All Posts in Category: Business Skills
The Simple Core of Most of Your Travel Writing Problems
Travel writing is a tricky profession.
I mean that very literally.
It’s not that it’s difficult to succeed at (contrary to popular belief–it’s dead simple to make a good living at if you follow the right steps). The problem is that it’s very easy to be tricked about the profession part of the equation.
In addition to working through our annual review series with all of our readers, I’m currently working with a new batch of coaching program members, and the beginning of that process inevitably begins the same way: intensely dissecting how they spend their “work” time.
Want to Make 2018 Your Best Year of Freelance Travel Writing Yet?
I’ve been so delighted to hear by email and in the chat rooms of our webinars from many of you how our annual review webinars are making you see where and how you can improve your business in the year ahead.
If you haven’t yet joined the series, here’s what we’ve covered so far:
- What is Standing Between You and Your Travel Writing Goals: As the beginning of our series on working through a comprehensive inventory of your business, where it’s going wrong, and a clear tactical plan that fits with your life to move you through the next year, we devoted a full hour to discussing the most common issues that keep travel writers spinning their weeks and how we will chart a course through them in the coming weeks.
- How to Clearly Catalogue the Work and Opportunities You Have Now to See When Your Need to Go: We dove head first into an honest look at exactly what each of you has in your income, relationship, and opportunity inventory as we continue our series on annual reviews as a travel writer. We not only walked through exactly what data on your business to collect for your review, but also how to draw conclusions from it as to what you need to do differently or more of in the year ahead. *BONUS* This work will also give you a huge leg up on your taxes, in addition to positioning you to be just the helper your favorite editors need this time of year.
Please, Please Don’t Send Emails Like This to Companies You Want to Blog For
Yes, this is THE time to pitch companies in the travel industry to help with their marketing in advance of the summer high season.
And, yes, cold pitching absolutely does work, when done right.
But not like this:
What Does Your Personal Mountain in the Path of Your Travel Writing Dreams Look Like?
If you’ve attended any of our events or webinars, you know that I don’t sugar coat things.
When people first start asking me to coaching them so they could achieve the same level of success with their travel writing income and choice of clients as I had, I embarked on a journey of inquiry that lasted for years and led to the 400 pages of The Six-Figure Travel Writing Map.
Aside from learning tips and tricks for excelling both as a freelancer and as a trace writer from the best of each world, one of the main things I did was have a lot of conversations with folks just like you.
Announcing an Exciting New Feature: FREE Daily Webinars as Dream of Travel Writing Turns 1!
Here at Dream of Travel Writing, we do so much that it’s easy to forget that we’ve only been doing it for a year!
Last November, we:
- officially launched the Travel Magazine Database
- ran our first webinar
- sent our first weekly job lists
- hosted our first writers at our retreat center in the Catskills (which is now open for $150/week individual residencies!)
- ran our first “on location” workshop in London on breaking into magazines for bloggers
This November, we’re taking a moment to celebrate not just what we’ve done, but the amazing writers (and especially formerly non-travel writers who now are travel writers!) we have had the pleasure to work with this year.
It like an early Thanksgiving!
In honor of our first anniversary, we’re launching an exciting new feature: You can now stream all of our past webinars–one each day–for free.
These webinars are only available at the times listed, live, but you can catch the replay in video, audio, and transcript form, along with the webinar slides, at any time in our on-demand webinar library.
Are Freelancers Travel Writers Beginning to Lose Ground to Full-time Staff?
There’s a very interesting job listing making the rounds right now that some of you may have seen.
It clearly appears to be posted in error (at least the overly honest part), but I can’t say that it surprises me.
The Best Pay for Travel Blogging is Literally Hiding
Photo by Samuel Zeller on Unsplash
We’ve been talking in the past few weeks about how the best-paid travel writing gigs are typically not advertised, but you can find them or create them for yourself with some very easy online research.
But my absolute favorite–in terms of the type of writing as well as the pay–type of blogging for travel businesses is hiding in a completely different way. It’s not just that it’s not advertised. You
It’s not just that it’s not advertised. You shouldn’t even be able to tell that freelancers are writing these blog posts at all.
Big Changes Are Coming to Our At-Home IdeaFest, Pitchapalooza, and TravelContentCon Programs
There are a lot of changes coming to our at-home programs–the versions of our live events, like Pitchapalooza, that take place over several weeks that you do from home rather than our location in the Catskills.
- major changes coming to ensure participants participate and finish their programs
- moving to a university-like model in many ways–your lessons and homework are when they are, and they’re due when they’re do–to move further away from the issues with online courses that people never finish
- new TravelContentCon and IdeaFest programs on the horizon
- IdeaFest (live or at-home) will now be a prerequisite Pitchapalooza (live or at-home)
- groups will be smaller and prices for some programs will change, but there will be much more personal attention as a result (in some cases more similar to a limited-term intensive coaching program, like at the retreats) and it will allow me to even run programs with just three people at a time if that’s who we have at that time (see–extra personal attention!)
- participation in group discussions (on a discussion platform for pitch- and idea-related programs or in group calls for TravelContentCon) will be a core component as it is essential to success–MFA programs are based on group critique sessions for a reason Read More
When Things Start to Go Sour With a Long-Time Editor Relationship, When Should You Cut the Cord?
Photo by Harli Marten on Unsplash
Welcome to the Dream of Travel Writing–the Monday Mailbag! We often get questions from readers, folks in our accountability group, or coaching program members that we think would apply to a lot of you.
Now, with permission, agony-aunt-style, we’ll be sharing a new one with you each Monday. If you have a question you’d like to see included, please send it to us at questions [at] dreamoftravelwriting.com and make sure to include a line saying we have permission to reprint your question.
On to the tricky travel writing questions!
Why Interviews Are Secretly the Answer to Everything You’re Struggling with in Your Travel Writing
No matter what the question is, there is a recurring refrain that I hear from freelance travel writers struggling to earn their desired income.
Whether the question is:
- how often are you sending pitches?
- why aren’t you sending more pitches?
- how long does it take you to write a pitch?
- what is keeping you income low if you already have a full load of clients they have?
- what is keeping you from writing for bigger and better outlets
It always comes back to time.