While it might not be too good as a long term strategy to base your sites topical content on passing fads it can add a welcome boost to your inflow of fresh visitors.

Such an inflow can push your regular visitor count through the roof. However, if you want to hang on to those visitors there are a few things that you need to get in place first.

There are a number of sources of top topics with the most well known being Google Zeitgeist. From this you can identify the top topics for your target country (or just the entire world).

This alone will not, of course, help you at all. But if you can identify a connection between your site's subject and one or more of the listed words the you have a subject that could potentially draw a lot of visitors. More importantly you have not had to trick the visitors into coming and so have a chance of keeping them.

Do not do this until you have 10 quality pages (posts, articles or what-have-you) on your site.

Why?

You need to have something to show the visitor what your site is about and what they could reasonably expect to find if they come back.

So you have a list that looks like this UK list:

1. bebo
2. argos
3. facebook
4. autotrader
5. cbbc
6. tesco
7. britney spears
8. rightmove
9. easyjet
10. orange
11. face party
12. anna nicole smith
13. wwe
14. sky sports
15. pc world

How do you use that to pull an inflow for your site?

It might be that there is no connection at all. Simply continue producing your best content and wait a little while before you look again. After all these are passing trends. They pass.

Now some topics are easier to target than others.

Look at number 6 - TESCO is a UK supermarket famed for catchy lines such as "every little helps" and the fact that you can buy almost anything from your daily bread to pet insurance from them.

How does this headline sound: "Five Things You Can't Get From TESCO"?

or "Don't settle for 'TESCO Value' hosting - use Globally Local" - now I'm playing on a well known cheap and cheerful brand and saying that our product is better than that (it is by the way).

What about the second item there as "Better Value Than Argos"?

You'd need some content to follow up on this but now you have what we call a hook to tempt people to your site.

It's not going to make you rich but on the other hand with some decent "on page SEO" you could reasonably expect to have this appear as the clickable text on a search engine result. this means you are not going to trick those visitors in but tempt them with a good hook.

Sadly 90% of those visitors will not be interested in what you have to say.

This sounds like a poor result but if you draw 1,000 new people over the lifetime of the passing fad - that is 100 new customers.

I definitely would not advise that you rely on this as a technique for long term promotion, much better to draw one or two new members with a highly focused topic based article but if you apply the 80:20 rule and keep this "bating" technique to less that 20% of your content you can expect to see reasonable growth.