Dateline: September 14, 2017. Ray Access, a local online writing and editing company run by partners Linda Ray and Mark Bloom, just landed its first international client: IPPWORLD (ippworld.com). Based out of Singapore, the transcreation and translation firm is looking to rebrand — to reconnect with their multilingual client base. They’ve chosen Ray Access to help create its new message.
When a small business gains international clientele, it doesn’t happen by accident. This connection came through the professional social platform LinkedIn.com. Ray Access, who walks the talk by blogging on their own website every week, promotes their blog through posts on Facebook and LinkedIn. The LinkedIn connection has been especially fruitful at driving traffic to its website.
A Truly International Concern
IPPWORLD is a translation and transcreation company with offices in Singapore, Shanghai and Mauritius. It primarily serves the hospitality, tourism and leisure industries. Their clients need to reach an international market with varying cultural and language differences. The process called transcreation integrates creative writing with translation to incorporate cultural nuances and important designations that simple translation often misses.
They’ve turned to Ray Access to help them solidify their international presence in the marketplace through a complete rebranding process — which, in this era, must now include clear, direct website copy and blogs. In addition to rewriting their website, Ray Access will provide marketing copy and regular blog posts for IPPWORLD.
Ray Access, a local Asheville, NC small business, gains international clientele by delivering the type of quality content clients look for. “We like the style [you used], the confidence that was felt … and how you managed to tell the story,” says Joanne Chan, IPPWORLD owner, of a recent assignment. “Cheers to this new partnership!”
A History of Excellence
“Since 2014, we’ve been building our reputation as an internet content provider by supplying clear, consistent, quality copy to businesses at an affordable rate,” says Ray. “We’re proud of our progress and our great team of writers. They allow us to give a voice to every one of our client businesses — with words that empower them to connect with their specific audiences.”
Ray and Bloom built up a business that started out writing blog posts for mostly local companies. Although they continue to offer their services to local businesses and agencies, their biggest clients are now outside the state, in New York City and Charleston, S.C. That growth prepared the company for growth beyond the East Coast, and now, as their small business gains international clientele, they’re preparing for more growth in the coming year.
Evolving Services
“We started out marketing to small business owners who couldn’t afford the big content mills, but still wanted quality website pages and blogs,” recalls Bloom. “Now we primarily target website designers and marketing agencies because their clients all demand quality content at affordable prices too. Through those agencies, we’ve made many businesses more successful. It’s just win-win-win all the way around.”
After blog posts for businesses came a service providing website content for businesses, which has evolved as search engine optimization (SEO) has evolved. Now Ray Access uses keywords and inserts cross-links, all while producing share-worthy content for their clients — or their clients’ clients. Today, the company also provides:
When you need excellent online content for a specific purpose, remember that when a small business gains international clientele, it means they really produce the goods. Hire the best.
Ray Access is a content marketing firm that delivers targeted words to empower your business. Contact us about your specific project to receive a quote or discuss your needs. We write website copy, blog posts, e-newsletters and more. Everything we do is thoroughly researched, professionally edited and guaranteed original.
Everyone knows a writer. Some writers may even be on your Christmas list. (Whether they’re on the Good list or the Naughty list is an entirely different question.) So how do you choose the best Christmas gifts for writers? Easy. Get them anything. Writers love the attention, even though they won’t admit it. Here, then, is a sampling of ideas for:
Christmas Gifts for Writers
The classic gifts can still bring joy to your favorite writer. Or can they?
The classic Moleskin notebook. Good writing advice says to carry around a notebook for all the brilliant ideas you get when you’re someplace inconvenient. — Because apparently, a notebook is easier to carry than a smart phone.
A fountain pen. It’s a classy gift, right? — Because apparently, writers like writing with pen and ink whenever their smart phone runs out of juice.
A book on writing. It’s helpful and encouraging to read what Stephen King or Ray Bradbury or whoever had to say about the writing process. — Because apparently, writers who emulate famous writers become famous themselves.
Adult coloring books. Writers are a creative bunch. When they’re not writing, they’ll enjoy doodling. — Because apparently, writers have lots of free time and like to doodle.
A T-shirt with a clever saying on it. Writers are often witty, so great Christmas gifts for writers can include T-shirts they’ll be proud to wear. — Because apparently, all writer aspire to write clever T-shirts.
