During the Superbowl I did a couple blog posts with the second one being firmly planted in my mind as a good test for what real time search can do for traffic and why paying attention to real time SEO for certain events can help drive visitors.

Being in the field we are in I was interested to see if Google would do a search commercial or something around the Nexus One, I was actually pleasantly surprised to see it was a commercial based on search, actually all the different things search can do for someone using all the capabilities Google has. Most people are not aware of the way they can use search and this was a nice venue to show them.

All that said, I knew there would be a ton of search done on Google Superbowl Commercial and although I had real honest commentary on the subject I also knew that it would be a real time search trend that would trigger Google into having their scrolling box in their search results page scrolling news as it happened from Twitter and blogs.

Well, the results, in a very short period of time I had hundreds of visitors to the one post, you can see a bit of what I am talking about by looking at the keywords  sending traffic to my blog below for just a few seconds, click on the image for the details:

Real Time Search

This is the tail end of the real time traffic that came in, I wish I would of caught it from start to finish but this will give you a good idea of the terms that were sending traffic from the real time search box that scrolls on Google.

Just an example of how social media and taking advantage of it can do.

A few days back I was contacted by Webfusion.com about doing a quick interview for use on their blog. At first I thought that was an odd place to have an interview posted then I heard why.

For the month of February they are running a special on dotME domains, $5.88 for each .ME, that is a great deal. If you have been holding off grabbing a few the time would be right at that price.

Obviously I am a fan and I will be taking advantage of that pricing.

I have met Bradley Epstein from Webfusion in the past and I can vouch for him being a great guy to deal with.

If you want to read the interview you can check it out here: Branding Building with dotME

And to be clear, once again, this is NOT a paid post, I just wanted everyone to know of the great pricing that Webfusion has right now as a service to my readers.

I am sure many tech minded folks are talking about how unimpressive the Google superbowl commercial was. And to those of us using search to its fullest everyday it may seem very unimpressive.

Many people are already talking about how it should of been for the Nexus One, or some other whiz bang new application Google may have.

Well, in a world where most people are still getting their hands around some of the most basic features Google has this was a great way to showcase the various functionality you can get right from your search bar, flight times, local search, etc.

By telling a story one search at a time and each search showing an example of a functionality built right into Google they did a great job showcasing what search really is today, a way to find anything.

Although Bing may not be all that right now Google needed to showcase what people can do with their tools, most people are not aware that you can do all of those things right from the search bar. I am there are many superbowl watchers thinking of new things to search for they never thought of before.

Also, the commercial reminded me of the blog post I did the other day about watching long tail search queries.

As someone who loves to see great uses and promotion of "alternative" domain extensions I thought, great job, to the Flo.tv team.

Their mobile TV device looks pretty nifty and obviously they spent some bucks on their superbowl commerical. It was great to see a promotion with .TV as the domain extension used.

dotTV is perfect for a company like that and shows that with the proper application using something alternative can work quite well.

On a side note, Flotv.com is the same company, different site. Yep, they chose the .TV to show in the commercial not the .COM.

As a gadget lover I will be digging into their product a bit more as well.

Just a quick post to remind everyone to check their junk or spam folder in whatever email tool they use.

I am a big Microsoft Outlook user and sometimes the spam filter can be a bit aggressive and if I do not remember to go back and check the folder ever so often it can get a bit out of hand and it makes it impossible to find anything that may of been filed as spam that was actually something important.

As an example in the past week I had 2 advertising deals that actually went to my spam folder, both will now be advertisers on this blog and I would of missed those if I would not of check the folder.

Also, I had a domain transaction that I would of missed as well, not a large one but a deal none the less.

Those three items all together equal over one thousand dollars that I would of missed out on had I not checked it. Although I know I am not the only one that has this happen, I felt it good just to jog peoples memories, you never know what may be hiding in that folder.

I am making it a habit now to check at least once a day. That decreases the amount of time and who knows what little gem I may find.

On Facebooks 6th birthday they launched a new layout that will be available  possibly tonight for  80 million of their 400 million users.

You read that right they now have 400 million users, not bad for a 6 year old company, what is really interesting is that the company started with a focus on social networks for the college crowd and now the fastest growing group on the site is women above the age of 50, how is that for covering every market, I am lazy tonight and did not go dig up the exact age range group but it says alot for the service that it does attract all types of consumers.

And that is what it is all about, learning what consumers are talking about, buying, recommending, etc. Facebook is gathering data at a level only Google could imagine. Except, some would argue, the Facebook data could be even more valuable.

All that said, today Facebook also showed they are dead serious about search, by making the search box more visible and prominent in the layout users are more likely to search Facebook which will make the site even more sticky.

For an idea of how prominent search is now check out this posterous link.

This may seem subtle, but changes like this can make a huge difference in user behavior.

More and more this makes me realize how social and real time SEO will matter to those that focus on search marketing. Makes me glad I picked up SEORealtime.com...

