Linda and Mark at Ray Access claim to be able to write about any topic they can research. And it’s true. They’ve written about plastic surgery, retail furniture, medical issues, construction, website development, and a whole range of other topics. Yet the prevailing “wisdom” in the industry is to specialize. Why?
Specialization Creates Experts
In today’s world, people gravitate toward experts. Experts speak the truth, they get paid lots of money for their intimate knowledge of their chosen field, and businesses and the media seek them out for advice. What’s not to like about specialization?
First, it limits your market and your audience. If your specialization is computers, you may occasionally write a piece that appeals to a wider audience, but most of the time, you’re writing for geeks. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. If your specialization is construction, you’re going to be writing for businesses in that field. Period.
While it’s easier to brand your services as a writer if you specialize, you also limit your marketing reach. An expert only matters when someone needs an expert in that field. Most days, they don’t.
Generalization Creates Opportunity
Since we can write on virtually any topic, we can write for virtually any client. Are you a dentist? We can create a terrific, engaging blog for you. Are you a landscaper? We can provide dynamic website text that’s SEO-friendly and written for the common man (or woman).
Being generalists means we specialize in a new field with every new assignment we take. We can still relate to the general population, so we don’t get bogged down in jargon. We get to learn and write about lots of different topics, and that suits us fine.
So regardless what your business is, it’s in good hands when you hire us to write about it. We offer a free estimate.
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.
Believe it or not — and this is a big admission from a couple of writer/editors — not everyone loves to read. Online, these preferences are exacerbated. So, let us present our three reasons to have a website video:
1. People Don’t Read Online
Many Internet users scan the websites they visit, hoping to find the content or information they’re seeking. Very few actually read the words you’ve so carefully crafted on your home page. That’s why it’s important to include headings and subheadings: they help direct visitors (not readers) to the key information you have to share.
A video allows people to sit back and watch instead of leaning forward to read. A video presents information, instead of forcing a visitor to find it. A website video can connect with more potential customers than a page of text.
2. People Don’t Learn the Same Way
People have different preferences, which are innate to them and colors the way they learn. Some are listeners. Some are more visually oriented. Others learn by feeling as they go. Not everyone enjoys dissecting the words to find the true meaning of your message.
A video can connect with those people who are visual learners. Auditory and visual learners are drawn to video more than to text. A well-done video also can touch a viewer on an emotional level, too. All these advantages can make video a more compelling presentation than a page of text.
3. People Love to Watch Videos
Many people would rather watch a video than read a page of text. A video can be more entertaining, but it can also get a message across quickly and effectively. A website video also keeps a visitor on your site longer, and if it’s good, encourages the visitor to explore the rest of your site. A video is an ideal complement to solid writing that engages the readers.
A video appeals to Internet users looking to be entertained while they get their information. If you want to tell your story, get your message across, or increase sales, you should consider what a video will do for your website … and your business.
We Do Website Videos
Luckily, Ray Access can help. We can produce a website video for you that helps you realize your goals. Attract a bigger audience. Improve your website page rank. Sell your product or service. We can help you to creatively reach out. Watch a sample of our work and imagine the possibilities:
Addiction Recovery & Prevention (1:50)
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.
Most savvy business owners today get a website before they even open their doors for business. While some actually need the site to run their companies, others do it just because everyone else is doing it. Is that a good enough reason to dump time and resources into something you’re not even sure you need?
If you’re a business owner, especially if you’re a small business owner, you know you have limited resources. Not just money, but time and energy, too. Building, maintaining and marketing a website, like any other business strategy, can use up those valuable, and limited, resources. Therefore, you should carefully consider your options and your needs before you rush to hire a web designer.
Go through the same process you would for any other business expense. Ask yourself why you need it, who you’re trying to reach and how it’s going to help you build your business. Know what you’re getting into before you invest. Below are our top four reasons to get a site of your own … as well as a few tips on when and how to use it.
1. Contact
Hardly anyone uses the yellow pages anymore. Is it worth the money to get your little square published alongside all your competitors? You’ll likely get a much better response with a good search engine hit. Even when people know your company name and just want to find your phone number, they’re more likely to search online through their home computers or smart phones than to pick up the yellow pages.
Make it easy for people — your prospective customers — to find you. Put your phone number, email address and physical address on your home page. Put this contact information in a conspicuous spot. In this era of instant gratification, visitors will click off your site in a heartbeat if they can’t find what they’re looking for. See our previous blog posts for other tips on how to optimize your website to attract visitors.
2. About You
Before future clients call you, however, they may want to find out a little bit about you and your company. Especially if your business requires a substantial investment, they will browse your site to see if you’re the right company to hire. For shoppers who do their research, provide clear, concise copy that highlights your goods and services. What do people need to know about your business to make the decision to hire you?
Furthermore, if your business is a brick-and-mortar destination, such as a restaurant or retail store, add a map or simple directions beside your address. Make this information easy to find. Make sure your hours of operation are listed on your home page too, because that’s one of the most common things customers look for online.
