5 year birthday

5 years ago, I had a dream. My dream was to build a community of writers under one umbrella; a boutique firm that would be devoted to high quality content. My one aim was to hire writers who were excellent at their trade, who would further a mission of creating great content across the entire web. And, to never drop my content quality standards for any reason. And I can’t believe how that dream has been fulfilled today! This week, Express Writers celebrates a five-year anniversary. It’s been a wonderful, crazy, enlightening journey. We’ve seen over 5,000 clients walk through our doors, and have 70 copywriters, content strategists, social media managers, and editors by now (tested and hired out of thousands of applicants); and have written hundreds of thousands of pages to date, across press releases, blogs, web pages, product descriptions, social posts, and much more. I won’t lie: it hasn’t been easy. To stay at the top in today’s fast-paced content creation industry, featuring smarter consumers than ever before, you have to a) work without stopping, b) learn every day and c) grow constantly. Evolving, adapting is the name of the game. And my team and I have stayed devoted, nonstop, to maintaining and growing our presence. I’ve written more entrance tests and training manuals solely for our team use than I can count, and I refine them every few months. We don’t want to just be a content creation agency: we want to be at the forefront and be the best provider there is for great content that will fuel today’s content marketing needs. To celebrate our five-year mark, we’re showcasing some of our staff and why they like to work at Express Writers (see below). Without our talented team of managers, writers, content strategists, and experts, we wouldn’t be able to offer the high quality content deliverables we’re able to. Plus, a little gift for our clients: $25 off anything in the Content Shop! Use the code in the image below to redeem. Celebrating 5 Years at Express Writers: What Our Staff and Writers Say About Working Here Writing isn’t for the faint of heart. It’s not a trade just anyone can be good at; without the inborn talent for writing, every word reads forced, and doesn’t flow. Our writers have been hand-picked out of hundreds, and have passed multiple entrance tests to enter our team. We’re grateful to every one of our talented team members: they make up the core of how we tick, and how we stay consistent in delivering quality in the human-centric, difficult product of writing. We’re proud to represent quality and stand behind our mission of delivering audience-friendly, real-value content across the web! (P.S: Keep reading from a brief story from me!) Founder’s Perspective: Our Story A little thought, fueled by passion, and a lot of elbow-grease hard work was at the root of Express Writers’ beginnings back in 2011. I began life as a freelance writer at just 19 years old. It was an idea that hit me like a lightning bolt when I woke up one morning. I changed my lifestyle, direction and career path solely driven by discovering my passion. I wasn’t feeling fulfilled at all in nursing school. Within three months of self-teaching and learning the trade of online writing, fueled by the fact that I was jumping into something I absolutely loved, I was able to quit nursing school and McDonalds and jump full-time into running Express Writers, a little company I created at 20 years old, in May of 2011. The best part? I was doing what I loved with my life: writing. And it was through a channel bigger than I’d dreamed of as a little kid, who loved to fill every last scrapbook page with words. I was writing content that would be distributed across the world wide web—and how useful, good, intelligent, and worthwhile my writing was translated to how people across the globe would further interact with it when they found it in Google. That was inspiring to me. What if I could make the web a better place by simply offering a solution for it’s fundamental key: the quality of great writing, for any type of business that needed to fuel their online marketing? Our Growth: Crazy Big Strides, Short Amounts of Time Over the past five years, Express Writers has grown from a baby company where I was the manager, editor, and salesperson, with a team of five writers, to a global agency with over 70 writers (hand-picked out of thousands), a staff of nearly a dozen people, and a 98% success rate in content deliverables, a feat considering the difficult human process involved in what we do everyday (from matching individual client styles to picking the best writers, managing deadlines, and so much more). We’ve seen a lot of growth across the years; from launching our online Content Shop developed by Josh in early 2015, to our latest internal growth spurt just this May. Interestingly enough, this month’s growth was fueled by the termination of our two head managers. We discovered that they were dropping our quality, pushing our writers to extreme deadlines, and overall going down a road counter-intuitive to the process and creation of quality content. In the following seven days after they were let go, I reinvented our content quality process, replacing editors with a more targeted, trained role of content reviewers; came up with a content turnaround expectations chart, that is now included in our policy page, and allows for the time our human writers need to create quality content; and trained three new staff members. We’ve already seen a 10% increase in the overall morale and production of our writing team, exhibited in clientele project approval and praise across the board, since we’ve lessened the urgency of their deadlines. I have no doubts that as we progress to training more reviewers and as our new Content Manager Katria works through her third week here full-time managing the assignments and refining which writer is best matched with a project, this production quality increase will only … Read more