10e20 Blog

Yesterday I wrote a post titled What part of a graduate’s costume gave the cordon bleu cooking school its name? No, I’m not trying to compete with Yahoo! Answers and launching a new service. That strange phrase (without the question mark) was actually the hottest term in Google’s new Hot Trends service at the time of writing. Personally I was a bit perplexed at how something that random could be so popular yesterday. Luckily some commenters were able to fill me in on a few things I had completely overlooked:

• Radio trivia contests
• Crossword puzzles

The purpose of my post was to see if anyone really was searching for that term:

How can you benefit from this service as a marketer? One way would be to see what the most popular trends of the day are and if they match your topics, write blog posts or news articles about them. That way when someone clicks through your article could be there. We’ll see how that works out with this post….

Soon after I wrote that, my post was on the Google Trends Page for the term under Blog Searches:

This started sending traffic right away and wound up sending close to 1,200 visitors from that Trends page alone. Even more interesting was how quickly I was ranking #1 for the term in Google (now it’s ranking #2 behind Google Trends). That was something I hadn’t even thought of. Granted there was basically zero competition for that term at the time other then other blogs curious about the term. But interestingly enough there were about 3,300 visitors from Google for that term alone yesterday.

Now for the most part, that is useless traffic because that question really has nothing to do with the subjects we cover here but there are sites that it could be. How could you use this info? If you have a blog, scan the top terms each day and see if there are any that are close to your niche. If so, write a post using that term that seeks to give people what they are looking for (and then possibly lead them wherever you want them to go). Just make sure you are in Google Blog Search.

The interesting part about this to me was the fact that the trends data isn’t all fluff. It will be even more interesting to try this again in the next couple of months because I am sure that many of the searches yesterday were also people curious about that wierd term being so searched for…