by Elle Ray | Jul 7, 2017 | Blog Writing
10 Tips for Writing Blogs for Fun and Profit
Whether you’re writing blogs, your company newsletter or a message to a new client, you may find, like most people do, that you’re having trouble getting started. If you’re like the millions of people who break out in a sweat just at the thought of writing blogs — or anything someone might actually read — chill out. You’re not alone.
The number one phobia among adults, according to most psychological research studies, is the fear of public speaking, technically called glossophobia. This seems to always head the list, ranking even higher than the fear of death, which often comes in at number two. Paraphrasing Jerry Seinfeld, this means the average person at a funeral would prefer to be in the casket rather than doing the eulogy.
Anxiety Prevails
When it’s severe enough, the fear of writing is called scriptophobia or graphophobia. And it can be debilitating. Although it may not rank among the top 10 fears with public speaking, dying and snakes, it’s still rated pretty high, especially for business people who must write for their jobs.
So, if you clam up or get nauseous every time your boss asks you when you’re going to get around to writing blogs for the company website — you can contact Ray Access to do it for you. Or you can take action yourself, which is one of the top tips we can share with you about writing blogs and other business communications.
Writing Blogs Is Profitable
Writing blogs elicits profits either through the ads you sell for your personal blogs or more often, through the brand awareness and name recognition you receive from customers and potential clients. And to get you started, the team at Ray Access join the marketing team of Nike to bring you the most important, number one tip for writing blogs: “Just do it!”
Write now. Open a new document and just start tapping away. Go with free-flow, unedited thoughts. Write like you talk. Write down your thoughts about the topic. Since getting started seems to be the hardest part about writing blogs, you can conquer that part just by following this advice.
Blog Writing Tips
So here are 10 more tips to get you going and keep you flowing. Stay on track and on schedule while delivering quality communications on a steady, profitable basis:
- Read. Good writers read … and they read a lot. One trick is to read a bunch of articles about your topic, but don’t copy them — you don’t want to get charged with plagiarism. Reading about a topic trips your thought processes and gives you fodder for content.
- Face the fear. Throughout your life, you’ve undoubtedly overcome a multitude of fears. You went on job interviews, applied to college, rode a two-wheeled bicycle and maybe even gave a presentation to a group. Understanding that you’re just facing another one of those illogical fears is no different.
- Grow up. Not meant to be harsh, this tip refers to the small voices that still follow you through your life. Maybe you were criticized as kids for something you wrote. Worrying about being criticized really is the main source of glossophobia. But you’re not a kid anymore. Your skin is much tougher, and you have a lot more confidence and a proven track record of previous successes.
- Visualize success. Visualization techniques work just as well for winning the Super Bowl as they do for writing blogs. See fingers racing across the keyboard as they write with clarity and intention. Visualize the finished piece. Seeing is believing.
- Stop thinking. Thinking has its place in the writing process, but it’s usually not during the actual writing. Overthinking the content of your communication dooms you to deadlock. Go with your gut when writing. You can always revise later (see tip #10).
- Make mistakes. The need to be perfect falls right in line with worrying about what others think about you. It’s all based on fear of failure. Drop the perfectionism; you’re a human being; making mistakes comes with the territory. Making mistakes is also one of the ways you learn how to be a better writer.
- Focus on the prize. That’s what worked for Tom Brady. Keep your eyes on the new customers your blog writing produces, on the kudos you’ll get from your boss for turning in an assignment on time and the inner peace you’ll enjoy once you’ve completed your task.
- Research. As you’re writing about a topic, especially something that’s new or inviting to you, stop when you think of a question. Google that question and reinvigorate your creativity with more information. Learning while you write is one of the greatest gifts of writing blogs. In this way, writing makes you a better, more interesting person!
- Practice. The more you write, the better you get and the less time it takes to complete a project. Writing is, after all, a skill you can learn. Whether you keep a daily journal or spend time writing blogs a couple days a week, the process gets easier when it’s habitual.
- Edit and revise. This part of the process lets your inner perfectionist shine. And it’s OK to let her out! This step saves you from making egregious spelling errors or from simply sounding foolish, which is one of the major fear-inducing situations. If you don’t have a second set of eyes willing to be brutally honest and you must edit your own writing, sleep on it and reread your work the next day. You’ll be amazed what a fresh perspective can do to your writing!
