How to Write Your Own Bio

by Elle Ray | Oct 12, 2014 | Writing

No One Is Better Qualified Than You to Write It

can you capture yourself in a bio?

It’s easy to let a professional writer like Linda or Mark interview you so we can write your bio. It’s a valid way to fill in the “About” page on your website. But if you want to write your own bio, you need to keep a few things in mind.

A professional bio is not a resume. It serves a different purpose. For example, you can use your bio for the following:

For posting on your LinkedIn profile
For self-promotion in a brochure
For speaking engagements
For networking
For a book cover or guest blog
For media outlets at the end of a press release
For board applications
And yes, for job hunting

Do It Yourself

While you certainly can hire a professional writer, we’d like to share a few tips so that you can write your bio yourself. Remember that your bio is you on paper. It should present your achievements in the best possible light and help you open doors.

Write your bio in plain language that not only is easy to read, but also sounds like you. If you’re not in academia, for example, don’t make it sound like a droll professor wrote it. If you’re a musician, don’t make it sound like an accountant — although an accountant may want to spiff up his bio with a few musical references.

6 Tips for Tight Bio Writing

Write in the third person
Your professional bio should sound as if someone else is writing about you, even if you are the author. Introduce yourself right at the beginning with an opening line that spells it out: “Mark Bloom is a man of few words, few spoken words that is, because he’s a professional writer and words are his medium.”
Use a conversational tone
Even though your bio should sound professional, use a conversational tone. Readers should get the feeling that you’re talking to them. Read your writing out loud to check your tone. Refrain from slang and industry jargon unless your bio will be read only by your peers.
Rely on a backwards timeline
Don’t rewrite your bio every time one is needed, so start with your current job or position and your most recent achievements. While you want to include historical information, such as your education and previous accomplishments, write in much the same order as you would a resume.

Include your family in your bio.

Get personal
A professional bio should show off your personality. If you have a great sense of humor, for example, add a joke or pun to highlight your bent. If you’re an earth mother, use new age words to describe your characteristics and history. Include information about your hobbies, your place of origin and your family. Either sprinkle these facts throughout the bio or present them in a bullet format at the end.
Boost your bio with stats and quotes
Give your bio a boost with statistics about the number of sales you closed or the time it took to turn a profit in your last venture. Include quotes from important people in your industry or from former clients. (Ask their permission first.) These are items any professional writer would include; when you write your bio, you are the reporter.
Prepare a set of bios
A professional bio should be one page — about 400 to 500 words. This version goes on your website, in your professional portfolio and to other interested parties. We recommend creating a mini-bio and a micro-version to use with guest blogs and social media posts. Think of the little bios as your 30-second elevator pitch. Pull the most interesting and concise information from your original bio to create the mini-versions.

Look at yourself objectively when you write your bio. Make it interesting and compelling — a good read. Write a professional bio that you would want to read. Keep it current and polished. Review your bio every year or two just to make sure it’s still relevant.

For more information on writing your bio, refer to 10 Things to Include in Your Bio. If you just can’t get started, contact Ray Access. We’ll make you look like the star that you are with a professional bio that sings success. Finally, don’t forget to update you bio every once in a while, both to keep your website fresh and to alert your potential clients of your latest achievements!

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.

The Occupational Hazards of Writing

by Elle Ray | Sep 11, 2014 | Writing

We Have to Sit at the Computer During Summer

We work in all kinds of weather, so you don't have to.

Ray Access is a content provider and content marketing business. That means we are writers and editors. In order to earn our income, we write. On a computer. At a desk. Inside an office. Regardless of the weather, the day of the week or even the time of day.

Fortunately, both Linda and Mark work at desks in rooms with windows that look out onto views with lots of green. We can see the sun shine and the clouds roll in and the rain begin. We can see the world pass by. Then it’s back to work.

Trapped in a Job?

That makes it sound as if we were chained to our desks, but the truth is far from that. We take frequent breaks. We stretch. We stroll around the room while thinking how best to help our clients. We do what we need to do to keep our bodies healthy and our minds sharp. Because we are writers, we get paid to write. If we’re not writing, we’re not making money.

So Linda and Mark of Ray Access have developed a term for the time we’re working. OK, actually, it was Linda who came up with the term, but now we both use it. It’s “B.I.C.” or “Butt In Chair.” If we don’t have our butts in the desk chairs, we’re not working. In other words, work starts when butt meets chair.

