Riding a trend or a craze can be profitable if you get it right.

As a general rule, trends last a reasonable amount of time whereas crazes are often forgotten almost as soon as they happen.

Sometimes there’s a crossover – the song Macarena was popular for a lot longer than a normal song but you knew deep down that it was only a craze when seemingly every politician felt the need to show they could act out the movements.

If Teespring had been around you’d have made a lot of money selling T-shirts with pictures of people making a fool of themselves.

As I write this, the current craze on Facebook and elsewhere is the ice bucket challenge.

If you’re reading this in a month or two, it’s where people are videod having an bucket of ice water poured over their head and nominating others to do the same. The theory is that anyone who’s nominated and doesn’t do the “challenge” donates money to the associated charity.

It’s raised awareness, which is good.

But it’s definitely a craze – even after a month or two, boredom is setting in to the Facebook community.

Trends normally last longer.

The whole internet could be classed as a trend although I think it’s probably better described as a seismic shift in communication.

But there are certainly aspects within it that are trends.

The trick is spotting them. Ideally late enough into the trend to make sure that it’s not a flash in the pan and to make sure that you’re not the one who’s spending lots of time and effort educating people only to have later entrants cash in on your generosity. And ideally not so late that seemingly everyone including your grandparents are in on the trend.

It’s a fine line and not one you’re going to get right all the time.

But when you get it right and ride a trend, it’s a nice feeling. Because you can get things wrong and still make a nice amount of money.

How can you spot a trend?

As usual, Google can help.

They have a trends search.

You can search for worldwide trends or ones that are more specific to your country – at the time of writing, the graffiti artist Banksy was one of the trending topics here in the UK alongside a new football manager and a television show.

You can drill down for trends – the amount of data varies and there isn’t always enough data to give an estimate but it can be a good starting place.

It’s also a good way to check a major area before you spend lots of time creating a site in a topic that’s in a downward trend.

As with everything to do with keyword research, it’s easy to become embroiled in the detail and spend a lot longer researching than you originally intended.

I find it’s useful to set a timer before I start searching so that I don’t get so immersed that hours disappear. It’s almost certainly worth you doing the same.

Riding trends and crazes can be a way to relatively quick income.

The idea of launch jacking – where you deliberatly aim to appear near the top of the search results for some or all of the duration of a product launch – is one way that people get income from relatively short time windows.

It can provide a quick income but that tends to be short lived and it’s the internet marketing equivalent of a sugar rush.

Launch jacking tends to get promoted as a way to earning a commission when a new internet marketing product is launched.

But if you allow yourself to think outside the box it can be applied to anything.

Movies are announced well ahead of time and you could ride the back of them. You can find out the approximate plot, who’s in the starring roles, where the locations are (the Lord of the Rings boosted tourist interest in New Zealand) and carve out a niche for yourself.

One advantage that movies have over internet marketing products is their longevity – cinema release, DVD, pay per view TV, satellite TV, terrestial TV.

Which means that if you get your launch jacking reasonably right, you get several bites of the cherry.

You need to be careful not to infringe copyrights but it’s definitely worth thinking about.

And you’re not restricted to movies.

Anything with a launch schedule can be on your radar.

That includes sporting events, music events and festivals.

It also includes anything with seasonality built in – Christmas, Halloween, Thanksgiving, start of school, spring break, proms, the summer solstice and so on.

Those are all annual crazes in that they are relatively short lived (even though here in the UK Christmas seems to extend over about 4 months) but can be near enough guaranteed to happen every year.

If you can set yourself up with a number of sites covering a variety of areas, you could be setting yourself up for a decent income from your internet marketing all year round.

So put your thinking cap on and work out where trends and crazes meet with almost guaranteed reliability.