If you read this blog regularly you should be aware that SMO (Social Media Optimization) is becoming as important as SEO (Search Engine Optimization). The reasons for this change and the evidence that supports this assertion is so voluminous that a thesis paper could certainly be written about it; without going off on a tangent, let’s just make a base statement that people are increasingly using SMO to find their information and artful maneuvering of the Social Media landscape can potentially generate massive traffic to your website. Even though SEO is still king, there isn’t a good reason to NOT pursue SMO to your advantage.

In a perfect world, one way an internet marketer can make their presence known on the vast social media landscape is by picking cohesive usernames across all possible channels. For example, if your product or brand was called “Organic Shampoo” you would want your domain to be “organicshampoo.com” for SEO purposes but “OrganicShampoo” or “Organic_Shampoo” for SMO purposes.

It can be a hassle to look up each social media outlet to see if your desired username is available or not. Luckily, there is a great website we found called Namechk that quickly searches for available usernames across a wide swath of social media websites, including but not limited to: Facebook, twitter, wordpress, blogger, youtube, stumbleupon, reddit, eHow, wikipedia, and badoo (to name a few).

Simply go to Namechk’s website and type in the potential username in the search box. Within seconds Namechk will display if that username is available on each particular website:

In practically no time at all you will know if that username is feasible to create a unified brand image across social media websites!

Having a unified name across all Social Media is ideal, but sometimes it is not possible. In fact, we are great examples of how sometimes a consistent username strategy is not feasible but yet SMO can still work to your advantage. Our main product is called “Micro Niche Finder” yet our twitter name is @micronichetool because Micro Niche Finder exceeds their character requirements (usernames can only be 15 characters long) and this blog is “micronicheblog.com” because “micronichefinder.com” is our company website and “micronichefinderblog.com” is an affiliate website that was already taken before our blog was up and running.

If you were to find yourself in a situation like us, fret not, all you have to do is make sure that people are aware of your other social media presences – include the info at the end of your emails, on the side of your blog, etc. If you keep your visitors and clients informed and constantly refer to your other social media avenues, your SMO will fall into place and work well for you.

We are not affiliated with Namechk in any capacity, we just thought their services were interesting and useful. If you know of any other websites that can search for usernames across social media websites, please share and let us know!

Internet privacy is an increasing concern (ex: the recent Facebook privacy settings fiasco) and Google has just released a beta feature that uses SSL to allow “end-to-end encrypted search solutions”. SSL is an abbreviation for Secure Sockets Layer, and this is the same protocol used to keep sensitive internet and data transfers protected. Google is beta testing this feature under the pretense that if a person searches using the SSL feature, it will help to keep their searches private.

A couple of points need clarification here: first and foremost, if you use the new SSL enabled search, Google will still collect your data just like it does in its current version (and has been for years). The difference is your search information will be encrypted so that third parties (employers, Internet Service Providers, hackers, etc.) can’t get access to your search information; so even though your search becomes protected it certainly is not anonymous. This is an important distinction. Your searches will be just “private” between you and Google. 

Furthermore, even though SSL will prevent third parties from knowing what precise search term you typed in, third parties could still see what websites you visited and could thus come up with a reasonable guess concerning your encrypted search term. For example, I could type in a mysterious encrypted search term and this could be my results page:

Search Results Page Using SSL

If I clicked on any of those websites I would no longer be in encrypted search mode and a third party could gather information about my visit. It wouldn’t be difficult to accurately deduct what my mystery search term was…

Miami Dolphins

Google’s new SSL feature is also only available for its web searches, although Google claims they are working on ways to encompass all of its features (images, maps, etc). Google also says its searches in SSL are slower due to the encryption process (although it’s barely noticeable on my computer) and that it’s working to improve the speed.

Google’s SSL is not a default feature. It is in beta testing, however, and you can try this new feature now. It’s incredibly simple.

