Managing a Remote Team

by Mark Bloom | Apr 21, 2020 | Agency Advice

What You Need to Know to Get Work Done

With all the changes in the world, more and more people are finding themselves having to work from home. It’s one thing if you’re a freelancer — you’re already used to the work-from-home routine. But if you’re a manager accustomed to directing your team within the same building, well, things have changed quite a bit, and you may suddenly be adrift in a sea of Zoom video conferences.

Managing a remote team takes extra work

Managing a remote team isn’t the same as managing a team in the next office. Even face-to-face, managing people presents challenges that require all your intellect and intuition. When you have a remote team, new problems seem to pop up every day, leaving you searching for answers or guidance.

Ray Access Is Here to Help

A small business focused on providing the best content to its clients, Ray Access was founded by two partners in Asheville, NC, but it employs contract writers from across the country. Even before the pandemic caused almost every business to lock down and self-isolate, the content writing industry didn’t require proximity. As long as a writer produced well-researched, well-written copy, it didn’t matter where that writer was located.

As a result, the partners have learned a thing or two about managing a remote team. If you’re looking for help with your own team, you may benefit from our experience. First, some background:

We rely on email for communication. While we make it work for us, your experience may require a more sophisticated tool. There are a number of web-based project management tools, such as Basecamp and Trello (which does not constitute an endorsement). Each has its pros and cons.
We pay our writers per project, not per hour If you pay by the hour, it presents different issues when managing a remote team. But you have to be willing to trust your team to work when they say they’re working while tracking how long it takes them to complete tasks.

Tips for Managing a Remote Team

The first thing you need to do is to set expectations. While we always look for exemplary work, we value communication with our team. We feel it’s better to have too much than too little. We therefore encourage our writers to ask questions regarding their assignments to get clarification when necessary. There are no such things as stupid questions.

When we hire a new writer, we send a contract, a W9 form and a document that establishes our non-negotiable guidelines, which include:

Requiring our writers to respond to email requests and assignments within 24 hours. That sounds like a no-brainer, but you’d be amazed how often this becomes an issue. By establishing this expectation up front, we feel empowered to enforce it.
Setting and honoring deadlines. We’re a deadline-driven business, so we set deadlines for every assignment. We used to provide just the date, but we discovered that writers sometimes waited until 6:00 AM the next day to deliver an assignment. Now our deadlines are at 5:00 PM Eastern time on the date provided. Lesson learned.
Establishing reasons for dismissal. Missing deadlines, being incommunicado or turning in shoddy work are all included in this section. Setting these expectations up front establishes a baseline for remote working behavior.

Team-Building Tips

When managing a remote team that’s house-bound for the first time, you face additional challenges. Ensure your team members have an appropriate space, the necessary equipment and a powerful enough internet connection to do the work. Provide any training they may need, whether for your project management tool or the video conferencing technology. Then give them the time to get accustomed to the new way of working. Don’t expect every team member to adapt at the same speed.

Regarding video conferencing, set the protocol early. That means showing up to meetings on time, sticking to the agenda, and reporting progress efficiently. You’ll experience some glitches early on as your team gets used to the technology, but that’s all part of managing a remote team. Another part is keeping your team motivated, which you can accomplish by:

Providing work-from-home tips, such as using noise-cancelling headphones
Making sure everyone gets a chance to contribute at meetings
Letting team members share their challenges and successes while working from home
Having food delivered to their homes on meeting day (or any day!)

Trust in Allah, But Tie Up Your Camel

At Ray Access, we give our writers the space they need to complete their assignments. We don’t check in unless there’s a problem. Our writers are pros; we trust them to do the work. We do coach new writers until they’ve gained our trust, and we do sometimes send an assignment back with notes for a revision, but we’ve hired our team because we know what they’re capable of.

When you’re managing a remote team, cross your T’s and dot your I’s. Be as clear as you can be in your communication, whether by email, phone or video chat. Realize that it’s not going to be the same as managing in-person. But give your team the space they need to perform. If they’re motivated, they’ll likely succeed — and may actually thrive — in this new environment.

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 talk about your needs. We write website copy, blog posts, e-newsletters, and more. Everything we do is thoroughly researched, professionally edited and guaranteed original.

