Last month I was browsing through some “make money online” blogs for shits and giggles, and I came across a post about Google Hot Trends at one of the higher-quality blogs in our niche.

That post, plus an earlier expose of Google Hot Trends at TechCrunch, reminded me of how fun it can be. (If you haven’t used it yet, Google Hot Trends is a continuously updated list of the hottest new search queries.)

At the same time, I realized I better get my act together and write about how to use Google Trends to dramatically increase traffic to your website. At this point, it’s no secret – more and more bloggers are writing about it, so the usefulness will diminish by the day, but there is still time to reap the rewards if you’re smart enough.

(Sidenote: Once bloggers exploit the crap out of this and it becomes common place and less effective, some guru will put it into an ebook and sell it for $47 )

Here’s how to do it:

The Prerequisite: A Well-Indexed, Frequently Updated Blog

Unfortunately, this isn’t going to make you rich overnight with no work. It requires a fair amount of work, plus you have to have done lots of work in the past to make this worthwhile.

See, it only works if you already have a blog that’s fairly popular and gets new content indexed in Google real fast (like within minutes.) If your new content pages aren’t indexed that fast, this strategy won’t do you any good.

But if your blog posts show up in Google quickly, this could boost your traffic dramatically. (Maybe not 30,000 new visitors per day like they claim in the TechCrunch article, but you never know until you try.)

Step 1: Head to Google Hot Trends

First, jump to Google Hot Trends and browse the list. This is a frequently updated list of the hottest search queries of the moment.

If you find an interesting term, you can click on it for a few more details. You’ll see just how hot it is, and when the peak searching was done. The list shows today’s date by default, but you can also browse past days if you so desire.

Step 2: Choose a Popular Search Term

Once you have scanned the list, pick a good, fresh term with lots of searches to focus on.

This is the tricky part though. It’s best to pick a new, uncommon, or long tail term since they’ll have less competition. The more popular, generic terms aren’t worth chasing. For example, even if a term like “Thanksgiving” is popular, it’s also very crowded, and big sites already have the top Google SERPs. So skip the obvious terms.

And as much as Google wants to have “fresh” results in their listings, some sites/pages are going to be very hard to knock off the top spot with nothing more than the timeliness of your posting. For example, if there’s a popular movie coming out on DVD, there’s a good chance IMDB and Amazon.com are going to claim the top spots no matter what you try.

A great idea that has served me well is to look at actual URLs that make it onto the list. People type URLs into Google all the time, and they’re usually not competitive terms. So having a blog post titled “coolwebsite.com” or “neatwebsite.com/newpage” could lead to lots of traffic from people who end up at your site instead of typing the URL into the browser directly.

The “neatwebsite.com/newpage” type pages are the real gold mines.

Step 3: Craft a Blog Post

Now that you have your search term, prepare a new blog post on that topic. It should use the exact search term in the title and then have it in the post, too.

The key is to do this quickly. Time is of the essence. You want the post published quickly and pings sent out so that your post is indexed in Google within minutes.

Step 4: Check Your Stats

First, keep searching Google using the chosen term and wait to see if your site shows up. Ideally you’ll get a top-three ranking.

Then watch your stats and see how many people end up at your site. It’s unlikely you’ll get a Digg-like boost, but if you have a good site and a very popular term, you can easily pull in a few thousand extra visitors in a day.

(I used this technique last December and went from about 2 visits per month the whole way up to 11,000, from one trendy blog post!)

Step 5: Repeat Daily

That was simple, wasn’t it? Now just repeat the process daily (or even hourly) every time you find a good query.

But before you get going, read these bonus tips…

Bonus Tip 1: Make Sure the Topic Matches Your Site

When I first discovered this tip, I made the mistake of picking any random hot term for whatever website I felt got indexed the fastest. So I might have had a website about mobile phones with a page about a new weight loss program on it.

It was cool to have a few thousand extra visitors, but it was a waste of bandwidth, because the visitors had no interest in browsing the rest of my website.

Yeah, you could throw some affiliate links in there and make a few commissions, but sticking with related topics is a better long-term strategy.

Bonus Tip 2: Consider Perennial “Hot” Terms

Another finding from Google Trends are the perennial hot terms. There are even a couple I noticed recently, like “black Friday 2008 ads.” So you can be reasonably sure that “black Friday 2009 ads” will be a big deal in 12 months time… so why not start planning now and get a jump on everyone else?

Or browse back to mid December 2007 and see what was hot. It’s possible something similar will spike in search volume tomorrow!

Bonus Tip 3: Certain Topics Are Better Than Others

You’ll notice certain topics pop up more than others. Celebrity names and event names, for example. Politics is a big one, too, especially with the current economy and recent election.

Weather is actually pretty big, too. Any storms and school closing queries are going to be searched often enough to make it onto the Hot Trends list.

If I had to pick one niche/topic this strategy is ideal for, it would be entertainment websites. Whether it’s celebrity gossip or UFC videos, you are virtually guaranteed to find great terms to focus on.

Bonus Tip 4: Combine Trends with Insights

You can also get some cool data with Google Insights.

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It doesn’t matter how competitive the category is, if you use these secrets, you’ll get top rankings in less than 24 hours! That is just one of the claims from Traffic Geyser, a new ebook that reveals how to “get massive traffic uploading videos to YouTube, Google Video, MySpace, etc.” Well, that sounds alright… it also sounds like they gave away the secret right there!

The sales letter and the screenshots basically give away the technique. And the fact that they say few internet marketers know about this, just means that many other people do! It’s no secret. You upload videos to YouTube, people watch them, then go to your website. And since YouTube, Google Video, and Myspace all have high rankings, your videos can get some good results in Google. Just be sure to have some good keywords in your video title.

Is it really a secret that Myspace is a popular website?

And if you want to see their videos, the URLs are all on the sales page. Just do a search for “internet infomercials” without the quotes and see if they are still ranked so well

To sum things up, here are two things to know about this product:

1. The strategy of uploading videos is nothing new.

2. Now there will be lots of spam going around YouTube and Google Video. (Myspace is already full of spammers.)

But have no fear, these are social sites – that means they have a rating and reporting system. The users themselves will take care of any cheesy videos that no one wants to see

If you read the user comments, you’ll see that the truth behind this video is already revealed.

But actually, the most important thing to note, is that now that sleazy internet marketers are implementing this technique, it will not help with great rankings. (Remember blog comment spam? They just used the “nofollow” tag and now that technique is worthless. The same will happen here.)

So here is the good way to do it: Make cool videos that people want to watch, and upload them. It’s that simple.

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