SEO Copywriting and Creative Work with Dorit Sasson

In 2016, Dorit published the award-winning memoir, Accidental Soldier about her time in service with the Israeli Defense Forces.

Here, Dorit talks about how she balances doing something with clear commercial intent with doing something creative, like writing memoirs about her time in active service.

If you find time to do both every day, then you will advance your career, you’ll get paid, and you’ll also improve at your craft. Who doesn’t want those things?

I kicked off the interview by asking Dorit to describe how her time in active service informed her memoir, Accidental Soldier.

In this episode, we discuss:

• Why Dorit had to do compulsory service in the  Israeli Defense Force
• How long it took her to write her book
• How to promote a memoir that’s so specific to personal experiences
• Establish who you are writing for
• What is SEO writing?
• Balancing creativity with SEO copywriting
• Writing for a consumer audience.
• How to balance working as a copywriter with writing a personal memoir

Resources:

• Dorit Sasson
• Accidental Soldier

Transcript

Dorit: You need to have an understanding of how to write for a consumer audience is basically what it comes down to and today’s consumer audience is just incredibly impatient, doesn’t have any time to waste, and, because of the pandemic, it’s even more exacerbated, this impatientness and this immediate gratification and “I want it now,” so if you’re not on target with what they’re searching for and what their pain points are, they’re gonna be hopping off.

Introduction: Welcome to the Become a Writer Today Podcast with Bryan Collins. Here, you’ll find practical advice and interviews for all kinds of writers.

Bryan: How can you find time to work in your craft and also to work so you can pay the bills at the end of the month every day? 

Hi, there. My name is Bryan Collins and welcome to the Become a Writer Today Podcast. For many years, I worked as an SEO copywriter for a British software company. In case you’re wondering what does an SEO copywriter do, well, it was my job to write the copy that appeared on the company’s sales pages for products and services, to write copy that appeared at the top of the web pages, and so on. 

It was a great job to have because I got to learn all about SEO copywriting and I learned many useful skills that I was able to use on Become a Writer Today. I also spent a lot of time looking at spreadsheets for keyword search volume for particular terms and we even had to write in Excel to deliver copy to the people who were building the web pages. 

So, as you can imagine, it’s quite difficult and painful to write copy of any sort in a spreadsheet. I still wanted to spend time working on creative projects like learning how to write haiku or how to write memoir or even how to write business self-help so I set aside an hour or two in the morning before work to work on creative projects or in the evening. 

That’s probably the same approach that many new writers take is to work on something that’s close to you in the morning and then go about doing something that will help you pay the bills during the day. Even if you’re a full-time writer, you still have to work on the business of writing. In fact, a couple of years ago, I took an online class from David Mamet. He’s a screenwriter from the US and I took his course on Masterclass, it’s worth checking out, but he had a rule for writers on the course. 

He said every writer should work a little bit on their craft every day and a little bit on their business every day because if you do that, you will improve on what you’re doing and you’ll also be doing something that would help you get paid because, at the end of the day, you do need to get paid. So, if you only have a couple of hours to work on your craft each day, I would say that that’s okay. That’s a note for you to improve. 

On the other hand, if you’re spending all day writing but you’re not doing something that would help you grow your creative business in some way, like, you know, setting up an e-mail list or building your art or website, then maybe set aside a little bit of time for that too. It’s a balancing act and it’s probably one that I still struggle to get right even though I’m working on Become a Writer Today full time these days.

Now, I recently caught up with Dorit Sasson. She’s an author, she’s an SEO copywriter, and she’s also an SEO consultant. Back in 2016, she published the award-winning memoir, Accidental Soldier, about her time in service with the Israeli Defense Forces, and these days, she works as an SEO copywriter for clients in B2B and B2C. So, I was fascinated to catch up with Dorit to hear how she balances, you know, doing something that has a clear commercial intent, like SEO copywriting, and also doing something that’s completely creative, like writing a memoir about her time in active service.

My takeaway from this interview kind of echoed what I learned from that course with David Mamet. If you find time to do both every day, then you will be able to advance your career, you’ll be able to get paid, and you’ll also be able to improve at your craft. Who doesn’t want those things? I started this interview by asking Dorit to describe how her time in active service informed her memoir, Accidental Soldier.