My turn to jump on the bandwagon. As has been reported on many domaining blogs over the past few hours Francois decided to do a couple things today that frustated people:

• Added a donate button with some fairly direct language it would seem to make a point
• Added in some feeds that on the face of it seem to not be related to domaining

Well, sure the donate button probably offended some but I will let other people discuss that.

What I found interesting is that the feeds he added were feeds I had manually added into my feed list on Domaining.com, the bummer is when he removed them it removed them from my list too. Oh the horror of having to go back and spend 30 seconds adding them back in.

In all seriousness I actually appreciate the fact he tried to add some variety into the Domaining.com feed, I have said too many times before that domainers need to step back and see where domains fit into the bigger online world and make sure we understand what is happening around us. It is way to easy to get wrapped up in your own little niche and not see the  train coming.

Sites like Mashable.com, Techcrunch.com, and ReadWriteWeb.com all provide valuable insight and what they discuss actually is information that will help you plan your domain business and also help you understand what changes are coming and how to react.

I was just glad to see Francois chose great sites, as much as we domainers do not like Michael Arrington's view of domains TechCrunch is one of the sites I visit frequently, sites like Mashable keep you abreast of the social media world. We should consider these valuable sites, good try by Francois.

Well, they are added back into my feed, they were there before this and they will be there moving forward too.

Wow, now how is that for a domainer interview title, state code .COM owner interviews .ME state name founder, we thought it was neat.

Brian Null, a fellow Missouri resident and owner of MO.com reached out recently to talk about the launch of Missouri.me, MissouriWine.net, and other projects of mine like this blog.

I thought, heck, how fun would it be to have Missouri.me interviewed on MO.com , which for those who may not know, is the two letter state code for Missouri.

Thanks to Brian for taking the time, he actually did a great job asking me questions that I had not answered before around investment and social media.

Brian was a pleasure to talk to and I look forward to meeting him in person soon.

You can read the interview at Bruce Marler - Show Me The Entrepreneur

Tonight I decided to do some competitive analysis comparing traffic to certain towns and areas in Missouri to the competing newspaper website in the area.

I had done this for a few towns before but this time I did so on a larger scale, I cannot say I looked at every newspaper site but enough where I could spot trends in data enough where I felt comfortable making certain assumptions.

Well, a couple things were made real clear:

• Sites that had RSS feeds and were open to syndication had more traffic than those that did not, this makes sense to me but knowing how the media industry feels about that it does not surprise me that many do not offer RSS feeds.
• In the cases that it was evident they were doing other things to promote the site (i.e .promoting it in their own paper...) there was more traffic.

Without a doubt as rural broadband stimulus pushed broadband deeper into the rural areas these newspaper companies are going to falter fast, right now the rural papers are the only ones holding steady but from talking to small businesses the desperation is even starting to be felt in the small areas.

To give you an idea of how low the traffic stats are, a really large portion of the sites had Alexa rankings of 20 million to 10 million, the next larger amount was between 7 to 5 million. VERY few had Alexa rankings below 1 million. The ones that did were major cities.

To be honest I am not a fan of Alexa rankings since I have enough sites to see how the data can be skewed, but in a case like this where the user base is pretty non-tech savvy the rankings cannot be gamed, makes for a cleaner set of data, but still not perfect, but fine for this test.

Now, what may not be clear is that many of these newspapers cover more than one county, so it is not like the customer base is only 5 thousand people.

One thing I did find is the sites that have taken the time to form community/social interactions on the site are fairing much better.

If these sites cannot figure out how to bring more than a few visitors to their site a day they will not be able to keep advertisers, it is obvious they are fighting the battle to keep the status quo and if they do not figure something out quick they may be gone faster than we expected.

It may sound like I look forward to that, I do not, as much as I am building a business to take advantage of the shift it is actually a bit sad to see an industry fall apart because they refused to innovate and I do think their will be some quality journalism that suffers because of this.

One interesting note is I found one local newspaper in a town of less than 9000 that had an Alexa below 300K but then one in a town of over 30K that had an Alexa around 7 million. Seems if you have a plan and the community gets behind it you can get traction. Small town or not people are online and broadband is coming fast.

For those that are not aware I thought I would do a quick post about a webinar that is coming up on Thursday the 4th of February.

Smartname is holding the webinar to show off their thoughts on domain parking and selling strategies for 2010 and after seeing a demo of their new content site solution I think it would be worth attending.

Although I am not quite ready to do the full review so far I have been impressed with the ease of use and the way the content sites are coming out, as many know if you do not have type-in traffic but want to generate revenue with your site it becomes all about getting traffic with content, their system looks good so far and I look forward to writing a full review in the near future.

In the mean time if you want to sign up for the webinar sign up here.

And to be clear, this is not a paid post, but  I think we as domainers have to think about new, effective ways to monetize. I know there are some other companies working on new systems as well but so far Smartname is one of the only ones that I have been able to test myself and like what I am seeing but will hold out full judgment until I test further.

An example of a site that has been minimally tweaked is Deployed.net , this took less than 3 minutes.