Ghost writer for Blog on ''How hosted applications can increase Business Productivity''

You will be ghost writing the blog for Giles Donovan, CEO of Reach Accounting, an online accounting application. The blog should position Giles as an authority on how business productivity can be improved using hosted applications and online technologies. This project is to quote for EACH blog. The assignment requires you to write one every 2 weeks. Please indicate your credentials for this project. Price will not be the decider. ## Deliverables **Reach Accounting Blog Brief** **Overview** Reach Accounting is a hosted application that empowers a small business owner to be able to manage their own basic bookkeeping and payroll services. Whilst it is currently a bit technical in nature, the soon-to-be-launched new version is expressly designed to be easy for a small business owner to use. Importantly this differentiates it away from competitors like Saasu & Xero that are really designed for bookkeepers. Competitors like MYOB Live Accounts are more suitable for small business owners, but we like to think Reach is easier. Reach works on a mobile phone due to the use of responsive CSS. This places Reach Accounting uniquely amongst all the competitors. **Benefits** Reach Accounting offers a number of benefits to a small business owner - It is free to trial - It only costs $14.95/mo (less if paid annually) compared to $100s for desktop application like MYOB. - It offers unlimited features, like unlimited employee logins and you can add unlimited customers. Most competitors cripple these features - You no longer need to pay a bookkeeper or a payroll bureau to manage your accounts - You don't have multiple staff using multiple computers managing excel spreadsheets and word documents to manage invoicing. All invoicing is stored in one place and accessible to everyone. - It is easy to see who has not paid their invoices - Capability exists to simply email or sms overdue accounts to save the pain of calling up - You can view your accounts and issue invoices from a mobile phone. Invoices issued at the point of transaction get paid faster **Blog requirements** _The blog is ghost written for Giles Donovan, not Reach Accounting_. I am the CEO of Reach Accounting and a relatively well known figure in the Australian Internet industry. I am better known as a director of Netregistry, one of Australia's largest domain name and hosting companies. The blog is currently at <[login to view URL]>. It's currently very bookkeeping focused, but that is unsustainable - there's only so much I can write about small business accounting! Moving forward the blog should position myself as a leading authority on how business productivity can be improved using hosted applications and online technologies. It should _not_ be focused on how marketing can be improved using hosted applications, because whilst this is a productivity gain other Netregistry authors cover this subject. Similarly it should not be focused on web development technologies for the same reason. ? Writing about how lots of people in the organization can use Wordpress to manage a website is not to be covered ? But, how Wordpress can be used as an internal tool to manage an intranet or training resource could be ? Writing about how SMS offers a lot of cut through on sending marketing messages should not be covered ? But how SMS is a great way to remind people of an appointment booking and lowers missed appointments - and noting a site that does this - is a good productivity story As much as possible, we should try to write about hosted applications that mean something to everyone and are helping a business problem common to all organizations. So, for example ? Using a hosted service to manage support tickets is something most businesses could & should use, ? But, a hosted service that empowers businesses to better run a supply chain is niche It can be futurist in nature, in so much as it can describe how enabling technologies will change the business landscape. For example; ? Services like Freelancer.com.au and [login to view URL] have been typically used by businesses to source cheap and willing labour to do skilled tasks like building websites. However, in the future there will be a growing willingness to use these services to source cheap and willing staff to do repetitive low skilled tasks like chasing outstanding invoices - mothers at home and retired people can do this on a per-debt basis, when you're too small to employ a credit agency (which is more expensive anyway). Obviously it would be great if stories had a natural affiliation with the Reach Accounting product. So, for example in the futurist story above we could reference Reach Accounting because Reach Accounting has a tool in it that lets you identify every customer who is in arrears.. The stories should not be too basic. So for example, I don't want to talk about something as trivial as web-based email saving on Microsoft licence fees - that story was good 10 years ago. I'd like to think that a qualifying criteria is that the bulk of our audience have not considered the opportunity I am describing. The stories must be solution focused. This means they actually talk about a specific business problem, or opportunity for a business and recommend a good hosted solution that deals with that issue. There needs to be some meat on the bone and a takeaway learning for the reader. Stories that talk from a macro perspective on, for example how mobile ecommerce is growing are not appropriate, unless we talk about a specific hosted technology that helps business take advantage of mobile ecommerce and how it does so. **Language and tone** In the same way Reach Accounting is simply designed to serve the _smallest businesses_ and least knowledgeable wannabe bookkeepers, the blog stories should also be written with simplicity in mind. There should be no high brow technical terms or concepts that are left without description. This blog is written for businesses with 1-10 staff. There should be a 'light bulb moment', when a reader 'gets it' and can visualize how the concept we are talking about would work in their business. I should sound less authoritative and more David Attenborough. **Header and Footer** As well as the blog content, every story needs to have a punchy title and byline as per the example newsletter at <[login to view URL]> Click through rate is important, so the title and headline need to convey urgency and benefit. At the bottom of each blog article needs to be my signature (Giles Donovan, CEO Reach Accounting) and who is Reach Accounting. This description of Reach can be customized to offer the most relevance to the story covered and remind the reader that a trial of the product is free. **Some ideas** Some story ideas: ? Something about how virtual desktops are being used to solve a mobility problem ? Hosted PABX & virtual receptionists - how a microbusiness can use it to appear big ? How hosted ticketing systems are good for managing support ? About vworker and how it is good to manage outsourcers!