TV writer who eats danger for breakfast
Okay, let me level with you in a way nobody in your life is doing right now:
Your short bio/about me blurb? Y’know, that one paragraph or more you use to describe yourself on social media, dating profiles, websites, LinkedIn, whatever? It sucks.
But you don’t suck. You just suck at writing about yourself.
It’s okay, I’m here to help you.
[Read more…]
I was about twelve years old when my techie computer programming parents turned to me and said, “Amy, we just got you your domain name. It’s time to start blogging so you can rank on Google someday.”
Boy was I lucky to be raised by total nerds.
Anyways, since then I’ve spent the past decade or so blogging on ye olde blog here at AmySuto.com, spinning tales of what I’m up to and sharing the knowledge I’ve learned along the way.
And now, it’s time for me to share all of my secrets when it comes to the magical witchcraft of ~search engine optimization~ aka SEO for blog posts and articles. But before we even dive into that, let’s start with why the hell even bother with blogs anyways.
As it turns out, you don’t have to be a sultry narrator of a Sex In the City-esque show to get benefits out of blogging.
Here’s a huge secret: your blog is the best free marketing tool ever. If your website has a blog, people will probably find one of your articles on Google while searching for something they’re looking for. Without having to pay a dime — bam! You’ve got traffic (the good kind, not the LA kind!)
If you’re a realtor or therapist or any kind of service provider, a blog helps to share your expertise with potential clients. When we’re making decisions about who to work with, we want to get a sense of who someone is and what they’re best at, and blogs are a great way to capture your unique personality while sharing your superpowers.
If you run a Shopify store or sell products, a blog is a fantastic way to announce new product releases, share behind-the-scenes content from your warehouse, and your company’s story. Now more than ever, we care about how our stuff is being made: story matters when it comes to sales. And every blog post you write is just another entrypoint that a new customer can find you on Google.
For me, this blog has been a huge source of incoming traffic. I’ve gotten leads for my own freelance writing and also I’ve met some really awesome folks who have found my work on here. Sometimes when you shout into the void… it shouts back? In a really friendly way?
But in order for people to find your blog on 100 vegan nutritional yeast recipes, you’ve got to make sure it’s properly optimized so that Google and other search engines can direct traffic your way.
When I wrote my article on how I ghostwrite memoirs, I made sure to include the keywords I was targeting was in every part of my article, from my article title, subheadings, and topic sentences. I even included my keywords in photo descriptions and the article’s metadata. If you’re blogging on WordPress like I am, I would recommend checking out plugins like Yoast that help automatically check and see if you’re hitting all the marks for the keywords you’re targeting in your article.
All that SEO legwork really pays off: from that one article alone, I’ve booked several jobs from people who found me on Google who were interested in hiring a memoir ghostwriter, which was one of the reasons why I wrote that blog post. See? SEO witchcraft does work!
But how does one go about targeting an audience?
[Read more…]
“I can’t walk,” I struggled to say, lying on an exam room table at USC’s health center six years ago as two doctors stood over me. My hip felt like someone had poured gasoline on it and laughed as they lit the match.
“There’s nothing wrong with you,” the doctor said after he completed with the exam. “Try a heating pad and some pain pills.”
The medical staff called a car to take me back to my dorm, and I hobbled to the elevator, trying not to cry as I struggled to get back to my bed. Something was wrong with me — this kind of pain wasn’t normal. I didn’t need a medical degree to know that.
But I wouldn’t find out the cause until this past January. In the past 6-7 years, I’ve had joint pain that blasts out of nowhere, lighting different joints on fire one day to the point where I couldn’t move — or do anything other than pray that the heaviest pain pill dose I could concoct would actually work — and then it would just disappear the next.
For the past two years, it started to get a lot harder to type or bear any weight on my wrists. This coincided with getting my 200 hour Yoga Teacher Training. In my yoga training, I almost completely lost my ability to do planks and other basic moves that were integral to the core yoga sequences. I had to get super crafty, and with the support of my teachers and fellow classmates, I redesigned entire sequences to be done on forearms instead (helloooo the challenge that is forearm crow!) so that I could teach yoga classes in the community. On my worst days, I struggled with the pain I was experiencing in a practice that was meant to be calming and restorative.
Then, 2020 came around, and things got a lot worse. Not only was I experiencing pain, but my joints started to swell as the fluid in my fingers and then my toes broke down and became something I couldn’t ignore.
In January of 2021, I got to the doctor’s office and after a set of blood tests, my official diagnosis came in: I had the autoimmune disease known as rheumatoid arthritis.
[Read more…]
If you’ve ever seen a video of the art prodigy ZhaoXiaoli, a Beijing-based painter who turns trash into her canvas and tools, it’s pretty clear there’s an incredible amount of creativity not only in her work, but in how she presents it:
If you scroll through a profile of hers on social media, you’ll get a strange aesthetic of a rebel who wears a beret while dipping roses into paint and splattering it across a canvas– and turning it into something brilliant. I’m pretty sure they don’t teach you that in art school.
Back when I used to host open mic nights in Los Angeles pre-pandemic, there was an energy about the musicians and storytellers who took the stage and moved the audience. While their performances came across as effortless, fellow creatives know how many hundreds of hours of practice and experimentation goes into achieving a high level of talent and quality of creative output.
When you come across a once-in-a-lifetime creative, you feel it. The way that person talks and shapes their life around their art is not of desperation of fame or of winning, it stems from the pure passion of making something incredible that comes from within.
[Read more…]
Since COVID started, I’ve gotten an incredible amount of inquiries for my services as a memoir ghostwriter. I think that’s because, in part, we’ve all been faced with our own mortality in the face of a massive crisis. When we die, what gets left behind? Who will tell our stories? That’s where hiring a ghostwriter for your memoir comes in.
Bleak, pandemic-related realities aside, I think the art of memoir writing is quite beautiful. But it can also be tough to tackle the challenge on your own if you’re not a seasoned writer.
A memoir should be a way for you to leave a legacy, set the record straight, and also give your family a kind of heirloom that will allow future generations to get to know you and how cool you were. (My memoir is just going to be just printouts of my Spotify playlists so my ancestors can see how great and so very obscure my music taste was.)
Enter: a ghost. (And not the scary kind!)
Whenever you’re hiring a freelance writer for something, there’s a few different things that come into play when it comes to cost:
[Read more…]
