Archives: Programs

57 minutes of video
57 minutes of audio
16 slides
29 pages of transcripts

In this very special webinar, I interviewed real tourism boards and other representatives to show you exactly what to ask, how to expand, how to move on, and how to make sure you get what you need on the fly in your interviews.

*****

In the first webinar in our series on conducting interviews that take your stories to the next level, I talked about the very first interview that I ever did for my first blog with the editor of mega food website Epicurious.

At the time, to prepare for the interview, I read articles on tons of general journalism websites about how to prepare interview questions, and I dutifully wrote, re-wrote, re-worded, scraped, re-wrote, and re-worded all of my questions until I was sure I had the perfect set.

But when I was doing the actual interview, it lacked energy, connection, and opportunities to get great quotes because I was so focused on my prepared questions.

The key to successful interviews is to have a (focused) conversation with your interviewee to get the most directly, poignant, and illustrative quotes.

In the years following that first stilted interview, I was lucky to have the opportunity to see some seasoned travel journalists in action on press trips and observe what points of a tour they followed up on and how they brought up questions that went beyond what the guide discussed to highlight essential information that should have been mentioned (that we needed for our stories) that hadn’t already come up.

As the years went on and I became a person who does dozens of interviews myself each month, the roles changed. During a tour during the Women in Travel Summit last year, when we were having lunch and a wine tasting at a winery in southern California, one of the other writers on the tour followed me when I went back into the barrel room to chat with the winemaker. She didn’t have any questions of her own. And when I asked her if she had something to add, she said she just wanted to hear me interview the winemaker.

In this webinar, I’m very excited to do something similar in the setting of our free weekly webinars. I will interview real tourism boards representatives to show you exactly what to ask, how to expand, how to move on, and how to make sure you get what you need on the fly in your interviews.

I’ve got two interviews scheduled with time for us to discuss the context before each interview (I’ve created article topics and outlets for each interview that I’ll explain before each call), and time after both calls for questions on what I did when and why, how I could have done things differently, and how to do your own interviews for upcoming stories.

We will cover:
– Recap of interview best practices and framing our calls
– Interview with Kristin Settle from Visit Milwaukee
– Interview with Stephen Hoshaw from Travel Lane County
– Debrief and questions

66 minutes of video
66 minutes of audio
8 slides
22 pages of transcript

By popular request, in this webinar, I walked through the process of organizing notes and quotations from interviews into a full reported feature article from start to finish. The entire webinar was a live demo using real interviews.

*****

We don’t actually talk about the writing part of travel writing much on this site.

And it’s not exactly because there are tons of other sites out there talking about to actually write publishable articles for travel magazines.

Though this is certainly an issue.

There are a lot of resources out there that tell you how to source ideas or test headlines for blog posts. And then there are a very small handful of resources that tell you how to do serious storytelling (though unfortunately all the ones I’ve come across cover so very many things at one time I can’t imagine it makes a lasting dent in your writing quality or ability to find stories with compelling characters and moving story arcs).

So if there’s not good information out there on how to write articles, why am I not telling you, regularly, how to write the kinds of pieces editors publish?

There are two main reasons, but the first is that you don’t need me to.

(“Yes, I do!” you may be thinking.)

You really don’t though.

Because writing for magazines works like this: Once you get an assignment for a magazine you’ve never written for, you study back issues of the magazine to see how the story you have been assigned is usually put together.

• Are there interviews?
• How many?
• With what type of people?
• How are the quotes incorporated?
• What kind of lead (opening) does the story have?
• Are there subheads or one uniform block or text?
• Sidebars?
• Does the article follow a certain trajectory in how it presents information (i.e. catchy descriptive lead, interview quote, then service information)?
• How much background information is included?
• How much historical background?
• Cultural background?
  Forward-looking information on what is coming soon?
• How much descriptive detail?
• What kind of descriptive detail?

When you’ve gathered this information, you not only have a road map for writing your story, but also for researching it.

But there’s a second, and much more important, reason that I don’t talk about how to write travel articles for magazines or editorial websites here.

The style, format, and structure are all completely different in every case. Not just for every magazine, but also for every section within a certain magazine.