Editors are to writers like a good sharp knife is to a top chef. They are the means to a perfected end. As Truman Capote once said: “I’m all for the scissors. I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil.”
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.
by Mark Bloom | Jul 4, 2017 | Content Marketing
Content Marketing Strategy Requires Promotion
First, keep in mind that content marketing works. It brings traffic to your business website and converts visitors into customers. It works over time as you add content and answer questions your customers are asking about your business or your industry. The relevant statistic is:
74 percent of buyers choose the company who first answered their questions.
As writers and producers of website content and blog posts, the team at Ray Access has seen its share of amazing successes. For instance, one client, a tent and party rental company, claimed to have lost money the first year we wrote content for them because they were unprepared for the onslaught of customers — they had to pay their team lots of overtime just to keep up.
Not Every Client Experiences Sudden Growth
Content marketing alone doesn’t always produce immediate results like this client experienced. To ensure success, you need to develop a content marketing strategy. Content marketing needs to be part of the picture, but not the whole picture.
The rules have changed, and the internet no longer provides a blank check. While it’s a level playing field — meaning small companies can compete with larger ones — you now have to do everything you can to get noticed. You have to promote your content and follow good SEO practices.
Outreach and Onsite Marketing
So, when you put together a content marketing strategy, you have to include the practice of promoting your website content. You have to push your blog posts and press releases out into the world. You have to deliver them to the platforms, whether on social media or complementary websites, where your prospective customers are spending their online time.
And still that’s not enough. You have to optimize the content on your website not just for search engines, but also for conversions. If you advertise online, you need carefully constructed landing pages to reinforce your value. Attracting qualified leads is just one job of your website. If those leads don’t find what they’re looking for, they’ll leave and never come back.
What’s Your Content Marketing Strategy?
If you don’t have one, you’re not empowering your website to do its jobs to its fullest capacity. If you haven’t developed personas, do you really know who your customers are or who’s really buying your products or services? A content marketing strategy:
- Points you in the right direction to gain customers
- Helps you develop the content those customers are seeking
- Provides the topics your customers and potential customers need to follow you from awareness to sales
- Clearly directs readers to purchase your goods or services
You can do all this work in-house, assuming your marketing team can handle the load and has the marketing expertise, or you can hire various third-party vendors to watch your internet back. Without a plan, you’re shooting blanks into a barrel of water instead of arrows into the minds of those you want to attract. Your marketing plan needs a content piece to guide your work.
If you need any help, contact Ray Access. Expert at content development, the principals of Ray Access can help you develop the right content to the right audience at the right time. To find out what it may cost, read How Much Does Website Content Cost?
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.
by Elle Ray | Jun 22, 2017 | Writing
Write in a Language Your Readers Understand
Just because you know the “parameters of team competency assessment support” as it relates to your business, remember whom you’re writing for. Just because management talks about “maximized systems of strategic environmental processes,” don’t assume your readers know what the heck you’re talking about. Buzzwords confuse and annoy your audience.
Politicians and marketing professionals alike make good use of “gobbledygook communication” — words that sound like they should convey meaning, but really don’t. Most of the time, the discerning public knows to dismiss gobbledygook as useless verbiage designed to sell or deflect blame. As a side effect, though, it makes people think they’re dumb or less-than-informed.
Don’t fall for it. What makes you think your customers will buy into the mish-mash of buzzwords, trendy slogans and industry jargon? If you try to pass them off as your “message,” it doesn’t make you look smarter, it makes you look dishonest (or at very least — a poor communicator).
Say What You Mean
Nothing is more frustrating for your customers when they’re trying to find a vendor or service provider online. If they continue to come up against the buzzword salads that marketers are trying to push on them, you’ll find some push-back. To put it simply: If a visitor to your website can’t figure out what you do after reading your home page, they’re not going to call or buy from you.
Instead of telling readers that you invented a new “multi-tined tool to process a starch resource,” like Dilbert might try to pass off as revolutionary, just tell us that you built a better “fork for eating rice.” Don’t try to make yourself look smarter at the expense of clarity. Don’t say that your company can “leverage analytics to drive prediction.” Tell prospects that you’re really good at helping them “learn from the past to predict future sales.”
