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!

If you are not already familiar with Google Labs, may we suggest that you visit the Google Labs website and get acquainted with it.

This website is basically the experimental stage of potential Google applications and features. Google develops a potential application, puts it on Google Labs, allows anyone to explore the potential features, and after considering user feedback eventually decides if it will graduate to becoming a full-fledged member of the Google features family or if it will cease to utilize the application. Anyone can explore Google Labs and it gives users an interesting peek into the psyche and direction of Google.

Since Micro Niche Finder relies on Google (and this is because most people in the world rely on Google for their search queries), we take interest in Google’s experiments.

One of Google’s newest labs, called Google Script Converter, is an interesting experiment especially if your business is either based in India or serves a large Indian population. Most e-business are open to anyone in the world (such is the beauty of the internet), but sometimes keywords or products are country-specific. If your keywords or product is specific to India, this application may extremely useful to you. If your keywords or product are available to anyone in the world, consider this: India is the second most populated country in the world (after China, and India is slated to surpass China’s population in the near future), it is the world’s largest democracy, it has a booming middle class and thriving capitalist economy, and a large portion of the population is technologically savvy. In short, India is a large potential market and you might want to make conscious efforts to target this demographic.

You see, I mention India because as of right now Google Script Converter only converts the script of languages found on the Indian Subcontinent. If this script converter is successful, it may very well extend to other scripts and convert those as well (such as Arabic, Kanji, Urdu, Cyrillic, etc.). However, at this particular time only Indian scripts are available to change.

If you go to the Google Script Converter, you will see a screen that looks like this:

Google Script Converter

In the text box, you can type in words or even a website in your original language(for this example, we will be typing in English since we are based in America). In this example, I will type “Hello”.

Google Script Converter Text Box

Now you will notice a drop box with the words “Convert to” on the left and a “convert button” to the right of it. This drop box contains several scripts/languages: Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Tamil, Malayalam, Telgu, Marathi, Nepali, and English (fun fact: there are more English speaking people in India than there are in America, England, New Zealand, or Australia). Hindi, Marathi, and Nepali all use the same script called Devanagari, so these three languages all use the same style of writing.

Pick the script you wish to convert to (in this example, I will select Hindi):

Language/Script Converter

You will now see the text or website you entered into the textbox has changed into your new script!

New Script - In this example, Hindi (Devanagari)

This is the Hindi (Devanagari) script for the word “Hello”.

English to Hindi (Devanagari) Script Conversion

Now as you can see, this Google Script Converter merely changed the English “hello” into the Hindi (Devanagari) Script for “hello” – it DID NOT translate it (In Hindi, the translation of “Hello” would be “Namaste”). Translation is a totally different process – this Google feature just converts the script!

Having just the script converted is handy if you have a good verbal comprehension of a different language but are not proficient enough to read the language. By converting the script, you can now read the words in your preferred script and if you are familiar with the language you’ll know what the text or website says! If you do not know the language, you can take this converted script and use internet translation websites or software to translate it into your language of choice. Some websites offer translating service for free, others for a nominal fee. A word of caution: sometimes the “translation” from free websites isn’t quite perfect so it’s worth double or cross-checking the final translation!

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

When you register for a website, there are several types of domains to choose – the most popular being “.com”, but “.net”,  ”.org”, “.gov”, and “.edu” are some other types of domains found on the internet.

The domains of “.edu” and “.gov” are not available to the general public. In order to get a “.edu” or “.gov”, you must indeed be a government agency (“.gov”) or a fully credited postsecondary institution, such as a four year university (“.edu”).

Yet out of the other domains, which are all publicly available, the “.com” domain is the preeminent domain for marketing purposes. While search engines rank “.com”, “.org”, and “.net” etc. equally, people are more likely to type in “.com” at the end of a website than “.org” or “.net”. For this reason, if you are offered the choice of several domains when registering your website, it is always preferable to register with “.com”.

Micro Niche Finder scours the vast internet to bring you all the information you need on particular niches. Our software specifically uses Google to pull its information – and this is not an accident. While there are many other search engines out there (Yahoo, Live, AOL and MSN instantly spring to mind), none of these search engines compare to the sphere of influence Google possesses.

Unless your product and website domain name is immensely popular world-wide, it is very likely that most of your traffic will come via search engines. Well, let me rephrase that sentence: there is a HUGE chance most of your traffic will come from Google. When people discuss “search engines” the topic is really about Google, which has become synonymous with “search engines”. Google has indexed more pages than any other search engine and thus provides a greater amount of search results. It also offers an increasing array of free services, which makes it more appealing to internet users. It comes as no surprise then, that Google is the top ranked search engine year after year.

Here’s an astounding figure: more than 60% of all search engine traffic comes from Google. In fact, Google is so popular now that if every other search engine were to disappear tomorrow the flow of web traffic would remain almost virtually unchanged. Many internet users searching habits would remain completely unaffected; it is simply undeniable that Google is the top search engine in the world. For an interesting article with charts and figures explaining the search impact of Google, click here.

