Blogopoly

Fellow commentator on Business blogging, Wayne Hurlbert mentions on his Blogbusinessworld Blog That writing about a current Search Trend in its early stages is a good way to boost traffic by riding on the wave of the trend.

Wayne gives the example of the recent Janet Jackson Boob flashing story at the Superbowl. Many surfers looked for info on this story, and any bloggers commenting on this will have grabbed quite a few eyeballs as a result. However, in its later stages most Search Engines will be pointing surfers to the most popular sites mentioning this topic. If you are lucky, you can catch this wave of searches by being one of the first to write on the subject, and if this results in high click-thru, Google should adjust its ranking of your blog to feature highly even in these later stages.

How do you become first to such a Search Trend?

You may think this is similar to the manner by which reporters get their "scoops" for newspapers - investigations and good speculation to unearth a good story. Well, the internet works a bit differently, and these trends can be identified quite quickly and easily. Often these trends will be either started or perpetuated by Blogs that discuss the topic and other blogs discussing it as they too discover other blogs reporting on the topic. These sites all provide a listing of the most discussed topics by bloggers:

Daypop
Popdex
Blogdex
Technorati

Its a good idea to regularly check these sites and look for new trends that are relevant to your own blog. Also, make sure you have a good headline and the first few lines of the post are strong enough to hook the surfer - search engines will display this text in the search results listing for your blog. If you get that part right, and you get the timing right, you could get a great boost to your traffic during brief life of this trend.