All Posts Tagged: Getting started
How Are You Getting Where You Want to Go With Your Travel Writing?
Behind the scenes, I’ve been working on something very unusual for you guys.
In a way, you could call it the map to the Holy Grail, a la Indiana Jones–that is, if becoming a full-time, well-paid freelance travel writer sounds like a worthy mission to you!
Of course, there may or may not be poisonous snakes and collapsing tunnel floors in ancient ruins in this scenario. Unless that’s your preferred travel writing topic!
Our On-Demand Coaching Concierge Now Has Answers to More than 300 of Your Top Travel Writing Questions!
Before there was Dream of Travel Writing or even The Six-Figure Travel Writing Road Map, there were questions.
I’ll never forget the time I was sitting in a room at the World Travel Market in London after one of the panels had finished up catching up on email, and a British gentleman came up and started chatting with my about what I did.
It was quite a few years ago, long before I ever even considered writing about freelancing, let alone coaching freelance business owners.
We were talking about what I did, and the conversation took a turn that it frequently did back then: a bit of puzzlement when I said that, yes, I was a blogger, but, no, I could not tell him what my blog was. I was a freelance blogger.
So I told him my mantra back then: “If I’m not getting paid, why would I write something?”
We Want to Pay for Your Flight and Registration for One of Our Favorite Conferences
Every year, on the mainstage and in the individual sessions at this conference, we are blown away by the amount of tell-it-like-it-is and no-matter-what-anyone-tells-you-you-can-absolutely-do-this wisdom shared.
It’s an environment in which attendees are so surrounded by people who are out there both doing work they love and running a solid business around that every year we watch those who haven’t yet made the leap into full-time freelance travel writing see that it’s possible to take the plunge successfully and put a deadline on when they will do it too.
Often just a few months after the conference takes place! (Because they’re so jazzed with possibility, they can’t stand to stay in their job any longer.)
We want this kind of experience for all of you.
Want to Take 50% of Registration for One of the Top Professional Associations?
A very cool opportunity came my way this past week that I am excited to share with all of you.
If you regularly join us for our new weekly webinar, you may have heard me rave about a conference that I went to earlier this spring/late winter that was bursting with editors that were friendly, easy to connect and chat with, and from very high-profile outlets.
I also mentioned that the conference itself was very expensive for an association conference and so it probably wasn’t the best fit for many of you.
But… (there must be a but, right?)
They have a really attractive promotion going on right now for membership to the association (the International Association of Culinary Professionals), which includes recordings of many of the sessions with editors I found particularly valuable from the annual conference.
Help Underprivileged High School Students Experience the Transformative Power of Travel
Here at Dream of Travel Writing, we are passionate about the power of travel to completely change lives, especially those of young people.
It’s the reason I worked in study abroad before I left to freelance, and originally planned to be an Italian language professor before I realized I could reach and empower more people to learn about other cultures through travel writing.
I myself am from a very small town and never left the country until a program through my high school in my late teens, and my business partner/husband, whom some of you have met and others may have heard me mention is from India, had the same experience with a program to Germany when he was in high school that inspired him to intern in Switzerland and finally come to the U.S. for grad school.
Should You Take a Second Look at Guidebook Writing…For the Paycheck?
Like any profession, travel writing has its trends of what’s “cool” that flow in multi-year segments.
In the past few decades, those ebbs and flows of popular taste have elevated enthusiasm and then relaxed it around many different types of travel writing work:
- blogging on a personal travel blog
- freelance travel blogging
- earning money as a social media influencer
Most of us are aware of the rise of these temporary stars of the field—the things that people all teach and everyone wants to do all at the same time, creating a huge flood in the market so that the tactics those first pioneers use don’t work anymore, and clients become weary of quality and consistency and skittish about investing.
But while these “new media” media have gotten a lot of press and attention, in the background, the more traditional ways of earning a living as a travel writer also have their own mini vogues among those that are focused on the work of earning a full-time living as a travel writer.
You could, in fact, say that the periodic rises in popularity of these “old school” ways of getting paid for your travel writing are actually primarily embraced by those looking for the easiest ways to make a living from their travels.
Those with their nose to the ground for where the demand (for travel writers in the global marketplace) outstrips the supply (the travel writers who know about these opportunities and put themselves in their path.
How Does Our One-on-One Coaching Really Work?
If you’re still considering whether or not our coaching program is right for you, I wanted to take a few minutes today to really spell out, in detail, what our program looks like once you get started.
As we’ve been exploring in our emails on why we offer coaching, how coaching is different than consulting, what freelance and small business coaching costs throughout the marketing, and our coaching philosophy, everyone really has very different specific needs.
But that makes it really hard to know what you’re signing up for!
So, to help you visualize what we can do together, let’s start at the beginning.
Applications for Our One-on-One Travel Writing Success Coaching Open Next Week
I often get emails from people who are looking for coaching on their travel writing or just want to hop on the phone for an hour and talk about what they should do next. Or perhaps they have a pitch or a piece of writing that they want me to look at and tell them what I think.
One-on-one coaching is how everything we do at Dream of Travel Writing got started. I was attending events as a freelance writer, chatting with other writers, and thought the rates that I was getting paid like $250 a blog post (in 2013) or 50 cents or a dollar a word were what everyone was getting.
I was working part-time, spending half my day exploring new cities, and had a healthy, self-sufficient income I was proud of.
Are You Too Afraid of Writing Round-Ups for Magazines–Or Not Afraid Enough?
When the topic of writing feature-length pieces for magazines in heavily formatted articles like round-ups or guides is broached amount freelance writers who don’t have those clips under their belt (yet), one of two emotions usually comes up:
- abject fear at writing something that long for a magazine (and how long it will take them to do it)
- absolute “I got this,” because you write these exact same types of pieces for blog posts
In case you can already tell where I’m going with this, neither of those is the “right” answer.
It’s Tax Season. Are Your Freelance Travel Writing Finances Ready?
Have you done your taxes yet? If so, bravo!
Every winter, in fact before the holidays, I tell myself that I’m going to get my taxes in early so that I can get my tax refund as soon as possible. I like to think of it as a freelancer end-of-year bonus.
If you work for yourself, that might sound a bit surprising, right? That I’m looking out for my refund (a.k.a. money back) rather than dreading how much I’m going to own.
And I hear that from freelance travel writers often.
In fact, I have been getting *a lot* of questions about tax preparation this year, both from my coaching clients and from folks that have come to the Catskills to join us for a writing retreat.