Bright Ones: Linda Bustos Will Make You Smile

Linda Bustos loves guacamole, hummus, salsa, tahini, tzatziki and peanut butter. A lot. So much so, she doesn't think of them as spreads or hors d'oeuvres, rather meals unto themselves. It's this endearing quirkiness, along with her penchant for chasing pigeons, giving hilarious presentations and getting really excited about ringtones which causes many people to become intoxicated with her amazing awesomeness.

Linda is an SEO and ecommerce guru who writes for elasticpath's getelastic blog on which articles such as Improving Search Results for Research-Online-Purchase-Offline Customers, Why eCommerce is a Lot Like iCanHasCheezburger, How to Find an Online Reputation Manager and Yes Virginia There Is a Santa Claus; He Searches for Free Shipping can be found.

Recently, Linda won Marketing Pilgrim's 2008 Search Engine Marketing Scholarship for an article she wrote entitled, 8 Stupid Things Webmasters Do To Mess Up Their Analytics.

Since Linda began writing getelastic in October 2007, she's grown the blog to one of the most widely read in the space resulting in its being named one of 15 entrepreneur blogs worth reading by the Wall Street Journal.

Before landing the getelastic writing gig, and all the travel-to-conferences glamor that comes with it, Linda was Marketing Director for Vancouver-based Image X Media, an SEO, SEM, web design firm which has done work for CreativePro, FreshBrain and Arizona State University.

In 2000, Linda suffered a kickboxing injury which injured her calf muscles and landed her in a wheelchair. As one can imagine that fate isn't an easy one to take but after spending five minutes with Linda, you very quickly realize the ability to walk is not the only thing that matters in life. Obviously Linda, as anyone in her condition would, wants to walk again and she's working diligently towards that goal but she hasn't let it over shadow her life or stop her from living a rewarding one.

I first met Linda at Blogword in Las Vegas in September 2008. I can't remember the exact moment I met her (hey, it was Vegas) but I distinctly remember sitting with her at a bar in the Mirage after the TechSet party at the hotel's Bare and just talking about life, relationships and this thing they call the internet. We even made our way into Jet, Vegas' answer to a New York City nightclub.

The next two days were filled with the aforementioned pigeon chasing and the "guacamole event" along with cosmetics shopping (at Sephora), dinner (I think she ordered a Caesar salad...without the Caesar dressing. I could be wrong, though. It gets "foggy" in Vegas sometimes), chocolate scavenging (from exhibitor's booths), more clubbing (I hate that word. It sounds so pretentiously...hipsteresque) at Planet Hollywood's Prive with a group of people including elastic path's Jason Billingsley and his wife, ring tone obsessing (hey, she likes them) and funny voices .

Linda is one of those really bright, fun, intelligent, positive-thinking people who will make you smile as soon as you meet her. So if you see her at some conference, stop and say hello. She'll brighten your day.

Second in a series profiling really cool people doing really great things in the online, interactive and digital space.