Section Category: Transcript
The Magazine-First Approach to Organize Your Pitches to Ensure You Hit Your Goals Transcript
Today, we’re gonna talk about the magazine-first approach to organize your pitches to make sure that you hit your goals. And the thing about the magazine-first approach to pitches that’s really interesting is that this is actually how I usually set people up for them working on pitching goals, people in our coaching program.
And yet, we did a webinar on the idea-first approach to pitching, which is not what I usually work with people on earlier. And so somebody asked me after we did that idea-first approach to pitching webinar, which we’ll talk more about in a bit, “Well, how does this work with a magazine-first approach?” And I was like, “Oh, of course, I can tell you that because that’s what I do.” And I realized that we didn’t have any material in our webinar library on the way that we do, in fact, recommend that people create their pitch plan. So that’s what we’re gonna look at today.
So, particularly, in this first webinar, in this series of four, I wanna kind of posit the counterpoint between idea-first and magazine-first pitching. And because these are terms that I don’t know if anyone else uses, that I think we use relatively exclusively in order to explain these concepts to you, I’m gonna explain what they mean so we can all be on the same page by what I mean when I say idea-first and what I mean when I say magazine-first pitching.
Then we’re gonna look in brief because we already did a whole webinar series on the idea-first pitching, but also because we’re gonna look at this in more detail when it comes to magazine-first pitching throughout this webinar series. So we’re gonna look kind of an overview of the main differences between the two, and then we’re gonna talk about the pros and cons of each process. And as we do that, you’ll start to see already why one approach works better in some situations and one approach works better in the other.
But then we’re gonna look at some specific, sort of, let’s call it goals you might have or points in your career when you might want to use one or the other.
As we get into what we’re looking at today, I was putting these slides together and thinking about, you know, in Dream of Travel Writing, when I’m talking to writers, working with writers one-on-one, or coaching program at live events, or things like that, there’s certain examples from when I was more of a freelance writer full time than I am now that I use. But as I was looking at this idea of what is my experience using these two frameworks and when have I used them and why to put this webinar together for you today, I realized that, interestingly, I’ve gotten national bylines using both of these methods.
So, even though, in this webinar series, we’re gonna talk about magazine-first pitching, and how to use it, and why, and it will often sound at times like I’m knocking idea-first pitching, I will say you can get results from idea-first pitching. I have gotten, like I said, national bylines from doing that. But as you’ll see, as we go through the webinar, there are some reasons why you may wanna choose one or the other in different situations.
We chose also to do this webinar series because I’ve been talking with a lot of people, both in our regular coaching calls, as well as on one-off calls that I’ve had with some folks about this idea of which magazines should you be pitching.
So I’m seeing these responses from people as lessons go by every day, and it’s really interesting how many people realize that they need to take a better look at which magazines they’re pitching and why, and how many people just take certain magazines and work on pitching those and get frustrated because they’re not either getting any results or they’re not getting results in the direction of their goals and give up on pitching entirely.
So, because I’ve seen a lot of these, you know, very appropriate feelings of frustration around pitching lately from folks that I’m not working with as closely, I wanted to do this webinar series to really sort of drive home this idea that it’s not about the quality of your pitches. In many ways, even the quality of your idea matches is not where you should start if you are working on sort of scaling up as a writer. You really need to start with being super clear about which magazines you are pitching and why, and that’s what we’re gonna look at in this series. So, definitions first.
So when I say idea-first pitching and magazine-first pitching as evidence sort of in the construct of this term that we’ve created, it’s all about where you begin. It’s about your jumping-off point. It’s about your departure point, okay? So are you departing on your planning of your pitches from the idea, from the destination you’ve gone to and the specific thing there that you wanna cover? Or, are you departing and finding your pitches from the magazine, okay?
So, more specifically, what I mean by that is, I’ll give you some sort of not extremely specific examples about people, but I’ll look at some situations that I’ve been in before, okay. So, somebody who, for instance, has a destination that is very dear to them. Maybe they go there often, maybe they’ve covered it in some outlets already. They don’t live there, but it’s a place that they feel like has so many stories, okay?
And, in this destination, there’s a couple different stories that they have ideas about specifically. And around those ideas, they’re sort of set that this is the idea that they wanna pitch, this is the concept of this destination, this is sort of the content that they wanna write. So all of the pitches that they’re working on for various magazines trickle back to this. They will look at magazines and see, “Is this idea that I have a fit for that magazine?” And if not, they put the magazine aside, okay?
Now, on the magazine-first approach, that would look more like somebody who has a particular topic that they wanna write about, let’s say beer or something like that, you know. And so they look for some different magazines that cover that topic, and then they look at what articles not just that magazine is publishing, right? Because a lot of things a magazine is publishing might actually be coming from in-house writers or writers who are in contract for the magazine. So, not so much for freelancers.
So these writers who want to write for specific magazines, they look for the sections that are open to freelancers in that magazine. And then rather than say, “Oh, here’s the story that I really wanna tell,” or, “I just went on this trip, and I really wanna place the story,” they look at what is going on in that magazine, and then they say, “Oh, they have a section for this, actually, there’s this idea kind of that I forgot that I had that’d be really great for here.” Or, “Oh, they’re looking for a profile of a bar that’s kind of a dive bar, but has a really interesting sort of cultural backstory. I have like three places that I know that are like that.”
So the difference here is that if you are starting magazine-first, the ideas come at the end, okay? The particular ideas that you’re gonna pitch. And they’re pre-shaped because you don’t even start to think about ideas until you’re looking at the parts of the section that are open to freelancers. So these ideas that you’re specifically honing down and even putting on your “Let’s work on this pitch” list are shaped already by what, not only the readers of this magazine are interested in, but what the editors are commissioning from freelancers in terms of specific type of articles.
When you start idea-first, you have an idea. It might be as drill down to like…there’s, you know, some people I know who write the whole story first, which I would never advise, of course, and then they go look for a home for it. So sometimes people not only have the content and the type of article, but it’s already drilled down to what the story is gonna include.
Sometimes, they just have, you know, this idea, like, for instance, I think this is probably played out by now, but this idea of New York City, where I’m based kind of developing its shoreline and becoming like a waterfront culture. This is happening in a lot of places. But I believe like when we first moved here or something like that, there were a lot of places starting to open on the waterfront and now there’s tons of free events that you can go to. There’s lots of bars. There’s lots of nice places to sit. They have Tango in the evenings, all these kind of things.
Where it used to be that nobody would ever really go there. There was nowhere to walk along the rivers. The rivers were dirty. You know, who knows, you might find a body like they do in the TV shows, whatever. So let’s say that that is your idea, and you’re kind of even taking it a little further. Like maybe you want to do a round-up of some of the new restaurants that are on the waterfront that are kind of hopping.
So if that’s your idea that you’re departing from, you’re already narrowed in terms of the type of article, okay? It has to be that it is a round-up, and you’re narrowed in the content, it has to be about these waterfront restaurants, and intrinsically, you’re also narrowed in other ways because you’re narrowed to magazine sections that will do a round-up just about one city as opposed to roundups that would have to be broader geographically.
You’re also narrowed to roundups that would be a round-up just about one type of place, as in just restaurants, as opposed to roundups that might be restaurants, and activities, and places to stay, which might be more common, but it depends on the magazine. So, now if you’re doing idea-first pitching, you’re equipped with these parameters, okay? And you’re going out and looking for magazine sections that have those parameters and magazines where the audience would hopefully be interested in this idea.
And then hoping that the parameters in that magazine section that the content that you’re interested in writing would also work for the editor in that section. So there’s a lot more question marks, okay, as you’ll see as we go along, but that’s kind of the basic difference between idea-first and magazine-first, okay? Is whether you start with the idea and then look for magazines, or you start with magazines and then look for ideas, okay?
So, again, if you’ve never heard of those before, don’t worry. I made them up for you. There’s a lot of times when there’s a concept I see a lot of writers struggling with where editors say, “Just do this.” In this case, editors say, “Just read the magazine.” But that doesn’t help saying just read the magazine. Because if you don’t know how to look at the magazine like an editor does, if you don’t know how to look at it, specifically with an eye to what ideas to pitch them, the advice, “Just look at the magazine,” does not get you anywhere.
So this is the exact…I’ve kind of written them next to each other. This is the exact sort of process of working magazine-first versus working idea-first, okay? So in our idea-first webinar series, what we did was we actually went through, and we had six webinars on this topic. And it was very different than what we’re doing in this series in terms of the series that I’m doing now with the magazine-first ideas, I’m kind of teaching you guys a method, okay? So I’m talking about why we do things this way. I’m walking you through how to do it and whatnot.
But, in this previous webinar that we did, it was a live workshop. So what that means is that in each webinar, I was only doing the work to put together these pitches on the screen with you so that you could see how long it takes me, how I make decisions, and each little piece, so to say, of this process and how it went together. And so the way that we segmented out our webinar series on this is a little bit different than I have here on the screen. So, I’m just gonna tell you that for a second.
So, again, it’s a little different because, in that one, I was doing in front of you, so there’s a lot of kind of seeing exactly how I would look at things, what kind of things I might look up to go into the pitches. It’s also a lot about writing the pitches, okay? So, in that one, we started with the same thing that I’ve got a number one here on the screen for you. So, in the first webinar, we took a trip that I had gone on, it was a press trip, a couple press trips actually, but it was kind of a round trip in the Czech Republic last year for the TBEX’s Conference.
And I went through the itineraries that I had and jotted down from memory all of the different things that struck me in the different stops that we went on that might potentially be article ideas, okay? And I ended up with a list, I believe, of 39 potential article ideas. And then the next thing that we did was that we took all of those article ideas, and then I went to the Travel Magazine Database, and I pulled up a bunch of likely subjects in terms of magazines that I think maybe some of these articles might work in because the audience seems like it might be good. So, I have the advantage of knowing the magazines there, right, which not everybody has.
So I was able to kind of narrow down which magazines I was looking at in the first place. But also, I only did this in about an hour, including some time for explanation. So if you were to be spending more hours on this, you would have gotten more matches. But what I did was I took the ideas we had, and I looked for how many magazine sections can we come up with that we might be able to pitch these two. And I ended up, again, with like about 30. Not exactly every section that I found was for just one article idea.
So there’s some article ideas that I didn’t find homes for exactly just in that one quick time when we were running through, and then there were some that I found multiple homes for. Like I had this idea around interviewing someone who was kind of like a local sort of representative of being a local in Prague. Again, we found several different places that we could put that.
But interestingly, and what happens in this step two of working idea-first is that we ran into the issue that a lot of the places that I had been on this trip were not super off the beaten path. Like, they had UNESCO heritage sites and things like that, but it was difficult to figure out, even among European, more regional magazines, who would take a story on something kind of out of Prague or out of Brno or whatever in the Czech Republic. That was a big stumbling block that we ran into in that series that you also run into when you work idea-first.
And I know often the stories that people that I work with are looking at are not just kind of like a basic city guide of a major city. They’re gonna be more interesting that they took, you know, a trip where it seems like, well, you know, “I might be the only writer who has this information, why can’t I find a place that would be interested in it?” And so that can be one of the things that can really drag you down working idea-first, is to be trying to figure out what magazine would possibly work for this idea, okay?
And then the next thing that we did in the series that you’ll also see as number three here is that we looked really closely at each of the magazine matches, potential matches, rather, that we had found, and we said, “Okay, how likely is it that the editor would actually accept this idea for the story?” Like, the format seems right, but do they cover, not just this destination, but do they cover this type of story arc around this destination? Do they cover this size of business if it’s a business profile?
Do they cover destinations that are this far from an airport, like I mentioned, that are this many people that have, you know, this number of attractions? And so we tried to really drill down in that way. And that’s a really important thing to do when you work idea-first because you’re looking in so many magazines that you need to take sort of two separate passes to make that initial step of, “Okay, this looks like this might work here,” and then go back and do more due diligence to see so that you don’t send an editor a pitch that’s really way off-base for him or her.
And then, we actually did that over the course of two webinars in the series, and then we worked on lining up the pitches. So when you’re working idea-first, and we’ll talk again a little bit later in this webinar about the times when I do think that, you know, that’s a potential method for you. So when you’re working idea-first, you’re trying to play stories from a trip, and so you’re typically kind of writing as many pitches as possible.
And so, in terms of scheduling, this gets you into a situation where you might be doing a pitch blitz. So you’ll need to have for instance, perhaps like a large amount of time set aside where you’re doing all of this research and matching work, and then another large set of time set aside in order to write the pitches and get them out, and then also a set of time set aside to follow up on them to make sure that you don’t miss that.
And then, unless you have some other… This is the tough part. If you’re pitching idea-first, particularly if you’re working with one idea at a time, you don’t typically have something to go back to that same editor that you just pitched with and say, “Here’s a new idea for you.” And if you’ve caught my webinar on “The Art of the Follow Up”, this is a really important part of the way we teach follow-ups, and it’s really effective. Which is that you send a pitch in a week or two weeks depending on when you’re doing online, or print, or how sort of time-sensitive the story idea is, in a week or two weeks, you go back and you just say, “Hey, what questions do you have about this pitch so that I can answer for you?”
But then in another two weeks, you essentially declare it dead to them without saying so in a way that could feel kind of like you’re backing the editor into a corner. So rather than saying this very anemic but common phrase of, you know, “Can you let me know if you’re not interested in this because I’d like to take it to another publication if you aren’t.” You say, “Hey, Sarah, editor, it seems like you weren’t interested in my pitch on Torcello. Here’s another pitch for you on, you know, pop up popsicle stands,” and then you put the new pitch.
And what happens there is that we activate a really cool psychological reflex, which is that rather than backing them into a corner saying, you know, “I who you owe nothing to need you to look at this pitch to tell me something. Guilt, guilt, guilt, lack of leverage,” okay? Instead of saying that, we’re saying, “Hey, I’m in demand. I’ve got lots of ideas. You don’t want that one? Cool, here’s another one.”
And then the editor is like, “Wait, did I want the other idea?” And they feel the scarcity rather than you having the scarcity. And then they go back and look at that other idea. And I can’t tell you how often people tell me, “Oh my God, that really worked. Somebody bought my idea when I sent them the next idea because they went back to look at the first idea, and then they bought it.” Okay?
So this is one of the problems with idea-first that people don’t think about, which is that your follow-ups lack oomph and leverage, okay? Because you’re not able to project this sort of like, “Yeah, I’ve got lots of ideas. Here’s a new idea,” because you just don’t have another one lined up that you can easily send them. And then what often can happen as well is that if the editor gets back to you, and says, “Oh, thanks so much. This won’t work for us this time, but feel free to send us more pitches.”
I know a lot of people whig out when they get those emails because they don’t know what to pitch next, okay? They don’t have another idea for that editor. But then they kind of feel like they have to drop everything and get to know the magazine and find a new idea. Because, you know, Lordy, like, this editor got back to you and asked you for pitches, so what else are you gonna pitch her, right?
So, as you can see, there’s a lot of, and again, we’ll look at kind of the pros and cons in a second, but there’s a lot of potential drawbacks to this idea-first method. So let’s look in more detail about the magazine-first process. So in the magazine-first process, the very first thing that you do is that you very diligently and specifically select the magazines that you’re gonna pitch.
And as with everything that we kind of counsel or teach as a process here at Dream Travel Writing, we advise you in a very sustainable manner. And so what I mean by that is that as you’re choosing the magazines to pitch… We’ll look at this again in a lot of detail in the upcoming webinars. But as you’re choosing the magazines to pitch, you look at it with your goals in mind, but also with your circumstances.
So we look at it in terms of what magazines are you gonna have a lot of ideas for first and foremost? But then, just because you have a lot of ideas for a magazine, is it a magazine you really want to write for? Does the voice fit you? Do the values fit you, okay? Does the persona of the ideal reader fit you? And, does the magazine fit you in terms of the pay that you’d like to be earning right now?
For some people, that’s a non-issue. For some people, it’s like the first stop. I had somebody who is a…writes features for “Travel + Leisure” and whatnot and was an, you know, avid user of our database who came and told me that he really wanted to know right away if a magazine paid or not. Because for him, it’s literally not even worth clicking two screens to get to see if the magazine pays because he’s at such a level that that to him is the very first consideration.
He doesn’t wanna open the magazine and then go to the How-to Pitch tab, and scroll down to the bottom and see the pay rate, or if the pay rate is unknown, okay. He wants to know right away. He only wants to even spend two seconds clicking on magazines that he knows are gonna pay. And that is not the situation for everyone. Not everyone is at a place with their writing that they can have the luxury of making decisions on that level about who they will pitch, okay?
