All Posts Tagged: Business Skills
12 Days of Holiday Specials Day 10: Ten-Part Physical and Digital Jump-Start Kit to Get Your Travel Writing Business Off the Ground in 2019
Today’s holiday trivia: January 4 marks a major festival in the Ryukyuan religion, a formal of Shintoism practiced in the islands between Japan and Taiwan, particularly Okinawa. The hinukan, a hearth god that guards the sacred family fire, returns to the family after returning to its own home for several weeks and is welcomed with offerings of rice and local alcohol.
For today’s offer, we’re combining two holiday offers we’ve extended for Thanksgiving and the holiday season in the past with more goodies, including some brand new bonus digital content.
All told, we’ve got ten things for you (well, some have multiple parts, so it’s actually even more :)) today, including some that you’ll receive right away digitally, and some we will ship to you–including something special that we will hand-pick based on your writing interests.
12 Days of Holiday Specials Day 8: Eight Classes to Learn How to Get Your Name on a Published Book in the New Year
Today’s holiday trivia: Celebrated from January 2 to 7, the Blacks and Whites’ Carnival is the largest carnival celebration in South Colombia, attracting a considerable number of Colombian and foreign tourists. The modern carnival is based on the need to express imagination, play, friendship and sharing the joy that surrounds the Epiphany. January 2’s celebration includes Tribute to the Virgin of Mercy, the Colonies Parade, and Pastorock, an event for the development of alternative music.
How to Pitch Five Magazines Looking for Activity Profiles
Welcome to the Friday Freebie Five, a new weekly feature on Dream of Travel Writing’s Six Figure Travel Writer blog.
Each week, we comb our Travel Magazine Database to bring you five magazine sections open to freelancers around a theme–front-of-book trend pieces, long-form first-person features, short narrative postcards–to inspire your pitches.
Sunset
“The View” highlights a particular attraction in a destination. There’s a 150-word description giving more information such as the history, the entry price and the website. This is followed by a 200-word sidebar which gives more information on things to do in the surrounding area. An example from a recent issue includes “Botanical Beverly Hills,” which covers the Virginia Robinson Gardens. After the description of the gardens there is a sidebar called “90210’s Natural Side” which outlines a bar, a park, a tea room, and a garden tour with prices and websites for each.
Want to Hit Your Travel Writing Goals Next Year? Start With Your Values
When I talk for the first time to a travel writer in the process of building their career—whether they’re just starting or they’ve been at it for decades but have never felt that ‘click’ of sustainability where they know they can do this and make the money they want for as long as they want—an eerily similar thing typically happens.
It takes a lot of guises though.
These writers are typically asking me a very specific, tactical question about how to do one specific thing: write pitches more quickly, make sure their ideas fit a magazine, find the right place to pitch a specific piece, or get started with those lucrative content marketing gigs.
And as I’m explaining the answer, the odd thing happens.
I Want to Stop the Scope Creep Hate that’s Making You Secretly Despise Your Travel Writing Clients
On a coaching call yesterday afternoon, I had a conversation that I have much more often than I would like.
This freelancer had a client that had landed themselves with a cold email–the first of the kind for this writer–and landing the gig filled her with so much pride and positivity.
At first. (There must be a but coming, right?)
The bumps started small. Her client insisted on providing her all of the blog post ideas, but would only give them one at a time. And not always on-time.
This left the freelancer constantly having to rush to complete the blog posts assigned, often dropping other things to do so. We talked about how to move the client into giving her batches of post ideas at once, and that helped. For a while.
Learn How to Track and Reach Your Freelance Travel Writing Goals for Just $5 This Week
At an event for business executives I attended earlier this year, the facilitator shared something that is a bit of a myth in the business world.
The short version is: in a room full of nearly 1,000 entrepreneurs, when asked how they track and check in daily with their goals, it turned out the that four wealthiest people in the room all carried a paper with their goals in their wallet on somewhere else on their person.
Let me say this again, because it bears repeating. In a room full of people who had successfully started their own businesses, the ones who made the most looked at their goals regularly.
Learn How to Get Work Done When You’re on the Road for Just $5 This Week
When I first left my job to be a travel writer ten years ago, travel blogging wasn’t really a thing, in terms of a developed business opportunity.
The term “location independent” was still new, and there were just a few sites really dedicated to how, exactly, to build an online creative (i.e. writing, design, etc.) business while working from wherever. And they were almost 100% dedicated to practical matters.
Grab a Webinar from Our Library (Usually $19 each) On Us for Thanksgiving!
Every week, we offer a free, live, one-hour travel writing class.
But, since we’ve been at it for a year, there might be some that you’ve missed!
Want to get your hands on one of our past webinars…for FREE?
Fill in a quick, five-minute survey, and get a free package from our webinar library, where you can get each webinar as:
- steamable and downloadable video
- streamable and downloadable MP3 audio
- full slide deck as image gallery or PDF download
- full transcript viewable on-screen with infinite scroll or plain text
- downloadable PDF transcript
Join Us This Week for Free Travel Writing Classes on Successful Interview Secrets and Putting Together a News Brief
In the two years since we began running regular one-hour travel writing classes, we’ve covered more than 80 topics, including:
- how to land free trips
- how to get paid really, really well for your writing
- how to get on magazine editors’ good sides
- how to navigate every step of the process to land travel content marketing work, including phone calls and proposals
- how to keep your hourly rate down so your bank account goes up
- how to get work done on the road
- how to write, step-by-step, 15 different types of travel articles
- how to land guidebook and other traditional publishing deals
You can grab access to all of our past webinars (and a ton of other resources you can’t find anywhere else) with a subscription to our Dream Buffet or grab them one-by-one when you need them in our On-Demand Webinar Library for a set with the video, audio, transcript, and slides.
But we also air a free replay of one of our travel writing classes each and every weekday.
A Quick, Easy, Empowering Weekly Accountability Check-in for Freelance Writers
How responsible do you feel to your freelance writing goals?
The answer I often here is some variant of “not very,” typically centered around all of the other factors that are in the way.
I ask because the word “accountability” gets through around a lot–on social media, in face-to-face discussions with other writers, and especially on coaching calls.
So I looked it up to dig into what accountability is meant to mean.