How to find trends and write to them before the subject cools

How to find trends and write to them before the subject cools

You notice a subject once everybody has written about it, and your piece goes out into an already crowded feed. The problem is not writing speed: you learn about a subject from what has been published, which is by definition late. Below is how to watch conversations rather than publications.

You notice a subject once everybody has written about it, and your piece goes out into an already crowded feed. The problem is not writing speed: you learn about a subject from what has been published, which is by definition late. Below is how to watch conversations rather than publications.

You noticed the subject once everybody had written about it

The classic story for anybody making content. You see a subject take off, sit down to write — and come out with your piece when the feed is already full of the same thing.

The result is predictable: mediocre reach, weak response, a feeling of permanently catching up.

The problem is not writing speed. The problem is that you learn about the subject from the same sources as everybody else — from already published material. That is, by definition late.

There is a way of looking not at publications but at conversations — where a subject lives before it has been made into posts.

How finding trends differs from reading news

News is an event already selected by an editor. By the time it is published it has passed a filter: somebody decided it was important, wrote it and released it. Everybody reads the same thing, because there is one source.

A trend is a change in what people are talking about. It is visible earlier than the news and in a different place: in ordinary people's posts, in comments, in which questions started being asked more often.

Hence a practical distinction. News roundups give you what everybody has. Watching conversations gives you what the others do not yet have.

And a second difference, in applicability. News has to be retold, and a retelling interests nobody. A trend can be used: material gets written to it answering a question people are already asking.

What to look for besides the subject

Three things usually missed.

The phrasings. Not only what people are talking about but in what words. That is direct raw material for headlines: a headline written in the audience's words lands more precisely than any invented one.

The objections. What in this subject irritates people and what they argue with. Material answering an objection works harder than material repeating the general opinion.

The gap between demand and supply. A subject discussed en masse with little coherent material on it is the most valuable thing you can find. That is the open space.

I found gaps like that by counting the shares of subjects among competitors: in 6 502 posts from eleven channels over 19 months the subject of prices occupied nine posts against mass demand for it. Nought point one percent of the feed — and the first of the three reasons people do not earn.

Where to look for trends

Four sources, each giving something different.

Your own audience's questions. The most precise and the most underrated. A question that started being asked more often is a trend nobody else has reached, because it is yours.

Comments under other people's material. There you see what actually concerns people about a subject — and it is usually not what the material itself was written about.

The feeds of professional communities. Practitioners' conversations run ahead of publications and with no editorial filter.

Search queries. The coldest and most reliable source: somebody searching for something has already stated the task. A subject with a rising number of queries and no coherent material in the results is a direct indication of what to write about.

What not to use as a source: "top news of the week" roundups. They reach you simultaneously with everybody else by definition.

How not to turn into a news channel

An important limitation, or trend-hunting does harm.

Chasing every subject is not on. An audience that already understands the field does not respond to news — it addresses a rung the person has passed. From my observations: the share of successful pieces in the news format is below a channel's average.

The rule: a trend is a pretext rather than the content. The event gives you a way into the conversation, and after that you talk about your own thing: what this means for your audience, what to do about it, how it differs from last time.

And a check before taking it on: will this piece still make sense in six months. If not, it is for a messenger and stories rather than for a page that has to live in search.

The second layer: ready scenarios

Separately from trend-hunting there is something that saves more time — ready multi-step scenarios for standard tasks.

The difference from an ordinary prompt is fundamental. An ordinary prompt is a request. A scenario is a pre-assembled sequence: role, input data, order of steps, result format. You fill in your data and get a finished document.

What such scenarios are usually assembled for: a business plan, a marketing strategy, sales, brand work, product ideas, HR tasks, customer support, financial calculations, viral posts.

Why bother, if you can write a prompt yourself. For the same reason you use a reference book instead of deriving a formula every time. A scenario assembled by somebody who has done it a hundred times contains questions you would not have thought of first time.

How to write quickly to what you found

A trend loses value within days, so speed matters more than polish.