You Live It, We Don’t
Many blog writers and website content writers also get so wrapped up in their work that they forget that the average readers — including many prospective clients — don’t speak the same language. Salespeople and marketing professionals get caught up in their language when they’re going at full tilt, anxious to “ABC” (always be closing) and get their “CRM” (customer relationship management) up to date. To the rest of us, they’re just buzzwords.
Bankers forget that their customers don’t understand “AWE” (average weekly earnings) as well as they do. And tech marketers are infamous for using lingo when they talk about progress and their “sticky products” — those are products with high retention rates — and how their new programs create “zombie mode” — when users don’t look away from the app on their phones — for you.
The Bottom Line: Avoid Buzzwords
Write like you talk and consider who you’re talking to. If you’re writing for moms, let your mother read your latest article to see if she gets it. If you’re writing for homebuyers, ask find a new homebuyer to review it. If you’re writing for a medical practice, ask a doctor to read your writing. It’s only fair.
Success comes to your business when you break out of your stereotype and write so that everyone can understand you. If you have a relevant service or product, you want to reach as many potential customers as possible, right? So don’t use buzzwords in your writing.
Don’t alienate potential customers by trying to “effectuate improvement of your manuals to better elucidate your customer goals and empowering your interactive competency team processes.” Instead, try to “improve your manuals to clarify your offerings.” When you avoid buzzwords, you gain trust. And that leads directly to more sales. If you need the help of expert writers, you know whom to contact.
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.
by Mark Bloom | Jun 13, 2017 | Small Business Advice
You Must Know Your Customers to Sell to Them
Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote: “If a man can write a better book, preach a better sermon or make a better mouse trap than his neighbors, though he builds his house in the woods, the world will make a beaten path to his door.” This sentiment may have been true in the late 19th century, but it isn’t any longer.
Today, you have to promote your brand, do your market research and offer compelling pricing. It almost goes without saying that your products or services are better in some way than your competitors’. To reach your audience in a meaningful way, you have to know who your customers are — and the better you understand them, the more your sales tactics will succeed.
Do You Know Your Customers?
Your customers include those who have already bought your products or services, as well as those who are merely interested in what you’re selling. You have to reach both of those audiences to increase your sales and grow your business. How do you find out who your customers are? Ask them, poll them or survey them. Explore your analytics. Search social media characteristics. Whatever it takes, you must do it.
It’s possible that the only difference between those who’ve already bought from you and those that haven’t is that one group already knows how awesome your company is and the other group doesn’t. Yet. You have to put the effort into getting to know your customers. Find out as much as you can about them. For example:
- What they like, beyond your products or services
- Where they like to go and where they hang out
- How much they earn, on average
- Why they like your company enough to buy your offerings
- What they do for work and play
- How old, what gender and what race they are, on average
The Point of This Exercise
To get to know your customers, research all the information above. But once you have that information, you have to act on it. You have to target your advertising and marketing to that audience. You have to be a presence wherever they are.
For example, if you determine that they’re more likely to listen to a certain radio station, buy air time. If they spend time on Facebook or another social media channel, advertise there. If many of your customers also mountain bike, drink beer or vacation in the mountains (to pick three random examples), make sure you have a presence in mountain bike shops, breweries or mountain rentals.
Success Involves Knowing Your Customers
As writers, the Ray Access team has to know who our clients’ customers are before any writing can take place. All writers need to know their audience. Stephen King, Peter Drucker and Ralph Waldo Emerson all recognized who would read their words. Fox News outlets, your local paper and the New York Times all understand their specific following. When you write your marketing copy, website content or blog posts, know your audience to get the best results.
In the end, when you know your customers, you know how to appeal to them. Because you know what they want, you can build the trust it takes to create not just customers, but loyal advocates of your brand. That’s worth taking the time to get to know your customers — both for the present and for the future.
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.
by Mark Bloom | Jun 6, 2017 | Small Business Advice
No Matter What Your Business Is, Know It Well
Running a business is hard work. If you’re a small business owner, then you’re likely doing almost everything yourself. It’s a lot to take care of, all those parts of a business, and you have to do everything well. The state of your business very often depends solely on you.
