Everyone knows the Internet Marketing drill.

1. Spot a trend (or niche)
2. Capitalize on it

Rinse and repeat

Let’s look at trendspotting more deeply.

You probably already know to go to Overture.com, do a keyword search.
Find keywords with a high number of searches.

Next go to Google.com and key in the same keywords.
Find something with as few results as possible.

Optimally, you’d want keywords for which there are many searches, but few results.
This’ll ensure that creating a website with these keywords will garner you sufficient traffic to monetize your adsense, affiliate marketing, product marketing, domain parking or other strategy.

This approach may be shallow though, if you’re merely looking at the supply-demand side of things (your results-search ratio so to speak).

Besides the Quantitative element, you will need to consider the qualitative elements too.
There are qualitative elements like cost-per-click, clickthrough ratios, but I’d like to expand the horizon more and adopt a macro perspective.

I’d like to introduce three dimensions which will help you further analyze, capitalize and profit from these trends.

The first dimension:

• Intensity: Is this a high intensity niche? Is it a major event? Or merely a blip on the radar screen?

Obviously all sports events are not created equal.
If intensity was on a sliding scale of 1 to 10, the Summer Olympics might be a 10, the Soccer World Cup might be an 8, the Winter Olympics and Commonwealth Games might be a 6.

Even events in the same sport and category might have differing rates, for example the Wimbledon and US Open might rank higher than the French Open, which conversely has a higher profile/intensity in comparison to the Australian Open.

Bear in mind that intensity may incorporate geographical, cultural and other dimensions.

• Lifespan: What is the duration of the niche? For the Olympics it may be a month. The US campaign against Iraq could be considered nearly decades long (assuming the campaign was backdated to the 1990s)

Does the niche kick off further niches, prolonging it’s lifespan? For example, the Punk movement manifests itself in culture, music, fashion, art, and some say even food. Most contemporary counterculture traces some of it’s origins back to punk. A long lifespan indeed.

• Evolution: Does the niche permutate and evolve itself? Does it become a different animal over time? Witness the computer industry, going from mainframe computers -> minicomputers -> microcomputers -> desktops – > laptops -> PDAs -> palmtops. Maybe the next permutations might be fingertops? Who knows but the certainty is there.

Likewise with game consoles, you can witness the evolution from the old Atari consoles, Colecos, Atari ST, Nintendo, Sega Megadrive, SNES, Super Famicom, Playstation, Xbox and the new versions. (excuse if I left out your favourite console).

Analyzed outside of the typical RS ratios, the three factors can further enhance your analysis of these niches and give you a broader and informed perspective of the niche potential.