Please Stop Before You Publish

by Elle Ray | Apr 16, 2013 | Editing

Grammar Matters — No Matter What You Write

Of course we believe that grammar is important; we’re writers, after all. But what if we loosened our standards:

Its time to talk to you about a day-to-day and week-to-week issues. And im not about to talk about the talk every one know does no good. Let me explains that now.

We could go overboard, too, thinking that everyone has a 16-year education:

Inferring the textual concept of proper grammar and punctuation, noun and verb agreement, correct spelling, and all the other tenets of the English language that make it a difficult, yet succinct form of communication among those who have a clear and concise message to deliver and require a medium that appropriately tackles the task at hand, you would think it would be performed accordingly.

Yikes. Please stop us.

The Problem Is Rampant

Since we’re writers, we read a lot. In our research, we have to peruse 100 or more websites a day, so we see it all the time. This kind of writing is rampant. You know it too if you’ve tried to find a quick recipe or picked up a newspaper lately. Sometimes, it’s impossible to get “just the facts.”

plain language works

Given this dilemma, we’d like to share a bit of good news. There’s a movement afoot called “plain language” that aims to make government documents and legal papers easy to read and understand. But even they get bogged down in trying to look smart by using big words and long, drawn-out sentences. We know — we’ve edited some of their work.

Everyone Loses

One problem may arise from alluringly inexpensive writing services that contract “English language writers” overseas. But we fear most of the errors are due to being either lazy or cheap. Perhaps publishers don’t take the time to read their own copy before going live with it, or maybe they are too tight to pay someone to proofread for them.

As a result, everyone loses. The reader quickly moves on to another webpage or forces herself to read the copy over and over until she understands its meaning. It’s tedious work, and in most cases, unnecessary.

Don’t do that to your customers and your readers. Please stop.

Get Professional Help

Before you publish that article, that press release, or that webpage… contact Ray Access. We’re professionals. We not only do this for a living; it’s our passion as well, so you know we want to do it right the first time.

If you don’t think you can afford us, call for a free estimate. If you want to keep all your work in-house, at least read your copy out loud before you publish it. If you’re not sure, get a second opinion. Give it to a fourth grader to see if she gets it. Sleep on it and then see if it still makes sense in the morning.

Whatever you do, make sure your prose is clear and to the point before you publish it. If it’s wrong or long or poorly edited, it can damage your reputation once it’s published. It may cause your customers, clients or readers to go elsewhere, which is likely the exact opposite reason you wrote it.

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.

Do What You Do Best

by Elle Ray | Mar 29, 2013 | Website Content

Spend Your Work Time Running Your Business

When you’re in the groove, doing what you do best, you feel energized. Everything seems to fall into place, and time passes so quickly that you barely notice. It’s why you got into business for yourself — to follow your passion, to turn your avocation into your vocation, and to follow your bliss.

When you work from your passion, it's fun

Unfortunately, owning a business requires entrepreneurs to engage in all sorts of activities that have nothing to do with the core of the business. You have to market your products and services to let customers know you exist. You need to do the books, pay the bills, write your blog, send out press releases, find suitable employees, and manage your time.

A Smart Solution

So if you’re smart, you turn to outside contractors. Using a third party to do those things that you aren’t very good at anyway can be a wise investment. Hiring local professionals to use their expertise to solve your challenges also supports the local economy. It’s not only big corporations that create a trickle-down effect to the local economy; entrepreneurs like you also drive those economics.

According to the Small Business Administration, hiring an outside contractor can save you money in the long run, too. The projects that you don’t want to do actually take you longer to accomplish, and you could be much more productive in those hours, doing what you do best. Because you only pay outside contractors for the work they perform for you, you have no payroll or tax issues to worry about.

Added Benefits

Hiring Ray Access can make you more of this In addition, the project is more likely to be successful because you’ve hired an expert to do it. We were so pleased this year to find a local accounting firm where we could just deliver our pile of receipts and return a few weeks later to sign the tax returns. We’ve all done taxes ourselves in the past, and while we did a good enough job, we learned that the time involved wasn’t worth it. In the hours it took to figure out all the codes on the various self-employment forms, we could earned twice as much money as it cost to hire the accountant.

At Ray Access, we’re writers. Our passion is writing and editing. It’s what we often do when we’re not even working. Our heads spin with ideas on topics to write about and angles to take them in. As writing professionals, we can save you time and money by writing your web content and your weekly blogs. Jot down all your notes, and we’ll put together a marketing strategy or business pitch you can present to your clients in readable plain language. It’s all part of what we do.

