Believe it or not, the first major stumbling block for those who are just starting an online business is to find a niche. Frankly speaking, this also happens to me. Finding the right niche where I have some passion or at least a bit of interest to learn about is important.

Probably most importantly, it has to be less competitive so we can get at least some results easily through some form of marketing without spending a fortune.

For this reason, I always look for a way to find the tools that can help improve this process. The trend is appropriately called trend monitoring tools. They monitor the conversations happening on blogs and chart a graph of the trend month by month.

Not only do this data could help you get more ideas about your competition, but also how crowded the conversations are going at a specific time over a period of one, two to three or six months, depend on the tool you are using.

1. IceRocket.com’s Blogs Trend Tool

IceRocket is one of the popular blog search engines. You can enter up to three keywords or topics and get a trend comparison chart for the last one, two or three months.

The feature allows you to compare up to three keywords, which are very useful to compare how many blogs are there actively talking about the topics.

2. BlogPulse Trend Search

This tool is my favorite. Both IceRocket’s and BlogPulse are very similar in design. They even have the same example (digital camera) on the top of the text box.

Both allow up to three keywords and labels. But, BlogPulse allows charting up to 6 months worth of data. You can also click at the vertices of the graph to reveal the search results of the actual conversation.

The graphs for BlogPulse has more edges, but more or less the same accuracy as IceRocket.

Please note that the blogosphere is growing very rapidly. It had just doubled seven and a half months ago to 50 million blogs, so you may see increase in number of blogs because new blogs are started in those topics.

Don’t get discouraged by the number though as not all them are potential competitions. They may have mentioned the word because they talk about it. New blogs also play at the same level if you start your site or blog rightaway.

That’s it. Play with them. See how much fun you can get.

While we are on the topic about trends, Topix.net has just added news trend tracker and Google also has its own called Google Trends, but they draw graphs using news and search data, respectively.