If you hadn’t heard of Foursquare, it’s a GPS-based application that lets you “check in” to the network whenever you visit an establishment of any kind. It doesn’t matter if you’re sitting in traffic on the Golden Gate Bridge, or having a slice at the local hole-in-the-wall pizzeria: simply open your Foursquare app (or the website), tap “check in,” and find the name of the building you’re in on the list once it refreshes. If it’s not there, you can add it, and it becomes a permanent inclusion. Then, “check in” to that building and get some points for doing so. Your points accumulate and give you serious e-cred (once again, if you’re a nerd) amongst the community, and you can be designated as the “mayor” of a building, location or establishment if you’ve checked in more than anyone else through time.

Beyond this, you can leave a comment. Much like using Twitter, these “Foursquare tweets” can be reviews, comments or anything else you’d like. You can view others’ comments, and they can view yours. This can either be great for business, or a real curse if your service, food or products suck. It’s a big score for humanity, since it adds another incentive (or threat) to those who do bad business anywhere.

Foursquare, to a major degree, has a huge subculture that is best compared to Twitter users and their “Tweet-Ups.” Foursquare’s gimmick are “badges,” which are earned by doing various things: checking in X amount of times, being the first to check in to a place that hasn’t been noticed before, checking in to multiple locations across regions, etc. There’s even an online store where you can buy wearable pin or patch versions of the classic Foursquare badges and wear them on your backpack or jacket. Believe me, it’s big, and getting bigger by the week.

I still don’t see Foursquare as being a threat to Twitter, or even a competitor. They both serve different functions. Now that Twitter is jumping on the geo-location bandwagon, it’s possible that they might be going into a similar direction, but Foursquare has already established its roots in the local “check in and comment” market, much like the way Yelp has become the official place to rate any business. Speaking of which, Yelp has already treaded on Foursquare’s turf – this will be an interesting battle, to say the least.

It’s early 2010, and one thing is for sure: Foursquare is in an obvious “neanderthal” phase. More than half the time, the buildings I check in to don’t even exist in their database, and I have to add them. Other times, you’ll notice how multiple Foursquare users have inputted the name of a place (i.e., “Vince Lombardi service area,” “Vince Lombardi rest stop,” etc.) more than once, with different punctuation or wording, yet, they’ve all made it through the system. This is indeed a problem, and a sloppy one at that. For the future, Foursquare should clamp down on legitimate names of businesses or some sort of uniformity that will disallow “sloppiness.”

The service has huge implications for what’s to come. Will businesses notice and contact, hire or reward “mayors,” or run promotions for customers who check in to their stores? Most likely.

Personally, I can’t wait to see new CMSs or even Joomla or Wordpress plugins that will let us create our own “check in” feature for our own local sites.

The announcement came to me from a GoDaddy email blast. The extra .50 – .80 cents or so won’t make a difference to those who own a handful of domain names, but if you’re like me and own hundreds (or thousands), boy is this going to be painful.

The change was brought about by Verisign; so, expect all registrars to up their prices.

What can you do right now? If you haven’t already done so, renew all of your domains immediately to take advantage of renewals while they’re still at their current prices. Come July 1, 2010, you’ll be paying higher fees, like it or not.

I suppose the first taste of this came when my corporation hired a multimedia agency to redo our TV campaign and re-structure our in-house conversion management. One of the steps they recommended was to use systems like Dart for Advertisers, and virtually make it so that there’s no need for me to sit here and babysit AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing or MSN Ad Center anymore.

Aside from the whole outsourcing thing, have you noticed any trends with SEM platforms? AdWords alone has new features including Conversion Optimizer, which basically turns off your ability to set maximum CPCs for your keywords, and automates them based on an algorithm so that better ads are shown more often during better times of the day, where conversions are more likely to happen. Yes, it does work like a charm, too.