Boggle or Scrabble. Writers are word nerds, so it only makes sense to get them a game that uses words. — Because apparently, writers often get together to trade books on writing and play games.
What Writers Really Want
The best Christmas gifts for writers are the ones you may not expect. This is what they want:
A coffee mug with a clever saying on it. Send a writer to the grocery store for essentials, and she’ll come back with a quart of milk, a loaf of bread and five pounds of coffee. It’s the fuel that makes writing possible. And a mug differs from a T-shirt because it becomes a private joke.
Sticky notes. It seems so silly — and so cheap — that you wonder why they don’t buy sticky notes for themselves. It’s because they don’t have a sticky note to remind them.
A red ink pen. There’s an editor inside every writer, and he’s trying to get out. A red pen gives every writer the single most important tool of an editor and reason to print out that rough draft.
A desk organizer. Writers like to get organized. And they often have lots of things to organize, from scraps of notes to first draft printouts. You won’t get them to clean up their desks completely, but this is a start.
A lap desk. It can be just a finished piece of plywood or a specially shaped wooden surface with a padded bottom. They’re great for reading or working when your writer is away from the keyboard.
There you go. No matter what you gave the writer in your life this year (probably from the top list), now you know the best Christmas gifts for writers, what they really want. Better luck next year!
Ray Access is a content marketing firm that delivers targeted words to empower your business. Contact us about your specific project to receive a quote or discuss your needs. We write website copy, blog posts, e-newsletters and more. Everything we do is thoroughly researched, professionally edited and guaranteed original.
When you want to learn about writing your own online content, where do you turn? When you want to know the ins and outs of how to develop website content or blog posts, whom do you ask? While a lot of information about the subject is available online, sometimes you want a live person you can question and follow up.
Fortunately, Ray Access can help. Part of our mission is to educate and elucidate business owners about our craft. As a result, Linda and Mark have been asked again and again to deliver presentations about online writing. So keep Ray Access in mind for your next business meeting.
Presentations for Business Owners and Executives
There may be beginning writers at our presentations, but Ray Access presentations typically attract a crowd of business owners who realize they need to improve their online presence. Better website content, they realize, often leads to better sales. A business blog, they’ve learned, can increase their company’s reach and raise their page rank. So now they want to know more about it.
The presentations about online writing that Ray Access gives teach the basics of writing, provide tips for publishing consistently and explain the use of keywords. Each of those topics could be a discussion in its own right. Since providing online content is a relatively new field, most business owners don’t understand its intricacies or the difference between it and writing for a magazine.
Ray Access always leaves time for questions and answers because they want to provide reassurance that it’s possible to apply these principles to improve business. Most presentations last about 45 minutes, but Mark and Linda can talk about online writing for ten minutes or two hours… and everything in between.
Successful Presentations About Online Writing
The presentations Ray Access does have been very successful, both in terms of the crowd size and the lessons learned. Ray Access can pack them in because it’s a topic not many people are talking about, but it’s a subject business owners need to understand. And it’s not a dry, boring subject, at least not the way Ray Access presents it.
Mark and Linda add a touch of humor, several real-world examples and lots of tips to their presentations about online writing. They get people involved with visuals and pointed samples. Because almost all of the attendees can write and has done some writing at some point in their lives, everyone can relate to the presentation. Everyone learns something and takes some tidbit away with them.
Presentation Samples
In 2015, Ray Access gave presentations at 1 Million Cups Columbia and WordCamp Asheville, among other venues. Although the video from these presentations is not of high quality, you can get a sense of the energy and information from their presentations:
Ray Access is a content marketing firm that delivers targeted words to empower your business. Contact us about your specific project to receive a quote or discuss your needs. We write website copy, blog posts, e-newsletters and more. Everything we do is thoroughly researched, professionally edited and guaranteed original.
Those are mighty bold words coming from a couple of local ghost writers who are beating the odds. They’ve built a business that’s thriving in an industry fraught with corporate titans and overseas, underpriced competition. That’s right: Ray Access, a small online content provider, has grown steadily since it began in 2012.
Launch Coincides with Halloween; Coincidence?
“It’s frightening to think that the right words can have such a huge impact on businesses,” says Mark. “But the Internet has leveled the playing field for small companies looking to compete. In the vacuum of space, no one can tell how big your business is… if you present yourself well. And content plays a crucial role, even more than graphics or catchy videos.”
