Thanks to Erik's creative and non-fiction writing experiences, he likes to believe he specializes in:
-Copywriting
-Creativity
-Conversational Approach
-Pacing
-Structure
-Research
-To the point, no fluff
-Psychology
-Technical Writing
-Landing Pages
-Blog Content
How does this help him in the arena of non-fiction writing for web content? Well, he thinks it's made him really good at:
-Creative web content
-Maintaining a conversational tone with the reader
-Maintaining a consistent point-of-view in each piece
-Following client instructions
-Maintaining narrative focus on the client's desires
-Getting to the point while remaining interesting and entertaining
-Following SEO best practices
That being said, Erik also has experience with SEO platforms like Surfer SEO and knows how to incorporate keywords without stuffing them.
Erik could list everything he's interested in but believes the best thing is to invest himself into what the client is interested in.
Erik isn't trying to be a sycophant. Yes, he's interested in writing, of course, and loves movies and television. He's also passionate about history, mysteries, and true crime. But he's also been pleasantly surprised at how much he's enjoyed writing about things he never thought he'd write about.
This is Erik's long way saying he's interested in doing his best to make each client happy.
Once again, though, Erik isn't trying to be a sycophant.
Erik attended the University of Southern California on a full Navy Reserve Officer Training Corps scholarship. He majored in Psychology with an emphasis in Developmental Psychology. He graduated with a 3.17 GPA. The day of his graduation he also received his commission as an officer in the US Navy.
Erik is a former Naval Officer and defense contractor with over twenty years of combined experience in Navy training, analysis, leadership, management, and technical writing.
Erik is also an Iraq War veteran (2003) and service-connected disabled veteran.
As far as projects completed noted above, it's really hard to give an accurate number if you take into account the sheer amount of Navy white papers, instructions, manuals, messages, evaluations, and briefings Erik had to compose, revise, and edit over 20 years of support. In addition, the last five years in the industry, Erik was a Training Lead for a major Naval shipbuilder where he wrote and oversaw the curriculum for two major ship classes.
Erik has experience working with small-press, online, and major New York City publishing companies. He's found homes for numerous novels, novellas, and short stories at all of the above examples, as well as publishing his own work himself through markets like Amazon KDP.
Erik also has experience editing for publication (his own work and such works as collaborations), e-book formatting for platforms such as Kindle, Nook, and Kobo, and cover layouts and art formatting using tools like Canva.
Erik is an active fiction writer who has completed and published numerous novels, novellas, and short stories through a variety of professional markets. Two of his novels were published by a major New York publishing house.
Erik has also self-published e-books himself, including creating his own cover art, layouts, formatting, and conversions.
Erik has a great deal of experience writing about appliances, including troubleshooting and repair, to name only a couple of topics.
Eleven of those projects have been completed here at WA, but Erik has also been a contributor for other appliance-centric companies.
Erik comes from a military background, include 15 years working in new naval ship construction. The number of projects listed above are related to actual physical ships Erik was a part of the construction process on. Each ship entailed many individual projects too numerous to go into detail here.
In the last year, Erik has had the fortunate opportunity to complete 19 projects for WA clients related to residential and commercial construction. The majority of the articles focused on foundations, foundation repair, basement, and egress windows.
Erik has spent the last 5 years as both an Instructor and Training Lead for a major US Navy shipbuilder, training new Navy crews for 16 different ships across two ship classes. Each ship required 8 - 12 weeks of training, combining classroom and hands-on subjects matters.
Responsibilities included classroom instruction, hands-on training, curriculum development, presentations, and budgeting (labor hours and material costs).
At one point, Erik had eight full time instructors under his leadership.
Erik wrote a white paper/brief for how to mitigate impacts to training schedules in support of the Military Sealift Command's efforts to training new commissioning crew in a shipyard during height of COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.
Erik holds a BA in Psychology. In the Navy, Erik served a term managing medicinal inventories for a ship he served on. In addition, he has four children and has had to work with health insurers many times in the past in regards to benefits, deductibles, co-insurance, and out-of-pocket costs.
As a Navy veteran, Erik has service-connected disabilities. As a result, he understands the VA-disability process and is well-versed in requirements, documentation, and medical histories that go into such claims.
As far a writing projects, go, though, Erik doesn't have much experience outside of WA for such content creation.
However...
In the last year, Erik has had the opportunity to complete 37 articles or blog posts related to healthcare services for WA clients. Some of those projects include pieces related to chiropractic care. However, the vast majority of those articles dealt with substance abuse counseling and rehabilitation services.
With a degree in psychology and years of narrative writing, Erik is in a unique position to deliver information related to medical services in concrete yet sympathetic ways that allows the information to be open, honest and accessible for anyone looking for help.
Over the last year, Erik was able to complete 20 unique articles on outdoor cooking for a client here at WA. The articles focused on types of food to grill or smoke, grilling and smoking techniques, entertaining, and safety and weather considerations when cooking outdoors, to name a few. All articles averaged between 1000 and 1200 words.
It should also be noted Erik, himself, is an avid outdoor cooking enthusiast so put a lot of his own experience and humor into each piece, making for very entertaining and conversational pieces.
Erik doesn't have a lot of experience writing for the auto industry outside of WA. However, in the past year, Erik has completed eight articles for WA clients related to the auto industry. Seven of those articles focused on Tesla models, including recommendations, FAQs, and troubleshooting, to name a few.
Erik maintains an active blog for his own personal use but has also blogged numerous times in third-party blogs by invitation and/or as part of a promotion for his books. Overall, he's completed more than a hundred blog posts in some form or another.
Outside of WA, Erik hasn't done much in the way of creating landing page or web page content outside of his own personal blog (which he's happy to take credit for).
However, since starting at WA, he's provided quite a bit of web page and landing page content for a variety of clients.
Erik has written numerous briefs for Navy command-level personnel while in the Navy and as a defense contractor. However, the number is "too many to remember".
That being said, as an instructor and Training Lead for Navy new construction ships, he active write presentation in support of student classroom training for 16 independent ships, covering topics in the areas of main propulsion and deck systems.
Erik is very familiar with MS PowerPoint.
Erik is the author of nine books that have been published by a variety of publishers, including HarperCollins. He has also self-published several works as e-books, in which he did all of the formatting and cover design.
This doesn't take into account the numerous anthologies his short stories have been published in.
Although he's only been paid to do one e-book (presentation to e-book conversion and formatting), he has several years of experience converting his own writing to the e-book format for Kindle, Nook, and Kobo platforms.
Outside of WA, Erik hasn't done much in the way of creating landing page or web page content outside of his own personal blog (which he's happy to take credit for).
However, since starting at WA, he's provided quite a bit of web page and landing page content for a variety of clients.
During his time in the Navy and as a defense contractor, Erik participated in the writing, review, and revision of numerous white papers. However, 4 main papers he had a big hand in covered topics such as:
-Concerns for future Navy training and manning and potential courses of action to mitigate
-Impact of change in shipboard manning in regards to firefighting, damage control, maintenance, and watch standing
-Future Ship Construction Projects and impacts/changes necessary to existing infrastructure to support
-Impacts of COVID-19 on training and crew rotation for new construction projects
Erik has completed 3 major case studies, all of which were done while he was a contractor supporting the US Navy. Studies involved Navy training analysis for a specific ship platform and Navy manpower analysis for a specific ship platform.