Advice for Avoiding the Coronavirus

by Mark Bloom | Apr 7, 2020 | Announcement

Social distancing during the coronavirus

How to Improve Your Odds against the Virus

Ray Access may not be healthcare professionals, but we specialize in writing website content for a variety of medical practices. Our writers and editors research the latest developments in the medical field for our clients. We find up-to-date medical information sometimes before they’re in the mainstream. So this advice constitutes the best and latest news available, which you’re encouraged to confirm.

Doctors now know the coronavirus is a respiratory virus that settles in your lungs. It either causes or enables pneumonia, which may be fatal for virus sufferers. The virus creates thick mucus, which then solidifies. Narrower walls in your respiratory passages block the airways to your lungs and eventually impairs the lungs themselves.

10 Ways to Protect Yourself from the Coronavirus

Here’s a list of 10 things you can do to protect yourself from the virus or keep it from getting worse:

Drink warm or hot liquids, such as coffee, teas, soups and warm water. Sip warm water every 20 minutes during the day. This washes the virus, if present, from your mouth into your stomach, where the acids neutralize it. Also, avoid eating or drinking cold things whenever possible.
Wash your hands every half hour. Yes, every 30 minutes. Use soap that foams with water. Scrub for at least 20 seconds — or the time it takes you to sing the Happy Birthday song.
Gargle an antiseptic liquid in warm water every day. You can find oral antiseptics in over-the-counter strength at your local pharmacy. They’re not expensive. Or try lemon juice, salt water or vinegar.
Wash yourself and your clothes often. Soap and detergent neutralize the virus; you don’t need bleach. The virus apparently attaches easily to hair and clothes, as well as skin. If possible, take a shower or bath, using soap, immediately whenever you come in from outside. Do not sit down, do not throw your clothes on the bed or carpet. Wash your clothes every day, especially after leaving the house. If you can’t do that, keep the clothes worn outside separate from the other clothes you wash.
Clean metallic surfaces every day. The virus has been known to survive on these surfaces for up to nine days. That includes door handles, countertops and the surfaces of cars, walls, desks … any metal surface you may touch. Keep them clean and wipe them down often, even daily. When you’re out of the house, avoid touching these surfaces directly or wear gloves.
Don’t smoke. Anything that impacts your respiratory system makes you more susceptible to a viral infection. And if you can go without cigarettes for the duration of the coronavirus outbreak, you may be able to quit permanently, which makes you less susceptible in the future, as well.
Eat lots of fruit and vegetables. Usually, promoting a healthful diet is good advice any time. Now, during the coronavirus pandemic, eating fresh fruit and vegetables increases your zinc levels, which strengthens your immune system.
Be aggressive in treating a sore throat. The virus most often enters your body via your throat. Your sore throat may be caused by the virus. It can remain there for three or four days before making its way to your lungs.
Maintain social distancing. The virus spreads through person-to-person contact (even if you’re less than six feet apart, since the virus hangs in the air for several hours), by hovering in the air and through contact with an infected surface. Besides washing your hands often, don’t touch your face.
Stay at home except for trips you need to make: for food, exercise and medical necessities. The less interaction you have with others, the better your chances of avoiding COVID-19. Stay safe!

Ray Access is a content marketing firm that delivers targeted words to empower your business to succeed. Contact us about your specific project to receive a quote. We write website copy, blog posts, e-newsletters, and more. Everything we do is thoroughly researched, professionally edited and guaranteed original.

Why It’s a Good Time to Maintain Your Online Marketing Efforts

by Mark Bloom | Mar 26, 2020 | Content Marketing

Even If No One’s Buying Right Now, They Will Soon

During the coronavirus pandemic, whole cities, states and nations are on lockdown. The United States economy is expected to shrink by as much as 30 percent. Unemployment is reaching record highs. Some states have canceled the school year. Even the Olympics has been postponed for a year. And as bad as things are now, they’re likely to get even worse.

And there’s no end in sight. In Asia, where the number of new infections has zeroed out, leaders have decided to relax restrictions. And no sooner has the population breathed a collective sigh of relief and ventured outside, free for the first time in two months, and infections started to rise again. The point isn’t to scare you, but that no one knows when this crisis may end.

