, but it does require a good amount of work, but the cool thing is once you build a site up in this manner then you have continued traffic from the search engines to content which is not even on the hot trends any longer.
If you look at the Huffington Post and analyze it then you should realize their main strategy is following trends. Now some people may say they are a news site and that is true as most trend blogs will contain a lot of news type stories as that is the type of topics that come up in trends more than anything else.
Of course there is a little more to this than just posting reviews of news stories and this area is where I differ in my approach. I may put together a little report and just give it away to my subscribers. I had thought of doing this and selling it, but giving it away would be better. I’ll try to get to work on this during the coming week and explain my methods for Trend Blogging.
