Exploding Topics Tutorial: How to Spot the Next Big Thing Before Everyone Else

Ever felt like you’re always a step behind the latest trends, watching others cash in on the hot new product or topic while you’re left playing catch-up? To really get ahead , you need a way to spot emerging trends before they become mainstream. That’s where Exploding Topics comes in. It’s a super smart tool that helps you uncover what’s about to blow up, giving you a serious competitive edge whether you’re building a business, creating content, or looking for the next big investment opportunity. In fact, many folks rave about how spot-on it is for finding hidden opportunities early.

This isn’t just about finding what’s already popular. it’s about seeing what’s emerging so you can be among the first to act. By the time you finish this guide, you’ll know exactly how to use Exploding Topics to your advantage, helping you stay ahead of the curve and turn data into real-world success.

What Exactly is Exploding Topics, Anyway?

At its core, Exploding Topics is like having a crystal ball for market trends, powered by some serious AI and data analysis. Imagine a platform that constantly scans millions of searches, conversations, social media mentions, news articles, and even e-commerce activity across the internet. That’s what Exploding Topics does. It sifts through this massive amount of data to identify topics that are rapidly gaining popularity before they hit the mainstream consciousness.

The tool was initially created by Josh Howarth and later acquired by Brian Dean, who’s a pretty big name in the SEO world, known for his work with Backlinko. This backing really gives you a sense of the quality and insight behind the platform.

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Now, you might be thinking, “Isn’t that just like Google Trends?” And that’s a fair question! But here’s the crucial difference: Google Trends primarily shows you what’s already popular or how known topics are trending over time. It’s great for validating if a topic has sustained interest. Exploding Topics, on the other hand, focuses on discovery. Its algorithms are designed to detect early signals of growth, often months or even years before a topic becomes widely recognized. It’s about getting in on a trend before everyone else even knows it exists, giving you that precious time to get established.

Why You Absolutely Need Exploding Topics in Your Business Toolkit

why should you care about spotting these emerging trends? Well, for anyone looking to make an impact online or in business, it’s a total game-changer. Decoding the Entire Semrush: Your Ultimate Guide to Dominating Digital Marketing

Beat the Competition

This is probably the biggest draw. When you identify a trend early, you can create content, develop products, or launch marketing campaigns long before your competitors even realize what’s happening. This “first-mover advantage” can mean significantly more organic traffic, higher rankings, and a stronger market position. One brand I heard about used Exploding Topics to pivot their packaging strategy towards sustainable alternatives six months before their rivals, which gave them a serious leg up.

Identify Untapped Opportunities

Exploding Topics is brilliant for uncovering niches and products that are on the rise but not yet saturated. It helps you discover emerging startups, under-the-radar markets, and even specific products that are gaining traction. This insight is like having x-ray vision into future market opportunities, allowing you to fill market gaps before they become obvious.

Smart Content Strategy

For content creators like bloggers, YouTubers, or podcasters, this tool is a goldmine for fresh ideas. Instead of constantly trying to rehash old topics, you can use Exploding Topics to find what people are just starting to get interested in. This helps you produce timely, relevant content that genuinely resonates with your audience and stands a much better chance of going viral. Think about covering “sea moss gummies” when it was just starting to pop, not when everyone else is already talking about it.

Informed Business Decisions

Whether you’re an entrepreneur, a product developer, or a marketer, Exploding Topics provides the data you need to make smarter choices. It helps with everything from inventory planning and product development to allocating marketing budgets effectively. You can use its insights to avoid the “me too” trap and position your offerings for what’s next, not just what’s currently popular.

Save Time

Let’s be honest, traditional market research can be a drag. Exploding Topics streamlines the process of finding new ideas, saving you a ton of manual keyword and topic research time. Its algorithms and human analysis do the heavy lifting, serving up potential trends on a silver platter. Connecting with Semrush: Your Ultimate Guide to Email, Support, and Beyond

Getting Started: Your First Steps with Exploding Topics

Ready to jump in? Here’s how you can begin using Exploding Topics to your advantage.

Exploring the Free Version The Newsletter

Even if you’re not ready to commit to a paid plan, there’s still a way to get a taste of what Exploding Topics offers. You can sign up for their free weekly newsletter. They’ll send you a curated list of some of the trends their data team has identified.