We All Sacrifice

Some people have to rise early to commute to a factory job where all the windows are 30 feet above them. Others drive around all day, stuck behind a wheel. Still others toil under the hot sun attaching shingles to wooden frames. Everyone has something to do for the job. Working — earning money to put food on the table — often entails some form of sacrifice.

So that’s how it is for us. Even on a gorgeous day, we’re usually inside typing away on a keyboard. Is it Saturday? Sunday? It doesn’t matter; you can still reach us on our cell phones, because we’re often still at our desks. Now that it’s September, we look up and realize summer has passed us by. It’s one of the occupational hazards of writing for a living.

Writing Is Our Passion

But it’s not that much of a sacrifice for us because writing is what we love to do. This blog post is evidence, since we don’t get paid for writing for our own blog. We do it out of love.

We like to think we’re adding value to our website by educating our readers about our business. But like most dedicated writers, we’d do it even if no one read our words. We’re writers; we have to write.

And that’s why we’re so perfectly poised to help your business. Because we love to write, because we’re so good at it after years of practice, we are the best options to rewrite your website, to create content for your business blog and to turn your company newsletter from a ho-hum read to a compelling one. Discover the difference professional writers can make to your business. Act now, you get not one, but two writers working for you, all for the same price!

Do You Still Need a Newsletter?

by Elle Ray | Apr 25, 2014 | Small Business Advice

Has Your Blog Made Your Newsletter Irrelevant?

Image courtesy of Andy Newson / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

In the past, newsletters were a useful tool for communicating information to your customers and stakeholders about your organization. They tended to be lengthy, full of notices, updates, a couple of decent articles and maybe even a few ads for your products or services. Newsletters typically were sent via normal mail as well as email.

With the advent and mainstream popularity of blogs, however, the newsletter of old may in fact be obsolete and a waste of time, effort, information and resources. Considering the amount of time consumers read marketing collateral material, you may actually get more bang for your buck by circulating your blogs instead of trying to craft an in-depth quarterly newsletter.

Newsletters vs. Blogs

You can use a blog post in ways that you never could with a newsletter. For example, you can post it on your social media sites, send it to your email lists, use it as a guest blog on other industry sites and shorten it for mobile communications.
Instead of sending out a newsletter, send your blog to your email list instead. Your existing and prospective clients will appreciate the targeted brevity of your information, and you’ll benefit by putting your company name in front of their eyes.
When you send a newsletter by email, you often have to attach a PDF file, which is the electronic format of the newsletter. Many of your customers, however, may not bother to even open the attachment. You can solve this problem by putting your blog post in the body of the email instead.
Keep blog topics straight and simple. With a weekly blog, you can touch on one subject at a time. In a newsletter, important information can get lost among the multiple stories and topics.
A newsletter doesn’t help your website page rank. Posting fresh content every week on your website through your blog posts pleases the search engines and gradually raises your page rank.
Single-topic blog posts can reinforce some keywords or add others, giving your website added strength when it comes to attracting new visitors. Newsletters can’t do that.
If your company does decide to do both a blog and a newsletter, each must include different information.

Blogs Are Better

According to Penn State University, a blog is a much more reader-friendly communication tool than a newsletter. A blog has more uses and is more likely to be read than a newsletter with multiple articles. But you don’t have to give up on your regular quarterly communications; just break it up into blog posts and put them on your website. The benefits are obvious.

Smarter Newsletters

If some of your clients still prefer to get a hard copy they can hold in their hands, you don’t have to get rid of your newsletter. Just be smarter about how you spend your writing and formatting time. First, ask your customers to opt in for a printed version to cut down on postage for your snail-mailing list. Then put together four or five of your best blog posts into a newsletter format and print it out for them. It’s a win-win situation.

At Ray Access, we’ll gladly share more about our experiences with online blogging — and even do it for you if you’re too busy. We also can pull together content for your newsletter customers and give you crisp new copy on a regular basis for all your followers.

Converting Website Visitors into Customers

by Mark Bloom | Apr 15, 2014 | Website Content

Content Marketing Effectively Converts Leads

Here in Asheville, North Carolina, we talk about content marketing a lot. Content marketing is, in essence, turning your website into a marketing engine by supplying useful information that attracts an audience. It works, and we have documented proof. We’ve also written about quality content before.

