Ep03 Transcript: How to Research Market Trends

Andrea Vahl: Hi Late Starters. I’m your host, Andrea Vahl. In today’s episode of Quick Fix Friday, we’re gonna dive into some tools that you can use to help you research trends. This will help you determine what type of business you might wanna launch or product or service. In Episode 01 Michael Stelzner talked about researching trends to determine whether he should launch his crypto business podcast and Web3 event.

So I’m gonna dive into some of my favorite tools that you can use to analyze trends.

Oh my God. Are we trending?

Intro: Hello dreamers. Welcome to the Late Starters Club, giving you the inspiration mindset and tools you need to start something midlife and beyond. Remember, it’s never too late to follow your dreams.

Andrea Vahl: In this example, I’m gonna be talking about researching things around midlife crisis. Maybe you’re considering monetizing your midlife crisis by launching a podcast. Perhaps it could be done.

Your first step is Google. Start Googling the terms, seeing what questions come up. You can see people also ask section that gives you some great examples of questions.

You can see exactly how many search results you’re getting. In this case, when I use midlife crisis, I get 26 million search results for that term. You may want to put a longer tail on that, put some more terms in there, to get a little bit more specific.

And I definitely encourage you to go beyond the first page of Google to page two of Google, or even three of Google, That’s where they bury the dead bodies. It’s always interesting to see what other content comes up on those other pages.

Another tool that is similar that gives you some good questions people are asking is a tool called Answer the Public. When you put in a search term such as midlife crisis, you’ll get some results around things people are asking about, such as why midlife crisis happens? What does a midlife crisis look like? And is midlife crisis a myth?

No, it is not a myth. I’ll just answer that one right away. Okay.

There’s also some cool things that you can do around the data and downloading some of those terms there and kind of getting some more visual inspiration for those types of searches.

One of my favorite tools for analyzing trends is Google Trends. Just go to trends.google.com. This is a free tool where you can see the trends around these terms for recently, even just such as a day or the last month, or even five-year trends. For example, when I put in midlife crisis as a Google trend search, I can see that it’s a pretty steady search term over the past five years, which could indicate steady interest over time.

You may be more interested in something that has an upward trend, for example, so you can get into a hot market. There’s lots of other cool things you can do, such as comparing search terms and diving a little bit deeper into the regional terms for the world.

Another tool that I think is absolutely awesome is Buzz Sumo.

This is a paid tool, but it does have a free version that you can use to start searching around. And what Buzz Sumo does is take your search term and bring up some of the most popular content on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Reddit all those types of social sites to see what’s actually getting shared.

What type of content is getting shared across those different social channels? Now you can go take a look at the articles that are being shared. You can dive a little bit deeper into what’s being shared over time. If you have the paid tool, it’s a great way to get started and see what kinds of content is really resonating around that particular topic.

Another tool I like is Pure Research. Now, this is pureresearch.org and they have a lot of research topics around trending things. They mostly focus on kind of different subcategories such as politics, family, economy and work, things like that. But you can do a little searching and see if they’ve done any research around your particular topic.

Another thing I think you should do is take a little poll of people who might be your target market. So see if you can find potential customers for your product or service or whatever that might be, and interview them. Find out if it’s something that they need, and maybe float it by some trusted resources that you have with maybe even an anonymous poll with something like Survey Monkey, so you can get some honest answers around your topic.

And one of the best things you could do is launch your product service on the side if you can, and see if people are actually buying it. That’s always the biggest measure of how successful it might be is floated out there into the world.

See if you can actually get some sales to start with. Before you do a lot of difficult things such as creating a website or registering the name or things like that. You wanna make sure it’s gonna be a little bit viable before you really invest a lot of time, money, and effort into your new idea.

So thanks for joining us on Quick Fix Friday and talk to you again soon.

Outro: Hope that was helpful, and make sure you grab the free guide Top Tools for Late starters on the website at latestartersclub.com and let’s turn dreaming into doing.