As small business owners, the principals of Ray Access have found themselves in the same boat — and to maintain this analogy, you’ll agree that when you have to do everything yourself, the boat sometimes springs leaks. When you’re working, you’re not marketing. When you’re doing payroll, you’re not earning any money.
Get These Parts of a Business Right
It’s a small business trap. It’s about balance… and knowing when to call in outside help. It’s about forging ahead… without killing yourself. It’s about recognizing the value of your time.
But some things require your touch. These are parts of a business that you must understand backward and forward. These are business aspects that you have to know so well that you dream about them. And let’s be frank, when you’re starting a business or nursing a small business, you’re dreaming about it most nights.
5 Parts of a Business to Worry About
No one person has all the answers. Ray Access is no different. We advise you to read and digest the information presented below, but how you approach them may be as unique as your unique value proposition:
- Operations. No matter what your company produces — whether it’s yoga eggs or accounting services — you need stay on top of your day-to-day work. To keep your business running smoothly, you need to nail your business operations. Keep your customers happy, keep your employees happy and keep the production flowing. This is perhaps your #1 priority. Without having your finger on your company’s pulse, your business can collapse from neglect or poor decision-making.
- Customers. No matter what you sell, your customers keep you in business. It’s imperative therefore that you learn as much about them as possible. Where do they hang out? What do they enjoy? How much do they make? How old are they? Create buyer personas so that you can better tailor your wares to your best customers. Personas also help you target the most appropriate market when advertising.
- Financials. To succeed in business, you must understand the three major financial statements: profit and loss statements, balance sheet and cash flow. To know how your business is doing at any point in time, you have to know how to read these documents. Fortunately, you can find software solutions, including QuickBooks invoicing that make your financials much more accessible.
- Research. The world continues to evolve. Don’t be caught with an outdated solution to a problem that no one experiences anymore. To stay current, keep up with research in your field. Advances are overtaking almost industry. With the Internet of Things (IoT), every business is or will be changing. How will your industry evolve? That’s your charge.
- Marketing. No one beats a path to your door — most people don’t know where and how to find you. You need to keep your brand in front of your target audience. Without marketing, your business is a corner shop on a deserted street. It’s no longer enough to be the best plumber, for example; you have to let everyone in your market know that you’re the best plumber — and provide the reasons.
All five of these parts of a business contribute to the success or failure of your company. Learn them. Use them.
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.
by Mark Bloom | May 30, 2017 | Content Provider
Write to Connect to Your Readers, Not to Sell
Business writing is rhetorical writing. That’s not a bad thing to admit; if you’re honest, you’ll agree. When you write for your business — or if you’re like Ray Access, when you write for another business — you’re writing to persuade the reader, to change behavior and yes, probably to sell products or services. That’s the point of business.
But it needn’t be that blatant. Businesses exist for many purposes besides sales — although sales do wonders for keeping a business in business. But sales happen when you connect to your readers. If you think about it, you’ll see that some businesses have motives beyond profits:
- Disney, for example, wants to entertain as well as make money.
- Amazon set out to change the way the world shops.
- Ray Access wants to improve the quality of online content everywhere.
Connect to Your Readers and the Rest Follows
The writers and editors of Ray Access are more than just professional writers, they’re professional ghostwriters. That means they have to know who their clients’ readers are. They have to know what their clients’ readers want. And they have to deliver that content in a way that connects with those readers.
Along the way, they’ve picked up a few tips to help you connect to your readers. Here are the top five ways:
- Write to your readers, not at them. When you write, whether it’s a blog post or a website page, use the word “you,” not the word “we.” To connect to your readers, write to them as if you’re talking to them. When you write intelligently, not taking your readers for granted, you connect with them and earn their trust. Once you’ve established that relationship, sales will happen.
- Don’t write about you; write about them. Contrary to what you may think, your website is not about your business; it’s about what your customers (and potential customers) can get from your business. In other words, it’s not about the features your product has, but about the benefits your products deliver. Explain to your readers what they’re buying. Give them reasons to buy. This is the only way to persuade people to buy from you; you have to give them something they need.
- Deliver timely information that’s of value to your readers. Write about what your readers want to know, not what you want to say. The ultimate goal of any blog post is to go viral. The only way to achieve that lofty goal, which is nigh impossible, is to provide the answers to questions people are asking. Why, for example, is it important to engage your audience? Because that’s how you connect with them. That’s how you build trust in what you have to say. That’s how you gain credibility and respect. That’s how, ultimately, you generate sales and lasting customers.