Let’s face it, SEM isn’t an 8 hour a day job. Unless you’re running a short term hyper-local campaign, you’re probably only doing major work once a month by checking up on keyword trends, pausing keywords that haven’t converted at all, or added new ones that have shown up on Google Keyword Tool or Google Insights for Search. Maybe you’ve thrown in a newly written ad or two. Beyond that, you were probably reading the news or playing Mafia Wars.

Even if you’re only slightly paranoid, you have probably seen this coming. SEM accounts by their very nature need little babysitting aside from keyword research. They set daily budget limits, so, it’s not like you have to be there to pause the account at 4:00 PM when you’ve spent enough money for the day. New conversion-based options and automated bidding tactics leave the grunt work up to the algorithms and settings, leaving you to be a totally replaceable employee.

The best resolve here is to build a case for your company’s need to ramp up social networking to build relationships, and mini-site building for the sake of getting more conversions. They’ll keep you busy, and nobody knows what the hell those things are besides you (it’s your chance to explain it and to raise some eyebrows in one of those upper management “yeah, we need this!” revelations).

Conclusively, a SEM/SEO/Social networker holds much more value than “the guy who runs those Google ads.” That task is quickly heading toward full automation – like it or not!

For starters, I don’t really use Twitter for anything but business. Having a Twitter account for personal use is rather pointless, considering how often I use Facebook (multiple times per day, every single day). For me, Twitter is a good way for me to keep my web visitors engaged on what I’m doing to update a site. That’s it.

The difficult part here is that Twitter has created a culture of “follow back.” People get offended if you don’t follow them back. Well, some do. Others will just delete you if you don’t.

So, you’re somewhat obliged to follow your followers, which in turn transforms your dashboard into an endless stream of worthlessness. Don’t get me wrong, I love my followers, but I don’t care about their lunches, current events or what their family members are doing. However, I have no choice but to see this. I do, however, follow several web developers, template designers and others who affect my business, and it’s important for me to read about their plans and updates. However, they get quickly buried in the pile.

Twitter somewhat addressed this by letting us organize visitors into buckets. This let me drop in the developers I follow into one bucket, the designers into another, and so on…however, it creates an extra step, since I’ll have to visit the bucket, and click a user to read all of their updates. It also defeats the core purpose of Twitter – being able to actually see their live Tweets as they happen.

With that being said, I’m never surprised at all of those statistics talking about how Twitter has an awful retention rate, or how they’re having such a hard time holding on to active users. At least with Facebook – I can simply “hide” someone from my front page live feed if they (or their gaming updates…or their constant selfless promotions) annoy me.

A Cease and Desist (called a C&D in short) is a notice that an intellectual property owner can send to ‘cease’ all unlawful activity being performed against it. In more human terms, it’s a legal letter you send to someone demanding that they stop doing what they’re doing, or else.

Of course, there can be two pretensions here: 1) You just want to scare the hell out of someone with a legal letter, and hope they’ll stop. If not, then you just give up and call it a day. Mission failed. 2) You want to scare the hell out of someone with a legal letter, and follow up with your promise of pursuing legal action.

Who are the kinds of idiots that you can send a C&D to? Scammers, spammers, content theives, cybersquatters, socialsquatters…anyone who is using your registered copyright or trademark without your permission, in a way that causes confusion (other people might think the false representation of your trademark are valid, and have come from you or your company), uses your business name in commerce (someone posing as you, using your good name to make themselves money) or is doing anything else that is obviously tarnishing your company name or property.

Note that I keep saying “registered” copyright or trademark. Technically, an un-registered copyright or trademark is still valid in the eyes of the law, it just has much less weight since it is subjective, difficult to prove, and has no legal backing like a registered version would. This is why I constantly urge people to register their business name properly.