This is why we are so adamant in the Travel Magazine Database about breaking down each section of a magazine that is open to freelance pitches and all of the details about what is included, what the tone is, and what the structure is for that specific section.

There is no such thing as a travel article without an audience. This is why editors don’t accept stories that you’ve written in full before pitching. So I don’t want to tell you how to work on travel articles and have you avoid pitching because you’re working on your “writing.”

The first type of writing you need to work on if you want to be a successful travel writer is your pitching. Perfecting your pitches does much more than help you get assignments. It makes you incredibly skilled at knowing the scope, scale, and slant of an article, which saves you at least 80% of the time you may very likely be spending researching and writing things that don’t belong in your articles now.

But, if you haven’t been pitching because you’re afraid you won’t be able to write the article once you get the assignment, today’s webinar is for you. I’m going to share my format for writing feature articles based on interviews quickly and coherently in this webinar on Transforming Interviews into an Article (Live Demo!) .

By popular request, in this webinar, I’ll walk through the process of organizing notes and quotations from interviews into a full reported feature article from start to finish. The entire webinar will be a live demo using real interviews

We will cover:
– The systems approach to turning your research into a finished article
– Working from interviews to the final piece with an interview-based feature
– Short look at doing the same with a short article

67 minutes of video
67 minutes of audio
16 slides
21 pages of transcript

I’m always shocked when I see people selling lists of contacts at tourism boards. They aren’t hard to find! And, you’d be shocked how many (important!) people are not only available, but very happy to speak with you for your articles. In this webinar, we looked at how to find the right people for each piece.

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In interviews and on panels at conferences, editors are often asked what they’d like to see in pitches.

The most common answer–that the writer is familiar with the magazine and pitching an idea that would actually work–we discuss regularly here.

But the one many editors also share (and secretly wish they could talk more about rather than the very basic pitching essential about) is that they want you to pitch them a story. With characters.

Yikes…now we’ve entered the realm of fiction. Or at least that’s how it used to seem to me.

Characters? Storyline? In a 200-word front-of-book short? Or a round-up feature? Yes, often even in articles like that where space is tight and there’s no room to waste words. It can sound like an incredibly tall order, especially for a short piece, but if you can start doing this, it will be an absolute turning point for your writing.

Let’s look at services pieces. And go outside the realm of travel for a minute. In women’s magazines, like Cosmopolitan or Redbook, there are always service pieces, articles that tell readers how to do something–and typically how to do it better or faster than they’re already doing it.

How are these different than articles you might find on a blog or any one of the tens of thousands of other women-focused editorial websites out there?

You might already see where this is going. The answer is sources, but there’s more to it. It’s not even just that they use expert sources. These articles use a mix of expert sources that meet certain criteria *and* anecdotes from regular people, often called “everyman” sources.

And, there might very well be three sources interviewed for a 300-word piece.

Still not sure you feel the difference? Try this. Head to Contently’s blog “The Freelancer” and check out their advice pieces that feature interviews with working freelance writers and compare them again a different post that is just a round-up or written from a first-person point of view.

What do you feel more inclined to trust without knowing the writer or anything about their background?

If the current review-driven culture of the travel and hospitality industries have taught us nothing else, it is the enormous power of collections of other people’s options. We may be skeptical or completely disinterested in one, but when you aggregate several examples, we are psychological compelled to find more value in the argument. If there is a weight of authority behind the opinion, it sways us even more.

How does this translate with travel writing?

All of our pieces have some sort of point, whether it’s as simple as why you should visit a certain destination, attraction, hotel, or restaurant, or something deeply, such as asking the reader to question his or her assumptions about cultural identity.

And that point, that change or emotion or action you’re trying to instill on the part of the reader, carries much more psychological weight with social or authoritative proof.

How do you get it?

That’s what we’ll cover in this webinar on Securing Interview Sources to Make Your Stories Sing, as we unpack how, when, and where to find the sources that give your stories that extra oomph.

We will cover:
– Does your story needs sources?
– Who exactly do you need to talk to for this particular story?
– Where can you find these people?
– How do you reach out to these people once you’ve found them?