Google’s url is:

Normal Google url

 If you want to search using SSL, you need to add an “s” behind the http:

Google Search with SSL Feature Enabled

You can then search in encrypted search mode.

My computer hasn’t experienced any issues using the SSL feature, but apparently some computers may display error messages. If you receive an error message, or if you want to learn more about SSL feature, read Google’s official blog post.

You may have noticed an increase in websites that end in .ly . The .ly domain is the top-level domain for the country Libya. For years the company in charge of handling Libyan registrations floundered, but relatively recently Libya’s General Post and Telecommunications Company took control of website registrations. The result is that .ly domains are available to everyone in the world, which is great for people who like unconventional top-level domains (sometimes known as “domain name hacks” or “domain hacks”). Two very popular .ly domain hacks include ad.ly and sound.ly, which both have heavy associations with twitter. This type of domain is definitely not for everyone, but for people with a very clear purpose it could serve their business or personal endeavors well.

With the influx of PLR related articles and ebooks, it’s important to use images to help distinguish your product (be it article, website, or ebook) from the rest. For instance, a well chosen cover image can boost your Kindle sales tremendously. While many people realize images are curcial for their sales, not everyone acquires and uses images legally. This of course can lead to BIG legal problems – and we don’t want you to ever, EVER fall into that predicament.

Much like articles can be copyrighted and trademarked, so can images, and much like using articles you don’t own the rights to, you can be sued by the person or company who does own the rights to the image(s) and be forced to pay a lot of money for copyright and trademark infringement. Doing a Google Image search is absolutely NOT a good way to find images. Most of the images are copyrighted and unless you know how to determine if an image is royalty free or not – risky business, may we add – you are better off not even looking for images in this way.

To avoid the humongous hassle of being sued, you want to look for and use images that say “Royalty Free”. Royalty Free images are akin to PLR articles – you don’t have to pay royalties, you can modify them, and you can publish them as your own. Royalty Free images are by far the safest way to add valuable images to your website or product without having to worry about repercussions.

We use this awesome website to find our royalty free images: http://www.sxc.hu/ It’s free to register and loaded with Royalty Free images. Even if there isn’t a picture directly related to your subject, the odds are good that with a little creative thinking you could find an image that will work well (and hey, it’s better than illegally using what you perceive to be the perfect image). SXC also sells really high-quality images for $1.00 (sometimes even less). It’s a very affordable way to legally use professional images.

To prove our point, here’s a royalty free image for your enjoyment:

"Oh Hi!" Panda - a royalty free image

For some internet marketers, acquiring massive amounts of data is a necessary step to launching their next great product or idea. The acquisition and organization of this data can be a very time-consuming undertaking, so time-saving shortcuts are always appreciated. In Google Labs a new development called Google Fusion Tables can be used to expedite the data-sorting process.

Google Fusion Tables takes data stored in the cloud and manages it while focusing on its collaborative aspects such as data integration from multiple sources. Fusion Tables also allows groups to discuss the data, visualize the data, edit the data, and even publish the data in an easy way.

Most data systems are based on SQL queries, but Fusion Table is not. For those that don’t know SQL, this new Fusion table is unbelievably convenient. You upload your data using the Fusion Table into the great cloud and then you have the option of either keeping your data private, sharing the data with your collaborators, or making your data public for world consumption. Should you find yourself working with sensitive data, you can choose to filter or hide data from your team or you can let your collaborators have full access to the data.

When you or your collaborators edit the data it will be updated automatically so that everyone remains on the same page. You can even discuss data and Google Fusion can keep save these conversations so that the progression of the data is documented.

Google Fusion Conversation

If you need to export the data and its correlating sets, you can export it from the cloud into a basic CSV file.

Google Fusion Tables is best suited for combining data from multiple sources because it utilizes refined forms of join capabilities.

Fusion Tables - Multiple Sources

 There are many tools to filter and aggregate your data in a dynamic way. For instance, you can arrange it to show on Google Maps or other kinds Google Visualization API.

