Alana L
Writer #7408
Joined 7/26/2013
6 Star Rating
100% Success
11,856 Projects
15 Endorsements
5 Elite Skills
Prices start at 30 cents per word unless you're looking for product descriptions which are subject to lower bulk rates. Please message for details!

Why do people say "stick out like a sore thumb" as if it's a bad thing?

Alana writes content that helps brands separate themselves from the sad sack pack of sameness littering the professional landscape.

Want to blend in? You've come to the wrong lady.

Want to dominate your competitors, make loads of cash, and thrill your customers from the end of their adorable noses down to their exciteable little toeses? Alana's your gal.

Alana is a firm believer in the idea that content should do three things:

+ Entertain
+ Educate
+ Engage

After more than a decade in hospitality with oodles of experience in wine and fine dining, Alana has a particular affinity for the food & beverage industry. That's a fancy way of saying that she'll use content to sell the hell out of your restaurant, winery, distillery, green foods brand, catering biz, bar, smallwares line, appliance catalog, F&B consultancy, etc.

She's also a lifestyle expert. Alana has helped brand and launch a luxury baby company, masterminded a marketing strategy for a travel publication, written compelling product descriptions for everything from yoga apparel to perfume, and created far-ranging content for some of the largest home design and decor retailers in the world.

Landing pages, sales pages, eBooks, blogs, content strategy, buyers guides, case studies, branding, interviews, chef & winemaker profiles/employee bios, social media management, social posting - Alana does it all.

If you want to build your authority, your brand, and your following, drop Alana a line to ask for samples or schedule a chat. She'll help you find a plan and a voice that brings your vision to life. Better yet, you'll work together to make noise, change minds, and create experiences. This isn't your bargain-basement blog writing or basic-Becky content scrawl. You want to level up? You've got to show up, and showing up isn't cheap. It's pretty awesome, though.

Ready to shine brighter than the sugary crust of a creme brulee? Alana is too, and she's packing a literary blowtorch.
Humor
Entertainment
Blog Post
Medical
Product Description
Marketing
Travel
Music
Food
Hospitality

Specialties

Alana specializes in content for the hospitality, food and beverage, and lifestyle niches, but she enjoys creating copy of almost any kind. Past work includes collaborations with brands in travel, real estate, finance, jewelry, yoga, natural supplements, health and fitness, and more.

Alana is particularly adept at:

+ Blogs
+ Profiles/bios
+ eBooks
+ Web pages
+ Landing pages
+ Sales pages
+ Product descriptions
+ Emails
+ Case studies
+ White papers
+ Content strategy
+ Social media posts
+ Haikus about fruit (just seeing if you're still reading)

Interests

Alana loves music, and frequently listens to everything from opera to Tuvan throat singers to Irish traditional tunes to Pink (and always lots and lots of Tom Petty) while writing.

She likes to be outside when the Vegas heat allows (i.e., not in June, July, or August), and her nightly walk with her stinky Shar Pei is her favorite time to brainstorm new topics. Alana tries to eat out when she can, which is hazardous for the waistline but great fodder for articles and blogs.

Alana is always packing reading material; anyone doubting her love of the written word only needs to take a gander at the inside of her poor Prius. Somewhere under the pile of industry magazines, local free papers, books (at last look there was Kevin Zraly's wine book, a guidebook about Italy, and a trashy drugstore romance novel), and some mail she should probably open, is a car.

She's currently learning French and Italian and will probably end up speaking a strange combination of the two.

Alana likes to juice on occasion (especially when she's on a particularly fierce yoga and Pilates kick), but she also loves McDonald's french fries. She's not afraid to say that foie gras tastes like pennies and, if she could, she would drink champagne with every meal.

Education

College of Southern Nevada

Alana studied a self-designed curriculum of business, hospitality, and hands-on culinary courses to arm herself with all the necessary tools to be successful in the restaurant industry.

Marketing

4,329 Projects Completed

Alana has a passion for creating superior marketing material designed to engage the reader. She believes that great copy nimbly toes the line between impassioned and pushy, drawing the consumer in and making them instantly crave more information about the product or retailer. Alana has written product descriptions and related marketing material for big-name retailers including a major cookware conglomerate, an office supply chain, a children's toy emporium, and several of the most popular internet-based shopping sites, as well for up-and-coming entities looking to broaden their reach and create an inviting (and of course profitable) internet presence.

