by Mark Bloom | May 10, 2013 | Editing
Write in Plain Language; It Helps Everyone
There is a movement gaining traction across America: writing in plain, understandable English. Plain language is, as William DuBay said, “a literary style that is easy to read because it matches the reading skill of the audience.”
Government agencies are adopting the tenets of plain language. Lawyers are hiring editors to “translate” their legalese into English that anyone with an eighth-grade education can understand. And more and more businesses are gradually coming around to the benefits of using plain English in their communications.
A New Wrinkle in Communications
In retrospect, it seems obvious that easily understood writing would help everyone — from those with a message to relay to those trying to read that message. The plain language movement’s goal is to make the written word easier to comprehend. Given that we are all inundated with messages throughout the day, making those messages clearer can make life simpler for many people.
Still, it has taken a surprisingly long time to get everyone to agree that documents should be written in plain English. Detail-oriented lawyers in private and public practice wanted foremost to close loopholes. Business writers assumed their audiences were highly educated. Training in clear communications did not exist.
The Movement Gains Ground
This is not a new phenomenon. Way back in 1972, President Richard Nixon issued a decree that the “Federal Register be written in layman’s terms.” The government — and future Presidents — have mostly continued to push for clearer and simpler written communications.
Like any grassroots democratic cause, the plain language movement has gradually gained momentum. People tired of the confusing status quo and asked for simpler content. They weren’t lazy; they needed to find meaning quickly so that they could make important decisions. Today, we can see the changes… in some places.
Writers still have work to do, but the benefits are becoming clearer as more research is done. For an introduction to plain language, check out the Plain Language Association InterNational (PLAIN) website. You can find cutting-edge information about and examples of plain language in the Wikipedia.
How This Affects You
Ray Access believes in plain language. We apply its principles in all the writing we do, matching our style to the reading skill of the intended audience, as Mr. DuBay recommends. We write for people, not search engines. Our writing is geared to attract more human eyes to your business, which can translate into more sales, greater visibility, and customer satisfaction.
In the process, search engines take note, too, which increases your website’s page rank. It’s truly a win-win scenario.
If you are ignoring your website, it’s likely ignoring you. Get the best value from your online assets. In plain English.
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 | Apr 16, 2013 | Editing
Grammar Matters — No Matter What You Write
Of course we believe that grammar is important; we’re writers, after all. But what if we loosened our standards:
Its time to talk to you about a day-to-day and week-to-week issues. And im not about to talk about the talk every one know does no good. Let me explains that now.
We could go overboard, too, thinking that everyone has a 16-year education:
Inferring the textual concept of proper grammar and punctuation, noun and verb agreement, correct spelling, and all the other tenets of the English language that make it a difficult, yet succinct form of communication among those who have a clear and concise message to deliver and require a medium that appropriately tackles the task at hand, you would think it would be performed accordingly.
Yikes. Please stop us.
The Problem Is Rampant
Since we’re writers, we read a lot. In our research, we have to peruse 100 or more websites a day, so we see it all the time. This kind of writing is rampant. You know it too if you’ve tried to find a quick recipe or picked up a newspaper lately. Sometimes, it’s impossible to get “just the facts.”
Given this dilemma, we’d like to share a bit of good news. There’s a movement afoot called “plain language” that aims to make government documents and legal papers easy to read and understand. But even they get bogged down in trying to look smart by using big words and long, drawn-out sentences. We know — we’ve edited some of their work.
Everyone Loses
One problem may arise from alluringly inexpensive writing services that contract “English language writers” overseas. But we fear most of the errors are due to being either lazy or cheap. Perhaps publishers don’t take the time to read their own copy before going live with it, or maybe they are too tight to pay someone to proofread for them.
As a result, everyone loses. The reader quickly moves on to another webpage or forces herself to read the copy over and over until she understands its meaning. It’s tedious work, and in most cases, unnecessary.
Don’t do that to your customers and your readers. Please stop.
Get Professional Help
Before you publish that article, that press release, or that webpage… contact Ray Access. We’re professionals. We not only do this for a living; it’s our passion as well, so you know we want to do it right the first time.
If you don’t think you can afford us, call for a free estimate. If you want to keep all your work in-house, at least read your copy out loud before you publish it. If you’re not sure, get a second opinion. Give it to a fourth grader to see if she gets it. Sleep on it and then see if it still makes sense in the morning.
Whatever you do, make sure your prose is clear and to the point before you publish it. If it’s wrong or long or poorly edited, it can damage your reputation once it’s published. It may cause your customers, clients or readers to go elsewhere, which is likely the exact opposite reason you wrote it.
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 | Mar 29, 2013 | Website Content
Spend Your Work Time Running Your Business
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.
by Mark Bloom | Mar 20, 2013 | Content Provider
How to Protect Your Business’ Good Name
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.
Click here for the complete article or go to: www.techipedia.com/2012/bad-reviews/.
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 | Mar 7, 2013 | Content Marketing
Why Your Page Rank Matters to Your Business
Creating a website can be cheaper than printing tons of brochures… and it doesn’t destroy any trees. You can update your website much easier than you can update your brochure, too. Best of all, you can save on mailing costs. Instead of mailing your brochure to customers and potential customers, you can email, text, chat, or post your website address (or URL) to whomever you want in any number of different ways. You can even put your URL on your car doors. Try doing that with a brochure.
The question is: Are websites more effective than brochures?
In this day and age, you can be confident that nearly everyone is online or can get online (thank you public libraries). If someone has your URL and wants to visit your website, they can. They don’t need your four-color tri-fold. All they need is your URL scribbled on a cocktail napkin or printed on a business card. Of course, reaching your potential customers can still present a challenge — and that’s where search engines and page rank come in.
