O.K. for you readers who, like us, are annoyed with self promoting blog posts, this will be our last (at least for a while).  Henceforth the Three Stream blog will be dedicated to offering tips and tricks to our customers and potential customers related to online business and web strategy.  However, we gotta let people know what we are up to these days.

Last year was a great year for Three Stream.  We went from a couple of guys doing consulting and web development on the side, to a real live company with an office and everything (those of you who have seen our pathetic office are probably laughing).  We feel good about this because we are growing for the same reasons that many of the great companies have grown in history – we focused on doing great work, providing great customer service, and not settling for anything but excellence in our products (which also happen to be our client’s products).  So, this year we are making some changes that you might find interesting

First off, after getting a slew of new customers in late 2008, we found the need to hire a new team member.  We thought his name was simply Mike Lee when we hired him, but little did we know his name is actually George Michael Lee, which led to a new company policy (regarding the mandatory use of middle names for those whose full names coincide with 80’s rock stars).  Anyhoo, George Michael Lee will be doing graphic design and also heading up our new email marketing service 3mail.  It is always a difficult thing hiring the first employee, but we just decided that we’ve gotta have faith.

Along with adding staff, we will be adding a few services that might be of interest to our customers.  Here is a brief list:

1. We are now offering ongoing maintenance & support packages for our clients’ websites.  In the past we were so intent on enabling our clients to manage their own websites that we failed to really offer them the option of letting us fully maintain the site for them.  We build every website on a content management system allowing clients to edit and update content on their own, but some of our clients would rather leave it all up to us.  Let us know if you are among the crowd.
2. We will be extending our marketing strategy services to include pay-per-click.  One of our strengths at Three Stream is our focus on organic (non-paid) search engine optimization.  While organic seo is a tremendous asset to a business trying to grow virally on the web, it really doesn’t entirely replace the need for paid search engine marketing – especially for e-commerce stores.  Thus, we will now be offering consulting on setup of a pay-per-click campaign, as well as fully managing your account.
3. We are adding a full range of email marketing services.  Online businesses, especially e-commerce stores, are quickly learning that email marketing is the only free lunch for businesses on the web.  It is an opportunity to connect with your customers directly and provide them with relevant news about your products or services.  Because of this, we are launching 3mail: Email marketing made simple.  It gives you the ability to send, manage, and track email campaigns through our online user interface.  This will enable smaller businesses to act like bigger ones in terms of customer engagement.  We will also be offering fully-managed email marketing campaigns as well.
4. Finally, we will be offering a wider range of print services in conjunction with our web design services.  Print design is a service that we really fell into.  Without question our core competency is web design/development; however, it has been all too convenient for our customers to rely on us to manage their print collateral needs as well.  A website is not something that magically brings customers into the door without a conjunctive marketing strategy.  Print collateral is a necessity to almost any business, but is something that can be obtained online for a fraction of the cost of most brick-and-mortar printers.  This brings us to the best part of our print services: our customers pay only for the labor to design and order their printing needs online –we don’t markup the costs.  Thus, we can offer everything from business cards to signs by utilizing low-cost online printers such as vistaprint and uprinting.

Well, that’s all for the shameless self advertising of our blog.  From now on we will be providing information for all our fellow small fish out there working to compete in this giant pond called the web.  Sign up to receive email updates or our feed in order to keep in the loop with the Three Stream blog.

Tags: online marketing, pay-per-click advertising, seo, Three Stream News, Web Development