But whatever level you’re at, you do have something, which is either what you think you should be earning right now, what you’d like to earn in a little bit. And so it’s important to take those goals into account in the spread of the magazines that you choose. Because if you find yourself only pitching magazines that don’t pay because if you’re okay with that, right now, but then you have a bunch of relationships with places that don’t pay, and then how do you grow? You have to start over from zero, right?
So another thing is that some people have goals around market position. They want to be writing for national news and magazines, or, even more specifically, they want to be writing for national news and magazines that are only exclusively travel magazines like “Conde Nast Traveler,” or “Travel + Leisure,” or “AFAR,” or something like that. Now, if that is your goal, rather than your present reality, it’s, again, important to make sure that you’re not exclusively pitching those. That you are giving yourself something that will also furnish bylines in the meantime, unless you have the freedom to just pitch, and pitch, and pitch, pitch, and pitch, and pitch, and pitch, only that, and not have any, you know, incremental steps in the meantime, and you have the constitution that that’s okay with you.
So when we look at this magazine-first approach, we spend a lot of time making sure that the magazines that we have selected upfront are optimized in a number of different ways so that you don’t spend time getting to know a bunch of magazines, reading them, learning their sections, starting to shape your brains that the ideas that you see in the world come neatly packaged just for these magazines, so that you don’t spend that time on magazines that are not the best use of it, okay?
This is really important because, as humans, we all have this sunk costs thing. Sunk costs, if you’re not familiar with it, is when you make decisions based on how much time you’ve put into something, even though that’s in the past and doesn’t technically have any bearing on the future. But it’s this feeling of sunk costs and making decisions out of it, okay? So that’s the first step for magazine-first, and we’re gonna spend a bunch of time on that in this webinar series.
And then, you’re gonna create a list, a special list for yourself that is not super, super detailed, but it’s more of a brain dump of potential article ideas for each individual section of the magazine that you’re looking at pitching. Now, we do this for a couple of reasons. There might be certain ideas, right? Everybody loves idea-first pitching. There might be certain ideas that you’re really clung to right now that are very present for you that you’re really looking for homes for.
But we begin with this massive brain dump that should be as detailed as possible to unearth all ideas that you have bopping around in the back of your mind during your previous travels, or maybe just things that you’ve seen online, or heard from somebody, or whatnot that could be a fit for these magazines that we’re looking at targeting. And we do that in one batch before we pick out ideas to work for because then we wanna choose the best idea, not the idea you’re most attached to right now, but the best, most closest fit for that magazine to start with, okay?
But we have all the other ideas there. And that means that once you’ve sent that first pitch to the editor, you can already start working on the next pitch to that editor. So you can have it ready for him or her for that moment when you get that reply email, or if you don’t get a reply email, for that, “Hey, it seemed like you weren’t interested in my first pitch. Here’s a new one for you to consider.” Okay?
So that is the process of magazine-first pitching sort of in overview as well as idea-first pitching. And, like I said, we have the webinars already on the idea-first pitching if you want to check those out, and like I said, those walk through me literally putting the pitches together in front of you, me looking through the magazines so you can see what I’m looking forward to see if an article idea is a fit or not, all of those things
But the magazine-first is one we are gonna embark on as part of this series. Now, as we start to look at which type of pitching you should utilize in each situation, I wanna say something unfortunate. I only have one pro here for idea-first pitching, okay? And the reason for that is that the pro of idea-first pitching, you’ll see that there’s a bunch of cons going up, but the pro of idea-first pitching is really this thrill of having an article idea that you’ve had on your own that you’ve generated independently and somebody saying yes to it and telling you that it’s valuable and that they want to offer you money for it, okay?
That’s the pro of idea-first pitching. It’s a fantastic feeling. The thing is, there’s also a pro of magazine-first pitching. Because as we talked about when we looked at the overview of how these two processes work, when you do magazine-first pitching, you’re still generating ideas that you are interested in, that are your ideas for each of the magazines that you’re gonna pitch. But you’re just starting with the buckets and the frameworks that are already given to you by the magazine, okay?
That’s the difference here. But you still get that same thrill, okay? But the other pros of magazine-first pitching is that because you’re pitching fewer magazines, you have to spend less time familiarizing yourself with the magazines because you’re more familiar with the magazines because you work with them regularly and they’re top of mind for you. You also have to spend less time verifying if your articles are a good fit.
Because you are emailing these editors regularly, you also have a warmer reception to your pitches because they’ve seen your name in their inbox before. And because they’re seeing your name more regularly and often getting back to you, even if it’s a no that has no sort of bearing on, you know, your ability to pitch like we already assign that idea, or we have a similar story running to a different destination or something, you’re building relationships with editors as a result.
And because you have relationships with these editors, you have a better chance of them thinking of you in an editorial meeting and about an idea that you haven’t pitched them, but that they wanna assign to someone. I know even in the case of…it wasn’t a far…I think it was close to living. Even major news and magazines will take article ideas that they’ve generated in-house and assign them to writers that they’ve never worked with if they liked the pitches from that writer that have been coming in. And they just wish that there was a good story that they could work on with that writer, but it just hasn’t worked out yet, okay?
And because you have these relationships with editors, and perhaps before they even assign you the first story, they’re getting to know you as an idea generator, as a writer, as a professional in the field, you have a better chance of getting a higher rate from them right off the bat because they have more respect for you. So if we go back here for a second to the processes around this, this is where we start to see a lot of the cons.
So, you know, we can also kind of class that all of these things that I’ve said to you here, you know, less time familiarizing yourself with magazines for magazine-first pitching, that’s gonna be a con for idea-first pitching, right, as well. So it’s gonna take you more time to familiarize yourself with magazines, more time to verify if the articles are gonna be a good fit.
You’re gonna have a cold reception for all of your pitches because you’re pitching so many different magazines. You’re not gonna build relationships with editors, and so on, and so forth. But we can also see here in the process a number of these cons. So, with magazine-first pitching, we’ll see that one con is that you perhaps, it depends, but perhaps you aren’t getting pitches out the door in the beginning because there’s a lot of this sort of upfront setup time of choosing the magazines, right?
Whereas with idea-first, you could find one magazine that seems like a fit for this idea that you’re trying to pitch and shoot that out. So you might have an idea going out faster with idea-first pitching than with magazine-first pitching, okay? But we also see that the con that we talked about quite a bit with idea-first pitching comes on the back end, which is that you don’t have another article idea to send to that editor.
But the big cons with idea-first magazine are really the time, okay? It’s the time that goes into finding all these different magazines, the time that goes into familiarizing yourself with them enough to know if this idea is a fit or not. And for me, what’s the big sort of tragedy of this is that that time is not utilized to its fullest because not only are you spending more time but because you’re not generating more pitch ideas for those magazines. It’s wasted. It’s one-off. It’s like the single-use plastic of pitching, okay?
Pitching a magazine once is like the single-use plastic of pitching, okay? So for me, that’s a real tragedy, okay? Because I know so many people are spending a lot of time familiarizing themselves with magazines but not writing that many pitches for those magazines. And so that’s the kind of thing where, you know, if you’re in the States, the IRS says, “Well, is this a hobby or a business, okay?” And that’s something that we want to avoid quite heavily, okay?
So we looked at the pros, and we looked at the cons. You may be saying now, if I’m so not just gung ho, but, like, I find it to be so much better in terms of efficiency output, meeting your goals, process, all these things, the magazine-first approach, why did I do a webinar series on idea-first pitching in the first place? And the thing here is that I get questions about it all the time because most people are doing idea-first pitching, okay?
This is really important for you to think about and to keep in mind because what it means is that if most people are spending a lot of their time on single-use plastic pitching and not building relationships with editors and pitching editors cold and not showing editors that they have a lot of ideas that can fit their publication, this is an opportunity for you. It’s an opportunity for you to be more focused on sustainability and longevity in your pitching than your peers to supersede them by working faster and more efficiently on your pitching goals and meeting them and being able to move up to the next stage of goals.
And most importantly, it’s really true, editors are typically not getting repeat pitches from people that they would like to get repeat pitches from, okay? Editors get repeat pitches from like, you know, people who are totally not on point, or like wackos, or just enthusiastic readers with no writing ability, or whatever. But it’s very uncommon. I hear this from editors all the time. If they tell you to send them more pitches, they do really mean it.
And even if they don’t tell you, if they don’t create some sort of weird wonky lie/never ever, ever get back to you after 200 pitches, they aren’t trying to get rid of you. They’re just waiting for the right pitch to come from you, okay? So I really recommend magazine-first pitching, but there are some times where I can see I have done I might recommend to somebody to do idea-first pitching. So let me tell you what those are.
So one of the core times that idea-first pitching becomes sort of a forefront strategy for people is when they have a specific trip that they must place, and this is almost always is because it was sponsored. So you can see now why I often advise people not to get sponsorships. This is part of why because it puts you in this idea-first position, which becomes a huge time suck and takes away from your other goals, okay?
So if you are on a trip which you must place a story for, okay, idea-first pitching looks like the best solution. But this is only when you don’t have any editorial relationships to lean on. I had a whole coaching call with somebody about this the other day who has been going on some press trips recently who wants to go on more press trips, who wants to build some more relationships, but she’s finding that she is understandably having a hard time placing stories from those trips because she doesn’t have relationships with editors already.
And so what she realized is that she actually needs to put the brakes on taking trips for a little bit, even though there are, you know, relationship she wants to build with tourism boards and things like that, and focus on building relationships with the editors in order to have somebody ready and knowing her and trusting her who will buy the stories from those trips, okay? So when I say that this is a good time to use idea-first pitching, I only mean when you don’t have the option to build relationships with the editors, okay?
If you have the luxury of time, I would work definitely recommend if you are interested in press trips to, in fact, build the editorial relationships first before pursuing trips, rather than the other way around. This is something that I’ve seen is just a huge door opener. I had for a long time, several trade magazines that I wrote for regularly, and I know several other people that I work with that I coach who have done this as well who have built up some relationships with trade magazine editors, which is great because then you’re not having to pitch for every story idea. You’re getting them coming to you with a story ideas.
So, you’ve got your relationships with the editors, okay? And then you can go to the destinations you want to go to or the press trips you’ve been invited on and say, “Hey, you know, I have this relationship with this editor. I can talk to this editor about what would be the best way to incorporate this trip into a story. You know, would you be interested in having me on the trip?” Knowing that this is kind of my anchor for this trip, but I’m a freelancer, and I will place this story other places as well afterwards, okay?
Because then you have the ability to go on the trip, know that you’re gonna place a story and have that pressure taken off. But still if you wanna pitch it later in an idea-first format, great. Or if you wanna funnel those article ideas into your pitch plan, we’ll talk about pitch planning later in the series, if you wanna funnel those article ideas into your pitch plan for the magazines that you’re targeting, building relationships with, okay?
Now, the second time in which it makes sense to do idea-first pitching is if you have a publication-oriented goal, okay? So this is when you really wanna place a certain type of article, you really wanna place a certain number of articles, you have a monetary goal that you’re trying to hit. So, for instance, you know, let me look at these through each of these three lenses.
So you have a certain type of byline you want. Okay, so maybe you want to land your first feature. Maybe you want to land first national byline, maybe you want to get a front of book story in an airline magazine. So these are all things that I’ve heard from people recently, okay? So if that is a superseding goal for you, so your income needs are more or less met, let’s say, in other places, and this is something that you’re trying to do as an achievement goal for yourself to show that you can do it to create a framework for going forward, okay.
A lot of ifs there because you have to be really clear if you have this type of goal for the right reason, okay? So if those are your goals, then here’s how you might use an idea-first approach. Because it’s really important here where the… This is why I was saying if that’s the right type of goal. I’ll give you an example. So somebody said the other day that she wanted to get a national byline, and I said, “Why?” And she said, “Because I wanna get the ASJA professional level membership.”
And I said, “Okay, why?” “Because that allows you to do these client connections meetings with certain content marketing agencies that I really wanna meet.” And I said, “Well, why do you need to do the professional-level ASJA membership for that? Why can’t you just set up your own meetings with those people? Why do we have to go do all the work to get a national byline to get this ASJA level to get these meetings when you’re still gonna have to pitch them in those meetings, okay? There’s still gonna be like only warm meetings at best,” all right?
And this is the kind of thing where if you want a national byline, for instance, because, you know, it will make you feel like your family can finally understand what you’re doing, I get that, okay? Literally, this happened to me with my grandmother. She’s like, “I want to subscribe to this magazine.” I was like, “Okay, great. I’m glad you like my article on it.” You know, but I totally get that, okay?
So if your goal is to get a byline in a national magazine, for instance, okay, now, let’s look at this. Because if your goal is just to get a byline in a national magazine, you still might actually be better off using a magazine-first approach, right? Pick a bunch of national magazines that you have good odds with to make sure that you meet that, right?
So that’s still a little bit wonky, okay? But if your goal is to place a specific story in a national-level magazine, then we get into different territory. That’s where you know, we have a specific trip you’ve been on that you really feel like this needs national-level exposure, and you’re gonna go pursue that strategy, the idea-first strategy, okay? So you can see why, again, it’s very dependent on your specific circumstances. And this is why when we coach, we ask a lot of why questions around this kind of thing.
So let’s look at the next one, a number of bylines. I just worked through this with somebody the other day. So she really wants to place, I believe it’s like 20… It’s kind of like 20 bylines or 2020, but I just thought of that. We didn’t think about that at the time when we were working on this. So she really wants to get 20 bylines under her belt, let’s say, okay, and I believe that the timeline that we ended up setting for this was something like August of next year, okay?
And we were talking about how to set that up. And she was saying, you know, “Should I have a goal of like a certain amount of bylines a month, or of building relationships, or what?” And what we ultimately said is if she really is set on having kind of like a number, she wants a number of clips, she kind of wants some diversity in her portfolio, things like this, then it’s probably better to have it as a publication goal so that she can be flexible on how she gets it.
So what that means is, let’s say that things are ticking along and maybe, you know, for various reasons, she’s been pitching some bigger, harder-to-get-into magazines. So if she gets closer to her goal and finds that those just aren’t working, then she might need to diversify kind of a bit in terms of the approachability of the magazine. So, she might say, like, “Okay, well, let me switch over to some online magazines, some more indie magazines, or some local regional magazines where I’m more likely to land this byline.”
But, again, you’ll see even in that setting, what’s still happening is that she really is just switching the type of magazines that she’s looking at, okay? Now, it just happens that as we were talking about this goal, she had five specific stories that she’s really interested in and really looking at placing. And so, she was really kind of going back and forth about her strategy of, like, is what she wants really to get those five-story ideas out there into the world somewhere, is it that she wants to build a certain number of relationships with editors, or is it that she wants to have a certain number of publications under her belt?
And what we realized was that they’re kind of three separate things that she needed to look at three separate ways. So what we did was we actually took this placing those stories, and we said, “You know what, let’s see if we can place these stories as part of this 20 bylines endeavor. And if not, we can revisit an idea-first goal of specifically placing those stories later. But if right now, you really want 20 bylines, we should focus on making sure that you’re pitching stories that are likely to get picked up, AKA magazine-first pitching to publications that are gonna be likely to publish them.”
So we kind of rejiggered her goal because she realized that while her publication goal was for a number of bylines that was kind of big in the time ahead of her, she could be flexible on the how. Now, sometimes, though, when people say that they want to publish a certain number of things, it’s actually from a certain trip that they’ve been on, okay? That’s what their goal actually is.
So I was working with someone on this approach the other day, where it was more like, “I went on this trip. There were tons of story ideas. You know, I have so many different things. I’m gonna sit down, and I’m only gonna pitch this one trip until I get seven placements from this one trip,” okay? So that’s when we’re looking at a number of bylines, and it does need to be more of an idea-first kind of goal.
Okay, now the next one I had on here is an amount of money. So this is an interesting one because we can have an amount of money goal, which is gonna shake out more as a magazine-first approach because you wanna build the relationships to have the expectation of that money coming in regularly. But you can also have, “I went on this trip. This trip cost me this much. I wanna make sure that I make at least as much back from the articles on this trip,” okay?
So that’s where you’re going in this type of thing where you have an amount-of-money goal that’s related to idea-first pitching. Now, when magazine-first pitching works well, I mentioned kind of a number of the use throughout the webinar. But these are some of the situations in which it would make sense for you to consider it. So, if you’re somebody who really wants to know that your work is going somewhere, okay? So if you’re somebody who wants to know that you’re following a method of pitching that will eventually bring you results, okay?
If you want to spend less time on your pitching and get better results, it sounds so silly. Like, who wouldn’t wanna do that, right? But I tell you, quite honestly, there’s a lot of people who want to spend a lot of time on the research and don’t actually wanna write that many pitches. And then you get back into this thing, like I mentioned, like with the revenue servicing, well, is this a hobby or is this a business, right?
