For entrepreneurs and content creators, finding the next big trend before it becomes mainstream can be a game-changer.

But it can be incredibly hard to stay ahead of the trends, let alone be an early adopter.

That’s why I‘m excited to introduce you to the ultimate trend discovery tool: Exploding Topics. 💥

Exploding Topics is an AI-powered trend-spotting platform that tracks millions of data points to identify emerging trends before they take off.

Founded in December 2019, it was created by developers Brian Dean (the brains behind Backlinko, which he sold in 2022) and Josh Howarth.

This tool makes it much easier to find what people are searching for the most on the internet. It will also help you jump on emerging topics at the exact right time for things like content creation, marketing, product development, and your next big idea. 💡

You can start looking at trends right now for free, or upgrade to the Pro version to access more advanced features.

Let’s take a deep dive into this incredible tool and all its possibilities.

First, who is Exploding Topics for?

Who Can Benefit from Exploding Topics?

Investors Looking for Under-the-Radar Companies with Growth Potential

For venture capitalists, it’s crucial to identify trends that have the potential for long-term growth. Anticipating future developments can be difficult, but with Exploding Topics, you’ll get insights into emerging trends that others may not have noticed yet. This helps you stay ahead of the curve and invest early in promising opportunities.

Entrepreneurs Looking to Launch Their Next Product

Exploding Topics can help entrepreneurs discover emerging products, categories, and markets. If you’re looking for the next big hit, this tool gives you a significant edge over your competitors by identifying hidden gems for investments, features, and products.

Enterprises Looking for Revenue-Driving Trends

By providing insights into emerging trends, Exploding Topics helps enterprises make informed decisions regarding new ventures and projects so they can stay ahead of the curve and allocate resources effectively. With this tool, you can gain a competitive edge by anticipating what’s coming next in your industry.

Marketers, Bloggers, YouTubers, or Content Creators

If you’re a marketer, blogger, or YouTuber who wants to create content around the latest trends in your target market, this is a valuable tool for you, too.

Exploding Topics at a Glance

• Powered by AI technology, Exploding Topics analyzes millions of searches, conversations, and topics on the Internet.
• It provides a glimpse of the most explosive topics and under-the-radar markets in different categories, regions, and timeframes.
• Rounds up the hottest trending topics of the week in its weekly newsletter.
• A convenient and easy-to-use dashboard streamlines the process of researching niche industries, products, and brands.
• The tool provides essential insights into current topics and keywords being discussed in a specific niche.

In a nutshell, Exploding Topics is a freemium tool that shows you trending topics in your sector. Simply choose a timeframe and category and the tool will present you with a list of trending search phrases with detailed metrics — just like doing keyword research for SEO.

Among the world-class brands that use Exploding Topics are Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Netflix, Samsung, Shopify, Airbnb, and Slack.

Ready to learn even more about this new trend discovery tool?

Here’s my full breakdown of the app.

What is Exploding Topics?

Exploding Topics is a cutting-edge tool for market research that enables businesses to identify emerging trends in advance. Powered by AI technology, it analyzes and forecasts upcoming topics by crawling online discussions, search engine inquiries, and social media interactions.

Exploding Topics excels at helping you discover new market opportunities, trending topics, emerging technology, and the hottest startups and products.

Here are a few trends that the app predicted 18 months before they took off.

Air fryer:

 

Substack:

 

And even OpenAI:

 

An alternative to the popular Google Trends, Exploding Topics offers real-time analysis of the latest and most promising trends in fields such as technology, healthcare, fashion, crypto, finance, gaming, food, fitness, pets, science, software, sports, travel, and more. It also allows users to filter results by industry, region, and timeframe, making it easier to discover relevant and timely information.

Exploding Topics is useful for businesses looking to capitalize on emerging market opportunities. It can help identify untapped niches, optimize their marketing strategies, and make data-driven decisions to drive growth and stay competitive.

What does an Exploding Topics data report look like? Here’s a live example on its website.

 

The basic Exploding Topics Trends Database is free to use. If you decide to upgrade to Exploding Topics Pro, you’ll get access to premium features like My Projects, Trend Search, Trending Startups, Trending Products, Reports Library, Meta Trends, and API access.

Ready to give it a try, find your next exploding topic, and fuel it all the way to the top of the SERPs with great content? Sign up for Exploding Topics Pro and try BrandWell for a true one-two-punch and all-in-one SEO content solution. 💥

How Does the Tool Work?

Exploding Topics collects its data by analyzing millions of web searches, conversations, and mentions across the web and social media. Its trend-spotting algorithm identifies under-the-radar industries, products, and categories… months or years before they take off.