- Give away your expertise. You are the expert in your field. You know more about your business and your industry than your customers and potential customers do. Use your knowledge to your advantage by sharing it. Educate your readers to become better consumers. Give away tips and advice. Provide valuable information, and you gain your readers’ trust, especially if your competitors aren’t sharing. The Internet is a level playing field. Readers can’t tell how big your company is, but they can judge your business based on how helpful you are. That’s what your readers will remember.
- Be entertaining. This may sound superfluous, but it’s absolutely true and the best way to connect to your readers. People do business with companies they like. People like Disney. Consumers trust Amazon. Both companies are entertaining in their own way. If you’re entertaining while delivering valuable content, your content has the chance of going viral, and your readers will remember you when they’re ready to buy. Be entertaining, but know who your readers are. That’s the best defense against going overboard and the best way to determine that you’re hitting the mark.
Connect to your readers, and you’ll connect to future sales. Good luck and remember: if you get stuck, you can connect to experts. We’re just a phone call away.
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.
by Elle Ray | May 22, 2017 | Small Business Advice
Don’t Get Sick or Plan for It — It’s Your Choice
Sick Leave? What’s that? As the boss, you probably read tips for entrepreneurs every day. And every day, you learn something new. While running your own company is hard work, you get tons of perks:
- You can’t be fired
- You can work when you want to work
- You can change the rules any time you want
- And you can take a vacation whenever you get an itch to
But you can’t get sick. Sickness means laying up, feeling helpless. At least when you’re on vacation or playing hooky, you can draw on those years of reading tips for entrepreneurs — and quietly check your email, place orders, close sales and take care of behind-the-scenes business with little effort.
But when you’re sick, not only do you not even feel well enough to touch a keypad, but there’s a good chance you’re in no mental state to make sound decisions. And forget about trying to pass it off like there’s nothing wrong. You know it; your team knows it and your customers probably wonder what that frowny-face emoji means at the end of your email. (Perhaps something you added in a medicated fog?)
When the Tsunami Hits
When the big one hits — something like cancer or a car wreck — you do what you have to do to make it through to the other side. If that means working your contacts on a laptop in a hospital room or running your partners and staff through every possible scenario while you’re out healing, do it. The best tips for entrepreneurs who get sick, however, involve keeping stress to a minimum.
Ills of the flesh heal in time. How fast and how well you heal depends on keeping your ills of the mind at bay. Research proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that physical health and psychological health are intricately intertwined. So much so that stress has a direct impact on poor outcomes following surgery and leads to less-than-stellar immune systems.
Prevent What You Can and Deal with the Rest
Stress not only impedes healing when you experience a big health crisis, it also can lead to lesser illnesses that can just as easily disrupt your business. For while you certainly can take a day off to get over a bug, it’s far more productive to play on those days off. To that end, here are 10 tips for entrepreneurs to live by — to stay healthy and free to enjoy all the perks of being the boss:
- Build in time each day for a stress-busting practice — whether that’s 20 minutes on a treadmill or in deep mediation. Do it regularly to reduce stress so that even if a crisis hits, you’ll be in a better state of mind to heal.
- Boss, know thyself. You may or may not be able to heal yourself, but when you’re honest with yourself, you know how much sleep you need to stay sharp; you know better than anyone what relaxes you and you know when you need a break. Listen to your body; it will tell you everything you need to know.
- Understand and follow the guidelines for healthy eating. The standard drill involves: 35 percent from lean protein (think skinless chicken and tofu), 25 percent from healthy fat (like avocadoes and olive oil), leaving close to 60 percent for good carbs (whole grains and raw veggies).
- Stay hydrated. Your body and your mind stay sharp and on-point when you take in the standard 64 fluid ounces of water a day. Keep a glass of water at arm’s reach.
- Keep your energy level high by breaking up your daily food intake into many small bites instead of big sit-down meals.
- Sleep deeply. Sleep is vital for peak performance. Even when you burn the midnight oil on a big project, take power naps to keep the edge off until you can bunker down for a solid eight or nine hours.