Now, while it’s free and a decent way to dip your toes in, keep in mind its limitations. The newsletter only covers a few trends each week, and there might be a delay of up to six days on the trends they feature. This means you might be a little behind the curve compared to Pro users, and the trends might not always be directly relevant to your specific niche. But hey, for zero cost, it’s definitely worth checking out!

Diving into the Pro Dashboard Paid Plans

For the real power and deep insights, you’ll want to explore the paid platform, Exploding Topics Pro. This is where you get access to all the juicy data, dashboards, and advanced features that let you track trends in real-time and tailor your search to your business needs. Many users find the paid version to be well worth the investment for the competitive edge it provides. You can even get started with a 7-day free trial or a $1 trial for 14 days to test it out. Semrush Digital Marketing: Your Ultimate Guide to Dominating Online Visibility

A Walkthrough of the Exploding Topics Pro Dashboard

Once you’re in the Pro dashboard, you’ll see how robust the tool really is. Let’s break down the main sections and how to use them.

The Trends Database: Your Goldmine

This is the heart of Exploding Topics. It’s a massive database with over 1.1 million trends, constantly updated daily. These trends are neatly organized into more than 31 categories, ranging from broad industries like ‘Health’, ‘Tech’, and ‘Business’ to more specific niches like ‘AI’, ‘Beauty’, ‘Eco’, ‘Education’, ‘Software’, and ‘Sports’. This categorization is super helpful because it allows you to quickly find macro broad industry and micro smaller, specific trends that are relevant to your interests.

Searching and Filtering: Pinpointing Your Niche

To really make the database work for you, you’ll need to master the filtering options:

• Timeframes: You can adjust the timeframe to see trends from the past 3 months, 6 months, 1 year, 2 years, 5 years, or even 15 years. The Pro accounts give you more granular, recent data, which is often crucial for catching trends early.
• Categories: Easily filter by industry to drill down into your specific niche. If you’re in the health and fitness space, you might find trends like “wearable breast pumps” or “Lion’s Mane supplements”.
• Status: Exploding Topics labels trends as “Exploding,” “Regular,” or “Peaked”. This is incredibly useful! You want to focus on “Exploding” trends, which are those rapidly rising in popularity. “Peaked” trends might still have high search volume but are on the decline, and “Regular” ones are stable but not necessarily growing fast.
• Growth Rate & Search Volume: The platform provides data on search volume and growth rate. A high growth rate signals rapidly increasing interest, making it a prime candidate for content creation or product development. You can also filter by growth potential, looking for those topics showing the most aggressive rise.
• Branded vs. Non-branded Keywords: This filter helps you distinguish between trends related to specific brands and general topics, which is great for different types of research.

Trend Analysis: Digging Deeper

When you click on a trend, you get a detailed report that helps you understand its trajectory and potential. Semrush Certificates: Your Guide to Boosting Your Digital Marketing Skills

• Understanding Trend Graphs: Each trend comes with a graph showing its growth over time. This visual data helps you quickly grasp the trend’s development and current momentum.
• Channel Breakdown: Exploding Topics can show you where a topic is trending, whether it’s on a specific social media platform, in news articles, or forums. This is invaluable for knowing where to focus your marketing efforts.
• Related Trends: One of my favorite features is how it suggests related trends. This can spark new content ideas or help you build out comprehensive topic clusters for your content strategy. For instance, if you’re looking at “whole body deodorant,” it might suggest “whole body deodorant for women” as a more specific sub-niche.

Beyond Topics: Products and Startups

Exploding Topics isn’t just for content ideas. it’s also a powerhouse for product and investment research.

• Trending Products: If you’re in e-commerce or dropshipping, this section is a goldmine. You can identify current product trends, filter by revenue generated, price point, sales volume, and even customer reviews. When you click on a product, you’ll often see more insights, related products, and top sellers in that category.
• Trending Startups: For investors, journalists, or anyone looking for new business opportunities, this feature lets you rank up-and-coming startups by category, timeframe, growth type, funding, number of employees, and region. It’s a great way to spot the next “unicorn” company or find leads for sales.

