I read, over at the Red Fly Marketing Blog, that you can get a $100 advertising credit on Facebook courtesy of Visa. As part of a Visa promotion, they are offering Facebook users a $100 credit to try out the Facebook advertising platform. All you need to do is to add the Visa Business Network App and you get a coupon code and instruction on how to add the credit to your account.

Now I have never advertised on Facebook or MySpace before, but I would imagine that the conversions are pretty bad. I don’t think that many people would be looking at or clicking on any banner ads. People are just too engaged in their social networks. I know that I completely tune out all ads when I am on MySpace. But, anyways, this is a good chance to test the waters!

I love it. A great post over at Cartoon Barry the other day about the recent announcement of ICANN and how they will be offering custom domain TLDs. He poses the question of who will get the .SEO and .SEM domain names. The new custom domain TLDs will cost anywhere from $100,000 on up and will probably result in a bidding process in the instance that two parties want the same TLD.

TLDs are the extensions on domains, like .com, .net, .uk, etc. Since the price will be so high to get one of these custom TLDs only the big fish will be able to take advantage of them. And this is something that I do not particularly like. Whenever there is a situation where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer it rubs me the wrong way. But Barry suggests that the Internet marketing community ban together and all chip in to secure the .SEO, .SEM, and .SMO TLDs. He offers up that we should do this through a large industry organization like SEMPO. But my guess is that there will be many people who will want these TLDs and that with the bidding process the price will get VERY high!

Well, its all wide open now. In a huge announcement today from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) custom Internet domain suffixes have been approved. They have backed an initiative that will introduce an unlimited number of TLDs (top level domains). In the past they have approved such TLDs as .com, .net, and 249 country codes such as .ca for Canada and .it for Italy.

ICANN noted that they have spent $10 million in studying the new domain names and will spend another $10 million to implement them. Hey, why not, while you’re at it tack on a few extra mil for the organic SEO consultant! How the heck do you waste so much money researching a concept that is so obviously a good idea. It is a good idea because it will allow marketers and business people to better brand their domains. And it is good for ICANN and the rest of the domain registrars because it will net them an exponential amount of CASH. Of course the cost for registering one of these new custom TLDs will start at about $100,000 and will probably be a huge bidding war. I wonder who will get .searchengineoptimization?

It looks like Live Search has added a VERY nifty feature for skiers and snowboarders that allows you to view the local conditions at resorts via Instant Answers integration into their organic SERPS. Check out a search for whistler, it shows a onebox like result that shows the status, new snow, base depth, surface condition, lifts open, and links to a more detailed full report, resort site, and a link to the live search map of the resort. Now THIS is the type of thing that search engines were invented for! Kudos to the team at Live search, it seems like a long time since they have come out with something this useful and interesting.

No new snow? Well, I guess that is par for the course in sunny southern California!