Is it time for online marketing? Yes.

So Why Do Any Online Marketing?

If no one is buying anything besides toilet paper and groceries, why do you need to market your business? If you don’t produce essential goods or services, your business likely is struggling to survive. Maybe you’ve had to furlough or lay off employees. Perhaps you’ve shut down operations. Online marketing efforts may seem fruitless during all this.

While it’s true the economy has ground to a crawl, opportunities for improving your business still exist. By keeping your brand relevant to your customers, you’ll be in a better position to return to your previous level of business once the coronavirus pandemic settles into the rearview mirror, whenever that may be. And you don’t have to spend lots of money to launch an online marketing campaign. In fact, online marketing is one of the least expensive and most effective marketing techniques available!

Actions to Consider for Your Business

Your business, like any relationship, requires nurturing. Although you work hard to make your business relevant to your customer base, you also have to keep your company name on the top of their minds. Assuming you want your business to continue post-COVID-19, you can get a head start doing that by:

Redesigning your site, especially if you haven’t touched it in the past three years
Revamping your website content to reflect the new reality or better express your value proposition
Beginning or restarting your blog to share insights, tips and advice with your customers and potential customers
Sending out a monthly newsletter to your contact list
Revisiting your business plan to adapt to these changing times

Once the coronavirus pandemic subsides, people will be looking around for the things they need and want. After people go back to work, they’ll want life to go back to some semblance of normal. Certain aspects of everyday life are likely to be altered forever, though. Shopping online may not fall off, even as local shops reopen. Now that consumers have experienced the ease of shopping online, they’ll likely continue the practice.

Maintain or Improve Your Online Business Presence

Online marketing is simpler and more effective than advertising on television, radio, newspapers and even billboards. It’s also less expensive. You can easily spend five figures on a new website, but it costs a fraction of that to refresh the content on your site, which works equally well for visitors and search engines. And while you can spend thousands on advertising, you can get a blog post every week for as little as $475 a month.

Hire Ray Access to research, write and edit the content that empowers your business. If you spend any money on your business during the coronavirus crisis, spend it on online marketing. That’s where the world is migrating to buy the things they need, to learn new things and stay informed. That’s where they’ll stay even after the pandemic. That’s where your customers will be looking for you.

Consequences of Missed Deadlines

by Mark Bloom | Mar 17, 2020 | Agency Advice

How to Mitigate the Fallout of Missing a Deadline

A missed deadline doesn't make anyone happy.

If you’re in business to deliver products or services, chances are you’ve heard at least some of the reasons for missing a deadline, including these gems. There may be a few legitimate reasons to miss a deadline, but in the long run, keeping your word is much more important to your business than excuses. Missing even one deadline damages your company’s reputation if you don’t make amends.

So while you must do everything in your power to avoid missed deadlines, you also have to know how to deal with the consequences when it does occasionally happen. Missed deadlines can sometimes be unavoidable, especially if you over-promise your deliverables and then a key employee gets sick or the scope of the project changes. Learn what to do next to handle the situation.

Lots of Moving Parts

If you’re the leader of a web development team, a project manager or an agency owner, you have to manage — and trust — others to do their jobs and do them well. Usually, your office may run like clockwork, pumping out great work on a tight schedule. But one incident — which can include not just an illness, but a defection or retirement — can throw your office into chaos.

Everything on your schedule usually trickles down and affects everything else. If you miss one deadline, every other project in the works or in the pipeline suddenly becomes in danger of being delivered late. Missed deadlines should be unacceptable to you and your business. Consistently missing deadlines is a recipe for a loss of work and a negative reputation.

Don’t Point Fingers

If you missed a deadline, don’t point someone out as the cause. Blaming others, even if you’re correct, does nothing to rectify the current situation. Instead, follow these steps to get the work done and delivered as quickly as possible, while you placate your client:

Assess what work still needs to be done. Regardless whether it’s a lot or a little, this work should be your company’s priority until it’s completed.
Immediately assign the work to someone you know will make it happen, including yourself. In other words, “get ‘er done” and get it done with the highest level of quality possible.
Meanwhile, communicate with the client that the work has been delayed as soon as you know you won’t make the deadline. Own up to the problem and take responsibility. Again, don’t point fingers or make excuses.
Offer to make it up to the client in any number of ways, such as a discount off the top of the current project, a valuable free extra or a deep discount on a future purchase. If your company is to blame for the delay, make sure your client understands that you value the business and will do what it takes to make it right.
Deliver the work as soon as you can, making doubly sure that it’s correct, accurate, complete and of the highest quality. Don’t disappoint a client you’ve already made wait for your product or service.

