Although LevelTen does do business nationally, even internationally from time to time, we should not forget our roots right here in the great state of Texas. Non-Texans associate Texas & Texans with many images & icons, some of these include: BBQ, Old West style shootem’ up cowboys, The Cowboys football team, and pickup trucks.

Online Truck Accessories
If an out-of-stateter visits, they will soon find out, these are not the only things that make Texas great. Nonetheless, LevelTen recently acquired a new marketing client – an online truck accessories retailer out of Richardson, Texas, named ChromePickup.com. Since we did not design the site, in order to market their products effectively, I had to really spend some time getting my hands dirty by researching what speaks to their customers.

Having to learn about these Ford, Dodge, & Chevy products & merchandise reminded me of my own roots where I spent the first 18 years of my life — 90 miles North of Dallas, in a small town with the population of 3,000 people.

Urban Cowboy
In Dallas, people add spoilers to BMWs or spinning rims to Hummers. In the more rural parts of Texas, status symbols for vehicles include truck grille guards, headache racks, and mud flaps. These additional truck accessories give the perception that the truck owner has some real ranch-ownin’, animal stock sellin’, weekend huntin’, cowboy bling bling to throw around.

The State of the Union
Since 45% of the American population do live in rural areas, and trucks are quite popular not only in Texas, but other states as well, there is consequently a huge online market for truck accessories and types of truck accessories. This is shown by the online search volume and large numbers of companies competing below.

Look what Yahoo’s tool tells us about searches from this last November for different types of truck accessories. For your convenience I have linked to pictures of each item in case you were like me and didn’t have a clue what nerf bars or headache racks were.

Truck Accessories (80,537 searches)
Headache racks (1870)
Mud flaps (4,968)
Mudflaps (1,016)
(obviously supposed to be two words, but the one word form gets a lot of searches too)
Grille guards (1,993)
(yes, that is with an “e”)
Bed rails (9,207)
Nerf bars (8,244)
Light bars (5,243)

By adding the word “Truck” there is less competition and less, but more relevant, searches.

Truck headache racks (537)
(obviously two words, but the one word form gets a lot of searches)
Truck mud flaps (904)
Truck mudflaps (37)
Truck grille guards (187)
(yes, that is with an “e”)
Truck bed rails (693)
Truck nerf bars (842)
Truck light bars (860)

This week LevelTen launched our free online game site, 10Minute Flash. We loaded her up with over 2100 free online flash games. To learn what the gaming community was searching for we started by analyzing the search engine terms.

Gamming is hot, over 110,000 people search “games” a day. 26,488 are looking for online games and 24,688 for free online games. The most surprising search, “addicting games”. 16,399 people are searching for addicting games. Odd, how many people are looking for things to be addicting? Are there gamming recovery programs?

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During the holidays roads are packed with travelers on voyage to see their family and friends. Festive office parties occur where people bond through White Elephant gift exchanges, raffles, and funny fake award ceremonies. During this time highway patrol people are on the lookout for speeders, and people driving after one too many eggnogs, if you know what I mean.

In the spirit of the holidays and people being on the road, I have put together a list of some defensive driving tips & techniques.

Top 5 Defensive Driving Techniques for the Holidays in Texas

1. Drive Sober
If your friend or officemate’s face is rosy like Santa & his breathe smells like the one at the mall, take his keys. Don’t drive when you are tipsy and don’t let your friends either.

2. Slow Down
Texans aren’t as used to driving in the snow as Yankees & Midwest folk. If it’s sleeting or snowing and the roads are wet, slow down! If your car starts to skid or swerve, don’t slam on the breaks. Pump the breaks and carefully steer into the direction the car is swerving.

3. Yield
Pedestrians always have the right of way. This includes pedestrians & shoppers carrying arms full of presents. So if you are last minute shopping and having to stake out the nearest mall parking spot within a four block radius only to wrestle that last Furby doll away from a deranged mom, don’t take it out on innocent bystanders. This includes the after Christmas mall rush, when you are trying to return that atrocious paisley tie & rock hard fruit cake.

4. Quiet Your Road Rage
Road rage puts you on Santa’s naughty list. Unfortunately, it is a fact of life that there will be heavy traffic. The holidays could even increase the time it would normally take you to get somewhere, by a few minutes to a few hours. While stuck in traffic, exorcise the demon within, breath, count to ten, and enjoy that Christmas Frank Sinatra CD your aunt got you. Besides, could you really not wait an extra hour to see your in-laws?

5. Red Means Stop, Green Means Go
Red and Green aren’t just holiday colors, they are rules for the road. Stop when you see red or grandma might get ran over by a mini van.

For other driving tips, suggestions, and laughs check out Comedy Defensive Driving School’s defensive driving techniques and online defensive driving course.

As the holidays approach we get routinely asked by clients to analyze the most sought out gift trends. For our friends as Corvette Gear USA we researched what gifts corvette enthusiast and their friends were most searching.

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