5 Tips to Monitor Industry Trends and Expose New Opportunities
Do you have a way to reliably monitor industry trends and conduct trend analysis? By applying the latest trends research tips below, you can effectively monitor industry trends and find new ideas to make you a super-star in whatever you do!
Recently, one of my colleagues paid me a humbling, awesome compliment. She said that I consistently bring radically different ideas to the table when we discuss issues; the kind of ideas that no one else had thought of. I sincerely appreciated that compliment. It made me realize that my hard work on monitoring industry trends and connecting different ideas together is paying off.
Here’s how you can monitor industry trends and apply them to advance your career and personal development.
Trend Analysis Prerequisites:
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An Internet connection and a Google Reader account
- Dedicated time to work the system I’m about to share, even if it’s only 10 minutes a day (I do this during the first hour of my day, since that’s typically the “calm before the storm” in my day). Make sure you really dedicate some time each week. I’m serious about this.
#1 – Subscribe to Blogs and News Feeds Using Google Reader
Google Reader is commonly referred to as a “news reader”: a tool that let’s you collect streams of news, articles, blog posts, etc. from around the web. You subscribe to these things in Google Reader, and when the websites update their news, blog, articles, etc. it is automatically updated in your Google Reader. This saves you the time of visiting all of these different websites to see what is new.
The first thing you need to do is open a Google Reader account, and subscribe to some of your favorite news websites, authors, bloggers, etc.
#2 – Turn Google Reader into Your Own Industry Trends Search Engine
Google Reader has a feature where you can apply a “tag” to a subscription. For example, if you subscribe to Dot Connector, you might tag it with “personal development.” These tags allow you to group your subscriptions into categories that are meaningful for you. I have over 250 websites that I subscribe to, grouped into 15 categories, like “search marketing,” “web analytics,” “authors I follow,” etc.
Tags becomes even more useful when you use the search tool in Google Reader. You can search only within a particular tag, hence creating your own search engine for topics, people, etc. that you care about! For example, when I need to find an answer about “number of Facebook accounts worldwide” I search my “social media” category for that term. The result? I get much more relevant search results than I would from searching Google for that term, since I am only searching websites related to that topic!
#3 – Find and Follow People from Your Blogs
Once you subscribe to and read blogs within your industry, pay attention to what websites and blogs they link to. Often blogs will link to other blogs, authors, and websites that would be of interest to you. When you find these sites, I recommend either subscribing to them outright or putting them into a “holding tank” tag where you watch their updates to see if they can “graduate” to one of your main Google Reader tag categories.
#4 – Find Industry Trends and Connect the Dots
Often, you will find industry research, data, and reports that may or may not be valuable to your colleagues. I recommend openly and frequently sharing these things with others to see what they think. Sometimes, you’ll know how the data or report might benefit them. Sometimes, you won’t. Share it anyway! You’ll be amazed at how the industry trends you find and ideas you come up with can “snowball” into something even better!
#5 – Leverage Your Industry Trends Monitoring System for New Projects
When you start a new role or project, it’s time to visit Google Reader! For example, I recently kicked off a new search engine optimization effort at Quicken Loans. Before I did, I took half a day just to review the search engine optimization category in my Google Reader. I hadn’t read that category in a couple of weeks, but all the news I needed to read was right there, allowing me to catch up in a fraction of the time it would normally take!
When you find reports, concepts, and new strategies in your industry research, actively look for places to apply them in your work. Become a source of interesting info! Frequently quote those sources that you’ve found and your network will soon seek you out for input and advice.
See also:Posted in: Internet Business Skills, Personal Development
What great advice!
[...] copy the RSS link in the upper right of the results page, and add it to your RSS reader (read my top 5 tips for conducting trends research using a RSS [...]
[...] my previous post, How to Monitor Industry Trends and Expose New Opportunities, I covered using Google Reader to help you discover new ideas. Now, here are 4 very simple ways [...]