But if you really want to spend less time on your pitching but get more results, having an organized pitch plan that’s magazine-first will be the way to get you there. If you wanna see your work appear in specific magazines, then magazine-first is a no brainer. But the funny thing is a lot of people tell me they want their works to appear in magazines, but they never pitch those magazines.
So, again, this requires kind of committing to yourself that that’s your goal rather than whatever else has been your priority as you’ve been avoiding doing this. Now, if you want to build a career for yourself that focus on magazine writing, then magazine-first is really a must. Because if you’re gonna be a full-time writer or even a part-time freelance writer, you need to make sure that you’re spending as little time marketing as you can and as much time doing revenue-oriented writing as you can. So, it means that building relationship needs to be the core of that.
The last one here is interesting because this is kind of similar to the first one I have on here about you want a method that will guarantee you results from pitching, but it’s a little different. So when I say that you wanna have a method that will guarantee you results, I say that for people who have this concern that they’re spending a lot of time on something and they don’t know where it will go.
A lot of people from blogging have this mindset or just people might have it generally from life. There’s a lot of things in digital marketing or trying to get into travel writing that you may have done in the past that may cause you to feel like you’re spending a lot of time on something with no idea where it’s gonna go, okay? But when I mean when I say that you would rather have a method for your pitching rather than throwing spaghetti, I mean this more for the people who really feel like they need to be organized about how they do their work and how they choose what to do in a given moment.
This is a big theme that I’ve been hearing from people about struggling to know what to work on in any given moment. And as you’ll see, particularly in the last webinar in this series when we talk about putting together a pitch plan, it’s 100% possible to have a lovely little list for yourself of every little next action and your pitch plan that’s gonna take you where you need to go.
I know for some people, it might sound like, “Oh, I can see how that might work.” But for other people, it might be like, “What? I thought I was pitching. I just have to sit there and make a grimace until I know what pitch to write. And then I still don’t know if that’s gonna lay on, and so on, and so forth.” So there is a way where you can always know what is the next pitch that you need to write and be sure that it’s gonna bring you to your goal, and that’s what we’re gonna talk about in the last webinar in this series.
So coming up in the next series, we’re gonna begin, in the next webinar, by talking about how to decide which magazines to pitch, right? I looked at several different criteria for that in terms of what we’re gonna look at when we talk about how. How do we make sure that you create a list that passes that criteria, and most importantly, how to do it without a lot of agitation, how to do it relatively quickly and confidently. And then we’re gonna talk about how to create a personal kind of file or dossier on every magazine that you would like to target with everything that you need to know about them at the tip of your fingers.
You don’t need to re-research every time, I hear a lot of people doing this, but also with all of your ideas that you have set up for them and the sort of low hanging fruit and all that. And then we’re gonna create this magical pitch planner that I mentioned that lets you know at any given day at any given time what you need to be working on to make sure that your pitches move you towards your goals.
It was lovely chatting with you guys today, and I will see you again soon on another webinar.
Introduction to Business Systems for Freelance Travel Writers Transcript
Welcome to the introduction of our new webinar series on Business Systems for Freelance Travel Writers. I’ve just been looking forward to putting this together for you guys. I’m hoping that it will be very revelatory to you guys.
So the idea behind this business system series is on the one hand, the idea that you are a business and how entrepreneurship really works in such a small scale, especially with service-based businesses. I know most of you guys don’t have other people that you contract out to for different bits of your work. But it’s also to explore something that is very near and dear to a lot of what we do here at Dream of Travel Writing, which is this idea of how do you take big business systems, the systems that have been refined by all the academics and their ivory towers? Well, these days business schools are more likely to be beautiful glass skyscraper towers, but you know what I mean. All the academics in their big glass towers, and all the CEOs and they’re even bigger glass towers, and all the consultants and all the research firms who are out there figuring out what is the best way to X? What is the best way to communicate with the client, land a client, maintain communications with the client, maintain your own liability and so on and so forth?
So throughout this series, I will be trying to as much as possible, keep the jargoniness to an absolute minimum because I don’t have an MBA and I don’t…looking at who’s on here, but also thinking through our email list. I don’t know how many people really do have an MBA that follow us, which is part of why we have this company in the first place. But the idea is that big business systems can’t just be plopped onto what we do as freelancers without a lot of interpretation. I was just on a coaching call today, other coaching training call for certification that I’m getting. And they were role playing some situations. And this person was role playing with our sort of training coach as the boss and she was herself, but using some different names with the situation that she had been previously. And it was all about, you know, like, this other person always gets to lead all the projects. Everybody knows that she always gets to lead the projects, why can’t we lead any other projects that I’ve been here a long time. I don’t think there’s opportunities for me. I was just listening to it. And I was like, what? First world problems? It’s so interesting as a freelancer what looks like a first world problem to you, whereas then as a travel writer, we have things that other people think it was first world problems, right?
As a freelancer, for somebody who has, you know, great pay, great benefits, somebody telling them what to work on, giving them, you know, feedback, like that’s going to pay them no matter what they do, is just like, how can you be complaining about this stuff, right? In a certain way, those of you who are still in other positions, I know that you would kind of, you know, gladly trade some of the foibles of the freelance world for what you’re encountering at work right now. But I promise you, once you’re out, swimming in the sea of having to make your own way of it, things will be a little different. So the problems, and the tactics, and the strategies that people in big business use, we can’t just drop into freelancing and we can’t drop into specifically travel writing, without a fair bit of filtering and reimagining.
So what we’re gonna do in this series is gonna be for each “department” and I’ll talk about what those mean of your business, I’m going to break out a whole variety of things that you should or that I recommend you be thinking about, be doing, be cognizant of that our parts of your business, whether you’re attending to them, or not through the lens of what a real freelance travel writing business is like. And today, since, like I said, this is kind of like a big dip into the general business, general entrepreneurship pool, I’m gonna lay a lot of the groundwork today for how we’re going to be discussing these things as we go into the different departments. So particularly what I wanna cover today is, it seems like I already explained why we’re doing this weird series. But I’m gonna give you some more background on that in particular, kind of how it came to me, how it’s worked for me kind of the different influences that I’ve had that I’m going to bring to bear for you guys in the series as well. And then we’re gonna look at, and I tease this a little bit in the blurb introducing today’s webinar, we’re gonna look at two different models. And when I say models, I don’t really mean methodologies. I mean more thought models or sort of constructs to really, hopefully open your eyes a bit about how you are or perhaps in the case, aren’t managing your own business.
And managing I’d use this word here very importantly. I have now got, I guess, five maybe more than that people who work for us regularly and I’ve managed before in a lot of different settings. But it’s really interesting how when you are in a setting where the players involved, including yourself, are all, you know, willing participants as in they need to be willing to participate in whatever is going on. Whether that’s an editor to get them to assign you a story, or you know, a PR to take you on a press trip, or maybe somebody that you’re working with try to get them to the shoot the photos to accompany a piece, or like I said, even corralling yourself to get your work done. It’s very different managing your business, when it’s all relying on this kind of rarefied air of willing participation, and no one can be forced to do anything. That’s a lot of the challenge that those of you in the coaching program that we talk about a lot, but you’ll see how it as we get deeper into the series, you’ll see how it plays out into also kind of managing, if you will, the different parts of your personality to get the different parts of the work that’s required of you done.
And then we’re gonna look at the specific departments that I’ve selected for us to explore in this series. And I did a lot of recon, for lack of a better word about what departments, as in business divisions is also a word that’s used. There’s a couple other terms that are used more in general business, but what other sort of sections, or subsets, or functional roles is another common term are common in different businesses and I kind of like look through all of them, and I look through how they played out, and the different names that they’re given and how they play together and separately. And I distill down a list of the ones that are not just most relevant for us, but really that paint a complete picture of what we’re doing in our business. And I hope that even just today on this intro webinar, seeing how complete that picture is will be hopefully not too stressfully, but a bit of a wakeup call for you guys about what parts of your business you might be overly focusing on and how that can be detrimental to you in both the short and the long term if you neglect some other areas.
And one of the other things that you’ll hear me bring into this series that we’re doing is a lot about, or that stems from coaching. And the reason for that is not just that I am now a certified business coach, I’m also working on another certification on power and influence which is very interesting and a number of things from that will come to bear in this webinar series that we’re doing. But also because whether I coach you one-on-one, or whether you come to one of our live retreats where we do some more small group coaching, coaching is a part of your business, because that’s how you get yourself. And like I said, not to imply too much split personality syndrome, but the different aspects of yourself that we’re gonna explore later is how they translate to entrepreneurship to do the things that need to be done for your business. And so this idea of how people are motivated, and how you prioritize, and how you think about these things is really a major component of what coaching is and what coaching does. So I’m going to bring that background out for you guys, as well.
And of course, you know, this is just how long I’ve been working on my own in the most recent batch, but I’ve been freelancing and running this company for nine years now. I think, exactly today is probably the anniversary of when I quit my last job for the last time. So it’s kind of apropos for us to be doing this now. So I mentioned that before we dive in, I wanted to give you not just a little more background, but grounding, and context, and food for thought on this series. And that’s partially because as somebody who myself has created and grown a freelance business, I was really struck by how much of a pain in the patootie it is to run a different type of business, which is not service-oriented, which is what freelancing is. But more of an overarching business with different moving parts that also provided products that have people coming into you from the web, that have issues that you’ve never even interacted with them before. And so why is this now taking up your time?
For those of you who have blogs, even if you don’t sell anything through your blog, you might be more accustomed to this because you have readers who are coming in kind of putting an onus on you, even though you haven’t sold them anything to have some sort of interaction, answer a question for you, to be accountable for something for different things like that. But even those of you who are strictly on the freelance side, there’s aspects of sort of the more business side of it that you may not have run into yet, that can give you that same sort of gobsmacked feel that I felt when I moved over into this business. And that often comes up when you are in situations where you don’t have direct control of your client load. So one of the reasons that for me it was a transition was that I was really strict about how I worked for a great many years in terms of who my clients were, what are the expectations and being very sure that everything was lined up that I could fulfill that. That, you know, I had processes in place to deliver what I was programmed to deliver, what I had signed on to deliver, and so everything was very comfortable, and confident, and secure in that way. But that meant that I had created my own client relationships entirely.
So, you know, before I switched over to doing this, every single major client that I had and all my clients were giving me, you know, more than $1,000 of work a month, they were all things that I had done myself. Either relationships I had built up through pitching and then doing more work for somebody and building that up over time, or something I had pitched and then landed like a retainer contract right out of the gate. That’s not the reality for most of you guys and for most freelance travel writers today or period. Most people are going through, you know, whether it’s third-party content engines where you might be in the unfortunate position where someone else has negotiated with the client what’s to be provided. They give you some directions that might not be the best reflection of what the client wants. You do your best to do what that says, only to find out that it has to be redone, you can’t be paid, the time has been pushed back whatever that is, because it’s very, very far from what the client wanted because someone else in the chain screwed things up.
Or, you know, the same things happens in magazines, small and large, like on a small magazine side. It might be that, you know, you’re interacting directly with editor-in-chief, you know, they’re able to make decisions, they’re able to assign you things, you feel very comfortable in that setting, only to find out that the publisher comes in and kind of stomps all over everything one day. And really, the editor can’t do anything against the publisher, and you can do even less, because they can just replace you with another freelancer like that. Or at least that’s how the publisher feels because it’s the editor’s job to have to do that, so it’s not their problem. In a large magazine setting, obviously, this happens even more. Perhaps the, you know, you’re working with a major magazine, you’re really delighted to have finally gotten not only a byline, but an ongoing relationship with the editor of this top tier publication that you’ve always dreamed about being publishing in. You’re doing regular assignments, maybe for their front of book, and the next thing you know, maybe your editor isn’t gone, but their editor above them is gone, or the founding editor of the magazine is gone. And now everything is gone pear shaped. Nobody knows if their job is safe. They won’t take a risk on anything. They don’t know what to tell you, because they don’t know what they’re gonna be publishing tomorrow. And your stability has also gone out the window.
So there’s so many different sort of stages that people’s businesses can be in, but at the same time, part of the idea of business is that you provide something that people buy. And that means you’re also relying on what’s going on with your clients’ businesses. So there’s a lot of uncertainty in this world. And, you know, I think maybe I wasn’t so clear on what a huge issue this is before I started coaching people. But if you spend any time on Facebook groups, or hang out with other writers, I’m sure you’ve noticed that uncertainty in general, questioning of oneself, and one’s abilities, and whether we’re doing the right thing out of all of the many, many options we have to market and put together our business, our approach, how we do our work or to maximize our time is a huge sticking point for freelance writers, especially in travel, where dazzling destinations kind of hang outside your consciousness beckoning you to go explore because we all really wanna be traveling more than we wanna be working usually, to be honest, right?
So in this setting, the more certainty you can have, the infinitely better you will be not just because you are better able to provide for your clients what you have told them you will deliver. And like I said, sometimes you’re providing something for a middleman and that can run into issues on the line anyway. But you will also be more secure in your ability to get new work, to know that you can manage your schedule to complete the work that you have assigned, to know that other things like paying your bills or being able to actually step away from your email on a vacation are certainties rather than things you have to constantly let the back of your mind be cycling about. So this idea of certainty seems like something that’s very difficult to come by in this profession. And the best that we can do is to be certain about what we are doing internally for our own systems. I’m actually gonna go back a couple.
So the title of this webinar, introducing this new series that I’ve been talking about the business department series is on systems because really, as we look at everything that’s going on, in each of these “departments” or functional roles of your business, it’s really all about systems. Now, systems sound boring, I get it. Systems sound like, you know, machinery or something like that doesn’t involve humans. They particularly feel like that, they feel like something that sucked, you know, maybe the life and the creativity out of something. Well, I wanna tell you, and I hope I kind of alluded to this earlier, that the beautiful thing about systems is that they if not automated, at least give a flow in a logical sense to other things, to free the both conscious and subconscious parts of your brain, to be more creative. To have big ideas, whether those are ideas for stories that you’re already working on, or for new stories, or for an adventurous trip that you wanna take and to make this happen. And to have more of a state of flow where you can produce your best work. Because I don’t know about you, but that’s personally kind of like the thing that I care about the most is producing the best work. Being able to produce the best work, being able to give the most that I can to every single thing that I’m doing.
So even though systems don’t seem sexy, let me tell you, they are literally singularly the difference that I have seen over all the years of paying attention to these things, between the people, whether it’s a blogger, or a freelancer, or somebody in a different field entirely, who grow from being an entity on the hamster wheel, to a thing. To a business, to a force, to a sense of stability, it is systems. So while, they may not seem sexy, if you’re a person who needs to be excited about things, I recommend you find a way to make them so because that is the difference. Okay? So first and foremost, before we get into talking about what systems specifically are, what they mean to us, what they look like, all these things I want to talk to you a little bit about mindset. I know we talk about this a lot, particularly with people in the coaching program, but I’m gonna talk about something a little different today than I usually talk about. This is gonna be not mindset in a how do we relate to editors, or anything at all related to freelancing way. It’s more sort of general mindset for the entrepreneur, for the business owner.
Now, let me know in the chat box those of you who are graciously and delightfully here today, I love you all, whether you even once a week, we’ll go with once a week, whether the thought process passes through your head once a week, not that you work for yourself, okay? Or that you are freelance or any untethered type thought like that. But this more proactive, positive, creation-oriented thought of I am an entrepreneur, or I own a business. Let me know in the chat box if once a week, at least or, you know, something along those veins, you have that thought kind of pass over you that you are a person who has created a thing. An entrepreneur, you know, I didn’t look up the definition of it before this webinar, even though a lot of what we’re talking about or that we will talk about down the line comes from some seminal books on that topic. But I’d really be curious what the etymology of entrepreneur is because entre is usually between. And I don’t know the Latin root of that pren off the top of my head, but eur is usually like a person who does a thing. So I’m quite curious what that means.
So Lindsay says yes, once a week. Now, I know that I said here, do you think I am an entrepreneur or I own a business? And the idea behind the way that I framed these two questions, is that like I said, it’s not that untethered or slightly negative feeling of I’m freelance, or, you know, I’m independent, or I work for myself, which implies a lack of something else. But more a sense of pride in proprietorship that you are creating a thing, building a thing. It’s not just your writing, but it is also a suite of systems, there goes systems again, right? But it’s also a collection of processes that run that allow a thing to run. And that thing is your business. And that thing is independent from you. So there is a book called, “The E-Myth.” And we’re gonna look a little bit more deeply about this, but I just wanted to let you guys know where this comes from. So the book is called “The E-Myth.”