Google Fusion Labs - Visualization Possibility

This is a free tool, but it is still in its beginning stages so expect inevitable changes. In order to utilize Google Fusion Tables, all you need is a Google/Gmail account. It is still in the Labs phase so feel free to experiment with it and give Google your feedback about this new feature.

We are hosting an upcoming webinar that will help you develop your own network of mini sites that rank within days in the search engines. It’s called the “3 Hour Profit Plan”, and its simple but effective formula will allow many people to reach their Online Income goals in 2010.

Did I happen to mention this webinar is FREE?  It’s simply too informative and too useful to miss.

The details for this webinar are as follows:

Date:  Tuesday Jan. 5th at 7:00 PM EDT
Sign Up Page: https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/301297170  
System Requirements: For PC-based attendees: Windows® 2000, XP
   Home, XP Pro, 2003 Server, Vista.
   For Macintosh®-based attendees: Mac OS® X 10.4 (Tiger®) or newer.

Space is limited, so sign up while there is still space available!

Publishing ebooks that you have rights to is a great way to earn extra income. With the intoriduction of Amazon’s kindle, ebooks have become an extremely popular commodity.

Obviously uploading your ebooks onto Amazon’s Kindle via their DTP platform is essential. The Kindle is currently the most popular e-reader in the world and your ebooks won’t be sellable if you do not upload them onto Amazon’s Kindle store! If nothing else, make sure to upload your ebooks here.

Luckily, other businesses have seen the soaring popularity and success of the Kindle and are creating their own e-readers and platforms to support e-books. If you are a person with ebooks to sell, this is an amazing opportunity to make more money using the same material over and over (and over and over and over…) again. There is nothing preventing you from uploading your ebooks onto other websites or platforms, so the more places you upload your material the greater your chances of making profits!

Besides Amazon, you can go to http://www.tradebit.com/ . You have to register with the website to upload your material (don’t worry, it’s free!) and once you go through the simple registration process you can upload your ebooks for free. The uploading process is very simple. If you are already familiar with uploading onto Kindle you will find uploading onto tradebit to be very similar. Once you log into your tradebit account, you will see there is a “Upload New” tab – select “Documents/eBooks” and you will have some information to fill in, including “Title of Mall Listing” (just type in the title of your ebook), Description Text (highly recommend typing a synopsis of what your ebook has to offer), Price and Currency, etc. Make sure to clarify what currency you wish to use, because unlike Amazon Kindle ebooks (which are sold only in the US currently) tradebit can be sold worldwide. This is a huge advantage tradebit has over Kindle, so if you upload your information on tradebit in addition to Kindle your target market expands from people living in the US to people living anywhere in the world.

The most time consuming route is to create your own website that sells your own ebooks, but on a positive note you will have total and complete control over your material. The process is way to detailed to entail here, other than you would need your own website, this website would need to be optimized (hey, Micro Niche Finder is great for that!), and you would have a the capabilities to accept payment (many people like Clickbank, although Paypal can be used too). It’s a lot of work (especially if you have never done this before) but the profits would be 100% yours. There are many people who do this process VERY successfully, but be forewarned that it’s not a set-and-forget process.

There are more options for ebooks being developed – Barnes & Nobles Nook instantly comes to mind. Sony Reader and Iliad are two other ways to upload ebooks, although their popularity and usability aren’t nearly as popular as Kindle or tradebit just yet, and Google is rumored to be developing an e-book platform. There will be more e-readers coming into existence in the near future, this much is certain; and  when these avenues are fully developed we will explore them further.

In light of the new FTC Guidelines, we are hosting a teleconference that will address your questions and concerns about the new FTC changes. It’s FREE, it’s informative, and it’s important.

Here are the details, so mark it on your calendar!

Date:  Tuesday Dec 8th at 7:00 PM EDT
Conference Dial-In: 1-712-432-3100
Conference Code: 163824 (do NOT enter # after this code — also, give it a few seconds for the voice prompt to tell you that you have joined the teleconference)
 
There is NO sign up required but since there are only enough lines for 500 people on the call you will want to dial in a few minutes early.