- Stand up and move. If you, like the partners at Ray Access, often are tied to the computer to meet deadlines, then you need to consciously make the effort to get up and move at least once an hour for about 10 minutes.
- Fight germs as fastidiously as if you were the charge nurse in the ICU. Wash your hands thoroughly after every human encounter. When you come in from a lunch away from your desk, a meeting or even just a trip to the office supply store, wash your hands. (Secret tip for entrepreneurs: nursing students have to sing the alphabet while they wash their hands to ensure they wash long enough.)
- Take advantage of slow times and breaks in the business rush when they happen. Use the time to get ahead of your work so that when you need to slow down because of a tickle in your throat, you’ll be ahead and can afford the break.
- Surround yourself with smart people on whom you can rely to take over when necessary. Don’t hoard your knowledge. One of the benefits of sharing — besides increasing your own prosperity — is that you have people ready and trained to step in when you need them.
S**t’s going to happen. No doubt. That’s why lists like these tips for entrepreneurs to stay healthy were invented. That’s why, just for today, I like to think that the measure of an entrepreneurial success is not how well you plan ahead, but as Sheryl Sandberg, the COO of Facebook puts it:
“The seeds of resilience are planted in the way we process the negative events in our lives.”
Or if you prefer to listen to Hippocrates:
“Healing is a matter of time, but it is sometimes also a matter of opportunity.”
Stay well. But if you can’t, then heal quickly.
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.
by Mark Bloom | May 16, 2017 | Content Marketing
Justifying the Cost of Marketing Your Business
Let’s start with the basics. Marketing is what you do to promote or sell your products or services. It can include advertising, building brand awareness and market research. Content marketing, on the other hand, is specifically online marketing that employs videos, blogs, and other targeted articles to stimulate interest instead of explicitly promoting your brand.
Measuring the ROI of content marketing, then, is to determine its worth in hard numbers. Is that even possible, given the definition above? Yes, it is — for two very good reasons:
- Businesses conduct activities for the sole purpose of selling more; therefore, the concept of content marketing would not even exist if it didn’t accomplish that goal.
- Content marketing has to be tied to a specific business goal, which can be measured.
The Goals of Content Marketing
Many companies begin content marketing to deliver “leads, leads and more leads.” So the prize is not just building brand awareness, but establishing a growing base of people who actually want to do business with your company. In this media-savvy market, that means marketing outside the traditional venues of advertising.
Companies are eschewing traditional advertising for content marketing. Nearly 30 percent of marketers report reducing their digital advertising budgets to produce more content. Content marketing reaches people in a way they don’t despise. That, in itself, generates brand acceptance. It’s also the first step toward creating leads.
How Content Marketing Works
Before you can measure the ROI of content marketing, understand the principles behind it. Traditional marketing uses content no one really wants. It’s forced on people as advertising. Content marketing, on the other hand, is content people want. It comes in the form of:
- Desired information — such as How Much Does Website Content Cost?
- Entertaining articles — such as Unique Wedding Invitation Ideas
- Added-value tips — such as Tax Tips for Home Buying
By the way, these are all blog posts written by Ray Access. But the goal here is to educate you, not just promote Ray Access. If you have the time and talent to create your own great content, do it. Once you know how it works and what you need, your business will benefit.
Bear in mind that for online content, the most effective results come from longer blog posts. The typical word count has risen from 808 words in 2014 to 1,054 words in 2016. Longer-form content generates something on the order of nine times more leads than shorter-form content.
The Costs of Content Marketing
To determine the ROI of content marketing, you need to know its costs. If you’re developing your own content in-house, you can accurately measure your monthly costs. You’re paying a managing editor, the person in charge of not only directing the work, but also editing the content so that it aligns with your goals and embodies your business’ personality. You also have costs associated with hosting and publishing.
If you outsource your content creation, you still have hosting and publishing costs. Depending on the size of your company, these costs can vary from about $100 a month all the way up to $32,000 a month. That’s quite a range, but it shows the difference between one blog post a month and a full strategic marketing effort across many platforms.
We’ve written about the cost of website content before. You need both alluring blog posts and effective words on your website for your business to generate ROI. One without the other leads to either low website traffic or high traffic with few conversions, so you need both to determine the ROI of content marketing.
