Once you search a term, you will see a screen with columns. Inside of these columns will be some familiar features (SOC, OCI, Ad Cost, etc.) but there will be new columns containing new features too. The second column is a new one, and it will say “Domain Availability .com/.org/.net”.

The reason you see “.com/.org/.net” is because these are three top-level domains. “.gov” and “.edu” are not available to the public, and “.biz” doesn’t generally rank as well as the “.com”, “.org”, and “.net” domains. Micro Niche Finder will only check these three types of domains for availability.

Once you have found a keyword or niche that appeals to you, click on the small circles with the question marks inside.

Domain Availability Feature

Micro Niche Finder will check to see if any of the domain names are available – if there is an available opening, you will see a green circle with a check mark. If there is not an available opening, you will see a red circle with an “x” in the middle.

Domain Availability

Each of these three circles corresponds to a domain name. The first circle (the one to the far left) corresponds to “.com” domains. The second circle (middle circle) corresponds to “.org” domains. The third circle (the one to the far right) corresponds to “.net” domains. As in the example above, I instantly see that for my search term (“mystic topaz jewelry”, in case you were wondering) there is not a “.com” domain available. Therefore, www.mystictopazjewelry.com is not available for purchase. However, the second and third circles are both green with checkmarks, so I know that www.mystictopazjewelry.org and www.mystictopazjewelry.net are both available domains! If I want either or both of those, I know I can buy them right away.

Now, you can click on these red and green circles to come to a new screen:

Check Domain Availability

On the left you will see the complete domain names. On the right, you will see if it is available or not quite literally spelled out for you. If any of the domain names appeal to you, check the box next to the appropriate domain names (in this example I clicked on both of them). Once the domain you want is selected, click on the “Add Checked Domains to my Domain List” tab. If the domain isn’t available, you will not be able to select it.

Micro Niche Finder will put your selected domains on a list, which allows you to store and purchase domain names in bulk.

To access your Domain List, look at the tabs running along the near top of your screen. These tabs include “Home”, “Back”, “Manage Searches”, “Manage Projects”, “Manage Background Queue”, among others. There is a tab called “My Domain List” – click on that to see your selected domains.

My Domain List

You will then see a screen with an entire list of domains you previously clicked – select those you would like to purchase  and then click on the big blue tab titled “Bulk Registration”. For convenience, if you wish to select and purchase your entire list, click on “check all domains”.

List of Domains to Register

Once you click the “Bulk Registration” button, you will see a screen pop up:

Register Domains

Click OK and a new window in your default web browser will appear. You will see a large white box where you can enter the domain names you wish to purchase. This is easy and you DO NOT have to manually type everything in. You see, when Micro Niche Finder opened this window for you, it also automatically copied the domains you checked using Windows Clipboard.

All you have to do is right click in the white box and select “paste” from the menu. Or, you can click in the box and hit Ctrl + V on your keyboard (this is a paste shortcut). The website(s) you selected will then appear in the box. It will display the first 500 websites you clicked.

Paste Domain Names

You will have to enter the access code (the digits) into the blank box – this is the websites way of making sure you are not a robot or some type of software. Once you enter the access code, click the blue search button.

Once it verifies that these websites are available, you will have to set up an account if you haven’t done so already. It is pretty self-explanatory from here, as the website does a really good job of walking you through the registration and payment process. For your information, these two example websites were not purchased, so they might still be available if you want them.

Once you have purchased the domain names, it’s time to TAKE ACTION and get your websites in working order! You don’t want to purchase the domain names and then let them languish unless this is your purpose so that you can attempt to “resell” them at a higher profit. Once you own your domain names, begin creating content, backlinks, and start your marketing plan!

The newest update for Micro Niche Finder is available starting immediately.

We have updated classic features (such as Project Managements) and added new features in version 4.6.1. New features include Measure of Backlinks, Domain Name Availability, and Multi-Threaded Downloading, among others.

You should see that there is a new version available for download on the main screen of your Micro Niche Finder as soon as you open the program. If you don’t see this notification, or if you don’t recall how to download the latest version of Micro Niche Finder, this posting about Program Updates will have you downloading version 4.6.1 in no time!

Micro Niche Finder’s OCI feature (Online Commercial Intent) is one way to determine a niches potential value. The higher the OCI the more likely a person searching for that particular term is looking to make a purchase, so obviously the higher the OCI the better!

Lately some users have noticed a problem with OCI – when clicked on, instead of a number the words “no response” eventually appear. This is not a problem with Micro Niche Finder, but rather with Microsoft and Microsoft Adlabs. However, there are several options you can utilize to get your OCI working.

