www.vermontguides.com/2007/08-aug/new_media.html -
[Cached Version]
Published on: 8/2/2007
Last Visited: 8/6/2007
Dave Winslow
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Dave Winslow
Dave Winslow, the president of EpikOne, a Web analytics and development firm in Williston, points to one recent example of the new, useful Web: shopify.com.Winslow says that with shopify, you can build a shopping cart application for your site in just a few minutes free of charge.You sell your product or service with your new shopping cart, and shopify takes a small percentage of your sales."All of a sudden, a company doesn't have to spend ten or twenty thousand dollars on a shopping cart," says Winslow; "They can get it for 3 percent of their sales until the point where it becomes too big a hit on their margin."
Winslow describes the shift to Web 2.0 as a major sea change , especially for smaller businesses."There weren't a lot of useful tools for companies online in the early 2000s," he says."That's completely shifted now, where everyone is focused on building useful tools."He seems excited by what the future holds and says the business world is "in for a bit of a shake-up," particularly with Google now freely releasing its Web Analytics software, allowing Web site owners to carefully track a variety of key statistics."You can find out immediately if something works or not," he says.
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Winslow is careful to warn his clients about jumping into these new technologies too fast."Marketing today has become easier in the sense that there are more tools available, but it's also become harder because there are more tools available," he says dryly.
With all of these free or inexpensive services at the fingertips of business owners, Winslow advises his clients not to overextend their online efforts.He says to start small, maybe with a blog and an e-mail campaign."Work those into your budget," he says.
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Winslow cites a coffee blog run by Winooski coffee roaster freshcoffeenow.com as a good example of how a blog can be used effectively.Joe's Coffee Blog is just that: a blog about coffee written by a guy named Joe.The posts at Joe's Coffee Blog are all about coffee, but they include anecdotes from Joe's life and his personal musings on being a coffee roaster.It's a combination of Joe's expertise as a coffee roaster and his personality that makes the blog work."We put links in there back to freshcoffeenow.com, but we never sell directly from the blog," says Winslow.
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Winslow concurs."Keep your ear to the street," he says."Listen to what your customers are saying about you."He points out that whether you have a blog or not, your customers are probably already discussing your product or service on the Internet, and if there's something wrong, like a product defect, your customers probably know about it before you do."You've got to be proactive," he says; "you can't ignore it or pretend you don't know about it."Winslow suggests addressing the situation in as positive a way as possible and assuring your customers that you recognize the problem and are working to fix it.