Since your time is money, spend it doing what you do best. Hire us to do what we do best. You follow your passion, and we follow ours. Everyone wins.

Why You Want High Search Rankings

by Elle Ray | Mar 7, 2013 | Content Marketing

Why Your Page Rank Matters to Your Business

Creating a website can be cheaper than printing tons of brochures… and it doesn’t destroy any trees. You can update your website much easier than you can update your brochure, too. Best of all, you can save on mailing costs. Instead of mailing your brochure to customers and potential customers, you can email, text, chat, or post your website address (or URL) to whomever you want in any number of different ways. You can even put your URL on your car doors. Try doing that with a brochure.

The question is: Are websites more effective than brochures?

In this day and age, you can be confident that nearly everyone is online or can get online (thank you public libraries). If someone has your URL and wants to visit your website, they can. They don’t need your four-color tri-fold. All they need is your URL scribbled on a cocktail napkin or printed on a business card. Of course, reaching your potential customers can still present a challenge — and that’s where search engines and page rank come in.

Make Your Message Count

Websites can do so much more than brochures as marketing tools, if you play them correctly. Websites never wear out. They are online 24/7. Your website serves as an advertisement for your company when customers look for your products or services. How can it fail?

Your website only works if your customers can find it. We’re not talking about cryptic URLs, which can be a problem. We’re talking about finding your site through an Internet search. Chances are good that people will find your website, but only if it comes up on the first or second page of a search result. That’s considered a high search ranking, with the first page being the ideal, the “Holy Grail” of all business websites. If your website doesn’t appear until page three or four — or worse — forget about it and keep passing out your business cards and brochures … because that’s the only way customers will find their way to your site.

The Puzzle of Internet Searches

The Internet is fast and convenient — and that’s what people have come to expect. Internet users aren’t accustomed to wading through page after page of entries on Google or Bing. They want instant gratification. If they search for buggy whips, they’ll visit a site that comes up on the first page. They might shop around, visit one or two sites for comparison, but more often than not, they’ll buy from the first site they hit. If your buggy whip company isn’t listed until page three, you’re out of luck and out of a customer. And not that many people are buying buggy whips these days.

No matter how slick your site, regardless of how low your prices are, if you can’t get your website to be listed on the first or second page of an organic search — meaning based on a phrase naturally entered by someone looking for something on the Internet — your site might as well be invisible. In fact, it is.

When a person uses a search engine like Google or Bing, it begins an intricate process that weighs complex algorithms, paid advertisements, and many, many other factors to deliver the results — and the order in which they’re posted — in mere seconds. Worse, this process is subject to change without warning.

Solving the Search Engine Puzzle

You can hire a team of Internet marketing specialists, called SEO (or search engine optimization) experts to help you rank higher on Internet searches. They understand the intricacies and can advise you on different strategies for getting the best results. These strategies often work, over time, but SEO experts are expensive and often work for large companies who have large marketing departments.

Alternately, you can take matters into your own hands and play the same game. Learn as much as you can. Spend the time tweaking your website to find the magic bullet that jumps your website to the top of the charts, so to speak. But be forewarned: this is a time-consuming venture.

Fortunately, there is a real solution. Not surprisingly, it involves us.

How Search Engines Work: A Primer

Search engines ultimately want to deliver to their customers a list of websites that most likely help, websites most likely to contain the information, products, or services the person is searching for. Search engines are looking for sites with clear content, consistent and relevant information, and useful copy. In other words, they’re looking for websites that are clear and easy to understand. These are the sites most likely to deliver whatever it is the user is seeking, even if it’s buggy whips.

The complex algorithms the search engines use are merely ways to try to find those clear sites. Your website can be one of them. It starts with clear text on your site, with the right words and good images on each page. It continues with a constant stream of new material, delivered over time.

Why is new content important? Search engines troll the Internet for fresh content all the time, to keep its “index” up to date. If your website is static, search engines will never have a reason to check back, driving your site lower and lower in rank. If your website continues to deliver good, useful information week after week, it will naturally rise in rank, not to mention get readers involved and result in links from other sites.

So don’t go to all the trouble of creating a new website if you’re only going to use it as an electronic calling card. Instead, take advantage of the marketing power of search engines and drive new visitors to your site. Post new content on your site daily or at least weekly. That’s one of the keys to driving your page rank higher.

If you don’t have time to write new stuff every day — because you’re also trying to run your business — then contact Ray Access. That’s what we do.

Always Edit Before Publishing

by Elle Ray | Feb 13, 2013 | Editing

Editing Your Content and What It Means to You

What does it mean to edit a piece of writing? Let’s look at an example.