Previously, the OCI timeout value was a rather low wait period. You can now change the timeout period for OCI by either increasing or decreasing the timeout period. It’s incredibly easy to do this.

On your main screen, look on the right hand column under the heading “important announcements”. Beneath the Tab “Google Settings” (which has always been there), there is a new tab called “OCI Timeout Setting”.

OCI Timeout Setting

If you receive “no response” instead of a numerical value in your OCI, you would want to increase the Timeout value. The maximum time you can set is for 180 seconds (3 minutes) but the minimum amount of time is 10 seconds.

OCI Timeout Value

If these tweaks don’t work, we have also included the website where you can get the OCI figure directly. We have noticed that finding the OCI in this manner sometimes clears the cache.

OCI Timeout Value - Text is a Hyperlink

Simply type the phrase you are looking for in the search bar, and hit the button “query”.

OCI - Run a Search Query

This will generate an OCI number, but their values go from .01 to 1.00. So if your search value comes to .93, think of it as 93% (a high OCI) – the higher the number and closer to 1.0, the higher the percentage for OCI.

Micro Niche Finder does a great job at helping you find hot potential niches, but we have noticed that there are some theme keywords that people use when they are in a buying mood. While any keyword could be a money making keyword, some words are more indicative of purchasing than others.

For example, localized keywords tend to fare well. Instead of a keyword like “living room furniture”, “Living room furniture in Chicago” will do well. Someone who adds a localized keyword is hungry for a product – be it informational, which you could cover via an article or blog leading to your product – or a tangible product, one that can be purchased. It doesn’t have to localized on a city level…county, state, even country in some cases works (ex: “Beer Steins from Germany”).

Another kind of keyword that does well is brand names…but this is a fine line to walk. Generally, with brand names, your domain name cannot include the brand name within it because the parent company owns the brand name. So, www.childrensnikeshoes.com would probably NOT be a good idea, because “nike shoes” are included in the domain name and Nike has every legal right to either make you shut down the website or hand over the domain name to them. But if you optimize the keywords “childrens nike shoes” on your website, the brand name keywords (nike shoes) will bring traffic to your website. While Nike serves well for this theoretical example, it probably wouldn’t work as well in the real world without dedicating a lot of time and resources to overcome the stiff competition. Fret not, there are an innumerable amount of brand names to choose from! Furthermore, someone searching for a specific brand name has most likely already decided that they wish to make a purchase, so all you need to focus on is positioning yourself high in the rankings!

Keywords the denote a bargain tend to do well too…examples being “cheap” , “discount”, “sale”, etc. Keywords that highlight uniqueness also do well too, examples being “antique”, “unique”, “special”, etc.

On the other hand, words like “free” generally mean the person isn’t looking to make a purchase, otherwise they never would have included “free” in their search terms. However, free is a great segue to other purchasable goods – maybe the person is looking for a free ebook, which you provide, and then you upsell them either by getting their names on your mailing lists or by offering them a related product at a good price, for instance.

Remember, these are just tidbits of interesting info we’ve picked up along the way, nothing set in stone. The best bet to conquering a niche is to take into account all the factors and data that Micro Niche Finder conveniently organizes for you.

Have you ever wondered how users interact with a list of search results? In the world of internet marketing and SEO we know some aspects of a webpage are important (page rank, title, keywords) mostly through repeated, real experiences and intuition. A study from Cornell University gives scientific facts and figures to support tenets of SEO that we (as in, internet marketers) already knew to be true.

Before delving into what Cornell’s study reveals, it should be noted that this study was done with a limited amount of participants (26 people in total) so the results should not be taken as an immutable law. This study, besides being interesting, is really just a foundation for more scientific analysis to come.

Let’s pretend we are looking up the term “Moroccan furniture”. The Google result will be as such:

Moroccan Furniture - Search Results

This is the entire first page of the search results. The Cornell study illustrates what users will do when presented with the information provided by the first page. They developed a “heatmap” that shows what links were most likely to get clicked and what links people would spend the longest amount of time on. Here is their sample:

Heatmap

The heatmap shows that on average, more than half (56%) of all people will click on the first link, and these people will spend more than a quarter of their allotted time on that website. For internet marketers this is important to know! The next tier, still hot but not on “fire” so to speak, only gets a click through rate of about 13%! That is a tremendous difference in the sheer volume of clicks and visitors, but once clicked through, the link in the second tier still retains visitors for almost as long as the top ranked (25% as opposed to 28%). As the heatmap goes down the list, the percentage of people who click on a link and the amount of time spent on that link decreases with each tier.

