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On St. Patrick’s Day I had the pleasure of meeting and talking to Steven J. Wagenheim – President, CEO, Director of Granite City Food and Brewery. For those outside of the Upper Midwest, Granite City is a restaurant, sports bar and brewery all rolled into one. Granite City has a great selection of food and they brew a lot of beer with the change of seasons and festivities. One of the things they offer is a special called the Mug Club. If you are a Mug Club member you receive discounts on food and drink, offers of free food and get to be among the first to try the newest brews produced and much more.

I have been a Mug Club member for a couple of years, and it has more than paid for itself. About a week before St Patty’s Day I got an email from Granite City saying the owner would be in town between 4-7pm to meet people and talk about ideas and whatnot. I ventured down and visited with Steven and the COO of Granite City, Darius Gilanfar, for a few minutes and talked about the restaurant and marketing. I mentioned the effect Twitter is having on the hospitality industry and how Granite City could use it to their advantage.

Steven offered up a challenge to me saying he would give a free beer to anyone who shows up within the next hour from Twitter. I tweeted the message out on my phone with the details on where to go and what people get and I sat back and waited. Right as Steven was about to leave and head out to the Sioux Falls, SD, Granite City, I got a tweet from Colt of @golfcartadz saying he was just down the street. Steven said I had 5 extra minutes .

Needless to say, Colt showed up and Steven was impressed. We both got a free beer and I got a Granite City VIP Card. I never knew Granite City had a VIP Card. You get a few little perks with the card including a 10% across the board discount as well as immediate seating. Nothing like jumping to the front of the waiting list on a really busy Friday night when the Eagles are in town. Here is a pic below of the card. If you ever want to buy me dinner, I will gladly bring my card along.

Twitter is growing very quickly, and the people who jump on the bandwagon now will reap the benefits much more than the people who join in a year. Get in early and dominate.

Just like one shoe doesn’t fit all, the same applies to Internet marketing. I wrote a post the other day targeting keywords like Internet marketing Fargo and SEO Fargo for the sole purpose of ranking in the SERPS (search engine results pages) for those keywords. I wanted to spend a little time in an effort to rank and hold a ranking for those keywords. I view that type of Internet marketing as the equivalent of buying a house vs renting one. The easy way to rank for keywords is to buy ad placements from Google, MSN and Yahoo. By doing so you are guaranteed to rank on the first page for those words and generate the visitors you are requesting.

The flip side to the paid-for model of Internet marketing happens when you quit paying for those ads and disappear from not only the first page, but all pages. Instead, if you invest a little time and effort into promoting your site/business online, your site can be found by many people searching the same things. You will only invest time, not money. My site and sites like mine sit at the top of the results pages for a variety of keywords. When I go to sleep or leave on vacation, my site still sits there. Every once in a while I will add some fuel to the fire ensuring I stay above the competition.

I am #2 and #3 for the search term Internet Marketing Fargo just by writing one blog post. That puts me just behind all of the paid placements on Google. It won’t be long, and I will be ahead of the directory listing at the top of the page for my selected field. This is done by building more support to my pages than the yellow page generated results. I will also be doing the same for other keywords related to my local niche as I mentioned on my recent Fargo Internet Marketing and SEO post.

A funny thing happened the other day when talking with a client about my Fargo Internet Marketing post and targeting those keywords. The client asked me if my competition knew I was targeting those words. What I didn’t mention is that I already have other sites ranking in the top for those keywords. Those sites have been generating leads for the last 5 months. It’s just another way to capture as much of the local market as possible.

You have many different choices as far as Internet marketing goes, but I view SEO as a more viable promotion option than ad buying. But SEO takes time and effort and involves a longer ramp-up period. If what you are doing needs more of an instant promotion model, then you should buy ads from the major search engines. At the same time, start working your way to the top of the SERPS for relevant keywords through SEO. Eventually, you will either capture a lot more market share and customers from other keywords you don’t rank for or you can swap one model of promotion for the other.

All of these ideas and tactics lead to a very important discussion when starting Internet marketing and web promotion of your product or service. Don’t leave out questions like “Where do we want our traffic to come from?” “How much are we willing to pay in advertising?” “What is the percentage of fraud associated with paid advertisement?” and many more questions. Of course if you are interested is talking with me, I encourage comments or emails.

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