If you are in live on this call, you will be able to ask questions. If you have a burning question that you desperately need an answer to, make sure you are one of those 500 people in on the call.

We look forward to discussing the FTC changes with you!

Google is offering a brand new feature in their Google Labs called Google Transliteration Feature.

It is an interesting feature and potentially useful to expand your target audience. For instance, the current population in the world is roughly 6,964,912,614 people (and 3 people are born every second, so the above number is already antiquated, but it will have to do!) and out of these almost 7 billion people 330 million speak English as their native language and 150 million people speak it at high proficiency as a second language. That means a total of 480 million people speak English at a very fluent level, which is a lot of people and could keep you busy indefinitely. However, this also means there are 6,484,912,614 people in the world who DON’T speak English at all or only speak it on a low proficiency level (once again, these are approximations, but they illustrate the point). Based off these calculations, a whopping 93% of the entire world’s population does not speak English at a fluent level, if at all.  That is a HUGE market and to even tap into a sliver of it could increase your profits, and the Transliteration Feature is one way to help reach out to those who are not completely fluent in English.

Now to explain the difference between Transliteration and Translation, for these two are different. A translation means identifying the corresponding word(s) in one language to their meaningful equivalent in another language, such as “water” in English corresponds to “agua” in Spanish or how the French word “oui” corresponds to the English word “yes”.  A transliteration means converting word(s) in one language to word(s) in another language by means of their close approximation in sound; this is usually done when there are no equivalencies in another language. For example, the name “Steve” doesn’t have a workable equivalence in Mandarin Chinese, nor does “Chicago” in Russian or other Slavic languages. In these cases, transliteration would be used to make “Steve” and “Chicago” more intuitive and easier to pronounce in Mandarin Chinese or Russian (or whatever language you are working with). Names, places, brand names, and newer words (twitter, blog, etc.) are usually transliterated. However, any word can be transliterated, with varying success as to whether or not the non-English audience will understand the messages you are trying to convey.

When you go to the Google Transliteration Feature you will see a screen that looks like this:

Google Transliteration Feature

Notice how in the gray bar you are given instructions on how to work Google Transliteration: “Type a word in English and press SPACE to transliterate.”

You are given a list of options as to what language you want to transliterate into. In addition to English, there are 13 languages to choose from: Arabic, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Nepali, Persian, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu, and Urdu. These are languages focused in the most populated regions in the world – South Asia namely, but also Central Asia and the Middle East. For my examples, I will transliterate into Hindi, since that is the language I am most proficient and thus I can check most easily (although I am less proficient in Gujarati, Punjabi, and Bengali, I can still check to ensure the results are correct).

Select Your Language:

Language Collection in Google Transliteration

Once selected, type in your English word you want transliterated – mine will be “Labrador”. Hit the SPACE button to have it translated into your language of choice.

Transliteration - Hindi and English

As you can see, “Labrador” went from English into Hindi and EVEN into Devanagari Script (which is the script Hindi is written in) – awesome!

I added the English text beneath it to demonstrate that the word is transliterated correctly – if you can’t read Devanagari script / Hindi, it does indeed spell “L-A-B-R-A-D-O-R”. If you wish to add English text and NOT have it transliterated into another language, type the word and then press “Ctrl + G” . It will not transliterate your word. If you want to reactivate the transliteration, press “Ctrl + G” again.

Now lets pretend that a business wants to transliterate their brand name – this would be one of the chief reasons to use this tool. For our example, we will transliterate “Micro Niche Finder” from English into Hindi!

Transliteration Proof

So this still reads and would be pronounced as “Micro Niche Finder”, even though it is literally spelled “Micro Niche PHinder”. The “Ph” sound is the closest sound possible to the “f” sound, so it is used. This is transliteration at its finest! Explore the Google Transliteration feature – you never know when you will have to transliterate your name, business, or brand name into another language!