These trending topics range across many industries, niches, and categories, from the past 6 months to the last 15 years.

As you can see below, trends are labeled as Regular, Peaked, or Exploding.

 

Of course, we’re most excited to see the latest exploding topics, but knowing those that are past their prime and holding steady can be helpful as well.

Now let’s look at the core functions of Exploding Topics.

Data Collection

Exploding Topics collects data from a wide range of sources, including social media platforms, online forums, news articles, blogs, and search engines. These sources are continuously monitored to capture the latest conversations and discussions happening online.

Trend Insights

NLP algorithms analyze the collected data to identify patterns and trends. They look for mentions of specific keywords or topics that are gaining popularity or experiencing a surge in online discussions. These keywords or topics are considered potential emerging trends.

Exploding Topics offers detailed insights about each identified trend. It provides information on the growth trajectory, search interest, and social media engagement related to a trend — all in real time.

Historical Data

Exploding Topics maintains historical data on trends for up to 15 years back, allowing you to track their progression over time and analyze their sustainability.

Data Visualization

Trends are presented through an intuitive and interactive dashboard. The platform provides visualizations, charts, and graphs to showcase the growth trajectory and search interest related to each trend.

 

Tracking and Monitoring

Exploding Topics continuously monitors the identified trends over time. It tracks their progression, analyzes the rate of growth or decline, and provides updated insights.

 

Exploding Topics Main Features

Exploding Topics offers several tools to help users identify and capitalize on emerging trends. Let’s look at its key features.

Trends Database

The flagship feature of the app is the Trends Database, which you can sort by category, timeframe, region, and status to find trending brands, products, and industry keywords. This allows you to focus on trends that are most relevant to your target audience.

The Exploding Topics database includes over 14,000 trending topics. The historical Google Search volume of each trend is presented through a graph, which determines its growth potential.

You can set filters to see things that are most relevant to you or you can scroll around to explore other niches.

 

You can also use the Trends Database to find competing brands. Just click on “Brands” and select a relevant category.

For example, if you want to see how your competitors in the pet space are doing, go to “Brands” and select the “Pets” category.

 

Good news: You don’t need to create an account to access thousands of trends in the Trends Database. But if you subscribe to Exploding Topics Pro, you can get access to premium features, which we’ll explore below.

Exploding Topics Pro Features

The paid version of this tool has a ton of great features that are absolutely worth the investment.

My Projects

If you find a trend that you want to follow, simply add it to your “My Projects” folder. You can create as many projects as you want and track your selected trends live inside your Exploding Topics dashboard.

 

Trend Search

Similar to Google Trends, this feature lets you search top trends by typing in a search term and your preferred region. 

The advantage of Exploding Topics over Google Trends is that you can add these topics to your “My Projects” folder and track them within the tool instead of repeating the entire search process every time you want to see the latest data.

 

Trend Search also provides more information such as related trending topics and “People Also Search For” ideas.

If you want to check the Google Search volume growth trend of a particular product, you can type that keyword into Trend Search.

 

To add these trends to your Projects, simply click the “Track Topic” button.

Exploding Topics stands out for its exceptional ability to crawl millions of databases across the internet and detect patterns related to your chosen topic. This means that regardless of your business category or niche, you can easily discover trending topics in real-time.

The tool then cross-references its search results with data from Google Trends to further refine its findings. With a user-friendly interface and clear visual representations of rising trends, analyzing market trends has never been easier.

Reports Library

The reports library is what sets Exploding Topics apart from its competitors. These carefully selected trends along with comprehensive analysis are presented to subscribers of the Pro plan on a weekly basis.

These reports are written by experienced professionals who have conducted thorough research and provide in-depth explanations for each trend — added value that you won’t find anywhere else.

The report is broken down into two parts. “Early bird companies” and “Tomorrow’s products today.“

In every report, there are five trending products and five trending companies with detailed information on why they present potential opportunities. The most recent report was about 2,000 words long.

 

Meta Trends

Next up, Meta Trends are broad topics that can be the focus of an entire website or blog, while specific trends are narrower subjects that can be covered in a single blog post.

In other words, Meta Trends refer to entire industries rather than individual search terms or companies.

Meta Trends cover a wide range of popular sub-topics. Great example of how to use them: If you’re looking to build a Shopify store, you could use meta trends as your foundation.

Meta Trends is a compilation of niche trends that are experiencing rapid growth. It provides a list of the fastest-growing products and keywords within each trend.

