All Posts in Category: Professional Writer Mindset
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.
Is There a Way for You to Get Paid to Write the Exact Same Things You Write on Your Blog?
When you hear the term essay, similar to the even more antiquated concept of a “composition,” you likely think back to your school days more quickly than your bank account.
Especially if the phrase used is “personal essay,” which fills an alarming number of people with dread.
The thing is, many of you are incredibly acquainted, both as readers and as writers, with the personal essays, just under a different name: blog posts.
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.
How to Be Independently Awesome No Matter What is Going on on Your Press Trips
After our webinar last week on how to lay the groundwork before your press trips to make sure you’re prepared to get the most article research for the most stories done when you’re in the destination, I received an unusual email.
A writer that I know that has attended our weekend Pitchapalooza retreat in the past wrote me with the subject line “THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU.”
Is Your Travel Blog Actually Serving Its Purpose?
Welcome to a new feature here at 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.
How to Set Up Individual Sponsored Trips from Scratch
One year when I had not been a full-time freelance travel writer for too many years, I was in Europe to attend a conference and had left some time open after the event hoping to get myself set up on a trip somewhere fabulous.
Setting Up Sponsored Trips 101
“We call this the travel section, not the don’t travel section.”
– A real editor’s response to a story filed about a press trip that didn’t showcase the highlights of a destination as intended shared at the recent TBEX conference
How to Research on the Road and Find Salable Ideas While Traveling
When it comes to article ideas, I’m a bit of a pack rat.
Okay “a bit ” might be a bit of an understatement.
I have article ideas squirreled away eve rywhere :
- my main inbox is full of them
- my to do app has hundreds in the “Pitches” section
- my personal email that I used as my freelance email when I started out has a few hundred
- the other email address that I set up just to capture pitch ideas has around 400
- and the notes that I take during trips and walking tours have thousands more that I haven’t extracted from those longer lists of trip notes
This Week’s Webinar: Don’t Create “Ideas” Out of Nowhere: How to Always Find Them When You Need Them
During our weekend workshops with an ambitious numeric goal to reach—100 article ideas matched to magazines at our recent IdeaFest, for instance—there is always a hesitation in the air on the first day and even the morning of the second about whether each writer will reach the goal.
For IdeaFest, we had several group sessions on what an idea really is, what editors need from us, and how to make sure your idea is a good fit for a magazine before I handed out pages marked one through 100.