I have, I guess, maybe I haven’t read the original. I don’t know if the original is still around, or if they only have the kind of new version now. But I’ll tell you the three books of this type in the series, if you will, that I have read and why. So The E-Myth books are, like I said, relatively seminal in terms of owning one’s own business. And they’re not, like they’re not fancy in a lot of ways. And sometimes, you know, and I say this lovingly, they can be a bit sort of random, or rambling, or something like that, or they can seem a little, you know, big picture in a way that can be hard to follow. But that’s because they’re really conceptual-oriented books, where they really outline something that Michael Gerber who wrote that and I believe he has a consulting company, started around this, noticed was holding people back with their businesses. And so he’s really looking to describe, and teach, and get people to be aware of something that’s a little bit intangible, which is, what they’re missing, what’s keeping them from running their business, perhaps as they should or as they’d like to or to achieve the success that they would like to achieve.
So the three that I’ve read are “The E-Myth Revisited,” “E-Myth Mastery,” and “Beyond the E-Myth.” now, I won’t necessarily tell you that one of these is better than the other, they’re all quite different and they serve different purposes. And they seek sort of like Marie Kondo’s litany of books, to explore a concept in different ways, to speak to different people, let’s call it. But I will say that if you want to have a look, “The E-Myth Revisited,” I believe, is kind of the first one of this thread that you should start with. Now, to boil it all down for you, there’s two modules or frameworks, if you will, about business ownership that I’m pulling from this series and also particularly the second one. A lot of others do as well, but this first one I wanna talk to you about is from the series that I wanna speak to you about today. Now, the first one is up on the site right now. It’s this idea of the three business owner personalities, they call it in a way in some blog posts in their site, but in their book, they look at it a little bit differently.
So the idea is that as the basis of this whole E myth concept now, E means entrepreneur. So the idea is the myth of entrepreneurship is what this guy’s concept is based around that entrepreneurship is a myth. Seems kind of like okay, well, then how are you telling us to do it right? But he’s more talking about how people get into being an entrepreneur is a myth. And he talks about this idea of the entrepreneurial fit. And what he means by that is that people don’t necessarily get into this. This meaning entrepreneurship of any type running their own business enterprise, you know, even non-profit. Knowing what they’re getting themselves into, it’s very common to hear people who do, you know, things of this nature, you hear it from people who’ve gone to law school all the time, for instance, that if they knew what they were signing up for they never would have done it, right? How often do you hear that?
Now, this thing with entrepreneurship that he says is basically that, you know, a person is going along, living their life, and then there’s this idea, they have this idea whether it’s an idea for a business or an idea of independence or something. There’s this idea that takes hold of them and this fit. That’s what he means by fit. And this idea is so strong, and so pervasive, and so powerful that they invest, whether it’s time, or resources, or letting other resources go, whatever, that they invest heavily in this dream, and this fit, in this myth. And then at some point down the line, they find themselves in the midst of it, in the midst of all the things that go into actually being an entrepreneur. And they’re like, “Oh, my God, what’s going on?” And it’s like, they wake up from this fit that they were in, okay?
Now, that’s the basis of his entire idea of the E-myth, but I wanted to talk to you right now, and interestingly, I didn’t notice until I put them on the slide because I don’t think he looks into this. But the three sort of facets of the business owner that he talks about spell out EMT, which I think is like a subtle message for all of us, right? About being saved from this fit of entrepreneurship, but I’ll leave you to think about that yourself. So he says that as you wake up from this fit, you settle into different modes of running your business. And there’s three different types. Now, I’m gonna explain to you what the different types are actually starting at the bottom, because I think that’s where a lot of, not you guys specifically, but a lot of writers tend to live. So the technician is not meant in a technical way. The technician is meant to be the person who is focused on the craft, the person who wants to create the best product, the person who is focused on, you know, for lack of a better word, doing the work, the actual output, okay?
Now, that might mean, you know, if you haven’t landed assignments yet, that you’re like constantly worrying over making the best possible pitches. You want them to look the best. You want them to be the best fit for the magazine, you want them to sound just like the magazine, you read 20 issues of an outlet, before you even put together a pitch and then by the time you’ve read them all you’ve convinced yourself that nothing is right and you don’t do any work. Or that can be the person who, you know, is adamant about their hourly rate while making sure that they are satisfying the needs of other clients and putting together the best pros. They’re really into the work in one way, shape or form, whatever the work means to them. Now, when I say they’re really into the work, I am implying because that’s what Michael Gerber implies that there is a bit of a savant dissociative syndromes type focus on the flow of doing the work. They can sometimes ignore the management of the situation and maybe the management of the situation is deadlines, or getting together your photos to go with the piece, or getting your interview set up, or managing your invoices, or managing your schedule generally, or making sure that you take a shower, brush your teeth, and eat your food. Whatever that is. But that oversight, or administration, or managing, or planning, or organizing aspect, that’s the manager.
So before I did this, I had a full time job, which of course I’ve mentioned before at a university, but I also had a second relatively fulltime job, which was that I worked in the theater. I used to be a stage manager. And in theater, there’s a very clear and striking dichotomy between the director, who is the creative person, and the stage manager, who in many ways and particularly wants the show open is the one who’s actually in charge. And it’s interesting, and they have a great way in theater over time that they’ve honed this division. But when you work in a professional theatre setting, as opposed to, you know, a school theater setting, which some people may be familiar with, or maybe an amateur or community theater setting, it often seems more like the power lies in the director, but that’s because the director is often doing some of the roles of the stage manager. In theater, the stage manager makes a lot of decisions, which I think a lot of people don’t realize, about who to schedule when, what’s the best way to work through the scenes? How much time should be spent rehearsing each scene, and a whole litany of other things, you know, especially as you get closer to production.
And as a stage manager, I also had to run a meeting every night before the show opened. So I had one show, this award winning show that we worked on that ran for, I don’t know, three, four, five weeks, something like that. We did quite a few shows a week, I think we were only dark, which means there’s no show on Monday or Tuesday. So Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, twice on Saturday, maybe twice on Sunday, where they’re doing our shows. So before every evening, and people would trickle in, they’d start doing their warm ups or whatever, you know, weird things diva actors do to get ready. La, la, la, la, you know, weird stretches, yoga, tango, whatever it was. And then I would corral the 40 odd dancers and backstage people and actors, and we’d have a meeting and I would go through all sorts of stuff. And it was my job to know every single thing that was happening. I had to put out a report about it every night, I had to report if there was a button off of a costume that needed to be redone. You know, if somebody complained about the heat in their dressing rooms, I was the center point of all information.
Now, as freelancers, we are all inherently forced to be the center point of all this information, but we do different things with it. You know, I’ve worked with a lot, a number. I don’t know if I wanna say a lot. But I’ve worked with a number of writers, as a one-on-one coach on their business. And I will definitely say that people take to this manager aspect very differently. Some people are organized to the point of being so organized that they might be neglecting some of the creative work. And what I mean by that is that they are in love with the organization, they’re in love with the spreadsheets. There’s some, I bet one of you on here knowing who’s on the call today, but one of you knows what this is. But there’s some table-oriented new app or something that’s come up that people use instead of Excel to make these elaborate tables for themselves. I don’t know if anybody on here knows about this, but, you know, I’ve seen people who we talked about pitching, and they show me all of their beautiful organization. And then I ask where they work, the technician aspect of it, the actual sending out of the pitches, the grunt work, if you wanna call it or what have you. I ask where that is and the answer is nowhere, because they’re more managers.
Now, I’ll explain why being one of these more than the other is not a bad thing in a minute. So don’t think that I’m taking this as an admonishment, if people are more managers.
Air table. Yes, Mackenzie, thank you so much. And I thought someone had mentioned it recently. I think it was you on our call. Thank you for that. I’m curious to check it out someday without falling down the rabbit hole because, as I mentioned, I’m really a manager at heart. So the difference though, between the manager though, and the idea bomb dropper, as you may have heard me say before, or the visionary is the space between this entrepreneur and the manager. Now, Mackenzie, who’s on the call, I know we just spoke recently, I won’t give away too much, but we spoke recently about how she was, you know, doing a slight bit of if you wanna call it procrastination, but you could call it airing of her creativity, to think through a lot of different business ideas recently, and they were actually quite good. And, you know, she’s gonna, I hope, pursue some of them.
And the entrepreneur is that type of person, they are somebody who goes around and they can’t help, but see the kernel of something that can, you know, with an appropriate, you know, fanning of air from the bellows develop into a beautiful full-fledged idea, or business, or article, or something. The entrepreneur is the person who looks around and sees the seeds that are under the ground that most people don’t have that extra vision to see, but not just as the seeds, but as the flowers that they would develop into. But they’re not the technician. They’re not the person who’s gonna do the work to make sure that those flowers grow. And they’re not the manager. They’re not the person who’s gonna decide what is the best spacing of the rose to plant those seeds in so that you get the most delightful landscape. Or what is the best timeline to plant those seeds and to make sure that you have flowers all year long, that’s the manager.
So I hope that small garden analogy has helped you see kind of how to create something, in the case that I just use a flower garden, you need to have all three. If you just have one, you’ll have, you know, a beautiful something, whether it might be like some beautiful work being done, but maybe it’s not the best thing. Or, you know, it’s just the thing that the person picked up, you’ll have a beautiful plan that will never be executed, because you have a beautiful idea that doesn’t even have a plan attached. But it’s so beautiful, this idea of the entrepreneur can explain it and sway hearts and minds with the beauty of this idea. Okay, so those are the three according to the E-Myth, the three sort of if you wanna call them maybe the functional roles, or aspects, or personalities, or, you know, we could say that all entrepreneurs have split personalities. But those are the three warring business owners inside of everybody who has this entrepreneurial fit, and goes off and creates their own business.
They wouldn’t get anywhere if they didn’t have that technician to actually do some of the work sometimes that was sold to somebody that allowed them to actually have a business. They wouldn’t get that work out there if they didn’t have the manager who actually made sure that things are getting done. And it wouldn’t get bought, nothing would happen if the entrepreneur didn’t know what was the right thing, the thing that would interest and delight people to do in the first place to pass on to the manager and the technician. I told you, we’re going to do about two different frameworks today for thinking about your business. And interestingly/ironically, you’ll see that they have only kind of, you know, secondary or tertiary connections to what we’re doing with this department model, but that’s because, like I said at the beginning, you need the grounding in these frameworks to understand where we’re going.
So I tell you this about the entrepreneur, and the manager, and the technician. So you can understand as we go through all of these different sort of job roles, or functional roles, or business departments as you will, as we go through each of these, your affinity or aversion to them, likely plays strongly back to where they fit if you were to sort them out into these three types of work, okay? So we tend to, like I said, you wouldn’t have actually gotten going as a business if you’re only one, right? Those people tend to remain employees so that other people can be paid to do that bit of work that they’re not doing. But we tend towards one. Sometimes we tend towards two. A number of us are great in all of them, but we still have one or another that we would prefer to be doing. Sometimes that can change based on your different seasons in life, right? Like, you know, I think I wrote about this in the webinar recently, but I used the Isabel Allende model that in the winter, as someone recently said on a coaching call, you know, when things are sort of scarce, and sparse, and, you know, there’s not a lot of light and energy that’s when I am the technician. That’s when I sit down and I focus and I do big books, or projects, or, you know, write a whole at home program or something like that.
There’s other times when I have to be the manager. I’ll just take, you know, like a week or two at a time and just do a ton of organizing. I’ll plan all my trips for the year, all sorts of stuff. And then there’s other times when I have to be the entrepreneur, and I have to just kind of like free my mind of everything else and just have big ideas, okay? So we all have to do all of them, and you have some ability, at least if not affinity, for all of them. I promise you or you wouldn’t even be here listening to this right now. But it’s important as we start talking about the different business departments to feel and listen, particularly listen to yourself, when you feel that affinity or on the flip side, when you feel that aversion to different types of work, intrinsic to running your business. Because it traces back to this. It traces back to the three different business center personalities. And you can tell yourself, well, I have to do my taxes because I just have to do my taxes.
But if you can tell it to yourself through the lens of, you know, doing my taxes is such a technician thing, but not about words, about numbers. And I’m not a technician when it comes to numbers, and that’s why I hate doing this. And it kind of, you know, you understand it more, I don’t know if it will make you do it more. But then what you can tell yourself as a manager is, hey, my technician self really hates to be a technician with numbers, it prefers to be a technician with words. Let me tell the entrepreneur, the idea side, that we have a problem here because this workflow of, you know, forcing all the taxes to be done last minute or my expenses doing at the end of the month or whatever isn’t working. And I as the manager wanna have a better and more harmonious system. And then your entrepreneur can come in to save your technician and say, hmm, a technician hates numbers, but this has to be done. Like what’s the most beautiful solution I can come up with here, okay?
So once you start kind of looking at these different hats, not just as buckets that you may or may not fall into one more than another one a different time, but see them as kind of working together and as this tripod that supports each other. And as a system well, as a triad without which nothing really can move forward in your business. You can’t do it is only the technician or only the manager, or only the entrepreneur. That can also allow more beautiful solutions or, you know, more harmonious or whatever solutions to different issues of affinity or, you know, like, you know, over affinity or over aversion that you’re running into where you’re not doing too much of one thing because you’re just too enamored with doing another. When you start to kind of run them through each of these different frameworks it can help you to find better solutions for yourself.
Now, I said that we’re gonna be talking about these functional roles or business departments. We’re just gonna stick with the word business departments for now. But as we get into talking about each of these things, I’m gonna tell you in a little bit what each of those things are. It’s important to begin by thinking about what you’re actually doing for each of these now. So like, if I sent to you, you know, like accounting, you’re probably gonna have some idea of what you do or don’t as the case may be, like in my case. What you do or don’t do for that area of your business now in terms of the role, right? You can probably kind of know to yourself at some point I have to do my taxes. I hope that you are, you know, being clever enough with your research that you’re not actually having to pay the government for your business at this point. But either quarterly you have to pay the government money, or at least once a year, you have to pull these numbers together for your taxes, you know that you need to be tracking, you know, your mileage, your cell phone bill, your internet bill, you know, what percentage of your home counts as your office. You know, like your expenses for…if you’re having a meeting with somebody, like let’s say, you and I meet at a conference and we have lunch, you know, that counts as a meeting.
You know, on some level, the different things that go into that. You kind of know because you have to do it eventually. What are the different tasks that go into doing that at least tax accountant part of your business? But when what about the other side of your business? Do you actually, you know, have a list somewhere or whether in your head or externally about all of the different things that you do for your business? Like, if you had to hire somebody to replace you, which obviously wouldn’t make any sense because all of our businesses are very much a mirror of us. But if let’s say you were going on maternity leave, or I don’t know something like that, and you were going to bring in another writer that you knew to take over all of your work for short time, which might have ethical issues and whatnot. So this is a very made up scenario. What job description when you write for that person? What are all of the things that go into doing your job?
Now, I bet there’s a lot of silence systems, meaning things that you do in a repeatable way that you maybe don’t think about doing in a repeatable way. Maybe it’s a way that you do things in the morning kind of that you process out emails, or interactions with clients, or something like that. Maybe you have a silent process for how you go about setting up all the interviews and other research you need to do for pieces for your regular clients, where it’s really kind of an automatic system that you fall into as soon as you get an assignment. You probably have different things like this, where if you thought about it, you could sit down and write out the tasks. But I wanna challenge you and we’re gonna flip over to a PDF for a second. Let me just make sure it’s on the right page. I wanna challenge you to think about the idea that you’re…okay, got it. Okay, let me open this link for you guys. That your business actually is not just you, that your business is made up of many different yous, that each are sort of different employees, so to speak, who have different roles, and each of them has a job description, okay?
So in and I couldn’t figure out which of the three rather long books this was in. In the E-Myth books, there is one really lovely section where they talk about a business that started by two gentlemen, I believe it’s supposed to be two brothers, okay? And as they started this business, they think about what it’s gonna be, they think about what kind of work each person is best suited to. But they also think about all of the work that needs to get done. And they sit there and they make for themselves an org chart of all of the different tasks that need to get done for this business if they wanna start to run. I believe the example that they used in the book is like a cobbler making shoes or something like that. So somebody has to order supplies, somebody has to, you know, go deliver the completed shoes to the customers. Somebody has to man the till so that when customers come in, they can buy shoes that have already been completed, and so on and so forth.
And so they’re all of these kind of different roles that work in this “cobbler company” that they do. But then they do something really cool in the book. So the, you know, we’ve got this whole cobbler metric going along, okay? And then what happens is, as they’re talking about the different roles, and they’re talking about the brothers, and they’re talking about which brother is best suited to do what and, you know, maybe this brother is actually better at all of these things. But it doesn’t make sense to have him do all of it. So they say, “Okay, well, you know, this brother is gonna do this bit, and then just to give him a little bit of relief, the other brother is gonna do this.” What they do is that they sign position statements. And I’m just trying to pull this PDF for you in the background, sorry. They sign position statements for each of the roles in the org chart that they have created. So, all right, here we go. I got it now.