To streamline your research process, you can start by looking into meta trends, find a niche, and then search for products that fall under that trend instead of randomly looking for products.

When you click on a Meta Trend category, you will get:

• A background analysis of that trend.
• A map of trending topics that fall under that meta trend.
• A list of related meta trends.

 

Weekly Newsletter

The Exploding Topics Pro subscription comes with a weekly newsletter sent directly to your inbox.

“Exploding Topics Tuesday” delivers 10 trends each week complete with reports, comments, and statistics.

Instant Trend Alerts

In addition to receiving newsletters on the best trends, Exploding Topics informs you of the most relevant news in your market through Instant Trend Alerts. This is great for digital marketers who are constantly looking for high-potential, low-competition keywords in their industry.

API Access

The minimalistic database of Exploding Topics may be enough for most users, but analysts, strategists, and SEO professionals might need to dig deeper into the data sources of these trends. Fortunately, Exploding Topics is now offering access to its API so you can look into highly specific sub-trends or integrate trending data into your current data sources.

 

Trending Startups

Last April, Exploding Topics launched a new feature called Trending Startups to help VCs find high-growth startups that are still under the radar.

 

You can click on any startup on the list to get a quick overview of the company, including growth metrics, total funding, the latest round of funding, and company information.

 

Trending Startups is currently in beta mode and available only to Pro users.

Trending Products

Another new feature is Trending Products where you can find emerging products with long-term growth potential.

For Shopify store owners, Amazon sellers, and drop-shippers, this is the most exciting feature of Exploding Topics.

 

You can sort products by category, bestseller ranking (BSR), monthly sales, price, revenue, and reviews. If a product shows steady search volume growth, it’s an indicator of long-term growth potential — and not just a fad that might die in the next few weeks.

 

If you want to track a particular product, click “Track Topic” to add it to your Projects. You can track as many products as you want on your personal Exploding Topics dashboard. This allows you to organize and track products in real time without having to update a complex spreadsheet.

Each product page also shows you a list of related topics to explore.

 

Ready to give it a try? Sign up for Exploding Topics Pro now. Need help creating SEO content around your exploding topic? Try BrandWell to get it done.

Are These Trends Reliable?

If you’re going to invest significant time and money into developing a product, you want to be sure the trend is sustainable and will still have strong demand in the future.

So how reliable are these trends?

Exploding Topics implements a three-step qualification process that ensures each trend in the Trends Database is backed by reliable data.

• Step 1: AI and machine learning algorithms scan the web (Google, Reddit, Amazon, etc.) and media sources (YouTube, Twitter, Spotify, etc.) to find trending topics.
  • Human analysts can’t read and analyze billions of content pieces on the internet – but AI can! So using AI minimizes the possibility of missing a critical rising trend. Scanning the entire internet rather than a handful of sources also minimizes bias.
• Step 2: Analyze each topic’s Google Search volume trend.
  • To eliminate fleeting fads and ensure that trends have promising long-term growth potential, the AI analyzes the historical Google Search volume data of each trend it finds. This step verifies that the trend has shown steady compounding growth over a period of several months or years — a sign that the topic will be an important trend in the future.
• Step 3: A human analyst vets trends for commercial relevance.
  • There are plenty of trending topics in pop culture. News about celebrities, TV shows, and music has no commercial value. So instead of making you sort through irrelevant topics, a human business analyst at Exploding Topics manually reviews and approves each trend before adding it to the Trends Database.

When you look at the Trends Database, you’ll see that each topic is either a brand name, industry search term, or product keyword — all relevant to your business.

There are four reasons why this three-step process is important:

1. AI has access to billions of data sources so it’s unlikely to miss under-the-radar trends.
2. Each trend is qualified based on actual Google search volume — it doesn’t get any more reliable than that.
3. Trends are qualified based on long-term search volume growth, not a few weeks or months.
4. A human analyst ensures that each trend is relevant to business so you only get high-quality topics.

 

How Can Exploding Topics Help Your Business?

Exploding Topics helps investors, entrepreneurs, and marketers find trending topics, brands, and keywords across different industries. 

Here are some common use cases for the platform:

Market Research

If you’re looking for emerging trends in your industry, Exploding Topics is a useful tool for conducting market research. It helps you stay informed about new opportunities, consumer interests, and market dynamics.

Product Development

Developing a new product idea can take months to years, not to mention millions of dollars, so it’s important to make sure there is future demand for your invention. If you miscalculate your prediction and end up with excess inventory, you will have to sell them at a lower price or give them away for free. This can harm your brand reputation and result in huge financial losses.

