Google Trends allows you to find out information about monthly & yearly buying habits. This was mentioned breifly in the "Searching the Niche" section, but we are going to elaborate on it here.

Monthly Trends

What good is it to know monthly buying habits? They allow you to:

• Run time sensitive promotions.
  
• Prepare promotions.
• Target your audience with relevant and timely content.

Monthly trends are typically the result of a seasonal event like Christmas, spring break, and Valentine's Day. There are many of these every single year that "smart" marketers take advantage of.

Let's look at Valentine's Day for example. What do people typically search for prior to and on Valentine's day. An obvious one is to buy flowers (c'mon guys, you should know this). Let's take a look at this within Google Trends:

As you can see from the 2011 search trends, there were two huge spikes for "buy flowers". One leading up to Valentine's day and another one leading up to Mother's day. From this search alone you already have a niche that you can target twice per year. You could create an article marketing campaign, a PPC campaign, or take advantage of these events with an email campaign ever year.

Yearly Events

Sometimes there are events that take place only once ever few years. These are typically very large events that receive a lot of exposure, a lot of traffic and have huge earning opportunities. I remember back in 2006 when Carson and I ran one of our most successful PPC campaigns ever, earning a whopping $60/minute (yes, per MINUTE) from the most popular yearly event, the World Cup.

Let's take a look at the search trend chart for this:

As you can see, in 2006 and 2010 during the World Cup, the term "world cup" receives 20 times it's average searches. In fact, over ONE Billion people watch the World Cup online. If you think about yearly events, you can definitely leverage these occassions with some targeted marketing. Think Summer Olympics...Winter Olympics...Cricket World Cup...Elections, etc. The opportunities are huge if you target these events correctly.