71 minutes of video
71 minutes of audio
22 slides
23 pages of transcript

This week, we cut past the anxiety and unpacked exactly what you do and don’t need to know about doing interviews to flesh out your articles–and how learning to rock them can make your writing process much faster and more effective.

*****

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 your 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.

I’ve written on our blog before that your hourly rate is the single most important thing to track in order to have a successful freelance travel writing business.

But I also have seen, again and again, that taking too long on your work has nothing to do with your abilities, whether skill-based in terms of typing speed or research acumen, or of the more mental variety, such as formatting pitch ideas and creating article structure.

In conversations, query critiques, and out-of-the-blue questions that come in over email, it’s become a leit motif that a lot of you are spending a lot of time on things that don’t actually contribute to the actual deliverable of your paid work.

Am I saying you are procrastinating? No!

There is just a lot of “work” going on that doesn’t need to happen. Time that doesn’t need to be spent.

On the one hand, you can cut down on this in some ways simply by tracking your time and being conscious of how long tasks take you, but there are some very powerful reasons why these situations persist:

• someone along the way told you to do what you’re doing in this roundabout way
• you’re just really interested in the topic and overresearching because you’re enjoying it
• you really don’t know what the point of what you’re writing is and you are trying to find that point or some piece of information that will suddenly make everything clear

In this webinar, Secrets to Successful Interviews for Your Travel Articles, we are going to talk about a solution to all of these problems that might surprise you: doing interviews rather than researching online.

Before the internet, this was how most reporting or article research got done! But this type of background digging, content creation, and purpose-honing through asking relevant sources if the topic matters, has gone by the wayside in many circles, particularly with a lot of online content.

But the funny thing is, interviews—lively quotes that paint a picture or introduce emotion, anecdotes that tell another side of the story that you couldn’t on your own, and morsels of insider information about things that are opening soon—are the antidote not only to what many decry as the banality of recycled online content, but also many of the issues you may be struggling with.

• Not sure what is the point of a place to a certain audience or whether your story is really novel or on the right track? Ask an expert and let their opinion guide you to the real story.
• Frequently struggle with taking too long to research and write your pieces? Stick to interviews and use online research to fact check and fill in the blanks; you’ll cut your writing time to 25% of what it is now…and have a better piece!
• Feel like your writing just isn’t “good” enough? Don’t create verbose descriptions and spend time tailoring your sentiments; get facts, figures, and specific details from those that know them best and let them show your point rather than you telling it.

In this webinar on Secrets to Successful Interviews for Your Travel Articles, we’ll cut past the anxiety of how to do interviews without a “journalism” background and unpack exactly what you do and don’t need to know about doing interviews to flesh out your articles–and how learning to rock them can make your writing process much faster and more effective.

We will cover:
– How to prepare for your interviews
– How to formulate the right questions for the setting
– How to maintain rapport to get the best quotes
– How to get the best quote of all with one simple question

77 minutes of video
77 minutes of audio
21 slides
29 pages of transcripts

In this webinar on How to Become Part of an Editor’s Stable, we’ll look at how to build those relationships with editors with copious quotes right from the sources that I’ve drawn from editor panels at recent events with major newsstand titles represented.

*****

As part of a series of questions on our coaching program, I received this inquiry over email earlier this week that I know affects many of you:

“How quickly can people make a regular income in the freelance travel writing world? I’d really like to quit my part-time job so that I can dive into travel writing full time .”

We’ve looked before at some different options for creating recurring work–especially doing blogs and other types of travel content marketing for travel brands and companies–but this week I want to talk to you about how to do that with editorial writing, as that seems much “harder.”

I had several weird experiences around how “it’s impossible to earn a full-time living writing for travel magazines” a few years ago.

When I first became a freelance travel writer, I knew how to ghostwrite and write for the web from a past job, but I knew nothing about journalism. I took an on-going writing gig writing for a magazine doing its news briefs and spent a ridiculous amount of time each day putting together 200-to-300-word pieces.

It just wasn’t my style. I was trained in the journalist’s inverted pyramid. But, at the time, blogging and writing online weren’t really “legitimate” writing, so I thought this was what I had to do to be a freelance writer.

