Websites and local marketing for Putnam businesses

Putnam figured out its second act before most mill towns knew they needed one. The Antiques Marketplace at 109 Main Street (four floors, more than 350 booths, running since 1991) earned the town its antiques-capital reputation, and the restaurant row that grew up around it keeps the sidewalks busy in a way most towns this size would envy. First Fridays turn Main Street into a street festival from May through August. WINY still broadcasts from its little building by the river, and the River Trail runs about two miles along the Quinebaug, past Cargill Falls, where Windham County’s first cotton mill went up in 1806.

So Putnam already knows how to market itself. The town does that part well. What individual Putnam businesses often don’t have is their own piece of it. About 9,300 people live here, but the weekend crowd is a lot bigger, and it finds the antiques and the restaurants on foot. Nobody finds a plumber, an electrician, or an accountant on foot. When a furnace quits in one of the old houses up the hill, or a shop on Main needs its point-of-sale untangled, that search happens on a phone, and the results are thinner than they should be for a town with this much going on.

That’s the gap I work in. A fast website that says what you do and shows the phone number. A Google Business Profile with real photos and hours that are actually right. Review requests that go out after the job instead of never. Boring, honest plumbing for your business, the kind of work Putnam’s old buildings would recognize.

I’m fifteen minutes away: straight up 395 from Brooklyn, or the long way through Pomfret when the weather’s good. I’ll meet you at your shop, walk through whatever you’ve got online, and give you a straight answer on whether it needs work. Sometimes it doesn’t. I’ll say so, and you’re out nothing but the fifteen minutes.