She also creates content for the marketing sector itself, including pieces featured in some of the industry's most well-respected publications. Her expertise includes knowledge of mobile marketing, SMS automation, relationship marketing, the workings and application of the Internet of Things and much, much more.

Hospitality

814 Projects Completed

Alana's impressive food and beverage background is amply outlined above, but it's her years working in the restaurant business that have led to her success as a hospitality industry consultant. She excels at menu design, refining dish descriptions, creating food and wine pairings, designing wine tastings, and event planning, and has written training manuals aimed at both new hires and continuing education, two things she believes are essential to any restaurant's success.

Food

718 Projects Completed

Alana's father met her mother when he hired her to work in his restaurant. Her parents' love for all things hospitality related was instilled in their children, and they all grew up working in restaurants, catering, and (eventually) tending bar. Alana took this passion one step further, enrolling in culinary school and becoming a sommelier pinned by the prestigious Court of Master Sommeliers. She regularly works in a restaurant as a sommelier and trainer, and teaches wine and food classes to both industry professionals and interested patrons.

Such a varied and extensive background has given Alana the expertise to tackle any food- or wine-themed piece with her signature combination of creativity, knowledge, and insight.

Travel

639 Projects Completed

Alana has spent her adult life discovering the world as an award-winning professional musician, sommelier, trained chef, and social media guru. She has traveled extensively, for both business and pleasure, and the only thing she loves more than seeing the world is being able to share her experiences with other people. Alana has written for the online version of a major travel book publisher and a well-known flight/hotel/car rental conglomerate, and also maintains a blog detailing her own exploits and adventures.

Medical

192 Projects Completed

While Alana is admittedly not a licensed medical professional, years spent studying biology and anatomy and a family full of nurses and doctors gradually instilled in her a passion for the field of medicine. She has written for several personal injury attorneys and for a major medical supplier site, creating pieces about everything from compartmental syndrome to spinal injuries, as well as articles about nutrition, researching and choosing a new doctor, and working with insurance companies. In this field, accuracy is paramount, so Alana does extensive research on each piece to ensure the information she includes is reliable.

Entertainment

135 Projects Completed

After several years working as a touring musician while based in NYC, Alana was hired by the NY-NY Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas, NV, to put together a show for a new in-house venue. A three-month contract turned into six successful years and a total of more than 1800 performances before Alana put down her fiddle to pursue her passion for writing.

Still, those years on stage and the decade she has spent living in what is arguably the entertainment capital of the world has given Alana a unique appreciation for the industry. She's always happy to offer up her unabashedly honest take on things like concerts, movies, live shows, nightclubs, entertainment news, and celebrity gossip, and several of her write ups have been featured in both local and national web-based publications, with a few of the funnier pieces making the rounds on social media.

Music

66 Projects Completed

Alana spent 15 years traveling the world as a professional musician and music teacher. Though she has essentially "retired," preferring to spend her time cooking, drinking wine, reading, and of course writing, she still does the occasional performance and master class when properly enticed. Her years of experience come in very handy when writing album reviews, how-tos on things like creating a band, learning guitar, or understanding music theory, and pretty much anything else music related.

Humor

0 Projects Completed

If you need proof that humor sells (or gets you Internet traffic, which essentially amounts to the same thing), all you have to do is check out your Facebook feed. Viral content is almost entirely humor based - with a generous dollop of cute babies and ornery cats - and there's a reason for that: people love to laugh and they love to make other people laugh, so they're more likely to share, save, and remember something that evokes their favorite belly-jiggling emotion.

If you want people to remember you need to either make them laugh or make them cry... and isn't it so much more fun to cause the happy kind of tears?

Product Description

3,235 Projects Completed

Alana has written thousands of product descriptions for companies that run the gamut from boutique startups to international retail giants. Her tone strikes the perfect balance between humorous and helpful, drawing in and engaging consumers while also highlighting products using feature/benefit structures. Like ThinkGeek? You'll love Alana.

Blog Post

1,728 Projects Completed

Alana maintains several blogs of her own (one pertaining to travel, one centered around food and wine) and is a frequent contributor to third-party sites, writing about everything from fashion to legal issues to education, with a few hundred pieces on construction, insurance, real estate, and wine thrown in for good measure.

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