Fast forward about three years, and after going to back, happily to writing blogs for travel companies for several years, I had started to inch back into writing for editorial outlets, because I had finally found a way to make it pay reliably: writing for the same three or four magazines exclusively, doing at least one if not more pieces for them each month.

When I attended blogging conferences and said, “Actually, I primarily write for magazines these days,” I received a lot of responses of the “it’s impossible to earn a full-time living writing for travel magazines” variety.

But the weird thing wasn’t just that I was doing it very comfortably and happily, but that the people who weren’t had never even pitched a newsstand magazine before. They had just “heard” that you couldn’t do it.

I want to hear a more encouraging side of things and have that be the narrative running around in your head telling you what you should and shouldn’t do. Not just my side of the story though–I want you to hear it from the editors who hire freelance writers themselves.

In this webinar on How to Become Part of an Editor’s Stable , we’ll look at how to build those relationships with editors with copious quotes right from the sources that I’ve drawn from editor panels at recent events with major newsstand titles represented.

We’ll cover:
– what the stable is and why you want to be a part of it
– the best ways to become part of the stable
– when you SHOULD NOT become part of a stable

78 minutes of video
78 minutes of audio
40 slides
28 pages of transcripts
6 pages of sample itineraries

In this webinar, we’ll look at how you can build a sustainable travel writing career by extracting the maximum number of articles from each trip. I’ll go through multiple itineraries and break them down in front of you to show not only all the possible articles to pitch, but also which can and should be pitched in advance versus the ones to pitch when you get home. (A very important distinction.)

*****

When we did our first couple travel writer focus groups, something really struck me about how many articles successful travel writers, as opposed to struggling (income-wise) travel writers, write from each trip.

I find that a lot of travel writers who aren’t happy with their income or still have a full-time job in another profession and haven’t broken out to make travel writing their full-time gig are essentially getting one paid article from each trip.

They might be getting a very large amount of content for their own blogs and social media, and perhaps to use as guest posts on other low-paying or non-paying blogs (ah, the age-old “exposure” arguement; if only exposure actually paid-off), but typically only one legit, properly-paying (saying $300 and up here to be generous) article.

THAT SUCKS

Not the writer, but the situation.

What are well-paid writers doing then?

I had a lovely chat in London with a gentleman who told me, firmly, “I would be sad if I didn’t [publish an article] about each trip at least three times in my lifetime.”

That seems like a very nice, but also achievable metric, so I asked how many articles he typically writes about each trip, and the answer was very different. “Ten to 12,” he said. And this is when he first gets back, not the other times he includes the destination down the line in years to come.

I hope that has blown your mind a little bit.

But it is not only achievable…it’s what you need to do to do this as a full-time career.

This is one of the biggest lines in the sand that I’ve seen in terms of income–the number of articles extracted per trip–but that distinction really circles back to pitching.

If you aren’t slicing your trip into every possible angle and getting those ideas into the hands of the RIGHT editors, you’re never going to be getting more articles per trip.

In this webinar, we’ll look at how you can build a sustainable travel writing career by extracting the maximum number of articles from each trip. I’ll go through multiple itineraries and break them down in front of you to show not only all the possible articles to pitch, but also which can and should be pitched in advance versus the ones to pitch when you get home. (A very important distinction.)

We will cover:
– why you need to break your trips up into fine slices to be a successful freelance travel writer
– three different approaches for breaking down your trip (combine all for maximum ideas in lean times
– live breakdown of three trips (include what to pitch before and what to pitch after

56 minutes of video
56 minutes of audio
28 slides
17 pages of transcripts

We have discussed how to get ideas for travel magazine articles from magazines and other types of research online, but some of the best ideas to report come from what you discover on your travels. Here is a look at how to use magazine pocket cheat sheets, getting lost on purpose, and hints of coolness from press releases and CVB sites to make sure you are gathering the most interesting and salable ideas on the road.

*****

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 everywhere :

• 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
  

I think that if I sat down and really combed through all of these locations and pulled ideas out of all the trip notes, even before going crazy and breaking them into smaller slices of ideas or slanting them for different audiences, I would have two or three thousand of article ideas in the bank for a rainy day.

