Paying attention to trends within your niche is an important way to increase your profit. If you’re not aware of parallel trends within your niche, then it’s time to look into them.
An example would be if your niche is DIY (Do- It-Yourself) Repurposing Furniture, there might be a trend within the niche of redoing garbage finds found on the street into usable furniture and decor. This would be a parallel trend.
If you’ve kept ahead of your industry, you’ll be one of the first to jump on this new trend within your niche.
How to Keep Ahead of Your Industry
Create a Google Alert
Using keywords, industry names, movers’ and shakers’ names, and so forth, create alerts that will come straight to your inbox that you can use to notice and then profit from parallel trends.
Search social networks
Social media networks such as Twitter are terrific for identifying trending articles and information within any given niche or industry. Do regular keywords searches within your niche.
Use innovative tools
Using tools like Think with Google and The Internet Time Machine to learn about trends in your industry. These types of tools can help you notice trends sooner.
Read industry news
If you subscribe to industry blogs, newspapers and magazines, and observe the people within your niche, then you’ll be able to see trends in advance of your audience.
Poll your audience
What does your niche audience want to know more about? Often, this is a great way to identify a parallel trend from which you can profit. Who better to help you identify parallel trends than the audience themselves?
How to Make Money and Profit
Once you identify a parallel trend within your niche, then you need to use the information you know to increase your profit. Using the example above of DIYing garbage to usable furniture and décor, once the idea is identified you will:
- Write blog posts about it – Where to find the garbage; what online sources to join to get free items to DIY, such as Freecycle.org, or Facebook groups devoted to giving away items.
- Photograph examples – Do some DIYs from garbage yourself and take pictures of the process.
- Teach others how to do it – Create lessons about how to DIY different types of potential garbage finds. Describe what makes good garbage finds to DIY.
- Create plans to sell – Draw plans of every garbage DIY that you create.
- Make videos of the process – Make videos of the entire process.
- Curate other people’s work – Show examples of what others are doing.
- Sell a how-to eBook – Combine everything into an eBook to sell.
- Etc…
The Rundown
Now that you know how to identify the trends, go out and market them as much as you can. Since it’s a trend, more people will be doing Google Searches for the trend because they’re going to see it everywhere.
If you’re not writing about it, making products to help with it, and educating your audience about it, you’re missing out on huge profit potentials – not only in new products or services you can develop based on the parallel trend, but your regular products and services too.