If we combine the principle of the heatmap to our Google query about Moroccan furniture, the result would be thus:

Moroccan Furniture - Search Results Combined With Heatmap

According to this study, the higher ranked your website, the more visitors you will receive and the longer they will spend perusing the website. This is certainly a good rule to follow, but understand there are variations. For example, I personally have a “root for the underdog” mentality so I’m more likely than most to give the lower ranked links a fair try. Another example of a variation: sometimes the title on link number 3 is more compelling than the (better optimized) title found in link number 1, so the third link will receive more visitors than would be typical of other examples. There are many variations so don’t fret if your website isn’t the top ranked search result!

Also, this study did not take into account the “Shopping Results” and so its effects on the heatmap are not known. This is also why in the above example there are no colors surrounding it.

Interesting things gleamed from the heatmap – the top two links get more than half the traffic. Position number 7 actually gets the lowest amount of clicks (check the Cornell Google heatmap – .36% of all people clicked on 7^th place link, but 8^th, 9^th, and 10^th place links all received more clicks – 2.91%, 1.45%, and 2.55% respectively). Why is the 7^th place link receiving so few visitors compared to the rest of the page? Well, the answer is unclear for certain, but it seems like because it is located right at the point where users must scroll down to see the rest of the results it gets lost in the shuffle. In fact, only one person out of the study even clicked the 7^th place link. If this holds true after more tests, it will be safe to say that although  being on the first page of Google is great, being the 7^th link is not so good after all!

The 7^th position is even more interesting when you take into account the scanning process, as illustrated in this map

Scan Results

The black line in the middle denotes the rank of the link. So for link #1, the black line is that place value…that’s why there is no gray bar above it, because nothing can be ranked above #1. This is also the same reason why link #10 has no gray bar beneath it – because nothing is ranked lower than #10 on the first page. #10 has a high gray bar above it because all links are ranked above it. Understand?

So when looking at this graph, it becomes clear that being ranked #7 is not entirely beneficial. The first 5 listings are clicked after browsing through 1 to 2.68 listings above and below it, while the 7th listing is clicked after the entire page is examined! This is probably due to the need of the user to scan down and #7 getting lost in the shuffle. You can also see that the number of listings scanned above the clicked result is much bigger than the number of listings below. This indicates that users browse the list from top to bottom, but this is something internet marketers have been fairly confident about for a long time – I don’t know anyone who scans search results from bottom to top.

While this is an interesting study, it’s not concrete so don’t fret if you are ranked the (un)lucky #7 in the search results. While it’s definitely best to be ranked really high (as in, first or second) on the search results, there are all sorts of variables that come into effect that will determine how successful your website is, no matter where you are ranked.

The entire findings are available at: http://www.cs.cornell.edu/People/tj/publications/granka_etal_04a.pdf

Micro Niche Finder is a fantastic software that digs up hot potential niches. Since you have used it to find niches and profits for yourself, you may want to consider becoming an affiliate and market this product to others for a slice of the profits. The commissions for all sales on the front end (meaning directly derived from Micro Niche Finder) is 50% and commsission for sales reoccurring on the backend (meaning Niche Informant) is also 50%. Yes, you can earn HALF of every sale merely for marketing the product, which you already know works and saves valuable time.

First and foremost, to be a Micro Niche Finder Affiliate it is necessary to have a clickbank account. Setting up an account is easy but absolutely crucial to being an affiliate, so if you are not familiar or don’t have a clickbank account, click on the previous link to get you started!

Once a clickbank account is secure, there are tools available for you to get started. Naturally you can write blog postings, market on your own website, spread the word via social marketing, etc. We do provide ideas on successful emails that have been used, videos,  squeeze page tips, graphics, etc. We want you to do well (of course!) so we have provided valuable tools that you can use as you see fit for your success.

An important aspect to having success on Kindle and other e-readers is to have an eye-catching cover. Most PLR ebooks already have a cover image included, and if your book has a cover image it is an easy process to simply upload it.

If an ebook you wrote, commissioned, or purchased does not include a cover image, there are several options to remedy your situation.

You can always create your own ebook cover image. Simply Googling “software to create ebook covers” or “how to create ebook covers” will generate pages of software (some free, others at various price points) that will enable you to custom make your own unique ebook cover. With this method you have the greatest artistic control of the cover, but there is usually a learning curve associated with becom ing fully confident using the software.