The ROI of Content Marketing
Remember that the goal of content marketing is to increase leads, which adds sales, assuming your website can successfully convert those leads into customers. You can, therefore, measure the number of leads your website delivers. And since you know your costs, you can determine your cost per lead. This is basic business.
One study by the Content Marketing Institute found that content marketing produced a lower cost per lead than paid advertising. For large businesses over a two-year period, the difference was as much as 41 percent — 31 percent for mid-sized businesses. That quickly adds up to dramatic savings.
Proof of Content Marketing’s ROI
Ray Access isn’t the only company touting the ROI of content marketing. Many other concerns have achieved proven results, either for themselves or for their clients. For example:
- Ray Access has always said that content marketing is the least expensive, most effective way to market your business. When you examine the ROI of content marketing, it costs 62 percent less than traditional marketing while generating about three times the volume of leads.
- As more and more consumers rely on online content, your content marketing campaign aligns with this shift in media consumption habits. Nearly 75 percent of all marketers considered online content more valuable than traditional advertising.
- Buyers trust online content that connects with them. It’s becoming part of the normal purchasing process. About 90 percent of B2B buyers reported that online content played at least a moderate role in their purchasing decisions. Meanwhile, 95 percent of B2B buyers consider trustworthy content when they evaluate your company.
- Unlike paid advertising, the benefits of which stop immediately when you stop paying for it, content marketing offers long-term ROI. In fact, 10 percent of blog posts increase in value over time, delivering more organic search traffic.
- Effective website content drives conversions, too. The conversion rate can be six times higher for companies using content marketing than those that don’t.
In savvy hands, content for websites and blog posts can be versatile and reusable as well. Nearly 60 percent of marketers reuse and repurpose their original content two to five times. Ray Access delivers website content and blog posts as ghostwriters, meaning you own it and can reuse it however you wish.
Measuring the ROI of Content Marketing
How will you measure success? You can capture your growing brand awareness through the number of website visits, especially for first-time visitors. You can count the number of email or form-driven contacts. And you know how many of those become customers. Even if you use these simple metrics, you can determine the ROI of your content marketing.
In the future, more complex formulas will be available for measuring your efforts. Of course, also in the future, content marketing is likely to shift to more complex products — beyond effective website content and blog posts, which by then should be as commonplace as storefront signage. Two predictions are:
- “Companies will share more stories of corporate social responsibility, highlighting people and programs focused on sustainability, diversity and inclusion, and community involvement.” —Cara Cannella, senior brand editor
- “We’re going to see an increased investment in storytelling as a core communications strategy. Visionary leaders will form centralized content teams responsible for managing all content across the enterprise, and laggards will simply task their staff with ‘telling more stories’.” —Dan Gottlieb, senior sales executive
On the advice of marketing experts, therefore, you need to build the basics of your content marketing plan before you can calculate the ROI of content marketing. Blog regularly and create engaging content on your social media outlets to generate leads. Make sure your website content converts visitors into customers. If you don’t do that much, the ROI of content marketing for your business will be zero.
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.
by Elle Ray | May 8, 2017 | Small Business Advice
A Clear Vision Statement Gives You Direction
Perfect eyesight is measured by how clearly you can see at 20 feet. If you have 20/20 vision, according to your optometrist, your visual acuity is sharp and clear for 20 feet. If only the future of your business was so distinct and easy to measure.
A mission statement is supposed to embody your passion, your raison d’être. In other words, it reveals who you are and what you do. Your vision statement, on the other hand, answers the how and why of your company. And it involves a little fortune-telling and gazing into the future. Your vision explains where you see your business going.
Why Bother?
Just as a clear mission defines your daily work, your vision forms the basis of the roadmap to your future. You’ve undoubtedly heard the saying: “You’ll never know when you get there if you don’t have a destination in mind.” Wandering willy-nilly through the business world is no way to build something of value, something that lasts and something that you can be proud of.
A vision statement also helps you attract talent, people who want what you want and align with your mission. Sure, every business owner wants to make money, and that should clearly be part of your vision. But it has to be inspirational, too. Making money for money’s sake is cold, even in a capitalist society like America.
