Success With Shopify by lhywantk - HTML preview

Chapter 21:

Spotting and cashing in on trends

One of the ways that you can improve your earnings from your website, and

potentially gain a lot of social media followers and future buyers, is to get in on

trends that are just starting. This is a very viable strategy, even for the smallest

ecommerce website, because if you can get your post in front of all of the other

people jumping on a trend, your traffic could be at the level of a viral post or video.

You could go from a steady 10,000 visits per month to millions of visitors in just

one day, just by jumping on a current trend and most importantly – recognizing it

will become a trend before anyone else does.

How to Spot a Trend

So, how do you spot a trend? Unfortunately, this has no easy answer. If it did, just

about everyone would be able to capitalize on trends and make money from them,

and it would only be the biggest companies that were getting in front of trends.

This is one area where a smaller website really can succeed because recognizing a

trend has a lot more to do with luck than with skill. While there isn’t a way that you

can train yourself to spot trends there are some best practices for putting yourself

in a position to spot them, and the more practice you have at seeing coming trends

the easier it will become.

The first thing that you need to be aware of is that trends are found just about

everywhere and that you should look out for them whenever you are watching

television, browsing the web or even listening to music. Successful writers have to

cultivate the sense of recognizing ideas (especially good ideas) when they come

along and this is the same sort of sense that a trend-watcher should try to create.

You want to recognize a potential trend when it comes along and develop skills and

experience to know when that trend is worth pursuing. Here are some tips that will

help you do exactly that.

Know Your Buyers

The shopping habits of baby boomers have long been the shopping demographic that

companies have set their marketing budget by. But baby boomers are no longer the

buying power that they once were. In fact, it is the directly subsequent generations

that have the majority of buying power these days and in order to recognize trends

you need to know what appeals to them. Today’s shoppers (and it is likely you are

one of them) have specific attributes and trends that appeal to them might be

different than what the biggest companies are predicting. That’s why it took large

corporations a great deal of time to understand viral videos and why some

companies are still struggling.

Know What Has Worked in the Past

If you want to know what possible future trends are going to be you need to know

what has worked in the past. Study past trends and be familiar with why they

become trendy and pay attention to factors like the longevity of the trend, the overall

popularity and any external factors that might have affected that particular trend

becoming popular. There are a number of companies that track past trends and

there is a lot of information online that can help you with your research.

Pay Attention to Regular Trends

Google has a tool that specifically allows you to search for trends for a particular

topic, and one thing that you should be looking for in your particular niche is times

of the year when your topic peaks or flatlines. These are part of the trends that you

should be paying attention to when you have an e-store because it can help you

decide when to step up your marketing efforts or take advantage of sales booms.

Know the Right Websites

There are websites out there that are specifically devoted to trends. Buzzfeed is one

of the most well-known ones but there are many others as well. If you can find some

of them that you can get updates from or check out once in a while you might get a

leg up on some trends. Mashable is another well-known site that follows trends.

Another great technique is to use Google and type in predictions and see what

experts are predicting for your particular niche.