But before we get over to this week’s interview, if you enjoy the show, you can become a Patreon member. Just a couple of dollars a month, I’ll give you discounts on my writing software, books, and courses. Or, if you like the show, you can simply leave a short review or hit the Share button on iTunes, Overcast, Stitcher, or wherever you’re listening.

Now, with that said, let’s go over to this week’s interview with Dorit.

Bryan: So you have a pretty interesting backstory and it informs your first memoir. Would you be able to give listeners some context for who you are and how it’s informed your writing?

Dorit: Sure. I started out basically trying to tell a story because I couldn’t understand it for myself when I lived in Israel. In Israel, people of all ages from — not from all ages, men, and women do their compulsory service in the army and when I came as an immigrant, as an American immigrant, serving with all these different foreigners, I didn’t really know what I was in for. It was such a huge learning curve.

There were so many things to learn in a very short period of time and I was so young that I needed time to really understand what I went through. So I think that’s primarily the main focus and the main reason why it took me so long to write a memoir, (a), and, (b), to understand what and how and why it all happened and that was the context for the first memoir, Accidental Soldier. 

I just needed space. I needed geographical space. I needed to leave Israel. I didn’t leave to write the memoir, that’s a whole different story, but I left, and then, as a result of leaving, I had all this space. Israel is a very tight-knit country, it’s a very intense country, and you’re in things as they are happening. 

It’s very hard to just all of a sudden pretend like you’re on vacation and that you’re like on an island. It doesn’t work that way. So I had all of a sudden all this space, all this mental space. I mean, literally, I didn’t see a lot of people on my street. In Israel, you’re seeing people all the time and it’s a very social country and there’s a lot of energy there, a lot of social energy. And in America, where the geographical distances are so big and so wide and you’re so separated you literally don’t know your neighbor, I finally had that space to tell that kind of experience.

Bryan: Yeah, that’s interesting you describe space. I was in Israel, I guess it’s five or six years now. Spent some time in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, and Ireland as well as quite a small country. I can imagine it’s quite a transition to the United States.

Dorit: Oh, yeah. I met a few Irish people in Israel but they did not serve with me in the army but I’d be curious to know if they did.

Bryan: Yeah, yeah. And so when your book came out around 2016, did you spend long writing it?

Dorit: I didn’t really. I had it all in my head and I already experienced it so it was already in my DNA and in my cells. It took me about two years to really write it from start to finish, I had the timeline of the service that served as a springboard to kind of go into it. That’s the framework of the story so it actually worked out well for me.

Bryan: Dorit, did you keep many notes while you were in active service?

Dorit: That’s a great, great question. I have one or two really sparse little notebooks that the army gave us when we were studying in ulpan, which is Hebrew language course, that the army does for their new immigrants so that they know what they’re doing and they know how to communicate and learning the language. I
 
did not. I really didn’t. I relied on memory. I relied on photos. I relied on the soundtracks. I actually listened to YouTube videos of popular army lingos, army songs, and that helped reinvigorate the memory. I looked at a few journals and that was all I really, really had. So — and the army back then was very different. T

hey didn’t have Facebook, there was no Twitter, there was no social media. I didn’t have anybody I could really ask. All the people that I was serving with, we were all either scattered in different countries or disappeared and you couldn’t find them or even two had actually died and so there wasn’t anybody I could really ask, you know, “What did you experience or how did you make of that issue and how did you go through that?” And I really was alone in this endeavor and only later did I reconnect with people. They found out that I had written a memoir and it was quite interesting.

Bryan: So, Dorit, you said there was no Facebook or Twitter. You served in the early 90s, is that correct?

Dorit: That’s right.

Bryan: Okay. Okay. So one thing that I was interested in is when I read memoirs from people who’ve been in active service, they have another round of reviews to go through. Did you have to send your book to anybody that you served with to check it for anything sensitive?

Dorit: That’s interesting. I did not. I actually did not because it was so outdated from a memory perspective. It’s interesting because memoir is so particular with places and times and dates and things like that. But, you know, the people that I had served with or the officers and their names, I had lost complete contact with them. I have no idea where they are today. I didn’t even know where to find them. I didn’t even know how to track them down. It was completely like my own endeavor for myself and I just took my chance with it.

Bryan: So your book was actually nominated for an award and it’s got over 80 five-star reviews on Amazon. So, how did you go about promoting a memoir that’s so specific to your personal experiences?