Exploding Topics can help uncover emerging needs, preferences, and demands of consumers. Analyzing the keyword search volume growth of a product is one of the most reliable methods to estimate its future demand.

Advertising and Campaigns

Exploding Topics is a great tool for advertisers looking for trending themes and interests among their target audience. This information can be used to optimize advertising campaigns, create targeted messaging, and increase campaign effectiveness.

Competitive Analysis

Want to know how your competitors are doing? Exploding Topics can show you which companies are trending in your industry.

Through competitive analysis, you can identify unique selling points or areas of differentiation so you can stay ahead of the competition.

Business Development

Another area where Exploding Topics can help is identifying potential partnership opportunities or market gaps. By spotting emerging trends and niche markets, you can explore new collaborations, expand your offerings, or enter untapped market segments.

Investment and Entrepreneurship

Investors and entrepreneurs can use Exploding Topics to identify promising areas for investment or startup ventures. The tool provides insights into growing markets and areas where innovative solutions are in high demand.

The Benefits of Exploding Topics for Content Marketing

If you’re a marketer, Exploding Topics can supercharge your content strategy by spotting emerging trends, identifying popular topics, and keeping your content fresh and engaging.

Here are some of the benefits of using Exploding Topics for content marketing:

Content Strategy

Exploding Topics provides data and insights that help you refine your content strategy. By understanding the trends and topics that are hot in your niche right now, you can align your content creation efforts to meet the needs and preferences of your target segment. This results in better content planning and a higher likelihood of achieving your content marketing goals.

Content Ideation

Coming up with fresh content ideas can be a challenge. Exploding Topics helps you generate new content ideas around emerging trends and topics so you have a starting point for creating timely, valuable content that resonates with your audience.

Exploding Topics introduces fresh and novel ideas to you, instead of simply presenting data on topics you already know. These are often under-the-radar topics that you can take advantage of if you act early.

Exploding Topics also indicates if a product has peaked, is declining, or still rising in popularity. 

SEO

Exploding Topics provides insights into trending keywords and topics — the very heart of SEO. 

You can create content around these popular search queries and add related keywords to your blog articles, video content, social media posts, and other marketing materials to help improve your search rankings, increase organic traffic to your website, and expand your online visibility.

Audience Engagement

By creating content around trending topics, you tap into the existing conversations and interests of your target audience. This can lead to higher click-through rates, more social media shares, and increased user interaction with your content.

Thought Leadership

By staying informed about emerging trends in your industry, you can be among the first to address new topics — providing unique insights and perspectives way ahead of your competitors. This positions you as a thought leader and helps you establish authority in your niche.

Finding Content Opportunities

Exploding Topics helps you identify new content opportunities. By uncovering emerging trends, you can explore niche topics or areas that are not yet saturated with content. This allows you to establish your brand as a go-to resource in specific trending areas, attracting a dedicated audience and fostering brand loyalty.

Exploding Topics Pro Pricing Plans

Exploding Topics offers three paid tiers for its Pro version:

• Entrepreneur: $39/month
• Investor: $99/month
• Business: $249/month

 

Most users are happy with the Entrepreneur plan. But if you want to search for specific topics or industries, or want to add team members and API access, then go for the higher-tier plans.

Conclusion

Exploding Topics is a trend research tool that offers detailed information on trending topics pulled from billions of data sources across the internet. Its database contains over 14,000 trends with daily updates, allowing you to access the latest information on high-potential trends discovered up to 18 months earlier.

It’s a great resource for content marketers, but it is also useful for online sellers looking for new products/categories to add to their store, or VCs looking for startups to invest in (or for the big dogs, outright acquisition). 

Exploding Topics is clearly not for casual users. While Google Trends is built for everyone, Exploding Topics is designed with the entrepreneur, creator, and first mover in mind.

Google Trends is also littered with trending topics that don’t matter to you — like “The Kardashians” or “NBA Playoffs” (unless you’re a fan of both). With Exploding Topics, you only get relevant results that give you a competitive edge in market research, product development, and content marketing.

With its ability to track and analyze emerging trends, Exploding Topics can help you seize untapped market opportunities even before they become mainstream.

Although Google Trends is available for free, I’d be willing to pay for Exploding Topics because of its efficiency in discovering trending topics and innovative business ideas in up-and-coming industries — and delivering those results right here, right now. 📍

Ready to give it a try, find your next exploding topic, and fuel it all the way to the top of the SERPs with great content? Sign up for Exploding Topics Pro and try BrandWell for a true one-two-punch and all-in-one SEO content solution. 💥

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