The Journalist’s Approach to Article Ideas

When I knew I was going to leave my job and pursue freelance travel writing full time, I devoured every posts on all of the sites out there telling you the nitty gritty of exactly how, where, and how often to pitch, and at the time, Carol Tice, who runs the How to Make a Living Writing Blog and the Freelance Writers Den, was really just getting started, but I loved her approach.

She didn’t have a college degree and had instead spent that time in L.A. trying to make it as a songwriter, but got turned onto writing for local magazines instead. An editor took her under his wing and gave her the real-world version of a masters in journalism, so her approach to all things pitching and writing is extremely pragmatic and grounded in what actually works in actual newsrooms.

She’s an absolute nazi about pitching regularly and that if you don’t have a good income coming in, it’s 100% your own fault if you’re not pitching, and her advice on idea generation is some of my favorite:

“If you’re not developing article ideas, you’re not serious about earning well as a writer.”​

– Carol Tice

What We’re Going to Talk About This Week

As travel writers, we get the majority–and in a rush to the head, 100 in one hour way–of our article ideas on the road.

This is where we get our hands on the kind of info that editors in their 50th floor offices in Manhattan would never have access to, from anecdotes from tour guides and restaurateurs to spotting a new, just-opened concept that’s going to change tourism in a key destination, or experiencing a once-in-a-lifetime event, whether one of tragedy or one of celebration.

But I am always shocked to see travel writers making their way through these experiences without frantically scribbling down the wealth of article ideas flowing around them.

In this webinar, How to Research on the Road and Find Salable Ideas While Traveling, we’re going to break down specific techniques for idea capture and generation on the road so that you never find yourself staring at a blinking cursor and a blank email wondering what to pitch again.

We will cover:
– how to avoid coming home from a trip and realizing you don’t actually have very many good ideas to pitch
– how to triage your ide collection process by looking for article types
– my favorite hacks for finding stories on the road

68 minutes of video
68 minutes of audio
22 slides
21 pages of transcripts

In this webinar, How to Get Work Done When You’re on The Road, we’ll discuss approaches to partitioning your time on the road, maximizing efficiency in times that don’t at first look like work opportunities, and my favorite tricks for being productive anywhere.

*****

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.

Working somewhere beautiful and by the beach was almost always impractical from a Wi-Fi availability standpoint. There was no AirBnb, so you had to rent apartment with large cash deposits that choked up your ATM withdrawal limit for a week or wire transfers that took weeks. And when there was internet in “exotic” places, it was often at the dial-up speeds on dusty PCs (no Wi-Fi). A lot of people didn’t even carry laptops for the weight, theft risk, and inability to really use them for any work that needed to be sent in while you were traveling.

These location-independent websites covered when to get inexpensive apartments without jumping thought too many hoops, in places where the Wi-Fi speeds and ease of access were on par with America, and the general cost of living was so low that you could get by easily when still coasting on your savings from a previous job.

But they really didn’t talk so much about how to manage your time between hitting the beach, exploring the city, and sampling the local restaurants. They trusted that you cared enough about your income that you would automatically sacrifice all those things as needed to stay inside in work…or that you wouldn’t have enough extra income to be off enjoying the local recreation.

The resources out there specifically on how to be a travel journalist were even more scarce and typically focused on the perils (psychologically, to your wallet, and at times physically) of being a guidebook writer, but the message was always quite clear:

The more time you spend traveling, the less money you can make.

Guidebook writers whose expenses came out of the same pool as their pay minimized their days and expenses on the ground as much as possible, which journalists who wrote for magazines and typically traveled on over-scheduled junkets (press trips) advised that every day out of the office was a day you weren’t earning.

I hated this advice.

In the beginning, I wanted to be a travel writer to travel much more so than to write. I wanted to travel to places that I might not write about, or that I wanted to check out before pitching to see what the story was.

I wanted to work and travel. I wanted to mix the location independence with the travel writing.