So what if you make a lot of money? That accomplishment doesn’t always equate to happiness or fulfillment. For proof, just look at the hundreds of millionaire athletes and entertainers who use drugs or other numbing behaviors to mask their feelings. Do you think they’re really happy or fulfilled?
Gotta See Clearly Now
Like sight, a company’s vision statement needs to encompass reality in all its technicolor. Truly satisfying work makes you feel good; it makes your team feel good; and ultimately it allows your customers and associated partners and vendors to feel good. Tapping into a goal with altruistic intentions makes for a satisfying life, something worth all the hours you put into it.
A vision statement doesn’t necessarily have to be attainable, either. Some might complain that vision statements often are too pie-in-the-sky and unreachable, if not outright misleading. But if you can contribute in even a small way to a future that comes closer to your vision, then you’ve been true to your values and maybe helped someone in the process. Take, for example, a few visions statements that are nice in their sentiment, but tough to really imagine:
- Microsoft’s written vision statement: “To help individuals and businesses realize their full potential.”
- Alzheimer’s Association goes big: “A world without Alzheimer’s disease.”
- Walmart really cares about all of us with its vision statement: “To be the best retailer in the hearts and minds of consumers and employees.”
- And who better to guide a vision statement than the American Optometric Association: To be “the acknowledged leader and recognized authority for eye and vision care in the world.”
Big Vision Statements Mean Big Returns
The bigger your vision, the greater impact you just may make on the world. Of course, as with all global visions, you’ve got to start at home. For example, the partners at Ray Access have a mission to “get everyone to appreciate and evaluate the media in their lives,” and to make communication understandable and valuable.
As a vision statement, we strive “to strengthen the written word to give every company in the world words that empower their business.” If we did that, we’d definitely make money, but more importantly, we’d play a huge role in maintaining the English language and reminding consumers that they can get a clear message.
We believe we do that for our clients and their customers. We also strive to help business leaders show respect for their customers by presenting their messages clearly and consistently — every time. Nothing less than 20/20. We invite you along, too. What’s your big vision?
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.
by Mark Bloom | May 2, 2017 | Small Business Advice
Decoding Your Life’s Passion into One Sentence
It may seem strange to discuss the fire of your life’s passion with the clinical rationality of a mission statement for business. As if the burning core of your soul could be summarized by a line in your company fact sheet. And yet that’s exactly what’s supposed to happen when you develop your mission statement.
A mission statement for business isn’t about dollars and cents. It’s not about operating strategies, marketing techniques or product development. If you’re a small business owner, your business must derive from your passion, or you’re just punching a clock. Starting and running a business is too dang hard not to have skin in the game — in other words, your business has to make your passion come alive.
Finding Your Passion
Before you can start, of course, you’ve got to know what your passion is. Many know what they’re passionate about already. It can be big, but it doesn’t have to be. It might be:
- The environment
- Education
- Perfectly manicured lawns
- People using turn signals
- Urban green spaces
You could develop a business that encompassed each of those passions. For education, for example, it could be starting a charter school, designing better classrooms or publishing new textbooks. And that only scratches the surface of possibilities. So, ask yourself: What’s my passion?
Putting Your Passion to Work
Once you’ve identified your passion, you can evaluate how it fits into your work. Your passion should form the basis for your mission statement for business. It’s what’s supposed to drive your business. It’s what gets you up in the morning. As Joseph Campbell said, “Follow your bliss.” In our words, “Work your passion.”
In real terms, that means putting your passion into your mission statement. The mission of your business should align with what drives you. If you can accomplish that, your business will thrive because you’re doing what you love.
The Mission Statement for Business That Drives Us
For Ray Access, communication is a passion, but not only written communication — although that’s certainly our little piece of it. But our passion is bigger than that. We want nothing less than to educate the world to be aware (and be wary) of media. We want people to recognize and appreciate content — and be able to recognize when it says nothing.
The principals of Ray Access visit many websites every day in the course of their work, and they see many that offer nothing — absolutely nothing — of value. When a website doesn’t work, nobody wins. Visitors don’t find the information they’re after, and the business loses a sale. So, that’s become the Ray Access mission statement for business:
“To help companies succeed online while educating business leaders about the value and purpose of well-crafted content. It’s not enough for you to say something; you have to say something meaningful. Your message must be worth your customers’ time and attention.”
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.