Advanced Features Pro specific

The Pro version really unlocks the full potential with some powerful advanced features:

• Meta Trends: These are the bigger picture trends – the broad industry shifts that influence various topics and have a significant impact on how we live and work. Understanding meta trends helps you see the context behind individual “exploding topics” and can inform long-term strategy.
• Trend Forecasting: This is where the time machine analogy really comes into play. Exploding Topics can predict future growth for trends, often up to 12 months in advance, with a reported accuracy of up to 87%. This kind of foresight is incredibly valuable for strategic planning.
• Custom Alerts: Never miss an emerging opportunity. You can set up custom alerts and notifications so you’re instantly informed when a new trend relevant to your niche starts to take off.
• API Access: For power users and developers, Exploding Topics offers API access typically in higher-tier plans. This allows you to integrate trend data directly into your own custom dashboards, analytics systems, or automated workflows, supercharging your trend analysis even further.

Real-World Applications: Turning Trends into Triumphs

Knowing how the tool works is one thing, but how do you actually use it to see real results? Here are some practical applications:

Content Creators Bloggers, YouTubers, Podcasters

This is a huge one. As a content creator, you’re constantly looking for fresh ideas. Exploding Topics ensures you’re not just creating content, but creating relevant content that people are actively searching for. Your Go-To Guide for Checking Domain Authority (DA)

• Bloggers: Find emerging topics to write articles about. Imagine writing the definitive guide on a topic just as it’s starting to boom, attracting tons of organic traffic.
• YouTubers: Spot visual trends and video topics that haven’t been saturated yet. Being an early creator in a trending niche can help your videos gain significant traction.
• Podcasters: Discover interview subjects or episode themes that are resonating with audiences, giving your show a timely edge.

E-commerce & Product Developers

For anyone selling products online, Exploding Topics is indispensable.

• Spot Winning Products: Identify products that are gaining momentum before they’re widely available. This is fantastic for dropshippers or anyone looking for the next hot item.
• Inform Inventory Planning: Use trend predictions to plan your inventory effectively, avoiding both stockouts and excess inventory. If you see a trend rising, you can stock up. if it’s peaking, you know to be cautious.
• Develop New Products: Instead of guessing, use data to inform your product development, creating solutions for emerging needs. For example, a DTC Direct-to-Consumer brand identified rising interest in sustainable packaging and pivoted its strategy early.

Marketers & SEO Specialists

This tool complements traditional SEO and marketing efforts by adding a forward-looking dimension.

• Enhanced Keyword Research: While it’s not a replacement for dedicated keyword tools, Exploding Topics helps you find emerging keywords that traditional tools might miss because they rely on historical data.
• Campaign Ideas: Use trending topics to spark ideas for ad campaigns, social media strategies, and email marketing that feel timely and relevant to your audience.
• Long-Tail Keywords: By exploring related trends, you can often uncover long-tail keywords with growing interest that are easier to rank for.

Investors & Entrepreneurs

For those looking to invest or start new ventures, Exploding Topics provides valuable market intelligence.

• Identify Promising Startups: Keep an eye on the “Trending Startups” section to spot companies with early growth signals.
• Discover Market Gaps: The platform can reveal emerging needs and underserved markets, pointing towards viable business opportunities.
• Strategic Investments: For VCs and angel investors, getting a broad overview of general trends helps in making informed investment decisions.

Exploding Topics vs. Google Trends: What’s the Real Difference?

I touched on this earlier, but it’s worth reiterating because it’s a common point of confusion. Many people think Exploding Topics is just a paid version of Google Trends, but that’s not quite right. Unlocking Page Power: Your Guide to Semrush Authority Score

• Exploding Topics is for Discovery and Early Insight: Its main goal is to identify topics that are about to explode. It uses a blend of AI, machine learning, and human analysis to spot early growth signals across a vast array of online sources, often before these trends register on other tools. You’re getting curated, processed data designed to give you a head start.
• Google Trends is for Validation and Historical Data: It shows you how searches are trending over time for terms you already know. While powerful for seeing interest changes and geographic insights, it’s not designed to proactively discover nascent trends you haven’t thought of yet. You often have to “dig for the data” yourself.

