by Elle Ray | Jul 6, 2014 | Asheville
Another Reason to Live in Asheville, NC
Asheville entices retirees and dreamers to move here. The city — known as either a “Cesspool of Sin” or as a bastion of liberal politics, depending on your point of view — offers a bustling beer scene and enough gourmet restaurants to satisfy most foodies. In other words, there are many reasons to move here.
Bring Your Job
But the region’s high-technology community is in its infant phase. The economy relies heavily on tourism, health care and construction. Normal office jobs are scarce. You must bring a nest egg with you to tide you over until you figure out how to make it here. Alternatively, you must already have a job that doesn’t rely on the local economy.
If you come to Asheville expecting to find the perfect job, you may be disappointed. We personally know several people who have come here, stayed a while, and then left to find a more lucrative location. Because not only are the jobs not plentiful, the pay scale is less than in other markets.
Outside of Work
There are benefits to living here, though. The scenery is breathtaking. The nearby mountains bestow feelings of peace and fulfillment. Even if you don’t like hiking, river sports (including river tubing) or ziplining, Asheville has a lot to offer.
The downtown scene jumps and hops during the summer months. The bars, restaurants and pubs do a brisk business. The sidewalks crowd with young, old and everyone in between. Asheville is a vibrant, fun small city.
Where Creativity Never Ends
We live and work here, and as long as we’ve been in Asheville, we have not suffered writer’s block. We’re not sure if it’s the mountains, the people, the trees, the architecture, the air or the food, but we never lack ideas. We never lack inspiration. Whenever we sit down to write, we always have the words.
Asheville is a place where creativity seems to appear whenever we need it, as if by magic. We can’t explain it, but neither can we deny it. Asheville supplies us with what we need to create. The place makes working joyful, fruitful and nearly effortless.
Let Us Show You
As a result, we create quality content for our clients. Due to where we choose to live and work (at least partially), our work is always on time and on budget. Our clients appreciate not only the timeliness of our work, but also the effectiveness of our words.
Let us show you what we can do for you. Check out our portfolio to see what we’ve done for other clients. Then contact us about your needs. We can solve your website, blogging and online marketing issues. If you let us.
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 | Nov 13, 2013 | Asheville
Why Ray Access Chose to Live in Asheville, NC
We are writer/editors. We produce content for websites. We work alone, in front of a computer. We could live anywhere. Why did we choose to live in Western North Carolina?
Everyone comes to Asheville for a different reason. For some, it’s the mountain air. For others, it’s just the mountains. Some people, and you know who you are, get out every weekend to go tubing, fishing, kayaking, hiking, mountain biking or rock climbing. Or all of the above.
As writers, we live a more sedentary lifestyle, but we enjoy the mountain views. We like driving the Blue Ridge Parkway whenever the opportunity presents itself. But there’s more to Asheville than its scenic environment.
Asheville Has It All
Asheville boasts terrific restaurants, cozy musical venues, safe neighborhoods and independent stores. Downtown is human-sized, small enough to walk around in. Breweries abound, and hotels are springing up as fast as the leaves are dropping. The culture is artsy without being pretentious. It’s a small town with some big city amenities.
Best of all, Asheville is friendly and supportive. It’s a place to make real connections and to develop real relationships. It’s the kind of place where you see friends and people you know as you go about your daily errands. Who wouldn’t love that?
It’s a Good Place to Live and Work
We chose Asheville because we like it here. We chose Asheville because it has everything we need. We chose Asheville because we want to support the local businesses run by passionate, creative people.
Our business is helping other businesses. We can (and do) work for companies outside Asheville, since the work we do doesn’t force us to be local. We aren’t selling widgets or fixing drains. We can work for anybody that speaks English.
But we chose to live and work in Asheville because it combines the best of everything: healthful living and a thriving marketplace. While not every local business depends on tourism, every local business needs to be online. And so we can help every local business.
Life isn’t all work, though, and when we take a break and leave the computer, there’s a restaurant or coffeehouse or park where we can get away to. And isn’t that what you want from a hometown?
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 | Oct 5, 2013 | Asheville
Professional Asheville Blog Writers Spell It Out
Even in a business community as small and insular as in Asheville, businesses face competition for their services. Asheville restaurants, Asheville architects, even Asheville dentists need business blogs to give them an edge. Why? It’s all about visibility.
