4 Reasons to Hire Professional Blog Writers

by Mark Bloom | Dec 6, 2016 | Blog Writing

A Pro Frees You Up to Do What You Do Best

Hiring independent, third-party blog writers may sound like more effort than it’s worth, at least at first glance. You have to find qualified writers. You have to test them out. You have manage them. Who wants all that responsibility?

Then you remember struggling with your blog. Finding topics to write about that other people might be interested in. Spending the hours it takes to actually write the darn thing, even when you know what you want to say. And your articles never come out as well as you want them to.

Hire professional bloggers

All that time and effort serves to remind you why you’d at least consider hiring out the writing. So let’s list both the reasons for and benefits of hiring professional blog writers for your company website:

Reason #1: Blog Writers Are Professionals

If you hire a third-party to write your blog posts, you’re hiring a professional writer, someone who makes his (or her) livelihood by writing. This has several significant advantages:

Professional writers hit deadlines, so your blog will never be late again.
Professional blog writers know how to write well — they do it for a living, after all — so your blog posts will always be easy to read.
Professional writers know how to connect with your audience.

Reason #2: Blog Writers Can Do It All for You

When you hire third-party professionals to write your blog posts, they can do it all. They present you with topics for approval. Because they’re not as close to your company as you are, they can come up with interesting topics about your business that you might not have considered.

Professional writers know how to do the time-intensive research to write about your industry. They don’t use Wikipedia or similar websites, but go to authoritative website sources for the information they need. And good professionals also have their work edited before they deliver it. Some third-party professional writers (like those at Ray Access) can manage the whole process for you, including publishing the blog posts on your website!

Reason #3: Blog Writers Free Up Your Time

If you don’t have to write blog posts for your website, you can spend your time more constructively:

Satisfying your customers
Managing your staff
Improving your systems
Making more money

You’re happier and more productive when you do the things you love to do. So if blog writing isn’t one of those things, leave it to an expert while you get to do the things you’re best at doing. In the end, you’ll save time and headaches by hiring out tasks like blog writing — just as you may do for your bookkeeping and marketing.

Reason #4: Professional Blog Writers Do It Better

If you’re not a writer, the process of writing blog posts takes you longer and the end result may not be as powerful as you’d hoped. Professional writers take pride in their work. They make it as good as it can be. They struggle over their words to make them sing.

The resulting blog posts are powerfully effective pieces of content. These articles successfully market your business. They help your customer base by answering questions and building trust. Blogging works to attract visitors to your website. Attract more visitors with a professionally written blog. Because that’s what professional blog writers do.

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.

How to Tap into the Digital Economy

by Mark Bloom | Oct 3, 2016 | Small Business Advice

tap into the digital economy

The Longer You Wait, The More Difficult It’ll Be

As of 2016, nearly 3.5 billion people, about 40 percent of the world’s population, are connected to the Internet in some way. In the United States, about 87 percent of the country’s men, women and children go online. Of that 13 percent who don’t use the Internet:

Over half (57 percent) are age 50 or older.
About a third never earned a high school diploma.
And almost a quarter earn less than $30K a year.

So unless your primary target market focuses on poor, uneducated retirees, your business needs to have an active (or better, interactive) online presence. Your business needs to be growing its Internet marketing activities year after year, because it’s the digital economy that’s expanding. By 2020, there may be as many as 20 billion Internet-connected devices (and only 7.5 billion people) in the world.

It Starts with a Website

Most businesses — including startups and nonprofits — now have a website. But that’s only the beginning if you want to really engage your customer base. If all your website does is list your business name, store hours, and contact information, you have a yellow pages entry, not a website. If you’ve paid someone to build your website but have never received a call or email from a potential customer who found you online, your website isn’t doing you any good.

A website is more than a 24/7 storefront in the digital economy. Your site can do so much more; all it needs is some attention. The principals at Ray Access have always maintained that “if you’re ignoring your website, your website’s ignoring you.” To tap into the digital economy of the future, you need to start now to lay the groundwork.

the devices of the digital economy

The Digital Economy Is Waiting for You

Not every business needs to be engaging social media. If your customers use it, then you need to engage them there, if for no other reason than to keep your company’s name in front of their eyes. (In fact, engaging social media is worthy of a whole series of future blog posts.) But every business can benefit from an active website.

To sell your products or services, your business needs a website that accomplishes a number of goals:

Attracts potential customers — not just “eyeballs,” but the right “eyeballs”
Answers questions about your business and your industry
Presents your business as a leader in your field with a distinct advantage
Establishes trust — because you do what you say you’re going to
Helps people like you — not in the Facebook sense, but in a real-world way
Persuades visitors to contact you

Let Ray Access Get Your Business on Track

You may think this is a tall order, but this is exactly what Ray Access provides its clients. Website content is the vehicle that helps you reach your business goals. A business blog provides your company an outlet to educate your audience and provide answers that people are searching for.

In the new digital economy, no one is going to beat a path to your door, even if you have the world’s best mousetrap. You need to engage the Internet to participate. You need an active website and a vibrant blog. You need Ray Access.

How to Beat the Blockers

by Elle Ray | Jul 11, 2016 | Content Marketing

Only Hire Content Writers Who Deliver Quality

Content for the sake of content is no longer enough. Ad blocking on desktop computers, laptops and mobile devices is rising every year like a great solid state cement wall around the cloud that is the Internet. According to Priori Data and Pagefair, an analytics company, more than 419 million people block ads on their smartphones now. And that’s up about 90 percent for the period between January 2015 and January 2016.

hire content writers to beat the ad blockers

All that blocking software is posing a really serious threat when you’re talking about one-fifth of the world’s 1.9 billion smartphone users. In 2016, about a quarter of laptop and desktop users employ ad blockers in the U.S., totaling about 70 million people. And that’s going up too. Content strictly for marketing purposes is now hollow and transparent, and people aren’t buying it any longer. They are, however, buying the ad blockers to keep obvious ads off their screens.