But it’s more than that. In case you’ve missed it, the Internet is replacing the Yellow Pages as the primary way consumers are looking for your products or services. It’s a sign of the times, just like other things that have disappeared, like rotary telephones, landlines and typewriters. So if you are ignoring your website, as our motto says, your website is ignoring you. That’s not a smart business decision.

This is what office phones used to look like

So whether you hire us or not, we urge you to adopt content marketing strategies. But even if you are doing everything you can to put content marketing to work on your business website, the next question is: Will just doing this simple thing actually convert the visitors you attract to your website into paying customers?

Content Marketing Is User-Centric

The Yellow Pages will go the way of the rotary phone The answer, of course, is yes. Content marketing, if properly done, can persuade your website visitors to become clients. Content marketing employs a user-centric approach, to use a term from the 1990s. “User-centric” means that you design your website with your visitors in mind. Make their experience everything they could hope for, and they’ll reward you with their business.

You must make your website easy to navigate. Make your content easy to understand. Answer your visitors’ obvious questions and provide your contact information on every page. Provide helpful tips and advice about your industry, products or services. To sum up: make your website valuable to your community of users. “User-centric.”

When Your Customers Have Landed

Content marketing can deliver this

Even if you do all this and your website is attracting a lot of traffic, you still must sell your company’s products or services. Knowing where and when and how to do this is a science, but it’s not rocket science. One tip is to construct effective “landing pages.”

A landing page is where visitors interested in a specific topic, product or service arrive on your website through a search engine or internal link. Landing pages must answer the questions about specific topics and effectively explain how your company can solve the associated problems. It’s not a pushy sales page. It’s not an advertisement. It’s a question-and-answer session, where your company has the best answer.

Content Marketing Has a Positive ROI

The Yellow Pages will go the way of the manual typewriter A landing page can be a blog post or a website page. It doesn’t matter, as long as it satisfies the above criteria. In fact, this very blog post can act as both an informative article and a landing page, since it targets businesses that need to learn about converting website visitors or creating better content on their websites — since Ray Access can do this for you, at a reasonable cost and with a proven return on investment (ROI).

Get a free estimate. We also offer a website analysis service that can provide an objective assessment of your website.

What Is a Persona?

by Mark Bloom | Feb 22, 2014 | Content Marketing

Personas Help You Write to a Specific Target

Whenever you write anything, the most important questions to ask yourself, before you begin, is:

Who am I writing this for? Who am I trying to reach?”

a sample of a persona

Regardless what you are writing, whether it’s a blog post, a brochure, a script, or even an email, you must answer these questions before you start typing. Your answers will determine:

The language you use
The approach you take
The tone of your writing

Without the answers, you’ll likely miss your mark and not connect with your target audience. You’ll be wasting your time.

Imagining Your Audience

That’s where a persona can be useful. A persona is an imagined conglomerate of what your audience might look like. It takes some research, but ultimately, creating a persona can help you target your business communications more effectively: marketing, advertising, websites, etc. Its return on investment, if you think in those terms, is astronomical.

Here’s a primer on how to create a persona (or a series of personas) for your company.

Creating a Persona

After you’ve done your research, you should have a pretty good idea of the people you need to target for your business. In other words, you should know the demographic you’re marketing to. It might be women aged 45–60. It might teenagers in affluent neighborhoods. It might be avid bicycle riders.

The trick to creating a persona is to personify your target demographic into one or two imaginary people — people with names, characteristics, jobs, families, hobbies, and possessions. Provide as much detail as possible. What are the names of the person’s children? What is he/she making for dinner tonight? No detail is too insignificant. Include a photo or drawing of that person.

If your target market is wide enough, create a second, complimentary persona. Make sure this second persona is distinct enough from the first to be useful, even if they share certain attributes such as their income brackets.

Pete the persona For example, Pete is a 35-year-old computer scientist who sits in a chair all week. He keeps in shape by riding his bicycle on weekends. He earns $52,000 a year, has two young children, Joseph and Shelby, and a dog named Hank. He loves his bike and spends time cleaning the tires and tightening the gears after each ride. He belongs to a cycling club that organizes regular group rides. They also do fundraisers for local charities.

Employing Your Persona

When you’ve finished your persona, print it out or copy it onto large sheets of paper. Put it up on the wall. This is the person or these are the people you’re writing to. These are the human beings you’re trying to reach. Respect them. Respect their time. Offer them value. Get their attention.

