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.

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.

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.

The Aim of Quality Content

by Elle Ray | Apr 6, 2014 | Content Provider

Why Your Website Needs Useful Content

Everyone has been telling you that you need “quality content” on your website. They repeat it so often and with such verve that you have begun to believe it. After you realize how difficult it is to produce content that’s actually useful, you take a pause and wonder: “What’s the point of all this?” Well, you’ve come to the right place. Let us explain.

What Is “Quality Content?”

Ray Access provides quality content

We first have to define what we mean when we refer to quality content. There may be many subjective definitions for what constitutes quality content, but here at Ray Access, we like to simplify, simplify, simplify. To us, quality content is just useful information: how-to tips, solid advice backed by facts or insightful articles that can actually help a reader reach a decision. Think of this way: Quality content is something that readers would want to share with their friends.

For example, let’s pretend there’s a company called Asheville Plasterworks. They make plaster-of-Paris masks and puppets. It’s a niche market, but they supply the local theater companies and make one-of-a-kind pieces for city parades. On their website and blog, they might feature information about the history of masks, how to incorporate puppets in a school project and what kinds of “green” materials they use to make their products. They have vision and imagine what their readers might want to read about. This quality content will attract a new audience, which is one of the things a website should do.

Why Quality Content Works

That was one example, but there are many others. Quality content works because it attracts people and turns those visitors to your website into customers. Quality content not only differentiates your company, but it also describes the benefits of your products or services.

When visitors arrive at your website, they’ll scan for whatever is useful or important to them. If you can supply that information, they’ll be grateful. They may become a customer. They may even share a link they think will benefit others, or they think it’s especially funny or practical. When your website reaches that level, you will know you have quality content.

The Goals of Quality Content

So what are the goals of quality content? They are:

To get you noticed in the sea of the Internet
To draw new people to your website
To convert visitors into customers
To get people talking about your company
To establish yourself as an expert in your field

But the way to reach these goals — and this is important to learn — is to give stuff away. Not swag or prizes, but information. If you can actually help people, they’ll remember you. If you can give them something that they want or need, they’ll be more likely to recommend you. They’ll be more likely to spread the word about you as your informal ambassadors. They’ll be more likely to buy from you.

On the other hand, if you lure people to your website with the promise of help, but you don’t deliver what they’re looking for, they’ll move on. They’ll forget you. Or worse, they’ll spread the word that you’re unreliable.

So give your audience what it wants. Provide quality content. If you can’t do it on your own, quality content is what we deliver. Every time.

How to Improve Your Website

by Mark Bloom | Mar 30, 2014 | Website Content

5 Tips That Can Help Your Site Right Now

Websites matter. A good website draws people in and coverts them into customers. The question everyone asks us is: “What makes a website good?”

So let us answer this question for all of you at once so you can improve your website. We’ve written — and rewritten — many websites. You can see several examples of our work in our Portfolio. We believe that if your website isn’t making you money, then it’s costing you money. And if that’s where you are, then you have two choices:

Invest in your website to make it the marketing engine it could be.
Use your website just as a Yellow Pages entry, listing your company name, phone number, hours and address. One page should do it, even if you add a pretty picture.

a good website sample: a simple design that nonetheless conveys its message

If you decide to go with option #1 above, here are five steps to get you started:

1. Update the Design

Nothing turns visitors away faster than a design that looks straight out of the 1990s. Technology has changed; so should your website. Hire a designer who listens to what you want and can make specific and helpful recommendations. Find a programmer who can make the vision work. This is an investment in your company, the same as redecorating a storefront.

2. Brand Your Look

If necessary, update your company logo. Choose a few colors for your website. Select a couple typefaces. Use them consistently throughout your new website. These things help establish your brand.

3. Place Contact Info

This is really the number one thing we see wrong with many websites. Your contact information — email address or telephone number — should appear on every single page of your website. In the age of search engines, your visitors don’t always enter your website on the Home page. Make it easy for them to contact you. This seems like a simple thing, but you’d be surprised how many websites get it wrong.

4. Simplify Your Message

Each page of your website should focus on one thing: who you are, what you do, where you work, how you work, what sets you apart. Whatever the purpose of that page, it should be clear and easy to discern. Don’t try to be clever. Be clear and concise, and you’ll win converts.

This site updates its content regularly

5. Add New Content

Once you’ve accomplished the previous four steps, you’re ready to tackle this one. Adding fresh content, on your website pages and in a consistent blog, does more to get you noticed than anything else. The other steps are important so that when new potential clients arrive at your website, they aren’t immediately repulsed, but this is the step that gets them there.

This is also the very thing that Ray Access can help you with. This is what we do, and we’ve helped other businesses improve their reach and their success. We can help you, too. Contact us if you want to learn more. We’ll assess your website and provide an honest, objective appraisal.

4 Steps to a Better Website

by Mark Bloom | Feb 28, 2014 | Content Marketing

Create a Website That Works for Your Business

As we’ve written before in this blog space, you need an active website to attract your target audience. You need to provide useful information that people are going to want to read, talk about and share. But how can you do that?

We wrote our content before designing our website

Before you even begin to fill your site with useful and creative content, take time to make sure customers can find their way around, easily move through your site and stay to learn more about you and your business. Here are four ways to begin this process:

1. Know Your Market

Before you begin to design your website and fill it with that useful content we’re always talking about, you first have to do the hard work of research. You probably already know what you do. You know the value that you offer. Your goal in this research is to find out what your potential customers want.

For example, if your business is selling rugs, you need to know who’s buying your rugs. Are they second-home owners? Are they newlyweds moving into their first apartment? Are they landlords or real estate investors or home decorators? The answers you discover will direct both the design and the tone of your website.

If your business serves a variety of clients, consider different sections that will appeal to those specific niches. Write differently to each group.

2. Design and Redesign

Almost anyone these days can build you a website, but to get the look and feel you need for your business, consider hiring a professional designer. Web designers can tailor the look and feel to appeal to your customer base (see #1). A pleasing design can increase your sales.

Your website is your online storefront. It’s there for you 24/7, open for business. It represents your firm. It should therefore reflect your values and show that you know what your customers want. A successful design makes your content better, like a pleasantly designed room makes your furniture look better. Don’t skimp on design, just as you wouldn’t skimp on the façade of your brick-and-mortar store.

3. Organize Your Site

Before you build the site, make sure it follows an obvious structure or organization. Is it easy to find your way around? Are the menus easy to understand, and are the subpages in the expected places? Put your contact information on every page. Make your organization as obvious as possible.

You don’t want visitors to arrive at your site and not be able to find what they’re looking for. That’s a recipe for a bounce. (A bounce is when a someone comes to your website, glances around, decides it’s not what he’s looking for, and then goes somewhere else.) Don’t let bounces happen to you.

4. Create Effective Landing Pages

A landing page is a page on your website that you send specific visitors to. For example, if you ran an online ad for a special sale on car batteries, you wouldn’t want the link to direct people to your home page. You’d want to bring them to a page that talked about how great your batteries are and now they’re even less expensive! Similarly, if someone on your site wants to find out about your car wash service, don’t send him to a page that lists all your services. Effective landing pages convert visitors into customers.

At Ray Access, we don’t build websites, but we understand them. We understand website content. While we’ll provide top-quality content for your site regardless of your website design, our content will be more effective if your website design is more effective. And a better website means more customers.

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