Honest and forthright communication is always the best approach. Don’t wait for the client to contact you, asking about the product or service. Reach out and alert them as soon as you know you’re going to experience any missed deadlines. Customers appreciate the personal touch in these instances. Even if they’re initially angry, you often can overcome this with a sincere desire to make it right and clear communication that you can always provide in a timely manner.

Online Reputation Management

by Mark Bloom | Mar 3, 2020 | Agency Advice

How to Keep Your Online Reputation Positive

Every business has a reputation, including yours. The question isn’t so much what your reputation is, but rather how well you manage it. The online world presents an opportunity and a challenge. If you ignore it, you’re just setting your business up to fail. So you need to develop a plan for your online reputation management.

With online reputation management, you can rank #1

Thanks to Google My Business, Facebook, LinkedIn, Yelp and all those other online review sites, anyone anywhere can leave a review or recommendation for your business. Good reviews are of course golden. But a bad review can fester like an unwashed cut, bleeding your business of potential customers. Unless you can afford to pay a company to repair your reputation, it’s on you to practice sound online reputation management techniques.

How to Foster Positive Reviews

If your business is successful and growing, you have clients who love what you do. For web developers, web designers, online marketing agencies and website content writers, each project you complete is an opportunity to ask for a positive review. Make it easy for your clients by sending them the link (or links) to online review sites, where they can leave their glowing comments.

Whenever you deliver a finished project, you feel great at the accomplishment, and your clients are flush with excitement. It’s the perfect time to ask them to review your work in an online forum. You can even copy and paste the testimonial to your website and social media accounts. In fact, that’s a step you must take to spread the word.

How to Deal with Negative Reviews

At some point, however, someone may leave a negative review on social media or on one of the review sites. You have to deal with it. If you don’t, it becomes more than a nuisance; it becomes a liability, encouraging potential customers to choose your competition. Fortunately, there are strategies for dealing with negative reviews, such as:

Reply to the negative reviewer, seeking to make it right. Whether the reviewer is right or wrong, if you publicly try to make amends, your business earns points when others see your response. But you must respond within 24 hours, which means monitoring your reviews. Online reputation management requires constant surveillance of your social media channels.
Encourage your existing clients to flood the review site with positive reviews. You can never make a negative review disappear, but you can bury it in a sea of authentic positive reviews.
If the negative reviewer is holding a grudge or trying to harm your business without a valid complaint, address the issue head-on. Ask for details. If none are forthcoming, explain to others that the negative experience couldn’t have happened (and why). Reputation-harming inaccuracies damage your business even if the claims are false.

You can use all of these strategies, as appropriate. Don’t just stop at one. The more active you are performing online reputation management, the more likely you’ll have a stellar reputation that draws customers to your website and your business.

It’s Not What You Say, But How You Say It

by Mark Bloom | Feb 18, 2020 | Communication

Use Every Tool Available to Say What You Mean

If you’ve been reading our blog posts, you already appreciate the value of clear communication. You already know how to give an effective compliment. And you already understand the power of body language.

When you have something to say — whether it’s an energizing presentation to your team or a big sales pitch to a new client — how you say it matters as much as what you say. Your actual words may go in one ear and out the other, but your attitude and demeanor leave a lasting impression. How you say it involves your:

Body language
Hand gestures
Facial expressions
Tone of voice
Eye contact
Environmental circumstances

How You Say It with Body Language

We’re writers. Words matter to us on many levels. So when we tell you that your spoken words to a group or even one-on-one convey very little, you have to believe it. We’d prefer it to be false, but it’s been proven again and again, and we can’t ignore it. Your body language when speaking says much more than the words you utter.

The number, in fact, is seven percent. What you say contributes only seven percent of your message. How you say it with your body language and other unspoken cues provide the other 93 percent. Be conscious of your body when you speak. Use it to convey and reinforce your message. When people listen to you, they’re watching your body language. A confident posture lends weight to your words.

