Find Profitable Niches Using Yahoo! Buzz

Aside from Google, people tend to read the latest blog articles and the hottest news from Yahoo. Garnering 20% of all web searches, Yahoo is considered to be the second best search portal (it is actually a directory), Yahoo's popularity is also sure to grow now they have partnered with Bing. To deal with the growing Internet demands in terms of topical social news, Yahoo created an extension called Yahoo! Buzz.

Yahoo! Buzz was introduced in February 2008, and aimed to determine the most outstanding and favorable website content across the Yahoo! site. It selects the hottest stories based on the votes or buzz of the Yahoo users and readers. If a site or Blog’s content gets the most number of buzz votes, it will be featured on Yahoo’s site where millions of visitors can see it immediately.

When you want to read headlines and breaking news from major news sites and personal blogs, then you will appreciate the benefits of Yahoo! Buzz. Instead of editors, you can personally submit stories, buzz up the best ones and initiate conversations through comments. It is similar to other social networking and content sites such as Delicious, Digg, Propeller, Reddit, and StumbleUpon. Every story submitted to Yahoo! Buzz is ranked based on the following factors: the number of acquired votes, the number of comments, the popularity of the keywords on Yahoo Search, and the number of times the content was shared with friends via email. If your content was amongst the highest ranked stories, then it will be showcased on the Buzz homepage as well as inside other Yahoo category pages.

Yahoo! Buzz scoring aspects are not the same as with Google Hot Trends. Google Trends track hot items or stories by the minute and updates their published results almost every hour. On the other hand, Yahoo! Buzz traces topics that are not only hot for a day, but it also holds records of the hottest items over a period of time. You can check them out at: http://buzzlog.buzz.yahoo.com/overall/. According to Yahoo! Buzz, “A subject's buzz score is the percentage of Yahoo! users searching for that subject on a given day, multiplied by a constant to make the number easier to read. Weekly leaders are the subjects with the greatest average buzz score for a given week.”

As an online marketer you can take advantage of the features of Yahoo! Buzz by promoting your own business blog and website. You can validate Google’s data on a hot trend and then compare it to the results of Yahoo! Buzz, and use this information to search for hot new niches. To find out more about the computation details, go to: http://buzzlog.buzz.yahoo.com/faq/

Once you discover a promising trend on Google and you also see it on Yahoo! Buzz’s hottest index, then you should consider this a niche worth investigating. Even if a trend is not included in Google’s hottest trend of the day, remember that the Buzz index results are one day older than Google's. If the hot trend ranks high on both sites, it means that the particular related niche has been heavily searched for in the last 24 hours.

It can be advantageous for you to develop a product for any related niches you discover this way because you can be somewhat confident that they will be searched for pretty heavily, and featured in search engine results.