3. Unique Information
Another good strategy for attracting potential customers is to provide information that’s not available anywhere else. That’s the value of a well crafted blog, newsletter or set of articles on your site. When people search for a related topic, they’ll see a link to your web page, and they are now one click away from your website.
How does this work? Here’s an example. According to the Pew Research Center, a think tank that tackles all kinds of interesting issues, 80 percent of all Internet users have used the web to look up health information. That’s 93 million Americans. If you can write about a health-related topic that ties into your own business, you can tap into that market. If you own a shoe store, for example, provide information about hammer toes and flat feet. Write about how your food is gluten-free or low-fat.
4. Entertainment
Don’t underestimate the power of engaging entertainment. Most Internet users go online to be entertained. Satisfy them by providing some gossip about your area or your industry. Add videos and links to YouTube that relate to your business. Add top ten lists, a la David Letterman, and share funny quotes.
Give your readers reasons to keep coming back to your website. Marketing is about keeping your name in front of their eyes on a regular basis. Make your site so inviting that visitors will bookmark it and send links to their friends. “Hey, did you hear about the joke that Auntie May’s Cookies put up on her site today?”
If you can accomplish these four things on your website, you’ll have a successful site … and likely, a successful business. To learn more strategies for improving your website, contact us today.
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 we say that we’re “content providers,” most people — even some technical people — give us the deer-in-the-headlights look. We’re never upset or surprised. Providing content is a reasonably new field, and we’re always eager to explain what it is we actually do.
Fewer people hear “content providers” and immediately make the association that we write blog posts. They understand that businessmen and women usually don’t write their own blog posts, even if they do come up with the topic.
Providing Content Means More
But as content providers, we’re proud of all the services we perform. One of the most popular at the moment, in a trend that even took us by surprise, is writing — or more frequently, rewriting — website content.
The words on your website have a lot of work to do. They have to positively influence search engines to help deliver a high page rank for the keywords that are important to your business. Website content also has to attract the attention of those real people who find your site, either accidentally or on purpose. Perhaps most importantly, they have to tell your story.
Put Website Content to Work
If you find your website slipping in page rank, all the signs indicate that updating your content should be a first step. It’s certainly less expensive and longer-lasting than an all-out pay-per-click marketing blitz. Remember, the best traffic to your site is organic — that is, the people who find you through a search or a referral, not through an ad.
Revising your website content, checking for the keywords you need, even redesigning the site are all ways to freshen up a stale site and reinvigorate your online presence. Every time you change or add content to your website, whether through a rewrite or a blog, you force the search engines to re-index your site. And that’s usually a good thing.
Gradual Change for Best Results
So think about what you want from your website in the next year. Then start putting the pieces together to make it happen. You don’t need to complete this project overnight. In fact, it may be best to approach it piecemeal, making small changes over time, keeping those search engines busy.
When you’re ready to start work on improving your website content, consider turning to the pros. That would be us, here at Ray Access. Contact us for a free estimate for your site. Join the many other satisfied clients who have seen positive change just by updating the text on their website pages. It works!
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’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.
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
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.
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.
Recently, we came across a blog post by Rich Gorman on Tamar Weinberg’s blog, and we thought it an apt topic to share with you. Ray Access is a content provider. As such, we encourage our clients to post new content on their websites no less frequently than every week. This influx of fresh, relevant content attracts visitors, establishes your authority, and (as a cool consequence) improves the page rank of your website.
So, we are involved in the world of SEO (search engine optimization) only in a tangential way. We don’t claim to be SEO experts, although we are involved in improving a website’s SEO through our work. We like to keep abreast of the industry, though, which means we do a lot of reading.
In Gorman’s article, he writes about what to do when your website or your company is fairly or unfairly given a poor online review. Just as your blog posts are always available and never go out of print, so a bad review is potentially always available. As Gorman says:
“A sterling reputation is worth its weight in gold — figuratively speaking, of course. That’s why businesses work for years, sometimes even decades, to earn the public’s trust, and to gain as much consumer goodwill as possible. In this Digital Age, however, all of that hard work can be undone in an instant. It just takes one bad review.”
So what can you do? Gorman frames the issue:
“The obvious question, then, is how you can defend yourself. It goes without saying that you can’t exactly coerce people into giving you positive reviews, and you can’t get people to stop leaving reviews altogether. A bad review could appear at any moment; there’s nothing you can do to prevent it, or to erase it. What you can do is ensure that it’s never seen by anyone.”
In other words, if you post content that floods the search engines, that comment is liable to end up on Page 4 of the search results, where almost no one will find it. That’s where we come in. Ray Access provides content — whether you need it fast to defend your company’s reputation or whether you are just starting to build your brand. A continual flow of useful content works for you on many levels.
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.
Another good strategy for attracting potential customers is to provide information that’s not available anywhere else. That’s the value of a well crafted blog, newsletter or set of articles on your site. When people search for a related topic, they’ll see a link to your web page, and they are now one click away from your website.
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.