In terms of the Cease & Desist letter, you’ll want it to sound as “frighteningly legal” as possible. Here’s the template I use:

Dear [CompanyName Representative] [Mr./Ms. Whoever],

Please be advised that I am writing on behalf of [My Company Name]. It has come to our attention that you are using the “[state the registered trademark/copyright]” mark, specifically found at: [give an exact URL of where the offense is taking place], is an infringement upon our registered US trademark, [State your 8-digit trademark ID number, or any other relevant number]. The rights to the “[state the registered trademark/copyright]” brand name are owned by [My Company Name], and this [trademark/copyright] was registered on [state the date it was registered].

The “[state the registered trademark/copyright]” mark is a widely known trademark for [whatever industry your mark has been trademarked/copyrighted under] that has been used in commerce since [state the date it first appeared in commerce]. My company has spent thousands of dollars advertising and promoting its brand name. This investment has generated widespread and substantial goodwill in the public acceptance for this trademark in the United States and worldwide.

The unauthorized use of the “[state the registered trademark/copyright]” mark infringes on our trademark registration, constitutes dilution of our registered trademark and is creating commercial confusion. Please relinquish the [list the domain name or social networking account name] to myself, the trademark holder. (or, state that you would like something taken down, if this is not in regard to an offending domain name or username).

Please advise me in writing no later than [input the date that is 30 days from today's date] that you have complied with this request.

(this is optional): In the event you do not act in accordance with the aforementioned, [your company name] will pursue all legal remedies.

Sincerely,

[Your Name]
[Your company name & all contact information]

Who should a Cease and Desist letter be sent to?

It depends on what event has happened. If you’re trying to get back your exact company name as an account name on a major social networking site (Facebook, MySpace, Youtube, Twitter), the C&D letter should be sent to their legal department. These sites always have a “help” section where you can search for “trademark violation” and find a contact link specifically for those instances. These sites do not waste time in responding to legal issues, and you should expect a response rather quickly with further information as to what happens next. Some of these sites will tell you to take the issue directly to the account holder (i.e., the account holder of MySpace.com/YourCompanyName). This move is dead wrong and unprofessional on their part, as they are the site owner. However, there isn’t much you can do beyond follow their instructions.

If you’re looking to send a C&D to an offending website, someone who has stolen your images or logo, or someone who is posing as you on the internet – send the letter directly to them by looking at their WHOIS information. If it is private or unavailable, you must contact their hosting provider through WHOIS, and send the C&D to them. They will most definitely respond to you. Another step you can take if the offender’s WHOIS information is hidden is to contact their domain name provider and demand that that the information is revealed. This is yet another case where you will most likely receive a prompt response.

Putting your money where your mouth is

Sending anyone a legal threat should never be a whim. If you’re going to threaten legal action, then most people (especially no-name content thieves working from their mother’s basement) will probably just give up and do what you ask. Others might tell you to piss off, and those are the ones where you’ll have to decide if legal action is worth pursuing or not. It really depends on how damaging they are being to your company. In those cases, a real C&D from your lawyer on their official letterhead might be the next best step.

What if the offender is international?

You’re pretty much screwed if the person offending your registered work is not in the same country as you. Unless you were able to afford the astronomical cost of registering an international trademark (which I doubt you’ve done), then you’re pretty much defenseless. The best you can do, in most cases, is to file a DMCA complaint and hope that the bad content gets taken off of the search engines.

In closing, a Cease and Desist letter is a good weapon you can use to combat content theft, or to simply make someone stop ripping off your intellectual property. It’s a way to potentially get back that social networking site username someone socialsquatted from you, or that cybersquatted domain name that’s profiting from the type-in traffic that was obviously intended for your company.

I never pick niches I like. I find niches and determine if they’ll be profitable. Then, I educate myself on them and start writing and building. I run sites about topics that I don’t give a damn about. However, all of the information on them is written from the perspective of “is this truly useful to someone who is searching for this topic?”, and I never publish a site that looks like garbage, or has useless content

I don’t care if it’s boring to do all of that mindless research to write quality articles for a quality site – I want to make money and I’ll do anything possible to achieve success. Your success, or even that extra paycheck all comes down to if you’re willing to go that extra mile that 90% of the rest won’t do.

