Atikokan Progress, Monday, August 21 2006
By Jessica Smith
The future is here Atikokan, and guess what–it’s not scary…really. Atikokan and Quetico Park is now finding its way to the top of the heap of internet search results, thanks to Quetico Internet Marketing’s Doug Lampi, who says it’s also time for local businesses –big and small— to amp up their presence on the worldwide web.
And here’s the best part—gaining internet presence is easy, even for confirmed techno-phobes.
Quetico Internet Marketing has evolved from building and maintaining websites, to offering marketing and increased exposure for the area’s tourism outfitters, non profit groups and businesses, through three separate websites.
“One thing that has always bothered me from my Chamber of Commerce days, 6 years ago, is that when you search for Quetico Park online, it’s mostly Ely, MN Outfitters that come up on the top [of the search results]. Our biggest asset [the park] is being out-competed by Minnesota.”
Hence, www.queticocafe.com helps put anything related to Quetico Park in the top 10 out of around 180,000 search results. The website predominantly advertises area outfitters and tourism operators. Said Lampi, “I’m trying to draw that [internet] traffic to our side where the people will be making trip decisions after looking at our outfitters, instead of the Ely outfitters.”
Lampi has also created an online directory of local businesses, www.atikokanonline.com which features free listings of any Atikokan business or organization (with upgraded packages available, where businesses can add documents, pictures to their listing or purchase a 15 second video commercial).
While we know we’re out there, does the rest of the world? Over the next six months to a year, Lampi’s goal is to list as many organizations and businesses as possible, for local and international internet surfers. Right now there are some gaps in the representation of services the community provides. (For example, top search results for ‘Atikokan hairdressers’ or ‘Atikokan realty’ yields search results for Kenora area, and not a single finding for Atikokan.)
The third component of the town’s increased internet visibility is www.atikokan.org, which features community information and a general overview of tourist information. Lampi hopes that down the road, the AEDC’s community events calendar will be available in a syndicated format which enables other websites to add the event information to their pages as well, to enable a feed of the latest community events to other websites. Lampi is helping websites now use this format, called RSS (for really simple syndicated format) to share information. For example, the Atikokan Progress will soon be going online and news articles would be available through this format to easily be added to websites who want to feature local news.
These three websites, along with www.ontario-parks.info, provide a “mini-net” of information continually directing the traffic to Quetico Park and are tourism operators.
So how can the internet benefit small businesses, artists, non profit groups, hobbyist or just anyone who has something to offer?
Following the initial investment (around $200) to have a website set up, a person “can potentially make thousands of dollars per month in additional income,” said Lampi. “These are the kinds of things that are really exciting for me these days.”
So where does the money come from? Basically advertising companies will pay to advertise products or services related to the material on a website and pay the website owner for each ‘click’ on that advertisement. To advertise through large companies like Google, the search engine will scan your web pages and provide advertisements related to content. (For example, Lampi said through his various websites he made $750 in web advertising while on a weeklong vacation in Dominican Republic).
“To help people make money this way is great. I think it’s fantastic to be able to do my own bit of economic development that I can do for Atikokan by changing where the money is coming in from. Now that money is coming in from outside of Canada into Atikokan. It’s new money found.”
Whether it’s beekeeping to politics, Lampi said every local website gives Atikokan a larger mark on the map of the information highway, drawing in more community interest and advertising dollars. Refreshingly, information technology means that for once our remote location doesn’t present a logistical challenge to doing business.
“It’s one of the things that are really powerful for the work-at-home mom. She can spend a couple of hours a day puttering on her website.”
In the past five years, technology has revolutionized how Quetico Internet Marketing’s does business. Lampi started out building and maintaining websites, but said now his business makes half its profit through advertising and half “is for clients who are paying me to get them up there on the search engines etc.”
Now, “it’s really helped me market a change in the way I’m doing business. Instead of building websites from scratch, I’ve become more of an internet solutions broker, where I can choose from dozens of different developers to bring you the solution that best fits your needs. There are literally thousands of different scripts that are built for each specific industry.”
After finding a suitable type of website, Lampi then provides ongoing market analysis to improve search rankings and number of hits and inquiries to the website.
The maintaining and updating of the website is mostly in the hands of the website’s owner these days. Lampi said that’s largely because—even though we may not realize it—people have become a lot more computer savvy over the past few years.
“If you can write your own email and add an attachment to it, you have all the skills you need to update your own website.”
Just ask local artist Alahna Marohnic, who like most of Lampi’s customers—are now adding pictures, graphics, text etc. to their own websites. “It’s like having your own magazine,” said Marohnic (who, in recent months has been updating her website from South Korea.). “You can pick your own colours, anything you want. Once you can do it yourself, all the ideas start coming.”
Lampi said the changing needs of his customers and the growing avenues out there in cyberspace, have “pulled him along” to the current stage of Quetico Internet Marketing. And demand is so high, he said it’s more than he can even handle.
As Atikokan continues to pull out onto the information freeway, Lampi wants to point traffic to this area and its’ businesses, and help the small at-home business find its’ place in the rapidly changing cyber frontier.