So let me show you what this org chart idea looks like because I’ve got one for us, but because we do a lot of different things like the travel magazine database, which means writers, and all this stuff, it’s not gonna look quite the same as one would look for you guys. And let me flip over. The idea that we’re gonna explore as we get more into the different departments is going to be how you flush out your org chart. So don’t feel like you need to sit down after this call and create one right now unless you want to. If you wanna create one and then add to it as we go along, that’s absolutely fine and great. So okay, great. So you’re seeing this now. So this idea of the org chart, I think we’re all familiar with if we’ve been in some other roles before. If you haven’t been in some other roles the idea is, you know, this big box at the top would be the boss person, and then these are the people who report to the boss person, and then there’s people under that.
So you know, let’s say in this case, right? They put the president and some people under that, lead generation, lead conversion, market development, this is great. And I will use this for us because we all have these roles, even if we don’t think about it, okay? So you are a freelancer, okay? Now, one half of your personality, okay, is the president and chief of your business, all right? But a big part of being a freelancer is getting the work to come in, right? So that’s these different aspects of lead generation. Lead generation is having leads come to you. So if you think about lead generation for a freelancer, that might mean, you know, maybe your social media, you know, making sure that your LinkedIn profile is updated. That also might mean applying to job ads that you see listed. It might also be the cold emails that you’re sending out. But also there’s this role or, you know, hat if you want of lead conversion. I know this is the part everybody hates, but this is closing those deals. So this is when somebody writes back to your email that you’ve applied to a job ad and they say, “Tell us more.”
Then the person who specializes in conversion or the, you know, the personality or what have you jumps in. Because that’s a different skill set, right? To close the deal is a different skill set than finding all those opportunities, right? So, as they go down here, and they flush that out more, you’ll see, and again, we’re gonna go through this as we go into the different departments. But they’ve got the person at the top, and they’ve got marketing that we talked about. And then over here, they’ve got client fulfillment. Client fulfillment is that technician work that a lot of us love to do and would just do if someone else would run our business for us. This is the part where you’re actually doing the writing, right? You’re doing the writing, you’re doing the research, you’re putting articles together, you’re editing them, you’re making sure that they look right and that they fit the speck and they’re going out.
The other side over here is the internal operations. I know a lot of you guys call this admin work, we’re gonna use some different names as we go through that, I’ll explore. But this is making sure that your work is optimized. I know a lot of the managers out there really enjoy doing that. You know that your books are kept so that your accounting is happening, and you’re a receptionist, right? Answering your emails, okay? So I wanted to show you this. So with the org chart, like I said, we’re going to be as we go through each of these different departments, you’re going to start to see for yourself some different sections of your org chart that you should potentially be considering. And you’re also gonna be through this series working on what that org chart means for you, in order to create this idea of the job descriptions, okay?
Once you know what the different sections of your org chart are, then it’s time to think about what do the different people in those different parts, and again, “people” in air quotes. What do the different people in those different parts of your theoretical, but in reality existing org chart do, okay?
So once you know what the roles are in your org chart, then it’s time to create position agreements for each of those roles, okay? I know it feels like we’re going really far down the rabbit hole here in terms of stuff that you don’t actually need to do as a freelance writer. But the whole idea of the series is that I want you guys to be more cognizant of what you really do need to do. And what I mean by that is some of these things you’re already doing, and some of these things you might not be doing, but you ought to think about. And some of these things would actually save you a lot of the work you’re already doing if you did them, okay?
So let’s look at this idea of the position description. And this again, this is an example they have on the E-Myth site and I will… Let’s see. I’ll make a note when we get off the call for Janet to set these up for you, as well in the client libraries for those of you who are in the coaching program. If you’re not in the coaching program, then I’ll make sure that these get added as well to the webinars, in the webinar library if you purchase them, okay? So the position statement, as they call it in the E-Myth world, is that job description that I was talking about for these different facets of your business, okay? It’s got the title, it’s got the results statement, what is the result that this description or that this position is responsible for? We’re talking about the example of the tax accountant before, right? Once a year or some parts of the year, some aspect of your personality is responsible for being the tax accountant for your business and their goal is to optimize or minimize, optimally minimize the amount of money that you need to send to Uncle Sam every month, every year, every quarter, while respecting the laws that govern freelance businesses, right? That is the result statement for your internal tax accountant.
And what do they do? We talked a little bit about what that is. Now, I really like what they do in the position statement here, which is that they break it up into strategic work and tactical work, right? So that goes back to the idea of the different types of the entrepreneurial hat you’re wearing. Whether it’s entrepreneur, the manager, or the tactician right here, or the sort of the technician. Now, this is a really important part that I think that not enough of us think about and that’s why I wanted to specifically show you guys this position agreement guide. This is the kind of work that our entrepreneur hat does, okay? Which is to think of the quality, quantity, and behavior standards for which this position is accountable.
Now, really importantly, I don’t know if you can read this because it’s a little small, it says do not include those that belong on a system action plan. So that means that your lead generation aspect, which is the part of you that’s responsible for pitching, you should not have some numbers in here that are your sort of quotas for yourself, of how many pitches you’d like to get out. But you can have something like, you know, responsible for generating, you know, 50% new client work every year or something like that. You can have something that’s more like, you know, responsible for changing the direction of the business as needed or something like that, okay? So those are sort of some standards, right?
So then, what they do in the book that’s really lovely with these two brothers, is that they have the two brothers think about the org chart. They have them look at which ones they’re all best suited for. Then they split it up to make sure it’s equitable. Then they write down these job descriptions for each role, and then they sign. And then they sign the manager, which means that they’re often responsible for managing themselves. I gave you in the example of these folks in the book that I think it was a cobbler shop. So that means that there’s somebody who is responsible for manning the till. Then there’s somebody who’s responsible for accounting, okay? And then there’s somebody who’s responsible for hitting sales numbers. But of course, these are the all the same dude in this example, so he is his own manager in these different roles.
And then what I actually think is one of the really lovely things about this model is it reminds you that you are responsible, not just for making sure that the work gets done, but also kind of for all of the things that go into that overseeing, you know, for making sure that the different “aspects” of your personality, or roles, or whatnot, have what they need to get the job done, right. How often? I mean, I wanna make sure it doesn’t seem like I’m picking on anybody on this call. But I’ll use my own computer and example. How often are we using equipment that doesn’t help us do our job, right?
I was just telling somebody about some problems I’ve had with my phone, which is stupid because the phone is new, but I’m not able to use my maps. So if I had to be on a press trip, and I was not able to use maps on my phone, and it was taking me forever to get around, then my manager, part of me is keeping the technician who’s on the ground, doing the research work from getting their job done. Because I’m not allowing them to have the resources that they need, okay? So it’s not only important that you accept responsibility for each of your positions, and like I said, I do not encourage you to go write these after this webinar, because we’re gonna look at what really goes into each of these positions and what matters for us as travel writers in this series, okay? But it’s important for you not only to accept the responsibilities, and the standards, and the strategic work of these positions, but also to accept that you are responsible for managing that role, as well as for doing it.
Lindsay just said that she got herself a new laptop after much needed delays. Yeah, for instance, like I have three gigabytes of space left on my laptop, and it keeps crawling to a halt when I try to do things, and I need to take the time to clear out some space. And we’re gonna talk about exactly that kind of stuff when we get to the IT part of the departments. So I’m gonna take that opportunity to switch back over to the slides for a second, to talk about the departments that we’re gonna go through, because I really appreciate you all being here and we’re at the end of our hour, so I don’t wanna keep you for too long.
So let’s have a look at what we’re gonna be doing in the upcoming weeks of the series. I hope you’re all starting to get as excited as I am about doing this and kind of see the possibilities of where this is gonna go in a not stressful way. Because I know the idea of having more work can feel stressful, but it’s all really work that you’re already doing, or that some part of you already knows that you should be doing in the back of your mind, or at least that you should be doing something sort of like this. And what I wanna do is I wanna clarify what that is so that you feel so much more confident that you’ve got this, that you are doing the work that you need to or at least you’re on a path. You know what the work is that needs to be done. And you know you’re not managing that “employee” properly, right? And that you need to help them do their job.
So I have split up what we’re going to do into several, and when I say several, I mean quite a few different departments. And they’re all kind of in these little buckets. So I’m going to go through each of them individually. The order that you’re seeing them here, however, it’s worth noting is not necessarily my final order that I’m going to do them in. I’m still dithering about them just a little bit because I really like things to be, you know, really building upon themselves and sort of perfectly rising to a conclusion. So I might make some changes in this as we go along. And also because nobody likes numbers, and I don’t want to start with that and lose you guys. But this is the way I’m going to talk through it for now.
So this first slide has two subsets on it. One is more if you want to call it high-level forward looking definitively that entrepreneur part of the bucket. Whereas the second ones, though, also very sort of instrumental, fundamental, and the high level in terms of the way they touch your business, they are definitely more manager/technician aspects.
So the one idea, or the one sort of department, governance and strategy, this is really sort of the big picture of where your business is going. And I actually feel like it might make sense to wrap up with this at the end, because this is really in a way, like the combination of all of the little pieces of your business and how you wanna run them. Now, the next one R&D, is something that I think it sounds kind of weird we think of science when I say it. But a lot of you guys do this in different ways. You know, like, one person who’s on here is working on a novel, another one…actually two of you who are on here working on novels, and you really ought to connect because you live near each other. And another one in here is working on a number of essays. And I know a number of you out there also whether it’s, you know, the essays that you’re working on or just pitches to new markets. Or maybe a trip that you wanna take to somewhere that you’re trying to see, you know, if you can expand into that geographic area. So a lot of us do do research and development in different ways.
But in that segment, I wanna look at doing it not just more strategically, but also how to be more cognizant that you’re doing research development and really think about what the goals of research and development are, and how to bring that into the work that you’re already doing.
Now, the next few seem kind of self explanatory, but I wanna take a moment to point out the difference between finance and accounting. Accounting is technician, finance is manager/occasionally entrepreneur, okay? So finance is going to be projections, and cash flows, and things that are grounded in fact, but that are reaching, that are planning, okay? Whereas accounting is actually getting that number crunching done in a way that is not too noxious. Now, the last one on here, which I’m literally actually gonna do a whole week on even though not a whole week, a whole webinar, which seems weird because it sounds like a weird category, is about purchasing. Okay?
For all of us, not just equipment, like Lindsay was just saying she got a new laptop, but purchasing of travel, conferences, different things like that is a big question. It’s a reality, what we do is something that must be considered.
And I wanna look at that as its own category in terms of how to do that, how to approach it? I’ve got a budgetary model around that, that we’ll talk about as well. Now, the “doing” the work part, this includes some management, some technician, and tiny little bit entrepreneur, but mostly management and technician. I talked before about how I wanna draw more of a line in the sand with you guys about what you call admin work, and what is operations work. And we’re gonna dig into that. And operations, we can just think of as a shorthand. I know some of you, particularly who are on the call today are very into this. Operations is really this idea of making the work get done in the best way possible. So there’s like a heavy optimization component to this as well. Looking at workflows and things like that.
Admin, we’ll get into what that is, but I know a lot of you guys have been lumping the accounting, probably less of the finance, but the accounting and also we’ll see in the next slide, just customer service, and also probably legal and a bit of IT into that admin as well. And we’re gonna pull that out and we’re gonna really look at what admin means, how to kind of build that into what you do, what parts are necessary, and maybe which parts you’ve been spending a lot of time on, but perhaps should not. Now, quality control, we’re also gonna devote a whole webinar to because for most businesses, this is a big thing. And I’m not saying that you guys don’t think about quality control, I know you do think about it, and probably too much. But I wanna give you some frameworks for looking at it that can be kind of freeing in terms of systematizing, how you look at quality control, and what levers you actually have available to you to manipulate in that’s setting.
Now HR, actually I’ve got a ton of ideas written down for this HR segment. I’m really excited to do this, which sounds really silly, but there’s so many aspects of your Human Resource Management. So your management of yourself is an integral resource for your business that big companies like Google are doing. And I can pull from Google because my husband works there, but also because there’s a really great book on how they manage and how they keep their employees, that we can translate into what we do. And that we can think of as parts of our business and perks of our business and things that our business should do to support us, rather than things that we’re doing at the expense of our business, that we’re stealing away from our business that I’m excited to explore with you guys.
Now, on the legal side, I’m not just gonna talk to you guys about things that you should consider in your contracts and things like this, but also some bigger picture things about how your business has been set up. And likewise on IT, I’m not just gonna talk about machines and apps, I’m probably not gonna talk about that at all. I want you to look at how IT works as a system in different businesses and I don’t just mean like from the backup or tracking perspective. But also from the idea of replacements, how often, you know, what kind of responsibility do you have to yourself as a business to keep things running and things like that.
Now, the last section is the part that probably I spend the most time talking to you guys about and that is composed… I’ve got four things on here on business development. Now, it might seem weird that customer service is in here. But as we saw in that example that I gave earlier, customer service for us is really part of converting. It’s part of closing a lot of deals in a lot of ways, or turning those deals into future deals. And so as such, it’s an integral part of the cycle of developing new business for yourself. And in addition to sales, which is separate from marketing, and we’re gonna explore how and why that is for those who are a little fuzzy on the difference. When you look at PR and what PR means for us as writers who don’t have a book out on the market or something like that. And when I say PR here I don’t mean working with PR people, but I mean the PR of ourself, and how we are positioning our own brands.
So those are the different modules that we’re gonna go through.
So thank you so much, guys. Just spending some time with you guys and talking about the stuff that I’ve really been looking forward to sharing with you guys has totally brightened my day even though it’s raining and grey outside and I’ve gotta go back out into the rain now. And I hope that you guys are all having a better day than me, perhaps a better day than when I first got you here. I’m excited to talk about this stuff in the future and thinking about these things for your business. And I look forward to talking more with you guys soon. Bye.
Live Idea-to-Pitch Collection Transcripts
Live Idea-to-Pitch Walkthrough #1: Turning Trip Notes into a Pitchable Idea List
Live Idea-to-Pitch Walkthrough #2: Matching Raw Ideas to Real Magazine Sections
Live Idea-to-Pitch Walkthrough #3: Identifying Glove-Fit Ideas
Live Idea-to-Pitch Walkthrough #4: Ruthlessly Auditing Idea Fit
Live Idea-to-Pitch Walkthrough #5: Creating the Bones of the Pitch
Live Idea-to-Pitch Walkthrough #6: Filling in the Blanks & Hitting Send
Live Idea-to-Pitch Walkthrough #6 – Filling in the Blanks and Hitting Send Transcript
So, today, we are gonna wrap up the last webinar in this series where we together have gone through starting with the itineraries, and my trip notes, from some trips and meetings that I took in the Czech Republic. And now today, we are finishing as many pitches as we can. And we will pull the editor’s email out of the database, and we will hit send on my very, very messy inbox, that you’ll hopefully get to see not too much of during this webinar.
So what we’re gonna do today, like I said, is that I really wanna…the last couple webinars or actually most of the webinars in this series, we’ve spent a bit of our one-hour time block talking about some sort of fundamentals, why we’re doing things a certain way, how to approach things, things like that. But in today’s webinar, I wanna really wanna make sure that we have as much time as possible to work on the pitching aspect, and that people have the ability to ask questions, or say they like something or don’t like something, or if it looks weird, or stupid, or something like that.
So let’s go ahead and get into it. I’m gonna do a little bit of a recap of what are the bones of the pitch, just for anybody who didn’t catch the beginning of this series or for people who are new to writing pitches. And then we’re gonna hit those notes files that we’ve been using. I have not looked at them since we did the last webinar in the series, I have no idea. Lindsay, who’s on the webinar, can tell you. I was talking to her until right before this webinar started. I have not looked over them, prepared, planned in any way.
So it’ll be just exactly like if you were doing this at home, you were working on some pitches, and then you left on a trip and you came back. And now you’re trying to figure out what’s going on? Where are these pitches? What do you need to do to finish them? Where are your notes? What do they even need? Are they really even fit anymore? Who knows? So it’s gonna be a very realistic scenario in that way.
When I was a freelance travel writer, some people asking me how I had set up my business, and how I was able to have recurring income, and grow my business in the way that I did, and particularly be able to kind of have control over my trips in a lot of ways. I’ve been chatting with a couple of people recently about press trips and non-press trips, and how you make sure that you get to see the things that you wanna see, and how you make sure you can get stories of the things that you see.
And one of the things that I found as a freelance travel writer is that a way to make sure that you not just travel how you want, but also write the stories that you want is really to be able to control your own destiny. And part of that circles back to controlling your own money really. And you know, it’s always a big elephant in the room at any conference, I was just chatting with somebody about how at writing conferences, whenever there’s an editor’s panel, some brave soul always says, “So what do you guys pay? Or what are the terms?”