Even if I go as far as having my websites pay for their own domain name renewals, my mission is accomplished – it eliminates the expense of owning yet another domain name, lets me amass a bigger domain name portfolio…and that’s fine by me. Their rankings will only increase as the years go by. Otherwise, I’m enjoying an additional $50 to $100+ per year from a single 10 page mini-site with AdSense that took me in the upward of a week and a half to two weeks to create (multiply that by the dozens, and it really adds to your annual income!)

Imagine finding a micro-niche and domain name for a topic in personal injury, insurance or accounting. All three of these broad categories are notorious for having expensive keywords in virtually any PPC program. Of course, it would be rather newb-ish to attempt to rank for these exact terms.

However, you’re smarter than that – do some keyword research. Pick a few branches of these categories, then do keyword research on THOSE branches, and you just might find a long tail micro-niche with a .com that’s available, and little competition. Who cares if the term only gets 300 global searches per day – get yourself on page one of Google (or easier yet, Yahoo or Bing) and make sure your AdSense ads are in all of the hotspots seen in the heat map diagram.

The catch is that you know nothing about these topics. They’re dreadfully boring. Most people are not going to be willing to educate themselves on these topics for the sake of creating a mini-site. The sites that DO exist for them were probably created by lawyers and accountants – neither of which know a damn thing about SEO. Starting to see a light at the end of the tunnel?

You sat though years of doing boring book reports in high school and/or college…surely you can muster up the strength to do it again. This time around, the incentive is that you’ll get a residual income from it :)

While the “write about what you like” crowd is sticking only with niches they like and are interested in (and I’m sure those niches won’t be profitable), you’ll have your opportunity to take the bull by the horns and diversify your portfolio of income-generating sites, even though they’ll be in topics you know nothing about.

Besides, you might learn something new, and that’s never a bad thing!

If you’ve been reading tech news for the past couple years, you could have gotten in early to snag a few great 3D TV related domain names when the chatter started in the mid 2000s. Obviously, whoever owns 3DTV.com, 3DTV.net and 3D.TV is sitting on a gold mine. Slated to be a revolution in the HDTV market, 3D TVs fit the requirements of displaying both 3D broadcasting (film shot with 3D cameras, which have two lenses) and being the pre-requisite for the new 3D Blu-Ray format, which has already been set in stone last December by the Blu-Ray Association. Everyone from Sony to Panasonic, LG, Samsung and several other huge companies are taking it very seriously.

I’ve been collecting mostly .com’s and several .net’s relating to both of these technologies in the past half year. It’s been nothing short of a mad dash, almost like a supermarket shopping spree – when a new market opens up, the world is your oyster in regard to domain names, since there’s no landrush period as there is with a new ccTLD. Even the little guy has a chance to get something really, really big.

Here’s the biggest question, though: will these domains ever produce? Are people going to be searching for generic terms like “OLED 3D TV” and “3D TV glasses,” or will they simply go straight to Amazon or BestBuy.com? If they do search for these terms, will they be faced with a cluttered Google.com SERP that’s filled with Google Product results (something you will never appear in, even as a dropshipper), a Google live feed box, and a mish-mosh of Adwords ads with organic results practically pushed on to page 2?

Or, would they be more inclined to go to a “branded” URL like 3Dcritic or 3Dfanatic? Think about it. What’s your strategy? To rank for generic terms and get lots of one-time purchases, or to create a custom URL and brand it, become a popular blogger on the topic, and generate sales through return visits?

The truth is, nobody knows what consumer behavior will be like for this market. Nobody even knows if 3D TV will be a complete flop. Wasting my money on Laser TV-related domains in 2008 proved to be nothing short of that…a waste! And, that was slated to be the “LCD killer.” Nobody even cares about Laser TV technology anymore…now, it’s all about OLED…which is way too expensive for the average person to even consider. Until then, these companies will keep milking LCD and Plasma.

