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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