And then the editors all sort of, you know, look at each other worriedly, and somebody, you know, starts answering the question, and eventually, they all have to answer and own up to the fact that they don’t treat their writers very well in a public setting, which is always hilarious. And even, you know, if there are writers up on stage, they don’t wanna talk about what they’ve been paid. Because they don’t want you to go to the outlets that they work for and say, “Well, I wanna be paid $5 per word because I heard that’s what you paid Suzanne.” So it’s just the big elephant in the room.
As we get into what we’re talking about today, I just wanted to circle back. I know I do this at the beginning of every webinar in this series. But I think with this series on how you turn your raw notes, or your raw experiences from the field, into actual article pitches, it’s more important than ever in this series to really hearken back to why we are talking about this, which is that if you want to be a person who’s just doing editorial writing, even if you have some bit, that’s content marketing writing, or you know, trade magazines, where they give you the assignments, if you wanna have a portion of your livelihood, and your sanity, and your time, and your schedule, and your commitments wrapped up in editorial writing, pitching is a part of that.
Even if they’re the editors that you already know, you have to send them actually even more pitches than editors you don’t know, because you send them five, and they just take one, okay. So pitching is a reality of the situation for any type of editorial writing that you’re gonna be doing. And you need to be able to do it quickly and confidently and with the smallest amount of doubting every word that you put into it possible.
I had a really interesting chat earlier today with somebody who was telling me she had finally hit that 15-minute of pitch mark for herself that she can write pitches that fast. And she was saying that she sent a pitch somewhere, and she followed up and the editor got back to her on the follow-up and wanted to talk to her about the piece. And when she went to look at the pitch again to sort of prepare herself to discuss this with the editor, she realized looking at the pitch, that maybe the pitch wasn’t actually such a good pitch for that outlet.
And so we were talking about why the editor got back to her and what to do in those situations. But the thing is that the people that I know…there’s a particular gentleman that I’m thinking of. The people that I know, who are just out there, peppering the world with their pitches completely regardless of whether it’s a fit for the magazine, or a specific section or something like that, they are doing it. They are sending 100 times as many pitches as you are. And sometimes…and they’re also following up probably four times as much as you are.
And you know, editors will get used to seeing those names and open those emails. So if you wanna be out there competing with that, and also standing out from the people who only pitch every so often but really don’t know what they’re doing, you wanna distance yourself from those people. You need to be more in that echelon of the people who appear in their inbox regularly. But you’ve gotta be better than the people who are peppering inboxes with the same pitch that’s not focused for the magazine.
And the way that you do that is by what we’re doing this series, by learning to pitch really focus to what most probably from what you can know as an outsider fits a magazine. Write that pitch quickly, get it out the door, and stop thinking about it. So part and parcel of that is because you write these pitches, not necessarily because you’re expecting to write that particular piece for that particular magazine. But pitches and pitches landing in editors’ inboxes, and pitches that editors are responding to, they’re part of a larger conversation that starts a relationship, which results in what we all want which is recurring work.
So what do those pitches look like? Okay, I always say that the pitch is three paragraphs and two bookends, okay? And the bookend, unlike in a pitch is often your headline. And we talked about that a little bit last time, I think we wrote some of those. And the bookend at the end is, “May I write blah piece for blah section of blah magazine,” fill in the blanks of the blahs with the appropriate things here. But the main portion of your pitch is these three paragraphs. The lead, which is about getting attention, and making sure that the attention that you grab leads in a, you know, seamless, thoughtful way into the particular idea that you wanna pitch.
The outline of what the piece that you’re actually gonna write looks like, okay? And then the “I’m so great” paragraph, which is a phrase from Kelly James-Enger, who is another longtime freelance writer and somebody who writes about freelance writing. She calls it the “I’m so great” paragraph, but I also call it the “About me” paragraph which is where you say who you are, but completely in the vein of why you are qualified to write the particular piece that you’re pitching.
Now, with this pitch formula, we spent a lot of time last week focusing on the second and third paragraphs…not last week, but the last webinar, because those are the easier ones to write. And on some of the pitches that we did, I wrote the lead for that pitch as well, the first paragraph, and on some of them, I didn’t. So I just wanna take a second to remind ourselves what kind of things you can put in the lead. Now I was looking at some pitches today with somebody and they were really to the point leads where the lead was almost just saying, you know, what the point of the pitch is, what’s interesting about that place. And in a really short pitch, you can absolutely do that.
But if you wanna have a pitch that kind of shows off your writing style and accomplishes that delicate balance of showing your writing style, getting the person’s attention, and leading directly into the article idea that you’re trying to pitch, these are some way to do it. You can start in the middle of a story if the story has an arc. You can start with a too-good-to-be-true statistic. You can highlight that something you’re pitching is really the only thing of its kind. Or you can do something more descriptive, where you’re using one image or experience that stood out to you really clearly.
Now, the middle paragraphs, we’ve already written on a bunch of the pitches that we worked on. If we have time to write some new pitches today, then we’ll do this again. But in the middle paragraph, we really focus on the section of the magazine the pitch needs to go into, or, you know, the resulting article would go into, why we’re pitching this, so both why we’re pitching it to this magazine, and why we’re pitching it now in terms of a time peg, if we have one, what we’re gonna cover, and also want research you will do or have already done.
In “About you” paragraph, I really usually set it up kind of as two sentences. And one is usually more about your writing background, and one is more about your specific experience as relevant to that piece. And that can be prior research, or other background experience, or exclusive access that you have, for instance, to a source or to a location.
So at the end of the last webinar, we kind of took some notes on what’s next, what we needed to do when we next came back together. And we looked at we’re gonna need some leads. And to do that, we might need to head back to my notes from this trip to pull out some descriptive elements. But as we saw in the last webinar, a lot of the things…because you don’t need a crazy amount of information for the pitch, to be honest. So a lot of the things for this pitch, we might be pulling from the internet. We already did that in a couple cases.
And, you know, for some of these, if I’m stuck on a certain lead, like if I…there’s a couple ones in my notes that make sense, or like we research maybe Honest Prague, these guys which I’m not doing profile about, if we research them and then there’s a couple different things, I’ll throw those out to you guys, and you let us know what we’re gonna do. And we’ll run through our idea checklist one more time. And also it’s not on here, but we’ll grab the email addresses for the editors, and we’ll get these pitches out in my inbox.
So let’s get pitching. Let’s have a look at our ideas.
So last week, we talked about this basic pitch formula that we use, okay? So the pitches that we looked at as our priority pitches last time were “Blue Wings,” “Up Close,” “Beers Spas in Prague.” So we’ve got that one here. We looked at a feature on modernizing spas in the Czech Republic. We looked at for Brussels “b.inspired,” “Off the Beaten Path,” which is kind of like a road trip oriented element. And we looked at a couple different options for profiles on these folks from Honest Prague which…they’re two gentlemen, they have kind of like a blog, vlog. I think there’s quite a bit of a video element, social community, that they’re locals, and they speak kind of about…I guess you wanna say tourism, like they’re definitely towards tourists.
But they did the keynote at the conference that I was at. And for this one, I said funny lead from talk notes. So I’ll have to look back at my talk notes. And then that was as far as we got. So we had three other potential ones here that we can come back to. And actually, I went to an interesting couple talks at a recent trade show I was at at this one. So this might be one for us to look at. But let’s see if we can turn out these four pitches in the time that we’ve got left, all right.
So I’m just gonna pull up on the side a…trying to make sure that I can see everything at the same time, including the chat box. Okay, so I’m just gonna pull up on the side over here a window for doing searches, I’m gonna move this down, sorry about that, so that I can still see the. Okay, great.
All right, so where are we? So with our beer spas, we don’t have anything in the range of a lead.
Now for this one, it’s a 300-word article also. Any of you guys that I coach have had me harangue you in the past if you had a pitch for 300-word article, that was very long. So a trick that I use, it’s just a little kind of web app thing. It’s just faster than going into Word or something like that, that I use to check the number of characters that are already in my pitch is this little thing called wordcount.io. So let’s see, for instance, how long this pitch that I’m working on is. Already? Oops, that’s not…oh, okay. All right, so we’ve currently got…nope, that’s not on my pitch, that’s someone else’s pitch. Okay, so currently, our pitch is at 170 words. And some of these are sort of just little notes that I made in here to myself.
And I like to say that your pitch probably shouldn’t be more than half the length of the piece that you’re gonna send. All right, I’m gonna try to figure out how I can pull, from what I’ve said down here, out a lead, or if it makes sense to just send this without a lead. So when we talked about this “Up Close” section, it’s an aspect of a sitting in detail, it could be a particular building, trend, or food item, written in third person, and often includes quotes from those involved, such as the owner of a building. So let’s just make sure…I already mentioned that I wanna interview some specialists there.
So what may make sense as a way to start this? So I talked about how I propose an article for your “Up Close” section. Because even though beer spas have spread from Iceland to Spain, to potentially somewhere else, so let’s look at that. Let’s look for beer spas in Asia, for instance. The brew obsessed city has the most, and this was something that I wanna check on, places to experience beers, purported abilities to detoxify skin, cleanse pores, and reduce acne. So maybe what I’ll do is I’ll take that…Lindsay had a question on the side that I can actually see. She said, “Should you include your ‘I’m so great’ paragraph on the word count with short pitches?”
I do because I think about it as like what it looks like on the page to the editor. I wanna show them that I’m sending them something short that I respect the word count. Because I’m sitting here checking the actual word count on your pitch in order to just give us a numeric benchmark that you guys can use and take home. But really, when people send me pitches to look at and I say this is long or not, it’s very much based just in the look, and that’s the way that it is for editors as well. So for that reason, I like to think of it as everything that’s gonna be on the page.
Okay, so we’ve got this 13 incredible beer spas. Beer spa hotels, this is even crazier. There’s beer spa hotels, guys, okay. So there’s one in Madison, Wisconsin but they seem to be not necessarily hotels that specialize in beer spas. So I think this is slightly a lie. Okay, there’s a lot of ones in the U.S. which I suppose I shouldn’t be too surprised by. We’ve got some Austria, more U.S., Czech Republic, of course. Yeah, they always seem to be 30 minutes. That’s interesting. Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania, Vail, Czech Republic. I totally wrote beer spas in Asia. I’m not sure why this came up. Okay, so we might not be able to find a beer spa. Oh, no, “The New York Times,” it appears some piece on beer spa. That’s interesting.
And there’s a crowdfunded beer hotel. Okay, see, all these other interesting things are coming up. But I don’t wanna… What I would do in this case is like it’s really easy to drop down the rabbit hole of like, “Oh, here’s some interesting things. Let me start reading them and see if I should change my pitch.” But let me just change one thing that hopefully will make these speed up, okay. But, well, that might be the case, like from here, I already just saw in the preview that they’re only talking about beer spas in Austria, Germany, and Czech Republic, we’re already kind of, you know, focusing on the Czech Republic as the place with the most beer spas.
I don’t really see anything in here that changes what we’re talking about, except maybe that they go into more details than we already have, which we might be able to steal for our lead if we write an additional one. But otherwise, I’m just gonna pop these over here for future reference, in case I…and this is in Ohio so it also doesn’t help. So I’m just gonna pop these over here for future reference in case I do get assigned a piece so that I have them for later research because I found them with a kind of weird query.
And interestingly enough to the person that I was talking about…look, it looks like “The New York Times” just covered Martinique earlier. So, back to our text here. We are looking for a way…I’m gonna drop this because I couldn’t really find another country. I’m gonna add here…
Just to kind of cover our bases. I’m just deciding that I used… You might have seen I made a note down here, I was trying to decide if I wanted to say Czech Republic or Czechia because the country changed its name. I’m just gonna go with Czechia. The original…
Okay. So what we’re gonna do is we’re gonna take this sentence and we’re gonna turn this into our lead. And I’m gonna explain a little bit here about what beer spas are. Though beer spas — a location where bathers can soak in their favorite brew and drink it too… Notice I’m not using a plan words. Though beer spas — a location where bathers can soak in their favorite brew and drink it too — have spread from their original base in Czechia, Germany, and Austria out to locations like Iceland and Spain…
I still don’t know about this. Have spread from their base in countries with beer-heavy culture, I’ll just go with that. Now I feel like there was a stat that I had somewhere else on how the Czech Republic is the most beer per capita that is gonna be important here. We’ll wait for that to load. Interesting, the Seychelles is next. Who knew? Though beer spas – a location where bathers can soak in their favorite brew and drink it too – have spread from countries with beer-heavy cultures out to places like Iceland and Spain, the Czech Republic…
Home of the highest beer consumption per capita. Is still home to… Now you’ll see that this is kind of getting long again, and also I wonder if we still need this thing about this spread. I’m gonna make it shorter.
I’ll just keep this like this for now. Okay, I propose a 300-word article for your “Up Close” section on beer spas in Prague to explore. Now, I would love both for this, and for this other piece we’re working on to get some data points on the history of the spa industry in Prague. And I know we had some… Rather in the Czech Republic. I know we had some links up on this before and I probably should have opened them beforehand, but I was trying to give us a really good example of if you came home from a trip and you were just starting from scratch what would that look like.
So 15th century, and then I’ll just write the oldest spa in the Czech Republic. Okay. Because I’m gonna write historic, but that’s like a lame word and I would rather write something better than historic. Okay, why the historic Czech spa tradition ventured into beer soaks. Okay, so I propose a 300-word article for your “Up Close” section on beer spas in Prague, to explore why the historic Czech spa tradition ventured into beer soaks, how to make the most of the experience, and the top places to go in Prague, with interviews with Czech beer spa specialists.
I am a New York-based travel journalist who has been working in the field for more than 10 years. My work has appeared in “USA Today,” “Dallas Morning News.” And what? I don’t know, what food publication? I’m not really sure. I’m writing this pitch too long anyway, so I’m just gonna not include a third. I have recently returned from a trip exploring the Czech spa tradition, and how it is modernizing for millennial spa travelers. Would you be interested in “Prague: Tipsy Spas?” Yeah, why not? We’ll just leave it. Prague, tipsy or just sudsy spas. I think tipsy spas is better. “Prague: Tipsy Spas” for “Up Close” for “Blue Wings,” okay.
I think that’s as much as we’re gonna do on that one. I have a feeling this is probably like 180 or 190 words, that’s even longer than before. But I’m just gonna let it go for now. Oh, 150, look at us. We exactly hit our word count. Probably because I’m using bigger words.
Okay, so for “Blue Wings,” this is for “Blue Wings,” right. Okay, let’s grab ourselves an editor. So we are gonna send this to… There’s only a few, so I’m just gonna send it to the editor in chief. So the contact information for this is firstname.lastname. So we’ve got arja.suominen. And then if this gets assigned, the rest of you can fight over who is gonna write this because I haven’t even been to this place anyway, and I don’t have time to write this piece. Okay, ready, guys? Let’s send a pitch. My mail is not responding. All right, one second.
There we go. Okay, I’m just gonna open a couple of new emails. All right, guys, ready? The first one’s gone out.
Or it’s trying to go out.
Maybe it’s just because my email is frozen. So let’s go back to writing pitches and hopefully this will sort itself out.
Okay, great. It seems like you can still hear me. Okay, so let’s go back to writing pitches and hopefully that email thing will get sorted. When something pops up over here, then it means that we’re ready to go.
All right, so next pitch. Okay, this is on the modernization of the spa tradition. And this one we are pitching in a short form, but it can also run as a feature to a couple different outlets. So we only have “Up Close” for one outlet, but we’ll, if we have time with these other four that we’re getting out. Let’s circle back and see if we can turn this into a new pitch to also run to different magazine as a longer pitch. Okay, it looks like this is ready. Nope, still going.
Okay, let’s come back. So from “Blue Wings…” Oh, this is also for “Blue Wings.” So we wrote this for “Inside Track” which takes the form of a roundup in 500 words. Written in the third person, the piece describes five to six recommendations in the same country or region. Recent examples include five national parks in America’s Southwest, six places to visit in Eastern Cuba beyond Havana, and six places to eat in Panjim, Goa including cafes, markets, and restaurants. So no, that’s all sec. Okay. So here’s what we’ve got. And you’ll see again, this is really long, I think the super large font size is also screaming up.
But let’s see what we’ve got here. Once upon a time, I imagine it’s meant to be. A visit to the spa began with the consultation with a physician and the receipt of your personal cup. The cup, as it’s simply called, is a constant companion of all Czech spa-goers as they drink mineral-rich spring water throughout their three or more week stay, and then I’m gonna say which is filled, which is filled with a regimented schedule of massages, soaks, and spa treatment. Perhaps sadly, or perhaps fortunately for the pact itinerary traveler of today, daily life at Czech spas now looks very different. I propose a 500-word article for your “Inside Track” section on how the Czech Republic’s 500-year-old spa tradition is changing for the modern experiential traveler.