It’s All About Visibility
Blogs not only add flavor to a staid website, but they attract potential customers. Blog posts can be about anything, potentially tying the business blog to almost any topical subject. In fact, if you’re using your blog merely to tout your monthly specials, you’re not getting enough visibility out of your blog.
Use the space to educate your customers. Write about not only what sets you apart, but also about the inside tips about your industry. Write about Asheville and why you chose to live and do business here. Regardless of your subject matter, if you provide useful information, visitors will not only remember you, they’ll come back.
Climbing the Ranks
An active website helps its page rank, too, which is another way to increase business. When anyone searches for your business online — not by your company name but by the product or service you provide — the first five listings (after the advertisements) are the links most likely to be clicked on. The competition for those spots is fierce, but an active blog helps.
What’s an active website? A site with changing content. That doesn’t mean you have to redesign your website every week. That wouldn’t help anyone. But when you add valuable information (like blog posts and new pages) over time, it gets attention from the search engines and from Internet surfers.
Finding Services in Asheville
Since consumers are turning away from the yellow pages and moving online, your Asheville business needs to make sure your listing shows up when those consumers do their searches. As Asheville grows, the new arrivals are going to be looking for new dentists, realtors, gardening stores, home decorating stores, and more. If you want their business, you have to be where they’re looking.
So update your website. Start a blog. Get busy finding the consumers who are out there trying to find you. We’re experts in website content, which means we’re experts in helping your customers find you online.
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 | Jan 21, 2013 | Announcement
Mark Bloom Recently Edits a Published Book
Joseph Campbell’s Wisdom Hits Close to Home
Two Asheville locals “follow their bliss” to create an unusual yet meaningful book.
“Follow your bliss and the universe will open doors where there were only walls.” – Joseph Campbell (1904–1987)
Mark Bloom and Linda Ray follow their bliss as the duo behind Ray Access. But both find other outlets for their creative and professional passions. For Mark, editing books (fiction and nonfiction) allows him to focus all his talent on a goal with two parts: helping an author create a marketable work and improving the author’s skill set.
Asheville author Dielle Ciesco took the words of mythologist Joseph Campbell to heart and started writing. Mark gave her words the heartbeat needed to make them come alive. By following their bliss, the two created a book that was accepted by the first publisher it was presented to. The results are apparent in the work, The Unknown Mother: A Magical Walk with the Goddess of Sound, published this month (January 2013) by Roundfire Books (ISBN: 978-1780996318).
The book personifies the kind of collaboration that makes Asheville a unique and thriving arts community. A vocal activist, healer, and teacher, Ciesco’s book is based on a lifetime exploring the mysteries and subtleties of the power of voice, the meaning of words, and the properties of sound. But writing the book became a journey in itself.
Ciesco at first tried to write an educational book to capture all the archaic research and practical experience she had acquired. After struggling with it for years, she had a brainstorm to turn the information into a novel.
“The book took on a life of its own,” Ciesco says. But the change to fiction also led to new challenges. Novels from unknown writers aren’t the easiest to get published. “I knew I had to present a very clean package and was willing to invest in that,” she says.
To realize her bliss in print, she turned to Asheville editor Mark Bloom, who does work for Ray Access, a local web content provider. Bloom’s passion lies in editing. His bliss led him through many careers, all involving the written word, including a stint editing at Lark Books.
“Working with Mark was easy,” Ciesco says. “He would take a sentence or paragraph and make it say exactly what I wanted with precision and flow. He had some really great ideas that made the book better.” When asked about the collaboration, she admits, “I really had no idea how deep the editing process could go. Mark made sure the story was unified and was a big support in making my characters more interesting.”
The book represents Ciesco’s life work, which is far from complete. “Going through the editing process has definitely made me a better writer,” she says. “I really internalized the things I learned from Mark, and that’s going into my second book right off the bat.”
About Dielle Ciesco: Dielle specializes in the transformational power of the voice to heal and connect us with our own Divinity. With over 18 years experience as a performer and healing facilitator, she teaches, writes, sings, creates art, and helps clients. Contact her at info at thevoiceoflife.com.
About Mark Bloom: A professional writer since 1989, Mark has contributed to five published books. As an editor, he loves guiding authors to improve their work and their skills. He has a number of projects in various stages of development. Contact him at mark at rayaccess.com.
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.