Make Your Message Count
Websites can do so much more than brochures as marketing tools, if you play them correctly. Websites never wear out. They are online 24/7. Your website serves as an advertisement for your company when customers look for your products or services. How can it fail?
Your website only works if your customers can find it. We’re not talking about cryptic URLs, which can be a problem. We’re talking about finding your site through an Internet search. Chances are good that people will find your website, but only if it comes up on the first or second page of a search result. That’s considered a high search ranking, with the first page being the ideal, the “Holy Grail” of all business websites. If your website doesn’t appear until page three or four — or worse — forget about it and keep passing out your business cards and brochures … because that’s the only way customers will find their way to your site.
The Puzzle of Internet Searches
The Internet is fast and convenient — and that’s what people have come to expect. Internet users aren’t accustomed to wading through page after page of entries on Google or Bing. They want instant gratification. If they search for buggy whips, they’ll visit a site that comes up on the first page. They might shop around, visit one or two sites for comparison, but more often than not, they’ll buy from the first site they hit. If your buggy whip company isn’t listed until page three, you’re out of luck and out of a customer. And not that many people are buying buggy whips these days.
No matter how slick your site, regardless of how low your prices are, if you can’t get your website to be listed on the first or second page of an organic search — meaning based on a phrase naturally entered by someone looking for something on the Internet — your site might as well be invisible. In fact, it is.
When a person uses a search engine like Google or Bing, it begins an intricate process that weighs complex algorithms, paid advertisements, and many, many other factors to deliver the results — and the order in which they’re posted — in mere seconds. Worse, this process is subject to change without warning.
Solving the Search Engine Puzzle
You can hire a team of Internet marketing specialists, called SEO (or search engine optimization) experts to help you rank higher on Internet searches. They understand the intricacies and can advise you on different strategies for getting the best results. These strategies often work, over time, but SEO experts are expensive and often work for large companies who have large marketing departments.
Alternately, you can take matters into your own hands and play the same game. Learn as much as you can. Spend the time tweaking your website to find the magic bullet that jumps your website to the top of the charts, so to speak. But be forewarned: this is a time-consuming venture.
Fortunately, there is a real solution. Not surprisingly, it involves us.
How Search Engines Work: A Primer
Search engines ultimately want to deliver to their customers a list of websites that most likely help, websites most likely to contain the information, products, or services the person is searching for. Search engines are looking for sites with clear content, consistent and relevant information, and useful copy. In other words, they’re looking for websites that are clear and easy to understand. These are the sites most likely to deliver whatever it is the user is seeking, even if it’s buggy whips.
The complex algorithms the search engines use are merely ways to try to find those clear sites. Your website can be one of them. It starts with clear text on your site, with the right words and good images on each page. It continues with a constant stream of new material, delivered over time.
Why is new content important? Search engines troll the Internet for fresh content all the time, to keep its “index” up to date. If your website is static, search engines will never have a reason to check back, driving your site lower and lower in rank. If your website continues to deliver good, useful information week after week, it will naturally rise in rank, not to mention get readers involved and result in links from other sites.
So don’t go to all the trouble of creating a new website if you’re only going to use it as an electronic calling card. Instead, take advantage of the marketing power of search engines and drive new visitors to your site. Post new content on your site daily or at least weekly. That’s one of the keys to driving your page rank higher.
If you don’t have time to write new stuff every day — because you’re also trying to run your business — then contact Ray Access. That’s what we 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.
by Mark Bloom | Mar 2, 2013 | Content Marketing
How to Get Ranked Higher for Search Results
This is the question on every business-owner’s mind. If a company has a website — and what serious company, no matter how small, doesn’t? — the visibility of that website becomes a major concern.
When a business thinks about ways to grow — ways to advertise its products or services, and ways to attract new customers — a new hot website seems like a no-brainer. It’s the old “If you build it, they will come” philosophy. In reality, however, the world doesn’t work that way.
So, after an initial push to launch the website, it just sits there. All optimism soon fades. The site is written off as a loss.
It doesn’t have to be that way, of course. Building the site is just the first step. There are ways to nudge the search page listing toward the top (aka, increasing the page rank of the website, getting more potential customers to look at your site, and then turning them into clients).
Build It the Right Way
We recently took a seminar put on by Chris Kaminski of Lone Bird Studio. He’s been in marketing for 30+ years and in the website end of it for 13+ years. He knows of what he speaks.
Chris ran through a litany of proper ways to build and code a website. Part of the trick is to develop and employ the right keywords, not only for your business, but for each page of the website. Everything has to be relevant, and every keyword has to match.
But That’s Not Enough
The really interesting thing about the seminar, however, was what Chris had to say about the key elements of the keyword use (and we’re paraphrasing here): “Stuffing keywords into text on the page no longer works. In fact, it may work against you. The copy has to flow naturally.”
To put that in layman’s terms, he said, “Search engines today are content-driven… It’s all about the quality of the content.”
What It’s About
This confirms what Ray Access has repeated here many times: the best way to raise your page rank is to provide quality content — useful and relevant information — to your website continually over time. It’s the best way to attract visitors, establish your authority, and yes, move your listing up on the search pages. Find out how Ray Access can help your website’s page rank.
Having your website rank higher based on the site’s content is not only the most effective way to do it, but it’s also the cheapest way to do it. There’s also a term for it: it’s called organic. Organic means that you’re putting the time into your website to add value. Search engines, regardless of the current algorithm for determining rank, will always be attracted to organic value. Or as Chris put it: “Organic buzz rarely comes without quality content.”
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.