Think of it this way: Exploding Topics gives you a list of potential winning lottery numbers before the draw, while Google Trends tells you which numbers won in past draws. Both are useful, but they serve different purposes.

Exploding Topics Alternatives

While Exploding Topics is fantastic, it’s not the only player in the game. Here are a few other tools that offer similar, or complementary, trend-spotting capabilities:

• Glimpse: Often considered a direct competitor, Glimpse also aims to provide trend data and insights, often blending the best of Exploding Topics and Google Trends. It’s a Chrome extension and offers customizable research.
• Trends.co: Known for business and startup trends, offering curated insights.
• BuzzSumo: Excellent for content creators, as it focuses on viral content and what’s performing well across the web.
• Pinterest Trends: Hugely underrated for anyone in the DTC Direct-to-Consumer space, providing fantastic insights for trending product ideas and visual content.
• Answer Socrates: Offers keyword clustering and helps build strategies, not just collect trend names.
• Google Trends: Still a valuable and free tool for validating trends and seeing historical data.

Each of these has its strengths, and sometimes combining them can give you an even clearer picture of what’s emerging.

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Exploding Topics Pricing: What’s the Investment?

When it comes to the cost, Exploding Topics offers different plans to fit various needs, and while there’s a free newsletter, the full power comes with a paid subscription. You can usually try any Pro plan for 7 days free or a 14-day trial for just $1.

Here’s a quick rundown of their main tiers:

• Entrepreneur Plan around $39/month: This plan is typically geared towards solo entrepreneurs and small business owners. It gives you access to the full trends database, allows you to track around 100 trends, includes trending products, and meta trends.
• Investor Plan around $99/month: As the name suggests, this is for more serious investors and growing businesses. It bumps up your tracked trends significantly e.g., 500 trends, includes trending startups, more trend analyses, and often features like trend forecasting and CSV export.
• Business Plan around $249/month: The top-tier plan for larger teams, agencies, or those with extensive needs. It offers the highest limits for tracked trends e.g., 2,000 trends, more trend analyses, and sometimes includes API access and custom reports.

The key takeaway is that the “Pro” features are where the tool truly shines, offering in-depth data and forecasting capabilities that can justify the investment for businesses serious about staying ahead.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Exploding Topics free?

You can sign up for the free weekly newsletter, which provides a curated list of trends. However, for full access to the trends database, real-time data, advanced filters, and other powerful features, you’ll need a paid “Pro” subscription. There are often free trials available for the Pro version. Digital Marketing Growth with Semrush: Your Roadmap to Online Success

How accurate is Exploding Topics’ trend forecasting?

Exploding Topics uses AI and machine learning combined with human analysis to predict trends. They claim their trend forecasting can predict future growth up to 12 months in advance with an accuracy rate of up to 87%. Many users find its predictions to be “scary-good”.

Can Exploding Topics replace my traditional SEO keyword tool?

No, Exploding Topics is not designed to replace traditional SEO keyword research tools like Ahrefs or Semrush. It excels at discovering emerging trends and topics, which can then be fed into your SEO process. Traditional tools provide detailed historical search volume, competition analysis, and backlink data for existing keywords. Exploding Topics helps you find the next keywords to research.

How does Exploding Topics get its data?

Exploding Topics gathers its data by analyzing millions of data points from a variety of online sources. This includes search engines like Google, social media platforms, online forums and communities like Reddit, news articles, blogs, and e-commerce websites. Proprietary machine learning models detect early growth patterns, which are then curated and validated by human analysts to filter out fads.

Who is Exploding Topics best for?

Exploding Topics is ideal for a wide range of individuals and businesses. This includes content creators bloggers, YouTubers, podcasters looking for fresh ideas, e-commerce businesses and dropshippers seeking trending products, marketers and SEO specialists aiming for early keyword opportunities, and investors and entrepreneurs wanting to spot promising startups or untapped market opportunities. Semrush features

What are “Meta Trends”?

Meta Trends are broader, overarching trends that encompass various individual topics and industries. They represent significant, long-term shifts that influence how people live, work, and interact. Exploding Topics identifies these larger trends to provide context and help users understand the bigger picture behind individual “exploding topics”.