Well it has been a long time coming. I have finally gotten off of my duff and am going to start targeting keywords in my local niche. What I mean by this is to rank #1 or thereabouts for keywords in my surrounding area. Part of what I do is to help local businesses rank for keywords in their respective niches. Say a brick company in Fargo wants to rank for Fargo Brick, I would help that to happen. In the process of ranking others for more niche keywords, I haven’t been working on my own niche as much as I should. So words like SEO Fargo and Marketing Fargo have been neglected by me. So, don’t be surprised if over the next few months I drop a few of these words into my posts from time to time.

Now, just because I have decided to start conquering my own local niche more doesn’t mean I will stop working larger keyword terms. I am calling this my Fargo Marketing campaign. The goal is to dominate my local niche and expand from there.

In case you are wondering, there is a huge void in the middle of our country for people who know search engine marketing or comprehend how to rank sites to #1 in the respective niches. I am going to try my best to take as much of that market as I can while the gettin is still good.

Of course, all of this takes time and I am not expecting to rank for Marketing Fargo the very first week I try, but you never know in a month or two. Along with ranking for keyword terms I am increasing my public exposure to local business people. This week I will be speaking at the Fargo Moorhead Lodging Association meeting on the topic of Embracing Technology. Boy do I have a surprise for them. That is if I can get it put together in time for the meeting . If not I will still be talking about increasing their exposure to the digital world and different ways to embrace it. I hope to record the speaking and post it here so you can critique it for me. I hope to not disappoint.

If you are interested in having me speak to your company, group or organization, visit my media page for more information. I am willing to travel out of the Fargo area.

Another thing I will be helping to increase is local blogger / twitter interaction. Last Saturday we had the first blogger meetup and the second tweetup (the day before) in Fargo / Moorhead. I will post the video below of some of the people saying hi. Hopefully next time the tweeters and bloggers can coordinate the next meeting. We had a few people travel about 150 miles to Fargo (really cool of them). Also here was the list of those in attendance. If you are in the Fargo / Moorhead area you should definitely add them to whatever communication medium you prefer.

Blogger / Twitter Meetup Attendees:

@therealjosh
@bonnyface
@cbensen
@fmsphotography
@magicderivative
@kalyke
@epizoic
@mpool
@jeffspad

This reminds me of the Shock and Awe campaign of the second Gulf War. Did that actually succeed or fail? I am not really sure. But anyway, it does truly shock me at how quickly we could transform a whole country with a few high-powered explosives. In the marketing world, that shock and awe would be a keynote speech by Steve Jobs of Apple.

Apple seems to have the ability to keep the lid on upcoming projects so well that when projects are launched, people are blown away by what is unveiled (pardon the pun).

But is it sustainable to keep shocking the same audience over and over again? Or do they come to expect it and grow numb to the antics.

Ultimately, I think that being original and interesting is far better. Yesterday, I wrote a post about something that I discombobulated with. Discombobulated is a word I always look forward to using in a sentence. That post was probably a lot more interesting to read than the normal mumble jumble I usually publish.

Could it be that I have been going against my own advice and writing to the middle ground, the boring area? Did I start writing to the middle where the majority is, and not to the fridge that I so often recommend? Why on earth would I do THIS!? Mediocrity is to blame. It took over, and the blog became dull. Maybe it was never exciting to begin with. AHA! Insert theme music from 2001 Space Odyssey here.

So with that in mind. I will try my best not to run a shock and awe campaign but to write the way I would for myself. I hope you all can be entertained and learn something at the same time. Because marketing should be fun, where else can you tell a story and get paid this well?