Determine what they need before you start writing. What is it that you have that would interest them? Why indeed should they buy your product or service? If you can find persuasive arguments to sell to your personas, you’ll have persuasive arguments for the people they represent out there in the real world.

At Ray Access, we believe in doing the research for finding the market you’re trying to reach. We don’t start writing until we know who we’re writing for. You should do the same.

12 Tips for a Better Business Website

by Elle Ray | Feb 13, 2014 | Website Content

How to Get a More Profitable Business Website

You can’t escape it. Sooner or later, you’ll need to provide business information — in writing — to clients, prospects, the government or the public at large. Whether you run a small business or occupy a small corner of the org chart at a multinational corporation, you need to be able to formulate a persuasive sentence.

you need to be able to write

If you’re one of the many businesspeople who lack writing skills, you should practice more. As more of your communication ends up online, more people will be influenced, either positively or negatively, by your words. Improving your writing can result in marked improvement in your business options. There’s no substitute for practice, but here are a few pointers to put you on the right track.

1. Less is more.

On a website, concision matters. Ironically, as written information becomes more important, people are less willing to read. Use words sparingly, cut out the florid prose and avoid meandering sentences. As Zorro taught his son: “Get in, make your Z and get out!”

2. Avoid jargon.

No one likes reading about “blue-sky solutioneering” and “strategical synergies” that ultimately mean nothing. If you mean “brainstorming” and “opportunities to work together,” simply say it. While jargon can be unavoidable when writing for a specific audience, use plain language whenever possible.

3. Write once, check twice.

It’s hardly fair — typos happen — but people judge you for those mistakes anyway, and harshly. To cut down on those mistakes, proofread immediately after you write and then again hours or even days later. Nothing is more embarrassing than a stupid typo in an otherwise fine document.

4. Write once, check twice.

writers get help Yes, again. This time, re-read your work to catch errors in tone that might cause trouble. For instance, if you’re upset or angry, you may write something you don’t actually want anyone else to read. Make sure your work says what you want it to say and how you want it to say it, before letting it reach its audience.

5. Pay attention to names, titles and genders.

The one thing more embarrassing than a typo is calling Mr. Smith “Ms. Smith.” If you’re not sure about the spelling of a name, job title or gender, check with someone who knows (like an assistant) or use gender-neutral language. Get the names wrong, and your readers will question everything you write.

6. Save templates.

Whenever you write a blog post or article, save it as a template for future use. You can save time and avoid common errors by using an existing document when you begin a new piece. Keep the headers, bullets, references and company information so you just have to fill in the new content.

7. Be professional, not necessarily formal.

professional, not formal writer Business communication needn’t be formal. While formal language works for legal documents and job applications, it can obfuscate your meaning. Remember, however, that informal writing doesn’t mean being unprofessional. Keep personal comments and off-color jokes out of your business writing.

8. Remember the 5 W’s (and the H).

Your writing should answer all the questions your audience might ask: Who, what, when, where, why, and how. Who is your audience? What should they know? When and where will it apply? Why is it important? And how should they use it? Use the 5W+H formula to ensure your information is complete.

9. Include a call to action.

Business websites are meant to achieve a purpose, so include a call to action on every page. A call to action directs the reader to do something. Don’t leave it to your readers to decide what to do with the information you’ve provided; most won’t bother. Tell them what to do and how to do it.

10. Don’t provide too many choices.

Ideally, you shouldn’t provide any choices to your readers. Just tell them what you want them to do and why they should do it. At most, give them two options and ask them to pick one. Too many choices can lead to “analysis paralysis,” which probably isn’t the result you’re hoping for.

11. What’s in it for readers?

Effective writing describes benefits, not features. Your readers want to know how to make their lives better. For example, nobody cares that Windows 7 runs in 64-bit mode. What they care about is that 64 bits runs faster than 32 bits, and getting work done more quickly is a benefit.

12. Hire a freelancer.

If writing is not your strength, hire a professional writer. Freelancers aren’t just for marketing material; a good freelance writer can produce corporate newsletters, blog posts, wiki entries, and much, much more. Expect to pay $35 to $45 an hour for good writing. Anyone who charges less is either not very good or not very business savvy. Ray Access is proven content provider in Asheville.

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