Dorit: Right. I think the biggest question I had to ask is who am I really writing for and why. I had to ask myself this over and over again, especially at the very beginning when, you know, I’m asking myself this as a foreigner back in the United States, “Who the heck is gonna wanna read this?” Because in Israel, nobody cares about IDF memoirs, but, in America, I had a market but I didn’t know who that market was. So I really needed to know who my market was. Once I knew who I was writing for, I could really write with that reader in mind.

Bryan: Could you give listeners an idea of who that reader is?

Dorit: Yeah, I had some — I wrote a list. When I was shopping for an agent in New York City, that was one of the big things I had to do for writing a proposal, I had to come up with a list of different audiences, which is what I did. I kept those in mind but I encountered new readers along the way that I didn’t even know would be interested in it, and, for example, I thought that my target audience primarily would be women and it turned out that men were a big group of that, a big segment of that group as well. 

So, I networked. Once I knew who I was writing for, it was easier to finish the book but once the book was being marketed and, by that point, once I was promoting it, I spent time really kind of with my network. Like I didn’t run down too many strangers because the book was so personal to me, I was afraid that if I ran too many strangers down, I’d feel so alienated from the process that I — I was afraid that nobody would see the value in such a book so I went with the people that knew Israel, that had visited Israel, that had some connection or affiliation to Israel, people in my community, which is a very Jewish community, Israelis that I knew, although they were not the primary audience, it was more the American diaspora, the Jewish diaspora, and the synagogue community and those were really the ways that I guess you could say helped my ego soften so that I could do the work that I needed to do to get the book out there.

Bryan: So you returned to the United States in 2007 and right now you earn a living through your work as an SEO copywriter. Would you be able to give listeners a flavor for what that involves?

Dorit: Yeah, it’s quite evolving. It’s time-consuming work. SEO is writing for the search engines in a way that convinces Google that a website should be ranked highly for certain search terms. And the work that I do is finding those search terms and it’s sitting in front of Excel spreadsheets and moving from cell to cell and finding those juicy, yummy key phrases that target audiences are looking for, specifically for a brand, for a product, for a name, for industry, anything, and it solves a pain point. So those are the typical ways — that’s kind of what I do in a nutshell. I just find those keywords and then I inject copy with those targeted key phrases.

Bryan: What’s your keyword research tool of choice?

Dorit: I use SEM Rush but I’ve also started out with Conductor and I have also some familiarity with Ahrefs. I stick to SEM Rush because I just feel like I’ve gotten very comfortable using it so it’s pretty much where I get my stuff.

Bryan: What type of clients do you work with?

Dorit: I have a variety of different clients, all different industries, all different niches, B2B and B2C, just many different kinds. Companies, big, small companies, entrepreneurs, individual brands, just different kinds.

Bryan: So I spend a lot of time thinking about SEO and reading about SEO and —

Dorit: Yeah.

Bryan: — it felt like a few years ago, there was an opportunity to put a lot of creativity into blogging, whereas these days, Google is quite prescriptive about what it expects in —

Dorit: Yeah.

Bryan: — blog posts, unless you’re writing for something like Medium. Do you find it’s a struggle to balance creativity with SEO copywriting?

Dorit: It is. It’s an ongoing struggle. What helps me get through the work is that I always think, you know, I am a cheerleader in the way that I would like my audience to cheerlead me for my book and so I turn into an advocate. I just help myself see the work that I’m doing as I’m their advocate. I am rooting for them, even if they don’t even know I exist, you know? 
Because sometimes I’m working as a contractor so it, you know, it’s a third party work agreement and I don’t even really know who this SEO person is so I just kind of use the appellation that I am an advocate, that I am cheerleading this brand on, and I — that kind of motivates me to succeed. It doesn’t really solve the problem of creativity, it just helps me think more creatively out of the box, you know? “What if I…?” or “How can I…?”, using, you know, the target audience pain points and that energy of being a cheerleader, those two things really soften the hard work of SEO because it’s just hard which is why so many people outsource it because they just can’t be bothered with finding keywords. It’s not interesting to them. It’s not sexy enough. 