Thus, we use Google to extract the information you need on Micro Niche Finder. It is the most comprehensive search engine, it generates the most traffic, and it is used by more people than all other search engines combined. If we were to use another search engine to pull results for Micro Niche Finder, the information produced would not be of the highest caliber.

Micro Niche Finder pulls much of its information from Google – a company that puts a lot of its pride in their creed “Do No Evil”. Google recognizes it possesses an extraordinary amount of power and in the spirit of fairness it actively chooses NOT to engage in censorship related activities and such (or so they say).

Besides abstaining from the forces of evil, Google is a big supporter of net neutrality…most of the time. Net neutrality is a hot button issue, and not to oversimplify the matter, the crux of the argument for net neutrality is that the servers should not have the power to decide what content, websites, platform, etc., are “better” (and since it all comes down to money, “better” actually means “more profitable for broadband providers”) than others. In theory, broadband providers and telecommunication corporations could put a price tag on different websites, therefore economically controlling your decisions as to what websites to visit. An example of this would be if the price to visit facebook.com was two cents a visit and the price to visit myspace.com was .025 cents ( a quarter of a cent) per visit, which social networking site do you think would be more popular? That’s right, myspace would be – which is conveniently enough partnered with Google!

Or what if a standard internet package (for the sake of argument, pretend its $59.99 a month) included myspace.com, but to access facebook.com you had to upgrade your package from $59.99 a month to $69.99 a month? Myspace would win again, although really, it would be telecommunication companies (and the websites in cahoots with them) that would really win.

Google recognizes that net neutrality is critical to the success of the internet and actively tries to use its power to keep the information it finds open, fair, and free. Supporting net neutrality, besides disagreeing with a tiered website pricing system, is allowing users to find what they are looking for – if someone searches “sculptures made of ear wax” Google (in theory) will supply the answers. Even though it may be gross to most sensibilities, who are they to judge? After all, the very nature of judging is not neutral!

Sometimes Micro Niche Finder users are interested in finding niches that highlight human vices; namely gambling, adultery, drug use, etc. For instance, it’s easy to see why it might be profitable to find a niche for gambling. It’s a booming business (multi billion dollars a year) and by using some marketing skills and specific keywords found on Micro Niche Finder, the potential for profits is tantalizing.

Yet on keyword searches in the aforementioned topics, sometimes it comes to light that information simply won’t show up. For example, a Micro Niche user looking for “online gambling” for a potential niche might not have their SOC work. If Google is net neutral, does no evil, and keeps information accessible, why would this be so?

The reality is that gambling and the like are markets where Google has decided to block certain requests, including the info that comprises the SOC. Over the years, it’s become apparent that it’s mainly human vices and ethically questionable human tendencies/behaviors that raise the red flags on Google’s end and thus prevents information from being fed into Micro Niche Finder.

Not quite as net neutral as you would expect, huh?

Since we value honesty and transparency, we feel it is important to tell how it is – you can definitely pursue niches in those categories but be forewarned Big Brother Google may put the kibosh on information you want.

If you are already twittering, our username is Micronichetool . If you are not yet on twitter, consider signing up. It’s free, easy, and a great way to connect not only with us but with other people! If you so choose, you can also use twitter from your phone – perfect for those on-the-go messages!

We try to send out at least one tweet a day, but usually there are more. When we find an interesting article, visual, blog, squidoo page, etc., we make a tweet about it. If we find niches that pique our interest or display potential, we pass the message along to our followers. Who knows – possibly one of our suggested niches might be just the perfect niche you have been looking for! Or, perhaps our daily niche tweets will be the inspiration for a different great niche. Internet marketing is very rapidly evolving and Twitter is one tool that all internet marketers should become acquainted with sooner rather than later.

Again, our name is Micronichetool. Find us, follow our tweets, and we would love to follow yours!

Some features in Micro Niche Finder such as search for affiliates, clickbank marketplace search, domain tools lookup, etc bring up an IE browser session to display the results. I’ve had one report that these features aren’t working.

Sounds like the IE install is buggy. I’ve had problems with IE in the past and this has fixed the problem 90% of the time:

This from Microsoft Knowledge Base:

To resolve this problem in Internet Explorer, follow these steps:
1. Quit all programs that are running.
2. Click Start, and then click Run.
3. Type regsvr32 urlmon.dll, and then click OK.
4. When you receive the “DllRegisterServer in urlmon.dll succeeded” message, click OK.

If this does not resolve the problem, repeat steps 2 through 4 for each of the following files (in step 3, replace Urlmon.dll with each of the file names below):
• Shdocvw.dll
• Actxprxy.dll
• Oleaut32.dll
• Mshtml.dll
• Browseui.dll
• Shell32.dll