Because with everything from Ayurvedic facilities stocked by…well, let’s say with practitioners. I guess, I mean, who’s the people who do the treatments, therapists? Okay, therapists. And aestheticians. Totally can’t spell that word. Let’s see if my computer can. Aestheticians. There we go. From Kerala, India, to itineraries specifically adapted to modern shorter vacations. The industry is poised for a major awakening. And I’ll say, and global attention. In this piece, I will introduce readers to five to six spa locations in the Czech Republic specializing in new takes on Czech spa…what is happening to my computer here? Czech spa tradition. I wanna say new. Okay.
Oh, I see, our email is trying to tell us that it’s ready to go. I’m just gonna maybe close that and reopen and see if it helps us. Or not, or it’s ready now, let’s see. I really wanted to hit send in front of you guys so you could see that I’m actually sending these, not putting them aside to work on them later, as I know many of you guys do. Otherwise, I wouldn’t fret about the fact that my mail isn’t working. Okay, we’ll let that keep thinking.
Okay, so major awakening and global attention. In this piece, I will introduce readers to five to six spa locations in the Czech Republic specializing… Oh, okay, we’re getting rid of this. To five to six locations specializing in new takes on the Ayurvedic spa tradition, including Hotel Santa Katerina, I need to check that spelling, where the Ayurvedic Center will open on date and some other interesting place. Okay. So we’ve gotta find some other interesting place that’s the point of doing the story.
Let’s just try this, Czech spas for millennials. Hey, I can put one of those spas that we saw that specializes in beer, right? Didn’t we see an interesting hotel on this list? Okay, well, that’s happening. Let’s see if we can get the email going again. It’s still not happening. Okay, guys, I’m so committed to making you guys see that I’m actually sending these pitches out that I might sign into my webmail and do it from there. But let’s see if we can get this going. All right, so we need to find a second one, we need to find when that Ayurvedic Center is opening.
For that, I might just end up checking my notes. I feel like I’ve written for a spa publication, but I just can’t remember off the top of my head. So we’re just gonna do this again like we did in the last one. I’m a New York-based travel journalist who’s been working in the field for more than 10 years, my work has appeared… I’ve recently returned from a trip including meeting…from a trip to Czechia that included hard-hat tour of Santa Katerina’s new Ayurvedic facility, included meetings with Czech spa professionals and a hard-hat tour with some let’s say…it kind of sounds dirty. So I wanna change this a little bit.
With some time to take in its new…let’s say some time to sample its new massages in the original spa facilities. Okay, well, that’s not important. Okay. “Your Spa Schedule is Ready” for “Inside Track” for “Blue Wings.” Okay, so our subject line here is pitch “Your Spa Schedule is Ready” for “Inside Track.” Okay. Now, let’s say where it would go? With our beer spas. Okay, so we saw over here in this “trivago Magazine” piece…the editor of “trivago Magazine” spoke at a conference I was at recently. We saw over here in this “trivago Magazine” piece that there were some examples, sorry, let me cover that up, that there were some examples here. We’ve got Hotel Metamorphis, a historic hotel in Old Town Prague, offering a beer spa with a traditional beer bath. What makes a traditional beer path is a great question. Let’s see what other Czech examples that they have in here. I thought they had a few. It’s only one in six matches. It seems like the whole computer just hates us now. All right, let’s see what else we’ve got. Okay, the five-star Corinthia Hotel offers an old traditional spa service beer bath. Okay, so let’s see this Corinthia Hotel. It seems kind of fancy. Okay, so we’ve got the Hotel Metamorphis and the Corinthia Hotel.
So this was my search for Czech spas for millennials. And somehow, nothing is coming up in the spa kind of way. It’s talking about wellness business. We can maybe try that one, but I don’t know if it’s gonna come. So let’s try modern… I don’t know if that’s quite the right keyword.
No, I don’t think that’s gonna go for us. This is interesting, though. This is an old LA Times article about spas in the Czech Republic that might give us some of these statistics that I’ve been looking for about the age of the spa tradition. Okay, let’s see what else we’ve got here. Okay, my email has finally resuscitated itself.
All right, guys, we’re gonna get our first pitch out now. I promise it’s happening. Okay, where did… Here we go. Okay.
Definitely don’t send your pitches on 200-odd point font, like I have them here.
All right, off we go, pitch number one is gone. Okay, so back to looking this up. See, I’m getting really caught up in looking things up here in this slow internet. It’s interesting because I have a lot of hacks of things that I do that are specifically for dealing with slow internet.
How do we end up with these on two places? I’m just getting really confused here. I had set up this other New York Times one before as well. All right, so let’s see what the LA Times had to say here. All I want is to know how long this has been the case, anybody, anybody? I don’t see any numbers. I see lots of gallons. Oh, okay. Here we go. That prompted the creation of the first permanent spa settlement of Karlovy Vary in 1350. Okay, so that means we are looking at more of like a 650-plus-year-old spa history. All right, okay.
More than 650-year-old spa tradition. Oh, no. Okay, we’ll fix that in a second. Okay, I propose a 500-word article for “Inside Track” on…okay. We still need to check that the Santa Katerina that that is the right spelling. And then we’re looking for one more thing to include, and I might just go with one of these hotels if we can’t get anything else. Okay, so they call it Svata Katerina. Okay. I knew I had something wrong. Svata and then Katerina, right. Okay. Let’s make sure I’ve got that right. I’ve mentioned it twice, I think. There it is. Svata Katerina’s new Ayurvedic facility, okay.
So when is the Ayurvedic facility opening? Yes, I can see that a lot of web pages are slowing down. Okay, Czechia Ayurveda. Maybe it’s already open. All right, so what about… We still can’t get anything. Okay, so let’s try this Hotel Metamorphis. I really just wanna find out about their spa.
Okay, that one is almost done. So let’s start looking at this next one then. So this other one which is for “b.inspired” “Off The Beaten Path” is a first-person article about destinations that’s a one to three-hour drive from a major city. About 500 words, the writer recounts their experience there covering what they did and saw.
This could cover the trip as a whole or focus on one particular activity or restaurant, for example, quotes included from locals. Examples include “Lazing on a Sunny Sand Dune,” about the writer’s experience out…adventure sports in the Bay of Arcachon, France, “Little Wonder,” covering The Inn, Michelin-starred restaurant 90 minutes from D.C., and “Urban Legend” about the writer’s experience visiting the city of Nashik three hours from Mumbai.
Okay, so what we’ve got here is I don’t have anything yet in the lead. I wanted to go back to my notes and rely heavily on the description here. What we’ve already got is I propose a 500-word article for your “Off The Beaten Track” section on UNESCO-rich Telč and Třebíč, because these 13th and 14th-century cities… I should say towns or cities, I’ll say towns. I don’t know, I’ll say cities is fine. Cities not only offer picture-perfect small town European charm, which is a kind of thing I can tell you guys never to say. But sometimes we can get away with saying these more, you know, trait shorthand things in this because sentence.
Not only offer picture-perfect small town European charm, but also include impeccably preserved architectural gems that offer a…I don’t wanna say unique but I might have to. View…I’m gonna lens or view into the lives of our Medieval and Renaissance ancestors of all faiths. In this piece, I will cover my recent trip through the area, highlighting the interesting things in name of place, and the name of the square in Telč and the something that make Třebíč…hasn’t this won a smallest cool town award? Anything else? I will include quotes from who did I meet in these places. Okay, so let’s go back to the itinerary. Well, I feel like the itinerary might be harder to get actually than to look up some of these things.
Okay, so there’s a lot of things here that we wanna look up. So let’s go back and start, I’m gonna open my crazy email again. Let’s look at the notes here from the Czech Republic trips, and find the notes for Třebíč. Okay, so for Třebíč, there’s only one…portal like this. It to protect the Romanesque door…monastery. Okay, so the construction of the church began in 1230. What do we really wanna say about this place in Třebíč?
Okay, well, let’s go and let’s see if we got some information on the spas on these places. Okay, hotel spa, spa experience, that’s what we wanna know. Great. Okay, so over here, we’re looking for a bunch of things. What can we do about the castle in Telč? That would probably be the chateau here. Okay. So this place was just crazy. It was… Maybe I should just find some pictures. I’m gonna call it the castle, we’ll see.
All right. So Corinthia… Just to go back to our spa thing that we were talking about. I don’t know that they necessarily have anything special here past the beer spas. So I think we’re just gonna let it go for now because otherwise, we could fall down the rabbit hole of all of the different hotel spas in all of the Czech Republic, and trying to then decide which one is cooler than which other one. So let’s go with this one. Okay. So we’re gonna say to finish this one up, I think this was the really pretty much the last thing we’re waiting on. Oh, and the date of the Ayurvedic facilities were opening. Let’s see if that’s come up in Google as well.
Looks like you can book it… Okay, I’ll just check my notes but it seems like it might be already open now. Okay, so we’ll say… Okay, five to six locations specializing in new takes on a Czech spa tradition including hotel Svata Katerina. Where? The Ayurvedic Center will open on blah. And Prague’s…what’s it called? Hotel Metamorphosis. No, Hotel Metamorphis, no phosis. Okay, Hotel Metamorphis. Hotel Metamorphis, which focuses its spa entirely on beer soaks with unpasteurized Bernard beer.
Okay, and then let’s just quickly pop in here and see if we can get the Santa Katerina. Okay, so they said it would be the only one in the Czech Republic. I just saw something, hold on, about Christmas.
Okay, yeah. So they were doing it over the holidays, okay. Where the Ayurvedic Center…where the only Ayurvedic pavilion in Czech Republic, in Czechia rather, in Czechia opened this winter. Okay, in this piece…
Okay, now again, I feel like this is probably too long, but it’s clearly hard for me to tell because this font is so incredibly big. So let’s look over here. It’s 176, it’s longer than I’d like but it’s not the end of the world, we’re doing this very fast. So let’s just look very quickly and see if we can… We talked about also doing this as a feature for “Wizz,” “Norwegian,” “easyJet,” and “Lufthansa.” Let me see if I can pull… That wouldn’t be in this, okay. So let’s see if we can pull the descriptions of what it would need to be for those different things.
Okay, so that would be in the matches. So for “Wizz,” “Lufthansa,” let’s look for “Lufthansa.” I think this is maybe the first one because I don’t see any “Lufthansa” in here. “Wizz,” “Tribes,” “Tribes,” “The Innovator,” pull to feature pitch, okay. There are 4 features which run 1,000 to 1,200 words, they cover destinations, focusing on trends, food, people, and things to do. Include quotes from at least three different sources, the style is journalistic.
Here’s how I’m gonna swap that out for a Wizz piece. Okay, style is journalistic and straightforward. At least three different sources. Okay. So I’ve got two that I can think of off the top of my head. I propose a 1,200-word feature on how the Czech Republic’s more than 650-year-olds spa tradition is changing for the modern experiential traveler, because with everything from Ayurvedic facilities stocked with massage therapists and aestheticians from Kerala, India, to itineraries specifically adapted to modern, shorter vacations. The industry is poised for a major awakening in global attention.
In this piece, I will feature insights of… Who do I wanna say I’m gonna interview? On this trend and its future from the force behind Hotel Svata Katerina’s new Ayurvedic pavilion… I keep writing Czech Republic, sorry, guys. In Czechia. And energy… This is a thing I haven’t mentioned here, but energy-landscaped rock formation echoing Stonehenge. Energy-landscaped rock formation for a.m. yoga sessions. Okay, I will feature insights on this trend and its future from… I will say sort of like spa professionals in Karlovy Vary. I’m gonna spell this wrong Karlovy Vary. How is it spelled? I know we had that before in the LA Times piece, right, Karlovy, okay. Karlovy Vary where the first permanent spa was erected in around 1350 and… Okay, great.
Oh, gosh, I hope I can cut and paste to that. Okay, good idea. Okay, so this is the “Wizz” version. Great. Okay, so that’s the “Wizz” version, what’s next? We said we could send this to a couple different places, we said “Wizz,” “Norwegian,” “easyJet.” Okay, what about “Norwegian?” “Norwegian,” there are five uncategorized features, which cover destinations, trends, and interesting people in about 1,500 words. Articles can be written in the first person using a narrative style or third person describing a destination or trend. Quotes are included from relevant people and sometimes one or two short sidebars featuring profiles of relevant people can be found. This profiles cover who the person is, and their thoughts on the topic being covered.
Okay, great. I think we can just send exactly the same thing. And then I’ll just kind of throw out there that he would be an interesting profile, the landscape architect.
There we go. All right, so now, see, I added a few changes, that’s ready for “Norwegian.” We also talk about “easyJet.” “easyJet” features. Okay, features, destinations served by easyJet. I’ll have to check my other notes page if this works or not.
Destinations they can be written as first-person narrative where the writer shares element of their trip, or third-person piece covering people or topics. Profiles can sometimes be seen. Okay, “The Other City of Light” covering changes in Pula, Croatia, including light shows, virtual reality projects. “Along Winding Paths, Between Zigzag Cliffs Through Andalusian Olive Groves” covering the Camino Mozarabe pilgrimage hike in Spain.
Okay, so for this “easyJet” one, I think that what we can do is we can make it be an amalgam of these two things. Where we’re talking about the modernization, so we’ll pull the modernization text, but then we will make it be specifically on Prague. And let me check in my other file. So we were just looking at idea matches, this must be initial notes. Idea fit. There we go. Okay, easyJet flies to Prague. So then what we’ll do is we will sort of make an amalgam of this so that we’ve got some from the beer spas, and some about the spa tradition. So I’m gonna propose a, let’s say, 800-word feature. I wanna say feature section, let’s fix those other ones.
Feature on… Here we are. How the Czech Republic’s more than 650-year-old spa tradition is changing for the modern experiential traveler. And then we’re going to make it be about beer, okay. Let’s go back up to our beer story and let’s pull this down.
Okay, particularly with the introduction of… Okay, I’m gonna amalgamate these two things together. With itineraries specifically adapted to modern, shorter vacations and the introduction of beer spas, locations where bathers can soak in their favorite brew and have it too. Okay.
Do I wanna talk about beers purported abilities? Locations where bathers can soak in their favorite brew and drink it too, magnifying beer’s purported ability to detoxify skin, cleanse pores, and reduce acne. Okay, great. So in their feature they’re gonna wanna see sometimes quotes, but probably service information, okay. In the piece, I will offer tips from local experts on how to make the most of the experience, the top places to go in Prague for different types of travelers.
And what I’d say I don’t have enough notes on having looked at this, I’ll just go with this. And what else is coming down the pipeline to shake up the Czech spa culture next, all right. Now I’m gonna have to change this line at the end of this one, and I’m gonna have to take back my line that I had for the first one. Okay, so there’s from that one pitch that we wrote, which was original feature pitch, but I’ve just sent one pitch to that outlet already, so I’m gonna hold on to this as my backup pitch for that outlet. So instead, I’m gonna send these things to “Wizz.”
So let’s get queued up here, “Wizz” and “Norwegian” and “easyJet,” and I’ll get these ones out the door. If my… Oh, no, my email’s crashed again. You guys, I’m really trying to send these for you. Okay, so we’ve got those queued up. Now, can we make some finishing on this? Okay, there’s like a lot of things that this is missing for. So let’s just see if in two minutes we can finish this guy up. Oh, no, because my notes are in my email, shoot. Okay, what’s the fourth one?
This one also needs notes from my email. Okay, let’s see if my email will come back to life. In the meantime, let’s pull the contact info. So again, this is really small one here for “easyJet.” So for features, I’m gonna assume that the person doing the feature is gonna be the editor, editor.
Okay, now for “Norwegian” we’ve got the small-ish stuff. They don’t assign a lot of stuff to freelancers, so I’m still gonna assume that the person doing the features is gonna be the editor, editor. We’ll drop her in here. Okay, next for “Wizz,” super-small, one person, okay, so it’s definitely gonna go to her. Okay. Now, you’ll notice all of these editors work at Ink Global, but you don’t see any crossover between the editors on different publications. So I wouldn’t assume at all that they share.
In some situations like AAA, they do in fact share content so that might be a thing, but it’s not gonna be the case here. Okay, so let’s get this guy out.
Okay, we’ve got the same subject line for all of them, but they’re all for different sections.
Sure, I’ll just do this. Now we already did “Wizz,” right. Okay, this one to Sarah.
I’m just gonna drop my signature at the end, okay. This one for… Oh, thank god I noticed this. Okay, we’re gonna change the last sentence here. So this is “Norwegian.” And bye “Norwegian.” Now, is there anything else? No. I say 1,200-word feature, okay. I don’t think there’s anything else in here that’s about “Blue Wings.” Okay, great, so that one is out. Okay, so let’s pop my signature in these and we’ll drop in the other ones. Okay, so this next one is gonna be for “Wizz.”