Doesn’t, you know, make them happy — sing and dance, you know? It’s not like something they enjoy doing. So, I enjoy doing it because I find that I almost turn into a data digger and I’m like a detective and I’m like, “Yeah, I’m gonna find these keywords that nobody else is gonna find,” and it makes me so excited and I get a little obsessed by it because I know that there are so many opportunities. 

It’s almost like I’m panning for gold, like in 1819 — like the 1849 miners that came to California for gold and I’m like, “I’m looking for that SEO gold and I can almost see it in the river and it’s almost floating. If I can just dig a little deeper and I’ll get there,” that’s kind of my personality. I’ve always been like that and I think people just don’t have the patience for it.

Bryan: Yeah. I guess if you find a keyword that has, you know, good commercial intent and —

Dorit: Yes.

Bryan: — no competition, it kind of is like a bit like finding gold.

Dorit: It’s like finding gold and you’re like, “Yeah, I did it and it’s my work,” you know? It’s like nobody has found it, then I’m gonna make sure that you know, this is a good word, and that kind of keeps me going because I can see a result in the end. It’s not like I’m searching for gold and there is no gold, right? And it’s an illusion and I’m like, “Well, what am I doing here?”

Bryan: So I’ve worked with a good few SEO people over the years and not all SEO experts or professionals are writers.

Dorit: Right.

Bryan: In fact, some of the SEO people I’ve worked with, you know, it’s quite a technical discipline, they spend time looking at spreadsheets, doing data analysis, and everything that I suppose a writer would not like to do. Do you believe that SEO copywriting is a discipline within SEO? And if so, what skills does a good SEO copywriter need?

Dorit: Yeah. I mean, you need to have an understanding of how to write for a consumer audience is basically what it comes down to and today’s consumer audience is just incredibly impatient, doesn’t have any time to waste, and, because of the pandemic, it’s, even more, exacerbated, this impatientness and this immediate gratification and “I want it now,” so if you’re not on target with what they’re searching for and what their pain points are, they’re gonna be hopping off and so you really have to get to their psychology. I really think you’re writing for an audience psychology, you know? 

What makes them tick and why and what’s their pain point and so that’s why I think good copywriters know this. They know that they have to get to the pain points really fast, in the first like few seconds that a person’s reading the first few lines of any copy, like a sales page or any other kind of service page and they need to get to that psychology right away. And I think the biggest tricks is understanding your target audience, making sure that you know what is their pain point and, a lot of times, people just don’t take the time to understand the target audience and it’s almost like, “Well, give me the keywords and write the copy,” and I’m like, “Well, you know, here’s the process. I need this — I need to understand your audience,” and that slows things down and, today, people have to see that there’s value in connections because if you’re not making that connection at that engagement, that’s really what it’s at. 

It’s not about finding the right keywords, it’s really about finding the right way to engage. And so that’s what copywriting I think really is. It’s evolving based on psychology, human needs.

Bryan: It’s kind of like with your memoir, you needed to understand who the reader of your memoir was going to be and it’s the same way —

Dorit: Right.

Bryan: — with the sales copy.

Dorit: Only I know doing the — only I don’t enjoy doing SEO for my memoir but I have no choice because nobody else will understand it like me.

Bryan: So when you were transitioning from writing, well, I know you still write a memoir but when you were learning to become an SEO copywriter, did you take any copywriting courses?

Dorit: I did and I will definitely vouch for one in particular that I got certified in from the SEO Content Institute run by Heather Lloyd-Martin who has been around for a very long time and knows her stuff. I needed that certification so that I could sell myself something — as far as certify that made me feel good because I was learning this new stuff but also I felt like I needed to understand the SEO and the copywriting together and I don’t think there’s that many types of courses that have that unique ability to kind of bridge those two gaps together.

Bryan: There isn’t. There isn’t. I’ve taken some copywriting courses and —

Dorit: Yeah, they’re not.

Bryan: — not many of them cover SEO. They more cover long-form sales letters and so on which doesn’t really relate to SEO. So, did you find learning SEO copywriting changed how you approached memoir on your subsequent books?

Dorit: You know, that’s a really very interesting question and I kind of like brushed it aside and I’m like, but, you know, you’re writing for print. Print is so different than writing for online. But where it does come into play is when you’re actually marketing your own book and that takes a little bit more effort and I know — I could never change the way I write for a print audience but if I wanna market the book on my blog and start doing that kind of work, I need to change the way I see my own content. 