How You Say It with Hand Gestures

Some people tend to talk with their hands. Their extended pinky and thumb become a telephone receiver. A pointed index finger and thumb become a pistol. Sometimes, a conversation consumes their full reach. But gestures add emphasis to your words, just as a conductor punctuates the music with his gesticulations.

Your audience wants to know that they can trust you. Yet no one trusts a speaker whose arms hang limply. Your hand gestures can win an audience over. Watch any great speaker; every one of them use their hands to sweep meaning into their words. So help your listeners understand the full extent of your message by incorporating hand gestures into how you say it.

How You Say It with Facial Expressions

Like body language and hand gestures, your facial expressions communicate lots of information on their own. Think of the very different messages you express when you say, “I love to write blog posts” — once while smiling broadly and once when scowling. The same words take on opposite meanings. No matter what you say, people are watching your face for clues to your attitude. Use your expression in conjunction with your words. Put the whole package together to make your point stronger.

You can convey your mood, your emotions and your attitude with just a look. Even if your audience doesn’t consciously process your expression, it sticks in their minds. They can’t help but understand it. That’s just part of human nature. You’d do yourself a disservice if you didn’t use your facial expressions to guide your listeners toward a deeper understanding.

How You Say It with the Tone of Your Voice

Communication is a multi-sensory experience. When people listen, their ears naturally open. Their eyes observe. Their noses are actually on alert for pleasurable or foul smells. The brain puts the input together into a package that helps the brain not only accept the information provided, but also to decide whether to trust the speaker.

How you say something — how you use the inflection, pitch and tone of your voice — engages your audience directly. It’s so important in the art of storytelling that it’s become part of how we communicate. You can express tension, surprise or gravity through the tone of your voice. When you use it to reinforce your message, your message has a more lasting impact. Use your voice to connect with your listeners.

How You Say It with Eye Contact

To connect with someone, you have to look them in the eye. That look conveys trust and honesty. While it’s easy to do when you’re talking one-on-one with someone, it’s a feat when you’re speaking to a group. But spread the love around the room. Maintain eye contact with individuals for several seconds before moving on. That connection opens the brain to be more receptive.

Eye contact is a necessary part of building trust with people. But you have to create a delicate balance. If you don’t maintain eye contact long enough, you lose any good will you intended. Look too long at one person, however, and it becomes a weird power play between you and the audience member. Make your presence real by connecting with your audience through eye contact.

How Environmental Circumstances Impact What You Say

It’s not so much what you say as to what your audience hears. If you’re holding court in the midst of a crowded subway station, few are going to pay you any attention. If you’re speaking to your crack management team in a pristine conference room, on the other hand, you can be sure that everyone is hanging on every word.

By providing an environment that’s conducive to the meaning of your message, you encourage your audience to better absorb that message. A comforting environment puts all the focus on your speech, as there are no distractions. And then, if you’re using all your nonverbal clues, you can reach your audience more effectively. And that’s the key to communication.

Does Popularity Equate to More Business?

by Mark Bloom | Feb 4, 2020 | Agency Advice

Do Popular Companies Get More Business?

In school, the popular kids always seemed to be the most successful. They were often smart, funny and attractive. Maybe they were outstanding athletes. Maybe they also got good grades. They were adored and envied by everyone, including teachers.

Do popular companies get more business?

Does the same hold true for businesses? Think of popular businesses, such as Amazon, Apple, Tesla, Google, Microsoft, even Facebook and Twitter. Each one of these companies is (or in some cases, was) led by a charismatic leader. Therefore, you’d assume that popular companies do get more business.

There’s More to the Story

Popularity in business today is measured in likes, mentions, followers and clicks. These are among the many metrics tracked and logged by search engine optimization specialists. Touted as showing market penetration, each like, mention, follower and click is collated according to age, gender, location and even income level. Big data is the means through which businesses measure their popularity.

In this kind of popularity contest, the goal isn’t necessarily to get more business, but to exceed your competitors’ numbers. It’s no longer a means to an end, but an end to itself. If being popular were the ultimate goal in business, you’d see fewer accountants and more marketers. There would be bigger and bigger discounts to woo fans — because the team with the most fans wins, right?