A prepared frame. Do not invent a structure every time: what happened → why it concerns my reader → what to do about it → my conclusion. Four blocks, and you fill in the content.

Ready generators for the formats. One thought unfolds into a post, a clip and a carousel — if there is something to unfold it with. A knowledge base assembled in advance makes that a matter of minutes rather than an evening.

The one-thought rule. A piece written to a trend does not have to be exhaustive. It has to be first and comprehensible. The exhaustive one will come out in a week and somebody else will write it.

And a check before publishing: did you say something the others will not. If not, it is a retelling of the news and better skipped.

Where to start

The "Grok: finding trends" express course is built on two levels.

The methodology — eight modules: prompt engineering for the model's architecture, managing context and response format, a universal template for a multi-step scenario.

The library — fifteen ready scenarios for business tasks: a business plan, marketing, sales, brand, product ideas, HR, customer support, finance, viral posts and others. Each is a multi-step scenario with a role, input data and a set format. You fill in your data and get a document.

Who for: entrepreneurs, marketers, product managers, writers — anybody needing specific strategies and texts rather than general advice.

The cost is $9. The course is included in the Basic plan, and registration is free and opens three days of full Basic access — that is, it can simply be worked through with nothing paid.

Inside with it are five more foundational courses, including prompt engineering with a map of every main model and the encyclopaedia of 198 verified services, the course "Sales" (a main module of ten lessons) and chats with 200+ AI assistants across 14 categories.

Do one thing today: write out three questions your audience started asking more often over the past month. Not subjects from the news — questions from real people. That is your trend, and it is more precise than any roundup.

Ready templates that find trends for you

Finding young YouTube channels by niche — a different approach: it finds not popular videos but young channels that broke through within weeks and collects them in a Google Sheet. If a channel is twenty or thirty days old and a video has hundreds of thousands of views, the subject has potential and there is no competition there yet. An advanced template: Full, or $9 once, or 1000 XP.

Reddit trend monitoring with AI analysis — collects fresh posts daily, ranks them and produces a short AI trend analysis.

YouTube trend finder by niche with AI — an AI agent finds trending videos for a given niche and builds analytics on them.

AI news digest with a chatbot on the site — gathers news from sources, rewrites it into short notes and publishes it on a site. An advanced template: Full, or $9 once, or 1000 XP.

What the first template gives that the others do not. It shows not what is already trending but where anything is free.

Regular templates open on the Creator, Make, N8N and Full plans; advanced ones on Full only.

The Grok course, entirely for this task

"Grok: finding trends" — $9 or the Basic plan. Two levels inside.

The methodology — 8 modules on prompt engineering for the model's architecture, working with context, managing format and a universal mega prompt template.

The library — 15 ready mega prompts for business tasks: a business plan, marketing, sales, brand, product ideas, HR, customer support, finance, game theory, viral posts. Each is a multi-step scenario with a role, input data and a response format. You fill in the placeholders for your own task.

Verifying what you found — the express course "Perplexity as an investigative tool", $9 or Basic. A trend not confirmed by a primary source is noise you can write a text to and get nothing.

Assistants, Basic plan: Market research — the market side. Strategic analyst — what of the findings matters. Brainstorm AI: Emergent Thinking — hidden connections in uncertain data. Creative strategist — how to turn a trend into content.

Trends into a plan. Freelance 2.0, prompts №8 "Topic map" and №12 "Content plan", Basic plan. And №11 — if the trend has to be combined with your own experience rather than retold.

Skills for finding subjects

All skills above are advanced: they open on Creator and above, or for $9 once, or for 1000 XP.

The rule from the third item is the main thing in this block. A surge on social media does not equal a trend. Until a signal is confirmed by a primary source it is noise you can write a text to and get nothing.

What to take on the platform for this task

What to read next

Analysing a competitor by figures — how to count rather than read a feed.

The content factory: a nine-week plan — where found subjects fit in.

How to verify a fact with AI search — the precise search tool.

How to turn a blog into a source of clients — the whole chain of eleven stages.

AI agents: what they are and what they pay — the full guide to agents, with market rates.

Also on AI SKILLS