In addition to a slew of local clients, Mark and Linda have attracted the attention of business owners from South Carolina to New Jersey, New York and Florida. With their new redesigned website launch, the partners hope to extend their reach even further.
Impressive Accomplishments
Some of the spooktacular success Ray Access has enabled includes:
Causing an explosion of business for clients immediately following their website content reboot.
Dramatically increasing the number of customer phone calls, directly improving the bottom line.
Increasing online visibility for one local company from 200 to 1,000 impressions per month within 30 days.
Producing website content revisions for some of the area’s top web development firms.
Hiring three part-time freelance writers to handle growth, including some Asheville locals.
Earning a sterling reputation among the local business community.
Not bad for the former reporter and former technical writer who started Ray Access. Now they research, write and edit website content that converts lookers into buyers, blog posts that attract attention and press releases that compel readers to learn more. All as ghost writers, meaning that their names, Mark and Linda, never appear as authors of the content. Business owners love it.
Behind the Costumes
True superheroes, the team at Ray Access can use its superpowers to make invisible companies appear on search pages. To bring truth, justice and prosperity to all, Ray Access gives its clients a singular voice that echoes in the cacophony of the Internet.
“One of our main talents is being able to adjust our tone to address the needs of every client,” says Mark. “Each has an individual voice and story to tell. Yet Ray Access remains anonymous on the pages we craft. We’re not scary, but we are ghosts: ghost writers.”
And all clients get equal time from both partners. “That’s another benefit of hiring Ray Access,” says Linda. “Every single thing we produce is reviewed by both a writer and an editor. No other writer can say that with the confidence we do — and mean it — with no tricks, twists or asterisks.”
To find out how the ghost writers at Ray Access can help your business, set up a time to talk about your needs and the writing services of Ray Access. It’s free!
Ray Access is a content marketing firm that delivers targeted words to empower your business. Contact us about your specific project to receive a quote or discuss your needs. We write website copy, blog posts, e-newsletters and more. Everything we do is thoroughly researched, professionally edited and guaranteed original.
The Asheville Chamber of Commerce hosts a monthly Educational Series — a one-hour seminar on various topics related to business and business people. These meetings alternate between a before hours’ time slot (8:00 to 9:00 am) and a lunchtime time slot (noon to 1:00 pm).
For the Asheville morning events, Ray Access will be providing the coffee. For all attendees. Free of charge. It will be the first time a morning Chamber Educational Series event has had coffee furnished. And it took a small business to make it happen.
This Small Business
Ray Access is a small business. In fact, we’re a partnership. That means there are two of us: Linda and Mark. Only a solopreneur business is smaller. But in our industry — online business writing — having two instead of one is a competitive advantage: Everything we produce is professionally edited.
Yet this small business joined the Asheville Chamber of Commerce in August 2014. Believe us when we say it was a major investment for such a small business. It could be a big step forward or a big step back, but we decided, “It was time to go big or go home.” We believed in our business enough to take the risk.
Networking Opportunities
We were determined to grow our small business. We market to other businesses, and the Chamber of Commerce offered a way for us to connect to more area businesses than we could otherwise reach. By getting involved and attending Chamber events, we could build relationships and gain name recognition for our budding enterprise.
The Asheville Chamber of Commerce also provided us with many, many, many networking events. We were fairly active networkers before joining the Chamber, but with our membership, our networking activity tripled. While this was exciting at first, we soon realized it was a “good news, bad news” arrangement.
Marketing vs. Working
If we spent all our time marketing, we’d have no time to work. If we spent all our time working, we’d have no time to market our business. It’s an old business dilemma, one we wrote about before. But to grow a business, you have to find time for both. And if you’re a small business, chances are you have to find time to do both by yourself.
Of course, Ray Access has an advantage a solopreneur doesn’t: There are two of us. So we split up the events to cover more ground, while still having the time to do the work we love. We attend weekly networking events, as well as monthly events, so it’s still a big commitment of time, but that investment is starting to pay dividends, in both work and better community relationships.
The Educational Series Sponsorship
One of the monthly events we attend is the Educational Series. At the last before-hours seminar, we complained about the lack of coffee. Instead of becoming a problem, it became an opportunity. Most Chamber sponsorships are well beyond the reach of a small business like Ray Access. But providing coffee for 40 people? We could do that.
