From 2007 through 2023, O3 Internet Consulting provided internet marketing to small businesses and non-profit organizations, including website design and development, search engine optimization and marketing, social media marketing, and email marketing.
Providing the Basics: On Principle
We was careful to provide the basics people needed:
- Communicate your message effectively to meet your goals.
- Benefit from a respectful and responsive relationship with an experienced professional.
- Maintain your internet marketing and website easily and cost-effectively.
- Have confidence that your work will be completed on time and within budget.
We started from the premise that most business owners or not-for-profit leaders didn’t always know how to create effective online marketing – or don’t have time to do it as well as they would like. This is, in part, because effective online marketing requires a breadth of knowledge, including planning, writing, usability, graphic design, search engine optimization, social media, project management and technology.
Our focus was on helping organizations plan and implement their internet marketing in a way that was functional, affordable, and completed on time. We enjoyed getting to know our clients and their business, and I believe that allowed us to provide customized, effective online marketing that helped them meet their goals, whether to make a sale or to make a point.
Project Management: On Time, On Budget
Our project management process evolved over 30 years of technical and marketing projects with a goal of delivering on time and on budget. We used a variety of tools for this, including Basecamp, email, a WordPress-based knowledge base, Timefox timekeeping, and, with the proliferation of online storage, we added a password manager to share important logins while keeping credentials safe, and also Sync to securely share documents and Sync vault to store sensitive documents.
Findable, Unique Content
We took an integrated approach to attracts visitors to a client’s website with search engine optimization (SEO), provided what those visitors needed to learn about our client’s unique value, and converted site visitors into leads and leads into customers. One of the most important parts of that was creating content that was honest about a client’s unique value but also expressed clearly what that value was to a potential customer.
Using Technology Wisely
We encouraged our clients to use technology that made sense for them – and for their audiences and potential customers, whether that was social media (often it wasn’t, especially as social media devolved into emotional, irrational and profit-motivated invasion of privacy and incitement to hysteria), email marketing, video, paid search, or other activities.
Investing in proven technology and not just following the latest trend helped our clients by saving their time – and their money.
WordPress Open Source Content Management System
Over time, we gravitated to using WordPress when a client wanted a content management system. At the time of this writing, WordPress was used by about 63% of all the websites whose content management system we know – or 43% of all websites. You can check out the latest usage stats on the w3techs.com website… We liked it because it was easy to teach clients to update their own content. It doesn’t suffer the frustrating limitations of hosted CMS.
WordPress expertise is widespread, meaning our clients could find good support services if they wanted to move elsewhere – or when we retired! They could look up how to do something on Google if they wanted to. With thousands of free and paid plugins and the new full-site block editor, it’s even more flexible. When we retired, we transitioned websites for several of our more cost-conscious clients to WordPress.com, which also provides hosting, upgrades and domain registration at a reasonable price.
Research & Forensic Services
Some of the most interesting and rewarding tasks was helping clients find and rescue “lost” online property. It always amazed me that some clients didn’t carefully save their online credentials for valuable assets such as domain name registrations, PayPal accounts, social media accounts, and website accounts. We helped clients with the following:
- Recovery of “lost” domain names and reinstatement of domain ownership
- Recovery of hacked websites
- Evaluation of old websites; recovery of assets.
- Recovery of social media and other online accounts.
- Hosting and domain name services: moves, backups.
Samples of Our Work
You can still see some of our work on our Portfolio – and read our thoughts on our On Internet Blog. Even though some are pretty old, they may still have some usefulness, like this one: What should you expect from a web design agency? What’s a fair price?