Joanne is a small business owner. Her business is called Bits & Pieces. She sells automobile accessories, everything from steering wheel covers to custom hubcaps. She’s excited about her growing business and has just launched a new website.

While she has employees to do the nuts and bolts work of finding or making items and then selling them, she’s been reluctant to hire someone solely for the purpose of marketing. So she hired a friend to build the website and wrote all the text herself, often staying up late at night to finish.

So she’s appalled, when browsing the new site, to see on the About page that she’s misspelled her company name. Worst than that, she used a “T” instead of a “B.” As she hurriedly places a call to her friend for a quick fix, she wonders what other errors are lurking on the site and what kinds of backlash they may cause.

How Editing Can Help

At its most basic, editing is simply getting another set of eyes to look over any writing before it’s published — online or in hard copy. Mistakes like the one described above are caught before they become a nuisance… or an embarrassment.

Effective editing goes beyond simple proofreading, as it well should. Editors fix grammatical and spelling mistakes, true, but they also make writing stronger, clearer, and shorter, which is most important to your online audience.

A good editor rearranges the thoughts on the page to make your case more persuasive. A good editor finds the perfect word or phrase to replace ho-hum writing. A good editor makes your prose come to life.

Ray Access Does the Hard Part

Too often, in our vast experience, we’ve seen business owners get discouraged by the writing process and stop blogging. This is a missed opportunity. A regular blogging practice on your company website can attract an audience, get your company noticed, drive up the website’s page rank, and establish you as an authority in your field.

But business owners aren’t necessarily writers. It may not be where your passion lies. But it is exactly where our passion lies. Let Ray Access tackle the blogging for you. Your company will still reap the benefits, and you’ll have more time to devote to the things you do best.

Ray Access has helped many companies increase their bottom lines. Our rates are surprisingly affordable, and you’ll start to see results in the first year. Don’t miss an opportunity to grow your business online.

No BS: Communicate with Confidence

by Elle Ray | Jan 17, 2013 | Communication

Be Confident Whenever You Speak to Others

How you feel directly influences how well you communicate. We can all appreciate, for example, how impossible it is to hide intense feelings of anger or sadness when trying to talk to clients, bosses, or even a loved one. Similarly, your level of confidence shows through as well.

Your confidence shines through your words and actions

Ideally, before you speak, you should consider what you’re going to say and how you’re going to broach the subject. You should also be sure you have your facts right. Add to the mix how you feel about yourself, which we’ve just explained colors your words, and you have a virtual booklet to read before ever get to open your mouth. If every person was this thoughtful before speaking, the world would know no war and few arguments.

In the realistic world, we all take shortcuts. Every chance we get. Open mouth, insert foot, close mouth. Repeat. If your goal is to communicate clearly, though, you must understand both the internal and the external forces that direct not only the words you speak but the tone of your voice.

Examples in Confidence

Here’s a real-world example. Let’s say you’ve studied the latest Facebook changes for your company. In a meeting the next day, the boss asks for your input on how to best use the social networking site to market your product or services. You realize all eyes will be on you, and the thought terrifies you because you feel self-conscious about your teeth or your weight. When you do finally speak, you keep your eyes on the table in front of you while your voice stays a low mumble. Do you think your boss is going to give your suggestions much credence? Can you imagine them promoting you to a top marketing position? No to both questions.

Here’s another example. Imagine you meant to spend the previous evening on Facebook checking out the latest developments, knowing the meeting was approaching, but you got caught up in a chat with an old high school buddy. The next thing you knew, it was midnight, so you shut everything down and went to bed. At the meeting the following day, anxious to make a big impression with the boss, you start spouting off what little you did discover in your “investigation.” When you can’t answer questions from the floor and begin sputtering, your whole charade comes tumbling down. Do you think you made a very good impression? Will they take you seriously next time you have a suggestion for how to improve the company? No to both questions.

Tips for Self-Confidence

Look at your reflection When preparing for a meeting, a party, a networking event, or any gathering with intelligent, important people, start with a little confidence booster. Look directly in the mirror and try to see yourself objectively. Maybe you’ll see that a little blush or hair gel will give you a more polished appearance. Go ahead and add whatever little touches you need to make you feel good about how you look. Then smile at your reflection and tell yourself that you’re ready for the encounter — because no matter who’s in attendance, you got it right!

If your self-confidence is in the toilet for deep-seated reasons that go back to your childhood, consider therapy or a support group. Professional help or support from peers can help you overcome image or confidence issues. No matter how well-versed you are or how much you know about a subject, your words will fall on deaf ears if you don’t believe in yourself and your abilities.