Even though every year it seems like the type of writing I’m doing is dramatically different than the year before, I’ve found a way not only to make this balance work, but to easily earn $100 an hour or more for my writing, even when I’m on the road, so that I can work 4-hour days (sorry, not quite Tim Feriss’s 4-hour work week, but I hope you enjoy what you do enough that you like to write sometimes!) and still earn a very good living.

Whether you have your own blog to maintain or simply have on-going work for clients and editors that you can’t post pone or do in advance, working from the road is a necessity for modern travel writers.

In this webinar, How to Get Work Done When You’re on The Road, we’ll discuss approaches to partitioning your time on the road, maximizing efficiency in times that don’t at first look like work opportunities, and my favorite tricks for being productive anywhere.

We will cover:
– Where people typically get tripped up with working on the road
– Three parts of your travel life you need to get control of on the road
– My favorite hacks for forcing productivity when traveling

38 minutes of video
38 minutes of video
16 slides
11 pages of transcript

For years naysayers have claimed that there is no money to be made in the magazine industry, the fact is that magazines still pay significantly better than websites–and there’s many more opportunities to write about travel for print magazines than you realize. Sleek, well-paying, new travel magazines are actually popping up every week. You just need to know where to find them.

*****

It’s the headline that doesn’t die: bookstores and magazines are dead. Nobody wants print anymore.

But the numbers simply don’t support this.

Not only have historic magazines pivoted, amped up their strategies, and zeroed in on exactly what content their readers care about, but a startling number of new magazines are popping up every month, especially in the travel space.

Airlines that had stopped carrying an airline magazines are adding new ones (even the likes of RyanAir!). Companies are rolling out branding magazines right and left, especially hotels and entities like Airbnb.

Magazines that you can find on the newstand or subscribe to are also still running strong, with independent travel magazines carving out a distinct (and stunning) new approach to print travel media.

All of these magazines have eye-opening storytelling and eye-popping photos at their core and work with freelance writers to help keep their pages filled and interesting to readers.

Tune into learn where the opportunities are and how shifting from writing exclusively for websites to focusing on print can immediately and drammatically increase your income.

We will cover:
– the biggest reasons writing for magazines will skyrocket your travel writing income
– 5 ways to make sure an editor not only gets back to you, but wants to work with you again and again
– how to start getting lucrative assignments right now

 

63 minutes of video
63 minutes of audio
19 slides
22 pages of transcript

As a travel writer earning six figures for several years, I used to get a lot of questions at industry conferences about just how exactly I did it, so I started coaching new, struggling and transitioning travel writers along the journey. Here we explore the misconceptions that keep people from achieving their income goals as a travel writer and you’ll leave with tools to increase your income right away.

*****

I’m often asked in interviews what my number one piece of advice for aspiring travel writers is, and I have an answer for that.

When you’re starting from zero, the path forward is much more clear than when you’ve been at it for a while and are struggling.

Not enough people ask me that question: What is my number one piece of advice for struggling travel writers? For those who have been at it for years and feel like they’re gong to quit if things don’t turn around soon, or like they should quit but they can’t imagine doing anything else and need to find a way to make this work.

I know a lot of those people personally. And every month as I travel around the world doing workshops, I find more.

Just this month, someone wrote me and said,

“I’ve been a travel writer for 25+ years and have never made six figures. And I make much less now than I did 15 years ago.​”

Unfortunately, this is not uncommon. But the good thing is, I am also 100% sure it doesn’t have to be that way, because I also get emails like this,

“While I am already making six-figures travel writing, I would be curious to learn from you and see what you are doing.​” ​(And this email actually underlines one of the big things that separates these six-figure freelancers from the rest!)

And that writer is not alone. In fact, on our webinar tomorrow on the secrets of six-figure travel writers, I’m going to share some pretty shocking income statistics from recent studies.

If you want to learn the answer to the question I wish more people would ask me and how to set yourself on the path to becoming a six-figure freelance travel writer, join us for The Secrets of Six-Figure Travel Writers.

In this webinar we will cover:
– Hard numbers on freelance writing, blogging, and travel writing
– 5 ways that the most successful freelance travel writers got that way
– What you can do at home right now to start to replicate their success