If you desire a one-of-a-kind cover image but have no time or talents for making your own image, it’s generally inexpensive to outsource the task. Once again, Google is the best resource to find people willing to make your cover image at a reasonable price – and sometimes, you can even negotiate your price!

You can also find an image to use via the internet, but BE CAREFUL. You must find an image that is Royalty-Free and give you full rights to use the image as you see fit. Most images found via Google or other search engines do NOT fit this category and thus are unfit to use. Copyrighted images are obviously not fit for use either. Failure to find a royalty-free image with full rights can result in legal issues, including copyright infringement. Legal issues stemming from illegally using images are expensive and are best avoided.

When we need an image we found the website www.sxc.hu to work in a pinch. Performing a search using a keyword related to your ebook topic will generate professional, beautiful images that are mostly useable (always read the print next to the image to make sure) and look great on e-readers. For images like these, it’s not necessary to add text so that your title is on the book – unless your software is good, sometimes it cheapens the look of the cover.  We have not found any evidence that covers without texts do worse than covers with texts, so use your personal judgement.

While most people still use Windows operating systems (amongst others) and PCs, we do get the occasional question about the compatability between Micro Niche Finder and Mac computers with various Mac operating systems.

As far as PC’s are concerned, Micro Niche Finder will run under Windows XP, Vista and Windows 2000. However, Micro Niche Finder is not outright compatible with Macs. Fret not! This is not an insurmountable protoblem. Micro Niche Finder will run on Mac operating systems with some type of PC Emulation software such as Parallels and a Windows operating system.

There are many emulator options available to Mac users to make PC compatible programs such as Micro Niche Finder function properly on a Mac. The previous link provides a website to help Mac users find the right emulation solution for their needs.

There is an interesting feature being tested in Google Labs right now called “Google Squared”. For the moment it is an experiment, but one day it may “graduate” and become a full fledged feature on Google.

After exploring this feature, one advantage we see is that it helps users research topics and generate content very easily.

For example: Let’s say I am an affiliate of some company that supplies products for twin babies, and I want to write original content (which Google appreciates and thus ranks higher!) for my niche. The problem is I know only a little bit about twins, but not enough to write plenty of unique articles about. Research is clearly necessary to writing high quality articles, and Google Squared makes this a quick process.

Click on the text to find Google Squared . For my example, I typed “expecting twins” in the search box and then hit the button that says “square it”.  I chose these keywords because I suspect, although I don’t know for certain just yet, that there is more than enough information to write about when it comes to expecting twins.

Google Squared my results as such:

Google Squared - Expecting Twins example

I now have several channels to pursue in my quest for more knowledge: I could research about important food to eat during pregnancies with twins, delivery classes insights, how to know if multiples are on the way, risks associated with twins, etc. Right away I have many (this is only a snapshot – there are more) avenues to read and research so that when I write my unique articles they can eventually  dominate the rankings.

The United States Federal Trade Commission recently updated its guidelines. If you are not a citizen of the United States and if your business and servers are not based in the United States, the following law may or may not apply to you (depending on the laws  in your country of citizenship).

While the guideline is very technical and long, the new update, in brief, is of paramount importance to bloggers. Some bloggers will write reviews about places or products, often favorable, and in the past the blogger did not have to reveal if they were paid to write a (presumably favorable) review or if the product or place was given to the blogger for free.  Seemingly legitimiate and unbiased views were in actuality paid advertising and consumers, intentionally or not, were being mislead by these cash-for-kind practices.

This practice is now illegal – and if the offense is serious enough, the FTC can go to court and get an injunction against your website and force you to pay redress to consumers “injured” by your advertising practices. This quickly adds up to a lot of money, so it’s best to follow the FTC guidelines to avoid the hassle and headache. If a company gives you a “freebie”  product or pays you, your review is actually now considered an endorsement. And like all products, endorsements need to be made public, so just tell the truth! There is no shame in saying, “Company ABC gave me a product for free and I think…” or something to that extent. Nor is it shameful to state that “Company XYZ has endorsed me this blog”. And just because you have been given freebies or paid some money, remember it is not wrong to write a less than steller review on a product given to you for free or that you were paid to endorse. Your customers or viewers appreciate candid, thoughtful insights and companies (yes, even the one that ‘hired’ you) appreciate the same sort of feedback. Honesty is always the best policy.

If you previously engaged in these practices, your business strategy obviously has to change. And if you never engaged in this sort of behavior, it’s still a good law to understand so that you never cross the line. Furthermore, this law serves to protect the consumer, which may be YOU in some cases.

Click on the following link to make sure you become familiar with the new FTC guidelines!