And that is a struggle. I think it’s for every writer, even if they aren’t certified or are certified in any kind of digital marketing or SEO. It’s just very challenging because if you’re a creative and you like, you know, the written word and you thrive on it and that you enjoy expressing yourself, then sometimes you have to be able to say to yourself, “Well, you know what, I’m not gonna worry about SEO. I’m gonna write for the ideas and for what I care about deeply and what my soul needs,” and sometimes the SEO part stifles it. It really does. Believe me, I’ve been there, done that, and I hate it. I’ve come to resent my own copy because I’m trying to sound like I’m doing work for a client and it’s my own life and I’m trying to, you know, make it SEO friendly and it doesn’t work when you’re —

Bryan: Yeah.

Dorit: — trying to write something that’s personal that has the SEO flavor to it. It’s just not a good combination. 

Bryan: Yeah. Yeah, it’s hard to — it’s definitely hard to do both. So your new memoir, Sand and Steel, is out later this year. How did you balance writing your new memoir which, being an SEO copywriter, like what did a typical working day for you look like?

Dorit: Yeah, this kind of work — this memoir was very special in that it really is encapsulating the life that I’m living now and when you’re writing about a period that you’re still living ongoing-ly, it almost becomes like a motivator because you are still present in it, as opposed to trying to remember what it felt like, not that writing something that happened five years ago is any less significant, it just makes it a little bit more relatable in the present moment, at least for me. 

I think the easier way to answer this is that I would wake up really early in the morning before, you know, any SEO stuff would start to get in the way and I just had to literally separate myself from client work to my own personal writing and I can’t do it any other way. Like that, for me, is a process because my day has structure to it but the first few hours of the morning before my house starts to wake up and things start to get a little chaotic, I have those few hours to do the writing and I think that’s where I got most of the writing in. 

That’s not to say that I didn’t manage to finish writing it during the day but the real writing pieces came out, (a), in those early morning hours, and, (b), with the help of a writing coach who’s also a fantastic editor. Having her edits really pushed me along. I think that, without her help, I would probably be still scrambling along and I think it’s crucial when a writer is trying to write a memoir and it’s not really — and sees the need for help early on, not to ignore that call.

Bryan: Yeah, I agree with that. So, we talked about tools there earlier. For this particular memoir, what tool did you use to write it?

Dorit: You mean like a regular software tool or just —

Bryan: Yeah, did you use Word or Scrivener or something?

Dorit: It’s just plain Word. I’m so happy that I didn’t have to write a memoir in Excel. That would be a real —

Bryan: Yeah. That would be difficult. Yeah. When I was working as an SEO copywriter, oddly enough, we spent a lot of time writing copy for webpages in Excel spreadsheets —

Dorit: That’s interesting.

Bryan: Yeah, it’s painful.

Dorit: That is painful.

Bryan: Yeah. Did it take you long to write this memoir? Because you mentioned your first one took about two years.

Dorit: It didn’t take long — once I know what I’m writing about, I pretty much go forward, I don’t like dilly dally, but what held me back was the editing pieces and the copyedits and that kind of thing but the actual writing was fun. I think writing anything is fun. Marketing it is a whole different story. And so I really enjoyed that writing process. It took me about two, two and a half years from start to finish, more or less, with a few breaks.

Bryan: And have you started marketing the book yet or are you waiting until it comes out?

Dorit: No. I’ve marketed — I’ve been marketing it for a while now. I’ve been doing a lot of different things with the marketing of it and so when it comes out, hopefully, next month, I’m still waiting to hear back from the printer about it, it will be still an ongoing marketing piece. So, need to work on that.

Bryan: Any particular marketing strategies that you’re feeling optimistic or confident about?

Dorit: Yeah. This is a great question. I will say that, with the first book, Accidental Soldier, what I ended up doing, it’s just an actually a brilliant idea, is to clean your inbox.

Bryan: Yeah.