Comparing Businesses to Sports Teams

In some ways, companies and sports teams are similar:

Both put an enormous effort into branding and name recognition.
Both actively engage in winning and keeping fans.
If successful, both enjoy a solid foundation of diehard fanatics.
Sports teams, like businesses, need positive media coverage.
Sports teams have a devoted local following, similar to successful brick-and-mortar businesses.
The most popular teams, like companies, are considered winners almost no matter what they do, unless and until they make an egregious marketing error.

But in other important ways, the two differ wildly. For example:

Sports teams can experience a bad year — or even a bad decade — and still be a viable enterprise; businesses can only sustain a certain number of annual losses before they have to throw in the towel.
Sports fans still attend games, even if it’s to root for the competition.
Sports teams, unlike businesses, need wins on the field to give their fans something to cheer about.
A championship trophy can sustain fans for a decade; business must constantly adapt and grow — their fans more commonly ask, “What have you done for me lately?”
Even though they are businesses, sports franchises don’t measure success in dollars. All other companies don’t measure success in wins.

The Value of Popularity

Businesses spend hundreds to thousands of dollars every month on social media. Some post daily or even hourly. And then there’s the responsibility of responding to comments. It takes time and money to manage an active social media account. Now multiply that by 10, to include all the various social media platforms, and you get an idea of the true cost.

But what’s the true value of those likes, mentions, followers and clicks? Do they actually funnel real people toward sales? The answer is complicated, but it relies less on likes and followers and more on website traffic.

Does Popularity Get More Business for Companies?

Social media generates brand awareness, no doubt, as it gets a business’s name in front of millions of people, if they’re successful. Social media is also a great place to manage a business’s customer experience. In the very public platform of social media, your business can mitigate complaints and foster ambassadors. All of these are positive things.

But most ecommerce takes place on a company’s website. So website traffic and online sales tell the story. To get more business, a company has to urge social media followers and fans to visit their website. Without that connection, being popular is no more relevant than being named Mark.

Tipping the Scales

The final part of the equation to get more business is balancing the cost of all social media engagement to actual sales from all that activity. It’s great if your company can generate $10,000 in gross revenue from social media contacts. But it’s substantially less exciting if you’re paying $8,000 a month to maintain that website presence. It’s still a win in terms of hard numbers, but the ratio isn’t promising.

Of course, it depends where you are in the cycle. If you’re just starting your social media campaign, you may have nowhere to go but up. But if you’ve been at it for a year, that $10,000 in revenue may represent the high-water mark. There are factors to explore, such as reducing the costs while maintaining the revenue stream. Only you, as the business owner, can determine if it’s worth continuing in this case.

Popularity, in general, doesn’t get more business for your company. It is only a sign of brand awareness and brand acceptance. Both of those are positives, but they don’t always translate into more profits. Beware the social media game.

Clear Communication Is Good for Everyone

by Mark Bloom | Jan 21, 2020 | Communication

Business Owners Especially Benefit from Clarity

Ray Access says: Clear communication produces smiles of understanding

The world of economics is driven by individual ambitions, group dynamics and national goals. But you could also say something similar about the world of personal relationships. The thing that bridges the gap between these widely diverse realms is communication.

When human beings are involved, clear communication is good for everyone involved. It doesn’t matter whether you’re an economics professor giving a high-level lecture or a love-smitten individual courting a partner. When you can impart information in a way that promotes understanding and action, you enable positive results, regardless of your specific goals.

Businesses Have Many Audiences

Personal relationships aside — since that topic would require a hundred blog posts written by a certified therapist — clear communication benefits your business in many ways because you serve several and likely very diverse audiences, such as your:

Clients or customers
Internal teams and employees
Vendors and suppliers
Third-party contractors — such as content writers, web designers, user experience experts and SEO firms
Media contacts
Investors

Each of these groups requires specific information from you. The better you can deliver clear communication, the easier your professional relationships become to manage. And that makes managing your business easier.