As you can see, there’s a lot of thought that goes into entering this market. As for domains, as anyone in the field would tell you – if you’ve come across anything generic or worthy, just buy it. Drop it later if it proves to be a flop! The point of the matter is that you’ll have a choice, as opposed to crying about “should have/could have” in a couple years. Happy domaining!

In case you haven’t heard of it before, Google Webmaster has an option that lets your website “target” a specific country. This feature may give your site some preferential treatment in the country you choose. Located in Site Configuration > Settings, you’ll be able to click a checkbox next to “Target users in:”, unlocking a massive drop-down of countries. Choosing one will geographically target your site to that country.

This won’t mean that you’re guaranteed anything, or that you’ll get boosted in that country’s SERPs, but it does help Google associate your site more specifically with that region. One thing it might do is put LESS importance on your site in other countries.

One of the most helpful cases where the geographic targeting feature makes sense is in affiliate marketing. Say, for instance, you’re running an eBay affiliate site within Canada. Knowing how eBay Publisher Network (eBay’s affiliate program) evaluates your performance in terms of clicks vs. earnings, you’ll want to keep your clicks as low as possible. That means being “unseen” in as many countires outside of Canada as possible, as any of those international clicks will never amount to a sale on eBay Canada. It’s especially beneficial to a Canadian webmaster running a .com site, instead of a .ca site.

I’ve done this myself: using a .us domain name (which is automatically geo-targeted to the USA, like it or not), my site only received occasional visits from Canada and the UK, with an overwhelming majority in the US. That’s exactly what I wanted, too, since all of my affiliate links were strictly going to eBay – not eBay Canada or eBay UK.

Note that if you’re using any other country specific domain extension, Google Webmaster will automatically bind your site to that country. There are a few exceptions, including .tv and .me, which can be geographically changed to any other country you want.

With the rise of localization this year, expect “being local” to be one of the biggest deals in internet marketing. Got plans to go international? Create subdomains like uk.mysite.com, fr.mysite.com, etc., and geo-target each one specifically to a seperate country in Google Webmaster (remember, subdomains count as seperate domain names!)

Let the geographic targeting feature be an initial step toward getting the visitors you really want, and remaining a little more hidden to the rest.

When it comes down to thinking up a name for a new website, some people opt to name their project or business with at least one (if not two) keywords that they want to be associated with. Many businesses have benefited from this…for instance: Pear Analytics, Search Engine Journal, iPhone, Pizza Hut, etc. Perhaps these entities haven’t purposely included their main keyword for SEO (certainly not Pizza Hut, since it was around before the public internet era), but it sure helps these businesses rank for those terms for one main reason: anyone who references them as a company will automatically be including that much-desired keyword in a backlink that points to their site.

Here’s another example: Wordpress theme designer “PremiumThemes.net” has its focal keyword as its own actual name. Therefore, it’s assured that he’ll naturally get tons of links pointing to his site with the advantageous keyword “premium themes,” which happens to be a major search term for people who look for Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal and other website themes that have a price tag on them. As a result, the site is always within the top couple results for a Google search of “premium themes” (which enjoys about 40,500 searches per month according to Google Keyword Tool, at the time this article was written!) According to Backlink Watch, the site has well over 12,000 backlinks with a majority of them including that 2-keyword term, either with or without a space in the middle.

Think about it: the most grueling part about launching a site is associating it with a keyword. While you’ll have to mindlessly build links to your own site, you’re also hoping that others will throw you an occasional link here and there along the way. There’s nothing more that you’ll want during this initial launch than keyword-loaded links that include the search terms you’ll want to rank for.

This is why exact keyword domains will NEVER decrease in demand. Many debate the hypothesis which states that having keywords in your actual domain name is a factor in helping you rank for those words in search engines. This may or may not be true, but one thing is for sure, it guarantees that you’ll get backlinks with those keywords.

This article was taken from Pixelrage.net – Ramblings of an Internet Marketer

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