Dorit: I had all these leads, all these groups, all these connections that I had connected with and I’m like, “Whoa, let me get my inbox down from, let’s say, 40K to about 3K and maybe, along the way, I’ll find more opportunities.” So that was a really good first step, because I found all these newer — these like, “Oh, wow, why didn’t I think about that?” The other thing that I did was I crowdfunded the second book as well and that helped rejuvenate or reconnect — this is the word I’m looking for, reconnect with the people who have bought into Accidental Soldier and, by crowdfunding, I mean, they purchased, they pre-ordered copies so that when I did get a publisher, that they would be the first to get their orders filled and I think that that kind of hurrah, that cheerleading squad, was really a good marketing play and now they’re like, “Well —” even with the pandemic because that’s like, you know, COVID is beyond —

Bryan: Delayed everything, unfortunately.

Dorit: It delayed, and then the third thing I would say is that really trust the local market. I think now, with the pandemic, we are living so small and we’re not traveling out anywhere or we’re really hesitant, we don’t want to take the chance, and we’re still living it locally and I think that is a great opportunity to tie into your local market and kind of keep running down the local media, the local press, the local connections, because, ultimately, Sand and Steel is really a Pittsburgh-based book, which is where I live, Pittsburgh, PA, and the cover even screams Pittsburgh and anybody who lives in Pittsburgh knows that it’s the city of steel will not ignore that this has Pittsburgh vitality and they’d be really, you know, like, wow. 

When they see the cover, they’re like, wow, and so it makes me — it confirms the marketing direction that anybody who’s writing a book that has local, valuable connections and they’re even mentioned in the book, like, for example, I write about the Carnegie Library, how I found myself there, and I actually reached out to our library and, sadly, they said, “We’re not doing any author visits but I’ll put you in touch with these book clubs who are being hosted by libraries,” and that’s how we got that rolling in that direction. So if you’re writing about a local place, you should just like keep that local radar going because people today are not really traveling. They’re staying local, they’re buying local, they’re thinking local and they just don’t — they don’t think, you know, “Hey, let me run down another state.” Just our worlds have gotten so small that it makes sense to do it that way and get a return on your investment.

Bryan: Yeah, thanks to the pandemic. You mentioned you crowdfunded the book. Is that something you did with your e-mail list or through some other tool?

Dorit: I went through a group, a publishing site called Publishizer, I hope I’m pronouncing that correctly, and they help you — it’s unique in the sense that they don’t just fund the book or get you people to fund it for you or to sponsor you or things like that, that you have to obviously do, but they help with finding a publisher so once you reach a certain level of supporters, then publishers start expressing interest and that’s how I found the hybrid publisher that I went with now and I don’t think — I think it’s a lot of work, it takes a lot of work to get it up and running, a whole crowdfunding campaign, but it was definitely, you know, like it’s similar to a Kickstarter, only Kickstarter doesn’t really help with getting you a publisher and I kind of wanted to see how publishers would respond and what kind of interest they would express once they saw this kind of book that spoke about this story.

Bryan: So you strike me as somebody who’s quite busy. For the next few months, you’ll be, you know, promoting your book and I’m sure you’ll be working on your SEO copywriting business too. Will you also still be writing or do you put that on the back burner for now? 

Dorit: Yeah. This is what I’ve been doing. I actually signed up to write for a fiction workshop so I’m doing that with an Israeli instructor who’s in Israel and I decided that I am so exhausted about writing about myself that I need to start using my imagination more frequently so that’s what I’ve been doing now is writing, just taking all the experiences and everything that I’ve gone through and turning them into characters from scratch.

Bryan: Okay, that’s interesting. So, Dorit, where can people read your work or find out more information about your SEO copywriting services?

Dorit: Sure. Everything is housed under my name, Dorit Sasson, doritsasson.com. There’s a tab there for services. On the homepage, there is a whole space dedicated to the first and second memoirs and there’s links that people can learn more about it. Once the book is officially released, there’ll be Amazon links. Right now, there’s just a pre-order to the publisher’s website where Sand and Steel can be pre-ordered.

Bryan: Very nice to talk to you today.

Dorit: Yeah, thanks.

Bryan: I hope you enjoyed this week’s episode. If you did, please consider leaving a short review on the iTunes Store or sharing the show on Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you’re listening. More reviews, more ratings, and more shares will help more people find the Become a Writer Today Podcast. And did you know, for just a couple of dollars a month, you could become a Patreon for the show? Visit patreon.com/becomeawritertoday or look for the Support button in the show notes. Your support will help me record, produce, and publish more episodes each month. And if you become a Patreon, I’ll give you my writing books and discounts on writing software and on my writing courses.