And so we created a new sponsorship opportunity. By supplying coffee every other month, we are both helping other businesses and spreading the word about our business. It’s a win-win situation that makes sense. Even for a small business like Ray Access.
Ray Access is a content marketing firm that delivers targeted words to empower your business. Contact us about your specific project to receive a quote or discuss your needs. We write website copy, blog posts, e-newsletters and more. Everything we do is thoroughly researched, professionally edited and guaranteed original.
Looking back on what Ray Access was doing in December 2013 is like looking through the wrong end of a telescope. We were still writing on paper, using pen and ink. We sent each other messages by Pony Express, especially when the cans-on-a-string hardware malfunctioned. And everything was in black-and-white. At least it was easier to pick out our clothes — everything matched!
OK, we’re exaggerating. But Ray Access did come of age this past year. Here are some of our highlights:
The Early Months
When 2014 started, Ray Access was primarily a freelance operation. We had few regular clients and no idea where our next meal would come from. We lived on the streets, writing on the backs of worn envelopes. But we did great work, and our few clients loved us.
Then came our big break in February when we gave a presentation for a group of business people through the Vibrant Asheville Business networking group. We followed that with an encore for a joint meeting of the Fletcher Area Business Association and the Mills River Business Association. Suddenly, clients started calling.
A Growth Explosion
In March, Ray Access rewrote a number of websites, including those of our current blog clients Asheville Cabins of Willow Winds and Hendersonville Tents. We started the company to write blog posts for businesses, but realized that website content was just as important (and just as in demand) as blogs. It was then that we started to hit our stride.
We gained quite a few new clients during this early growth explosion, such as the Southeastern Spine Institute and the Wired Mouse. It felt like being in the driver’s seat for the first time, ready to go, but not moving, and then noticing the parking brake’s still set. Naturally, we released it while pressing the accelerator to the floor. And varoom! Off we went.
Moving and Shaking
In May, we joined the Fletcher Area Business Association. We gained more visibility and more clients, like the amazing Bubbleland Imagination Company. In July, Linda and Mark signed a formal partnership agreement after consulting with SCORE. By then, Ray Access had existed for about two years. In August, we joined the Asheville Chamber of Commerce. We had arrived. We were a real presence. People were getting to know us.
In October, we started writing for an online magazine called Simply Appalachian, which officially launch in January 2015. Serving seven states in Central Appalachia, we write feature articles on sports and adventures, flora and fauna, and people and places of interest. Look for our work on the pre-release version of the website.
Expertise and Exceptional Service
As we continue to grow, we pride ourselves on our personal and professional service. We love that we can do what we love while serving a growing number of businesses. One client has even called us “genius” for the work we did. But we haven’t let it go to our heads. We don’t have time for that.
In 2015, we’re going to maintain the momentum, both in Asheville and in outside markets. Regardless of our future growth, however, we promise to maintain the highest level of customer service and support to all our clients. If you were a client, thank you for your business during 2014. We remain — gratefully — at your service. If you are not yet a client, learn how we can help you attract more business.
Ray Access is a content marketing firm that delivers targeted words to empower your business. Contact us about your specific project to receive a quote or discuss your needs. We write website copy, blog posts, e-newsletters and more. Everything we do is thoroughly researched, professionally edited and guaranteed original.
“Since 2014, we’ve been building our reputation as an internet content provider by supplying clear, consistent, quality copy to businesses at an affordable rate,” says Ray. “We’re proud of our progress and our great team of writers. They allow us to give a voice to every one of our client businesses — with words that empower them to connect with their specific audiences.”
True superheroes, the team at Ray Access can use its superpowers to make invisible companies appear on search pages. To bring truth, justice and prosperity to all, Ray Access gives its clients a singular voice that echoes in the cacophony of the Internet.
We were determined to grow our small business. We market to other businesses, and the Chamber of Commerce offered a way for us to connect to more area businesses than we could otherwise reach. By getting involved and attending Chamber events, we could build relationships and gain name recognition for our budding enterprise.
In May, we joined the Fletcher Area Business Association. We gained more visibility and more clients, like the amazing Bubbleland Imagination Company. In July, Linda and Mark signed a formal partnership agreement after consulting with SCORE. By then, Ray Access had existed for about two years. In August, we joined the Asheville Chamber of Commerce. We had arrived. We were a real presence. People were getting to know us.