How to Improve Your Communications

Regardless what your business entails, you can learn to improve your communication skills. It takes commitment and desire, but you can will yourself to more clearly impart your meaning to whomever you’re trying to reach. Practice techniques that include:

Listening. Clear communication begins by listening to your audience. They may tell you what they want and what’s important to them. Communication is a two-way process. You can’t effectively reach someone until you’ve listened to their needs and concerns.
Learning all you can about your intended audience. Find out who they are and what they want from you or your business. Learn their language — slang, acronyms and all — and use it freely when appropriate. The most useful information becomes useless if your audience doesn’t understand what you’re trying to say.
Making it easy for your audience to understand. People learn in different ways. Some learn by listening. Others learn by hearing. Still others have to get hands-on to learn. Tailor your delivery to give as many learning options as possible to satisfy the highest number of your intended audience.
Understanding why your message matters to your audience. Know your goals in communicating. Are you trying to encourage action? Do you want to educate? What’s the urgency of your message? You should be able to answer these questions without hesitation. That knowledge gives your message the gravitas it needs to hit its target.
Simplifying your message. Everyone in business has to manage hundreds of daily emails and battle a constant flow of spam. Your business communications aren’t a literary short story, so don’t make your readers wait. Get right to the point and deliver your message in the simplest of ways. Simplify your language, deliver it in a way that connects and ask for confirmation.
Determining the emotional impact of your message. If what you’re imparting has an emotional component, consider delivering it in person. Don’t discharge an employee by email, text or phone message. Do it in person. Even positive news is more effective coming directly from you.
Putting it in writing if you need to make sure they got it. The more complex the information, the more important it is that you give it to your audience in writing. They may need to refer back to your message. If your message is important enough, deliver written clear communication so they have it when they need it.

It’s Not Brain Surgery, But…

by Mark Bloom | Jan 6, 2020 | Agency Advice

Believe in Yourself and in Your Website Work

Believe in yourself and in your website work

One of the great things about working within the internet industry is that our work rarely puts lives at risk. We’re not brain surgeons or air traffic controllers. We never harm any animals in the course of doing our jobs. We simply create valuable websites that help businesses thrive.

But that doesn’t mean what we do isn’t important. In our own way, we support and enable the economy, both in the United States and beyond its borders. While it’s nice to see that Amazon had its most lucrative holiday shopping season ever in 2019, the fact is that small businesses contribute about 44 percent to the U.S. economy. The online world of commerce grows every year, and website professionals — even those who just do small business projects — help drive that growth.

Yay, Us!

So take pride in your work. Believe in yourself with each new website project you undertake. Try something new and learn something new. Every time you move the needle of best practices forward, everyone wins, especially you and your clients.

What you do matters, both to businesses and consumers. And when you believe in yourself, you tend to do your best work. Consider the value of what you provide your clients, such as:

Easy-to-navigate websites
Intuitive new designs and conventions
Attractive new color combinations and compelling imagery
Search engine rankings, despite a constantly moving target
Valuable, clearly articulated information on particular industries and businesses

Keep Your Eye on the Big Picture

But those of us who work in the online realm — and we’re speaking to all the website developers, SEO experts, graphic designers, content providers and project managers out there — occasionally get sucked into the minutiae of our jobs. Tiny tasks that take all our time seem to grow in importance until we lose sight of the big picture. It’s a natural phenomenon for industry specialists.

Yet every website project can impact the industry. Remember that the internet as it now exists is only 20 or so years old, still in its infancy. What will websites look like 20 years from now? It’s up to you to determine that with every new job. While it’s not brain surgery, it does involve inventing the future, and that’s a significant responsibility.

You’ve Got to Believe in Yourself

When you believe in your ability to get the job done, you can go beyond the basics. Anyone can build a website today, so it takes a master like you to do something truly extraordinary. That’s the value Ray Access brings to its clients. Anyone can write a web page or blog post, but this content company — composed of experienced writers and editors, including former journalists — produces content that exceeds what others can create because:

We only use substantiated, authoritative sources for our research.
Our writers have proven their mettle over hundreds of projects.
All our work is edited multiple times to ensure the highest quality and a consistent tone.
We stay on top of search engine trends, using keywords and synonyms appropriately.

We believe in ourselves, as you should believe in yourself. Appreciate the value you deliver to your clients and to the world. Improve with every project, and you can set the bar in your specialty. When you strive to be the best at what you do, you can change the world for the better.

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