If you are ever curious about translating languages, you may want to try the Google Translate Feature. You type in text, a webpage URL, or upload a document for Google to translate. This feature works really well especially for being a free feature. A note of caution, though: it’s not always perfect, so a little bit of research and/or cultural understanding can go a long way.

Let’s run a few examples so we can see how the Google Translate feature works.

For the first example, I am going to translate the word “winter” from English into French.

Google Translate Feature Example

This is a mostly correct translation. The word for “winter” in French is indeed “hiver”, but one would never say “hiver” without an article (ex: les, le, etc.). The correct way to translate this word would be “l’hiver” which is:

l’(the article) + hiver(word for winter) = l’hiver. So although Google was close, it made a grammatical error by leaving out the article. On the plus side, most french speaking people would know what you are trying to say although it would be obvious that you are not a native speaker. If you were to reverse the process and translate “l’hiver” from French into English, you would see that it translates into “winter” perfectly.

If you notice beneath the space for the translated word there is headline that says “Dictionary – View detailed dictionary”.

View Detailed Dictionary

If you click to see the detailed dictionary, more information about the word arises such as synonyms, web definitions, related languages, and more:

Detailed Dictionary Features

This is a handy feature, so be sure to explore it regardless of what words and languages you are translating.

Now for the next example we shall examine how Google Translate Feature addresses issues involving formal tenses.

In many countries, there are two types of verbal protocols: the informal and the formal. The informal is what a person would use to address to someone they are either friendly are familiar with, or are of the same age. The formal is sometimes used when a person is speaking to someone of higher superiority, age, or rank. The formal denotes a tone of respect that the informal does not.

For example, in the Spanish language there is the informal and formal way to address a group of people. The formal conjugation, called the vosotros, would be used if a person is talking to a group of people of higher superiority. The vosotros is not as widely used as it used to be in most spanish speaking countries, although it is still used in Spain.

In this scenario, let’s pretend we want to ask a group of people who have higher superiority or seniority how they are doing. Google Translate has trouble detecting the subtleness of the formal vosotros, so they best way to enter this would be:

Formal Conjugations

This, as far as we have been able to test, is the closest form of vosotros we could find. By adding “sirs” we acknowledged that the group of people that were being addressed had superiority. It’s not perfect but it does translate very well and is close enough to the vosotros to basically become a non-issue (except to the language purists).

For French, which also has the informal and formal, we noticed that if you want formal sentences, type in what you wish to have translated but then put (formal) in parenthesis. For french, the vouz/votre form (which is the formal form) will come into play.

For instance, here is the sentence “what is your name” that I want translated into French. However, I want it to be formal:

Formal Form in French

As you can see, the “votre” is the French way of designating “you” formally. Obviously, disregard (formelle), because that literally means “formal”. You want your sentence to translate as ”what is your name/Quel est votre nom” not “what is your name(formal)/Quel est votre nom (formelle). 

If you don’t enter (formal), Google Translate Feature defaults to the informal:

French Informal Translation

As you can see, I wanted the exact same sentence translate, but without adding (formal) to my sentence I now have the translation for the informal “you” conjugation, which creates a completely different sentence. 

For longer sentences, the Google Translate feature works rather well. It’s not perfect, but it’s really close. Nothing beats being a native speaker of a language but this tool will get your message across to people of other languages well enough.

It’s also useful to check the the translated features on the side:

Other Google Translate Features

These enable you to get translations with a single click by adding buttons to your browser’s toolbar. Then whenever you want to translate a webpage you’re viewing, just click the button. You can translate any part of the page by selecting that part before you click, and it’s pretty accurate. Once Again, all of these features are worth exploring once you have your translation.

It might not be 100% correct all the time, but it’s better than most costly translating software AND it’s free! Have fun exploring this translating feature - in the highly globalized e-world, you never know when you are going to need it!