Archives: Programs

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