Enter Quality

For website and blog writers, SEO consultants, web designers and marketing pros, that’s a huge challenge. Found a keyword you really love that puts you high up on a Google search? Your customers have an app to block that. Pushing your weekly blogs through social channels? They’ve got their choice of content blockers for that. Think you hire content writers to sway the masses with quick wit and common words that trump the day? Yep, your target audience has got big bad comb-over blocking apps for that.

And don’t forget: all the while the Internet is being flooded with new ad-blocking apps for every possible device, search engines continue to mature and become more discerning. It’s a double-whammy. So what can you do? Actually, there’s only one way around it and that’s through it.

Search Engines Demands Quality

You’ve got to hire content writers who can overcome these growing Internet user habits by creating something we in the content creation biz call: “interest” or “buzz.” Let’s face it, you just can’t get around good content creation that draws you in with its sly character assassinations and good, old-fashioned stories. Stories work in marketing because people like stories.

content wins again

Good content creation requires imagination, creativity, a nose for the news and a pulse that resonates with readers. When you hire content writers today, you’ve got to love their words, fall for their phrases and relish each and every syllable as if it were a life force. Stories live. Stories breathe life into stale marketing campaigns.

Internet surfers aren’t going to hold still for writing that doesn’t inspire flat-out love and infatuation. Content that tries to pull readers in with keywords that have no relevance will fail. Poor writing that’s hardly decipherable will fall flat.

Hire Content Writers Who Deliver Quality

If your content isn’t good enough to pass the search engine filters and can’t quite get around the ad blockers, it’s definitely not good enough for the masses. If it’s not effective content, it’s not worth anyone’s time.

Break it all down to plain English, which is another enviable virtue that you get when you hire content writers who prize quality. For your customers to spend any time with your content, it must be:

Unique
Excellent
Interesting
Free of errors
Valuable — maybe the most important quality

Writing to Connect

Write to your readers like they’re real people. Because they are. Tell your content writers to stop writing to some sentient algorithm. Stop trying so darn hard to write content that ranks. Just give the people what they want — entertainment, information and quality writing they aren’t embarrassed to share or let anyone know they’re reading.

It’s time to push unique content creation to the next level. If you stick with the tricks your SEO guy tries to sell you, you can bet your marketing team a week’s salary that there’s gonna be an app to block it — sooner rather than later. Instead, embrace the evolving techniques and industry-standard practices that are leaning heavily toward customer engagement. In other words: interest them, and they’ll take an interest in you.

3 Decorating Ideas for Promoting Creativity

by Elle Ray | Oct 1, 2014 | Office

All Blog Writers Get Inspired in a Creative Space

creative room decorating

As professional blog writers, we continually need to create fresh new copy. If our bonnets buzz with busy bees looking to sting our creative ability out of existence, we’re in trouble. We have to come up with new ideas every week for our clients — it’s what makes them stand out from a crowded marketplace.

Feng shui aside (that’s another blog topic), how you decorate your office or primary workplace can illuminate your creative spirit — or conversely damper your efforts at generating fresh ideas.

Try these tips to increase blood flow to your brain and boost your creative energy:

Color Counts: Paint your office (all four walls or just one wall in your main work area) or decorate with colorful accessories to stimulate creativity.
- Pale Blue: You see pale blue in many schools because it’s known to have powers of creative stimulation. It’s also very calming, which can help you focus. Furthermore, believe or not, it’s an appetite suppressant — an added bonus when you’re dieting or just trying to work past lunchtime.
- Earthy Orange: Orange is a blood stimulator that increases sexual energy and brain power; when the two mental activities merge, blog writers, graphic artists and project developers get plenty creative. Orange also energizes and puts you in the mood to accomplish great things.
- Bright Yellow: When added in small touches, yellow boosts creativity, activates your memory recall and helps you concentrate. While dark yellows can cut off your creative juices, bright colors used as accent pieces give just the right incentive for new ideas.
Helpful Reminders: Success breeds success and creative success breeds the same. Surround yourself with reminders that you are creative.
- All around your office, post pictures and copies of past campaigns or closings that make you particularly proud to remind you that you have what it takes.
- Decorate your office bulletin board with testimonials from clients and pictures of celebrations.
- Make a copy of your first check from your business and hang it up. It’s a ploy that’s been used in restaurants for years to remind owners how far they’ve come. The boost in confidence will boost your creativity and help to dispel doubt.
Promote Collaboration: Oftentimes, the best bouts of creativity are sparked in brainstorming sessions with friend or partner. One person’s ideas spur the creative juices in another, leading you both to greater creative heights. Blog writers and project teams are particularly in need of brainstorming time and space.
- Create open spaces in your office where employees automatically run into each other on a regular basis.
- Make the break area clean, inviting and full with coffee machines, bowls of candy, flowers and snacks so that workers want to spend time there and are comfortable sitting around.
- Place meeting rooms and break rooms in places that allow plenty of outside light to enter the space. Light spurs creative juices and the outside scenery also serves as a kick-start to ideas, whether you’re looking at nature for ideas for blog writers or out on a busy street for fresh people perspectives.

Blog writers need inspiration and creativity. Blog writers need ideas. Even if you’re a lone writer, you can still help yourself be more creative. Here at Ray Access, we take creativity seriously. We depend on it, and our clients depend on us.