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Creating
Goodwill for Your Business and GeoDomain Websites
Through Community Involvement - Rob Grant Shows How It's
Done On
Monday (Feb. 15)
the 113th Annual Saranac
Lake Winter Carnival came to an end in Saranac
Lake, New York. What does this event that dates back
to the late 1800s have to do with domains and developing
a successful business on one? Everything.
Especially if you are trying to promote a geodomain
website or build goodwill for your locally oriented
online business.
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Saranac
Lake is an Adirondack Mountains resort
town that also happens to be home to
veteran domain investor/developer Rob Grant
(who was profiled in our April
2008 Cover Story). Rob has built a
number of geo targeted sites devoted to
the area, including
SaranacLakeNY.com and
LakePlacidNY.com,
and also runs a successful real estate business
there. He has found that the best way to create
goodwill for his various sites and business
enterprises it to get involved in high
profile local events like Saranac Lake's popular
winter carnival.
If
you visited the link to the Carnival's official
website in the first sentence of this article
you visited a domain that Grant donated
to the carnival organizers in 2007 and a site
that he hosts for them at no charge on
his servers. In addition, Grant's flagship Adirondacks.com
website and his Rob Grant &
Associates real |
Rob
Grant |
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estate
firm (online at AdirondackRealEstate.com)
have both been high profile sponsors of the
town's Winter Carnival for years now. |
In
another initiative that has paid especially big
dividends, Grant
founded and continues to sponsor an Annual
Childrens Ice Palace Contest (now in its 15th
year) that has
become an immensely popular part of the Winter
Carnival. The contest was inspired by one of the biggest
attractions at the Carnival - a huge real life ice
palace that is built each year by cutting giant
blocks of ice from nearby Lake Flower and hauling
them to the palace construction site (February
temperatures in the area range from 0-15 degrees so
melting ice is not an issue). 
Above:
Workmen cut blocks of ice out of Lake Flower to
use in building
an Ice Palace for the annual Saranac Lake
Winter Carnival. Below:
Fireworks go off behind one of the most spectacular Ice
Palaces
in recent years - the one built in 2003 (see the large
crowd in the foreground). 
A
different ice palace design is used each year, so Grant
came up with the idea of having kids build ice palace models
of their own design, using tasty materials like sugar
cubes, M&Ms and gum drops. "The contest
generates a lot of interest and involvement
from parents and kids from the local school
systems here in northern New York," Grant said.
That means more traffic for his geo websites and
business enterprises. He has even developed a separate
site dveoted entirely to the Ice Palace (both the real
one and the ones created in his contest) at WinterCarnivalIcePalace.com. 
This
year's winning Ice Palace model "Castle Ranch"
had an Adirondack Cowboys theme.
It earned 1st prize in Grant's contest for Christa
Irvine (at far right in the photo above). There
are many ways you can promote a geodomain website and a
local business, but Grant believes from experience that
the most effective method of making your site and
business a community fixture is to get personally
involved in high profile local events and to help
community organizations establish their own web
presence. This will not only benefit you and your
business, it will benefit the domain industry as a whole
as people see domain owners using their names in a constructive
way while being proactively involved in local community
life. |