One Final Note

Make sure to get your facts straight. If you ever get caught spouting BS in an effort to impress, your credibility will be shot. Done. Kaput. No matter how good you feel about yourself, keep your mouth closed until you’ve done your homework — all your homework.

A cocky attitude and inaccurate information will likely damage far more than just your presentation. But when you have a solid grasp of the facts and speak without fear or embarrassment, you send a message that you are someone to be taken seriously. Communicate with confidence and put your career on the fast track!

That’s Not What I Meant

by Elle Ray | Jan 10, 2013 | Communication

Here Are Some Communication Shortcomings

Communication. Merriam-Webster defines “communication” as an act of transmitting a message or an exchange of information or opinions. Human interaction hinges on sending, receiving, and reacting to information, whether verbal, written, or sensory. We send messages whether we intend to or not.

Look it up in the dictionary

But are those messages reaching your intended audience in the manner you hope they do? You don’t always know how a person will receive your message because there’s usually a lot going on behind the words that affect your communications.

The main question is: are you sending the messages that you intend to send or are you inadvertently transmitting information that strikes others in a way you didn’t expect? Being clear in our communicative styles is both an art and a skill. It takes a certain finesse to deliver criticism or bad news, for example. Too often, when we talk to another about a failing or offer what we think is constructive advice, we invoke a defensive response. Worse still, we can alienate our family, friends, coworkers, or customers through an inadvertent lack of subtlety. The art of letting a person down gently, expressing your opinion, or delivering a critical report is a skill that you can learn, but your education starts not in the classroom, but in your heart and mind.

By taking a quick inventory every morning, you can get in touch with your true nature and the mood that most likely drives your interactions each day. If you’re like most people, that mood varies from day to day. For example, days that you wake up feeling fresh and excited about the tasks ahead, knowing full well you’re up to all the challenges and eager to meet them — those days you’ll most likely talk to everyone with positive overtones you don’t have to manufacture. On the other hand, on those self-critical, negative mornings when you’re filled with fear and trepidation, not sure how you’ll manage to get through the burdens you’ve been strapped with — those days probably elicit harsher tones and negative projections on everyone you talk to… even those whom you praise.

Communication is not just about the words you say, it’s also about how you deliver them. More often than not, your mood affects your message more than the actual words that come out of your mouth. Even your memos, emails, letters, and reports can reflect your mood at the time you composed them.

You can learn the skills inherent in communication through a wide range of instruction and practices we’ll discuss in a later post. In the meantime, if you want to make sure you’re getting across the message you intend, let someone else read it before you send it. The writers at Ray Access have a knack for cutting through the moods and attitudes so that your blogs, emails, press releases, and articles are clear and free of emotional overtones. As the writer and speaker, you usually don’t recognize it. We can — and do. Email us at info at rayaccess.com for a preview of editing services that can save you from having to follow up with explanations and embarrassing apologies for sending inaccurate or unintentionally vague communications.

Why You Need a Content Provider

by Elle Ray | Aug 30, 2012 | Content Provider

Ray Access Helps Your Website Stay on Page 1

John and Jayne Public decide to vacation in Asheville. They go online, open a browser to a bookmarked search engine, and type in a phrase like “bed and breakfasts in Asheville.” A page of results lists the most likely choices for the Publics to choose from. Obviously, if a link to your bed and breakfast website appears on the first page of results, the chances of them picking you increases. It’s that simple.

Thanks to the popularity of e-commerce and the maturity of search engines, more and more people are using the Internet to find what they’re looking for. Restaurants. Colleges. Even doctors. The businesses with an active website are more likely to attract these people.

Whether you are a Realtor or a home furnishings store, a plastic surgeon or an architect, a clothing boutique or a dentist, your website can be (and should be) an outreach and marketing tool to bring in more business. If it’s not, you’re wasting your money.

Fresh Content

So how do you get your website onto the first page of search results, especially if you are in a highly competitive field? There are multiple theories and costly formulas that promise to get you there, but while those services can help, the truth is much simpler:

Your website has to attract attention. That doesn’t mean you need bells, whistles, or flashy graphics. What you need is relevant content delivered consistently. What you need is an active website that reaches out to your market and draws them in. That’s what a content provider does.

New content on your site attracts search engines and visitors alike. Fresh content delivers attention, and fresh content is exactly what Ray Access delivers. Blog posts written from your perspective. Press releases written to attract new audiences to your website. Website text that better addresses the needs of your market. These services (and more) can help bring in more business, because:

If you’re ignoring your website, it’s likely ignoring you.”

Contact us to discuss your individual needs. We can put a package together that’s right for you and your budget.

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