Using Google Trends and Yahoo Pipes to Boost Sales

[scottm]

This isn't new... But it is underutilized. Using a RSS Feed of Google Trends to see "what's hot" when your writing articles, blog posts, twits, etc. to help your sites stay relavent (and possibly have a SEO boost as well).

First things first... Finding the Trends

http://www.google.com/trends is the link. You can surf and see what's hot for the day, week, month, hour... Loads of information. Just take a look at the hour and weekly trends first. Get a feel for what's going on outside your area of interest and expertise.

Getting Creative

Now the hard part is being creative. Applying the "hot" search trends into a solid relevant post / tweet / blog entry. I took a look just a while ago and saw that the Nickelodeon show iCarly is swept up in a "is it or isn't it" cancelled frenzy right now. My kids both LOVE iCarly. It's a show about jr high school kids that have their own webshow. Okay, I'm a computer geek. I can make a blog post about that. Maybe even a forum posting? Hmmm.. Do ya think?

I'm sure your EPN or Amazon Associate or SAS or Affiliatefuture (or whatever) network has items that you can tie into iCarly, a post mentioning iCarly, or even a post that muses about what would happen on an episode of iCarly where they lose all their data and don't have an online backup. (see... a relevant link).

Using Yahoo Pipes with Google Trends

So here, I've made a forum post about using Google Trends to find out what's hot and a short paragraph about using what you've discovered in a post.

"But your title talked about Yahoo Pipes".. Why yes, yes it did. And here's why. The Google Trends RSS Feed isn't normalized. It's just one big long dump of terms with no formatting (wrapped in Atom). But Yahoo Pipes made it possible to normalize that data (some call it tokenizing) and push it into a website RSS Feed Reader.

On the left side of the "new and improved" AffSpot you'll see a block titled "Google Trends Tokenizer". It's a Yahoo Pipe set up to normalize (tokenize) the Google Trends feed and display it here at AffSpot. We're using the Hourly feed.

Putting it to Use

Who knows, you may decide to do a little more with your sites (where appropriate) and use Google Trends for a Tag Cloud, Google News searches, or searches on Amazon, your product data feeds, etc. that helps your prospects become customers that use your site to find things they want to buy.

[webwarrior]

Very cool! Thanks Scott, I honestly had no idea this stuff existed. Will be using it.

[mikaela2009]

i had no idea about YAHOO..... well is it good as google or is it just like any other service of yahoo ..

or should i try both ? do using both help

[scottm]

Well, Yahoo Pipes looks like it might be going away.. So you would need something else to do the job. But there are several excellent Wordpress/Joomla plugins (in fact, almost any RSS display can do it for you).

As long as your news/hot item searches are current, relevant to your site, and are informative for your users this could be a good thing. On more than a few sites I've installed this type of thing that is only viewable by me. Just to help me generate good ideas and spin for blogposts, etc.