Congratulations to our newest Affiliate Spotlight winner, Fiona Mary Ivancsik from Sydney Australia!!!

Fiona Mary Ivancsik has been an affiliate of Micro Niche Finder for a little over four months now. In this short time, Fiona has developed a very specific method for finding high-quality niches using Micro Niche Finder and gives her advice on what constitutes a good potential niche.

To read about Fiona’s strategy for finding profitable niches, check out our Facebook Fan Page and look under the “Affiliate Spotlight” box (left hand side of the page, underneath our ‘People Who Like This’ box). To learn even more about Fiona, check out her marketing website Fiona Mary Online.

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.

An interesting report recently released explained that everyone on twitter only has 5 degrees of separation from each other. In theory, this means you could trace your connection to anyone on twitter in five followers or less. I decided to test this for myself using Micro Niche Finder’s twitter account.

The results were surprising. Every random celebrity I could think of had some connection to our twitter account within 5 degrees of separation (with the exception of MC Hammer – we have 6 degrees of separation). Sometimes there were even multiple connections to a celebrity, as in this example with Stephen Colbert ( he’s the host of the popular show ‘The Colbert Report’ in the United States):

Interconnectedness of Twitter

The twitterverse is indeed a lot smaller than it may initially seem. Several companies, using complex algorithms, have determined that even though most people are 5 followers away from each other, the second most common degree of separation is a mere 4 followers away from each other. A company called Sysomos created a pie chart that shows the interconnectedness of people on twitter:

Twitter Degrees of Separation Chart

Even more interesting is the fact that about 22% of all twitter relationships are reciprocal (where both people follow each other) – a whopping 88% of all twitter connections are one-way (in real life, this would be considered stalking, but for social media networking, it’s fine!). This has serious implications for retweets – no matter how many followers a person may have, a retweet has the potential to reach thousands (perhaps even millions) more people. To illustrate this point, the Department of Computer Science at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology computed the potential impact of retweets and came up with this spiffy little graph:

Retweet Graph

The importance of these studies for internet marketing is that it proves that one well written tweet can travel quickly throughout the twitterverse and reach an audience of gigantic proportions. If there happens to be a link in that tweet (to your blog, your affiliate website, your website, etc.) the potential for a higher number of page visits, rankings, and sales increases.

If you want to see your connection to other twitter users, two good websites to try include http://whofollowswhom.com/ (this is in depth but takes a while to compute though) and http://twtrfrnd.com/ (this may also take a while too, and may not be as in depth). The results may even surprise you!

Please join us in congratulating Michael Murray from Tarpon Springs, Florida, our newest Affiliate Spotlight Winner!

Michael has been a Micro Niche Finder affiliate for a year now. He says that originally he was attracted to the product from the videos we release showing Micro Niche Finder in action, and he was so impressed with the software that he became an affiliate!

To be a successful internet marketer, Michael strongly suggests not falling victim to the “bright shiny object” syndrome, and gives good advice about multiplying your business strategy.

You can read more about Michael Murray by going to our Facebook Fan Page  and clicking on our “Affiliate Spotlight” Box on the left hand column (it’s under our ‘people who like this’ box). While you are there, check out his blog called Tarpon Internet Marketing !

Amazon and Overstock.com have pulled their Affiliate Programs out of several states due to sales tax issues.  Here are some other options:

1) Register an LLC out of state.  Will cost you a couple hundred bucks.  Be sure to check with a CPA in your state and consider any additional tax obligations.

2) Sign up as an affiliate with Walmart or Target.  They have many of the same items as Amazon.

or

3) Monitize with Adsense or go through cj.com to find a specific merchant.

or

4) Go ahead and set up Amazon sites, get traffic to them and flip them.

or

5) Partner with someone in a different state.

or

6) Do something other then niche affiliate sites such as selling ebooks on Kindle, writing niche specific articles and selling them as PLR, consulting to offline businesses.

Or…

7)  __________ (you fill in the blank — click comments and let us hear your ideas)

James

We have an upcoming webinar tomorrow (May 5th)! Some of our friends, Rob Howard and Keith Dougherty, have stumbled onto a unique profit system that is so easy Keith taught his 10 year old daughter how to do it… and she earned money using this system in less then a week.

This system is so impressive that when James saw the Quad Cash Profit System he asked Keith and Rob to be guests on a webinar to show you exactly what its all about.They agreed but then went one step further… They’re going to come on the webinar and set up a profit stream using their Quad Cash Profit System live right before your eyes.

The essential details are as follows:

Date: Wednesday May 5th
Time: 7:00 PM – 8:00 PM EDT
Sign Up Page: http://www.snip2.com/re/qcbl
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 for this webinar so register for it ASAP! As always, this webinar is completely LIVE and FREE!

http://www.snip2.com/re/qcbl

I’d love to tell you more about the Quad Cash Profit System…but it’s too sweet…it’s too AWESOME actually…so I’ve been sworn to secrecy not to reveal anything more. You’ll just have to go to the webinar and see it for yourself