All right, and then our last one of these three is for “easyJet.”
Now, how on Earth do they actually… I know they capitalize some things weirdly. Okay, so it is “easyJet Traveler.”
All right, off we go. Okay, those are out the door. All right, guys, so what I’ve got left on here, like I said, are things that we gotta pull out of my notes. So let’s see if we can get this to load this time, otherwise…okay, great. Was restored at 90 million Czech crowns. So what is 90 million Czech crowns?
Okay, so this is the Telč Castle, all right. I was trying to get some pictures of it for us before so that we can… I have some on my phone, of course, but I’ll just be faster this way. And obviously, UNESCO is also gonna tell us why it is preserved. So what we’re looking for here? So we need something in the lead. We’re proposing this article for “Off The Beaten Path” because they’re beautiful, and they offer unique view into the lives of our Medieval and Renaissance ancestor of all faiths. I feel like I have to qualify that.
Okay, so this is about the castle. Let’s see if we can just get like a quick… Okay, so here we’ve got in Třebíč, we have this really famous Basilica, and then we also have the Jewish synagogue. And I think that was talked about over here. Okay, so Třebíč… Okay, so… Highlighting the Jewish Quarter and Basilica. How old is the Basilica? The historic Jewish Quarter around the…what is the Basilica called? St. Basilica. I’ll cover my recent trip to the area highlighting Třebíč’s historic Jewish Quarter around the Basilica of St. Procopius on a site dating back to a 12th-century monastery.
Where’s the name of the castle? Okay, this is Třebíč. Where’s Telč? There’s Telč. The Telč Chateau. Okay, how old is the Telč Chateau? I really wish that the UNESCO would load. There we go, okay.
Okay, they’re saying through Renaissance castle. And Telč’s town square, one of the largest in the country and home to dozens of historically preserved facades. And what do you call… Tunnel systems. Not quite the word I’m looking for, they call it the underground city.
And then in Třebíč’s historic… And the Renaissance castle and town square. Telč’s Renaissance castle. I wish I could say something about the castle. Let’s say there’s something quick I can get from my notes. I guess we’ll do a description of it. Let’s go back to those photos. Okay, so the thing about this castle is that…
You enter the courtyard on Telč’s Castle, there’s no question an incredibly monied person once lived here. High walls immediately deafen… Doesn’t seem like a right place to say that, okay. Deafen the sounds of the bustling square, one of the country’s largest… And I don’t need to say that down here.
One of the country’s largest. And the manicured lawn looks fit for an impromptu game of croquet, or whatever Renaissance nobles fancied. Entering the castle, the richness of its original inhabitants… I’m doing a tell, not show thing here. Entering the castle… Upon entering the castle, the pervasive use of gold leaf to accent deep blue mineral… Let’s see. Deep blue walls to create favorite constellations. And the… Let’s say square footage dedicated to trophies…hunting trophies from faraway lands confirm that this castle was designed to impress. Okay, when you enter the courtyard of Telč’s castle, there’s no question an incredibly monied person once lived here. Or maybe I should say designed it.
No, I think that’s fine. The high walls immediately deafen the sound of the bustling square, one of the country’s largest. And the manicured lawns fit for an impromptu game of croquet, or whatever Renaissance nobles fancied. Upon entering the castle, a pervasive use of gold leaf to accent deep blue walls and create favorite constellations coupled with the sheer square footage of wall space dedicated to hunting trophies from faraway lands, confirms…and this confirms that this castle was designed to impress.
I propose a 500-word article for your “Off Beaten Path” section on UNESCO-treasure-rich Telč and Třebíč, because these 13th and 14th cities not only offer picture-perfect small town European charm, but also include impeccably preserved architectural gems that offer a unique view into the lives of our Medieval and Renaissance ancestors of all faiths. In this piece, I will cover my recent trip to the area highlighting… I will include quotes from local historians who accompanied my trip.
I wanna make this so short. Whose work has appeared here and here. I have recently returned from a trip through Telč and Třebíč where I was fortunate to be guided by enthusiastic young historians passionate about taking the torch of their cities history brightly into the future. And I will share their insights…quotes from them in the piece.
Now, there’s all sorts of stuff that happened. Like there were some really beautiful stories that they told us about… I’m never quite sure which is the British and which is the American way to say gems. There’s all these beautiful stories, they told us about people finding their ancestry and all these things. And the thing is like I could go look those up, and I could massage this, you know, into some perfect thing about…you know, like recreating somebody’s story. And I could bicker around with how I wanna, you know, make that fit into the number of words that I have.
But the thing is, like, well, I could absolutely do that. We’re trying to get pitches out the door, right? So I’m taking what I can pull out of my notes, and what I can pull off the internet, and put together a pitch that is capable of leaving my inbox in a reasonable amount of time. Because the time that you spend going back through your notes and pulling those things together, and really putting together something beautiful, that’s the kind of time that you should be spending when you already have an assignment, you know what I mean?
Like to really rake through everything that you’ve done, and give yourself that time travel, really, like you’re not just investing the time in writing it, but you’re also investing time into kind of pulling up those memories, which you can’t really pull up forever, you know what I mean? Like, every time, I think, you pull up memories from a trip, you’re gonna be losing a little bit of something that you had when you were there. So you’re taking the time to pull those up just for this one story, and really not even just for this one story, but just for this pitch for this one story. And then what are you gonna do when you go back to write the piece? You’ve already, you know, relive those, you’ve already lost some of that moment.
So in this case, I leaned on focusing more on something that was descriptive, because it was easier because it’s a pitch, you’re not being paid to write this pitch, right? So this is the time when, like I said, is kind of the operating principle of this entire, you know, enterprise of doing this series that we’re just wrapping up here. You wanna do what you can do with some speed. You don’t wanna be, you know, putting your heart and soul on the line into these pitches, because then when you don’t hear back, which you often don’t, you’re going to be bummed, right?
So do these pitches in a way where you take what you have, you take what you can get your hands on, you put it together. And then like we’re about to do with this last pitch, you let it go, all right? It’s gone. So how many pitches did we send today, guys? We sent one beer…what do you call it? We sent one beer spa. This one is the backup for the first beer spa pitch, right? We sent them to “Wizz,” we sent to “Norwegian,” we sent to “easyJet.” Then I just got that “b.inspired” off, right? Oh, no, I’m gonna check on that. Okay, so we got five pitches out today in a bit more than an hour. I know we went longer than we said we were gonna do.
Have a great rest of your week, guys and a great weekend.
Live Idea-to-Pitch Walkthrough Part #5 – Creating the Bones of the Pitch Transcript
Today, we are going to do the fifth portion of our “Live Idea-to-Pitch Walkthrough: Creating the Bones of the Pitch.” The pitches will finally start appearing on the page. We’ve spent all this time drowning in so many things, I think it crashed my computer one day. Run so many PDFs of magazines with their high-resolution photos, to run so many different tabs of the database and look through things, to look through all these ideas in my notes, and then the agendas and the tear, we’re finally starting to write the pitch.
Now, reality, we have done this over the course of several months. It feels like a long time. But if you think about it, we’ve only spent four hours so far and a decent bit of time were me talking about background. So I’d say we have spent less than three hours actually working on pulling this together. And I have, we will look at them later, but I’ve got seven pitches queued up for us to write, and some of those also have spinoffs. One of these about monetizing spots has like five spinoffs. And then, maybe six, we’re going to do for sure. The seventh is on the Santa Caterina Hotel profile.
We didn’t have a chance yet to double check that with any particular magazine sections yet because we just didn’t see any come up in the magazines we were looking at, that we had time to look at, that is. So we have six pitches that we’re going to write today. Now, in reality, as in not the reality of us doing this over several months, but in the reality of you guys at home or anybody at home to have spent two and a half odd hours and have six pitches that are for sure connected to more than six sections because a number of them have duplicates, would be a fantastic use of time. It just feels longer because we’ve done them this way.
So we’re going to get into this in a second but using your time well and wisely for the highest output is what this series is all about. Because there are so, so, so many ideas out there that you guys can pitch. I mean, I opened it up just for us to know and see, where’s the original? I think we started with like 47 something, right, guys? We started with the initial notes. We started with 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, from that initial. I think that number, I think I said 37 the first time I said it.
So I maybe just kind of wronged it, now I’m being really fast. We started with that many ideas and we have six that are solid, that have a home or multiple homes in that two and a half odd, three hours of work. So that’s excellent. So what we’re going to do today, and I apologize that the slides aren’t working, but one webinar out of three something had to go wrong. So today, we are going to circle back with the purpose of the series, but for some of you who I know who are newer to our webinars, joined in the middle of the series, and also because it’s finally coming to fruition. And the title of today’s webinar is “Creating the Bones of the Pitch”. So we’re going to talk about what are those bones and why we start with particular parts of them.
And it’s funny because I was thinking about this metaphor of the bones of the pitch. And if you think about the skeleton, the upper body, the ribs, arms, the fingers and all that stuff, the skull bone is pretty serious. But there’s so many tiny bones and things going on in the upper body, whereas the lower body has the pelvis, which is like one big solid honking thing that kind of holds it all together. And the legs, the feet also have a lot of bones of course, but the legs are really long, really solid bone. So you can almost think of in a way that it’s a very apt comparison to say the bones of the pitch and how the body of the pitch is constructed.
So we’re going to go back to those six ideas that we’re working on writing out today. And then I’m going to start putting together the pitch for each of those.
The whole idea of the series, I’ve talked quite a bit since we started this call about how much time we’ve spent so far and what has actually come out of that time. And each of the individual webinars as I’ve done them, it just feels so piecemeal. Like at the end, I count so that we feel like we have something that came out of it. We’ve got 38 ideas. We’ve got 39 sections of ideas matched up or whatever it is that we have. But now that number is getting smaller. It somehow feels worse to go from having 40 to 6.
But it’s great because as we are doing this process, we are showing how you make those decisions. How do you choose what to cut, when to move on? And in this case, we’re bound by that eternal thing, which is time. We’re bound by time. At the end of the hour of our webinar, I need to let you all go, I need to go have dinner and whatever it is. So we stop, and in real life it doesn’t always happen. Even when you do stop, when you come back, you don’t always move on to the next stage. So what we’re doing in this webinar is giving you both an example and a model…I’m doing but of how you can, in fact, with the resources you already have at hand get more pitches out faster.
Because the reality of the situation is pitches just can’t take you that long trade. And when I say take you that long trade, I’m including all the parts of the process here. Getting the ideas out of your trips, taking the ideas and matching with magazines, refining them with the magazines to make sure they actually fit. All of these stages, not just the writing of the pitch, it just can’t take that long if you want to be a freelance writer. Even if you just want to write for websites, okay? Because you need to be able to get your ideas into a form where they are communicated to other people quickly.
And that’s not just for your pitches. It’s for your emails, your editors. It’s for your articles itself. It’s for all of these things. Candi says there’s lots of buzzing suddenly. Does anyone else hear that? Recently, I was talking with a couple people whose freelance writing is not where they want it to be. Perhaps they are already full time, they’ve left their job or something like that. Or maybe they’ve left their job and they’re doing this and something else. And the something else is going fine but the freelancing part just isn’t taking off. And those conversations have always ended with like, I guess, I just need to send more pitches.
The problem is if all pulled between having an idea or looking at a magazine, thinking about different ideas that could possibly work, researching their viability, writing a draft of a pitch, doing your research while you’re doing a draft of the pitch, throwing that out because it doesn’t work, it’s not clear enough, you don’t like the draft, the point isn’t clear, writing up another one with a new point, deciding maybe that one doesn’t even point and pitching it at all, and then going back to the whole thing, you’re often looking at more than six hours per actual pitch that goes out the door.
Now, if we think about the statistics on what pitches are accepted, I like to tell people to take like a 20% acceptance rate as a baseline if you’re kind of pitching things that are in your level and a point…or sorry. It’s a 5% acceptance rate if you’re just kind of pitching quite randomly, or you don’t know what your level is. If you’re thinking about a 5% pitch acceptance rate, that’s 1 out of 20. So if 1 out of 20 pitches is going to turn into a story and you’re taking 6 hours or more per pitch, that’s 120 hours or 3 work weeks, whole work weeks before one pitch actually lands.
That’s not a good ratio. You just can’t take that kind of time. And so that’s why we’re doing this whole speed round version that we’re doing, both so you can see that it’s possible but also so you can see what sacrifices I do have to make in order to make that possible. So for those of you who are newer to the series, if you’d like to join at home, here’s what I recommend you do. Go back to the beginning, watch each webinar one by one. And after the webinar, take some trip of your own and do exactly what I just did in the webinar.
Do each piece on it own, one by one, and with that time you have. Like I said, you don’t have to implement this hour-long method forever but just so you’re following at home.
So I think I heard somebody, I don’t know if she’s still on the call, but I think I heard somebody tell me recently on a coaching call that she was following along with this. So I don’t know if you are here still and if you are and if you want to share where you’re at with that. If you don’t want to share, that’s okay as well. But I’d love to kind of celebrate the people who are going through this along at home as well. So I want you to think about whether you want to do that, but the other thing to not forget, this horrifying 120 hours thing that I was just talking about, is that once that pitch does go out and get an assignment or even if it gets a response but not an assignment, that that is just the beginning.
That the main purpose of your pitch is not really to get an assignment, it’s to start a conversation which then leads to a relationship. So we’ve talked in the past in this webinar series and others about how that conversation is built on us showing that we understand them, so that they then will like us, so then they offer us something back in the form of an assignment or in the form of advice about what to pitch better next time or something like that. But it is a give and take process that begins with us flattering them with our understanding of them as the editor and of their magazine. And we do that with our pitch formula.
So all pitches are composed of three things. So we’re going to talk a lot about this in the format of P1, P2, P3. So make sure that you remember this for later. So P1, right in the chat, is the lead. P2 is what you’re going to write about. I don’t know if they’re separate. We’ll get into that a lot more why later. And P3 is about you and why you should write this piece. Now, I have formulas for all of these things, each thing except the first one. And because of that, in part, we’re mostly going to do the lead or the beginning of the pitch in the next webinar.
Because I always recommend that you do that part last. It is the hardest part in general but it’s also difficult because there are so many options. If you’re not really clear on what restrictions you have upon you, which will get more familiar with the rest of the pitch, it’s a lot harder to know what choice to make from all those options until you have some variables kind of nailed down, let’s say, all right? So as I was pulling these slides out of our webinar on crafting the perfect pitch, where you will also find them, I saw this quote that I just love and wanted to share here because you’ll notice that all of the ideas that we’ve been talking about so far are like one word.
They’re like the name of a destination or something super vague. So the quote that I love is, I once had a guy call me up. He gave me one-word pitch, he said Macau. And that’s not really a pitch, is it? It’s not a narrative. It’s just a place. So it might seem kind of odd, because so far in this whole webinar, I have been giving just not one word, but I’ve been giving these like maybe 2 word, 3 word, maybe in some cases, potentially even 10 word placeholders from what an article idea is. And there’s actually a reason for that. And it’s not because I have a one-word pitch in mind, it’s because you need to do that in the beginning to keep your ideas flexible. So when you do sit down and write them, you only write in your pitch exactly what matters for the specific magazine that you’re pitching. And that’s what we’re going to get into.
Now, like I said, we’re probably going to save unless I have a really good idea for one, but I’m probably not going to have too many at this point, because you usually need to look at your notes to get these. But we’re probably going to skip over the leads for now. So I’m going to also skip this slide because I assume that we will look at it in more detail in the next webinar when we’re going to talk more about leads. But it depends how far we get today.
So what we write about in the second paragraph is you’ll see I have a very specific formula for this, that makes it go really fast. But you’re going to say what magazine section this is meant to appear in. You’re going to talk about what you’re going to cover and what research you will do or have already done. In the paragraph about you, you’re going to talk about the information that is relevant to you to this specific place, the specific story idea. Prior research, background experience, and exclusive access. And you’re going to talk about your most impressive or related titles.
Now, I said even if volunteer here because this answers the question of what if they are things that you have written for free? All right. So which ideas are we settling on? I said, way back in the earlier pre-troubleshooting break time that we have about six that we’re focusing on. So we’re going to scoot over. I’m going to do…I guess maybe then rather than doing a full-screen share just for now for this webinar, I’m just going to share that one page with you.
So let’s go over from the slides and do a screen share now.
And what I’m going to do is I’m going to bring over, as we work on each pitch, I’m going to bring the relevant information more about the idea and particularly more about the magazine section. But first, let’s do the basic formula. So the basic formula is lead, whenever that’s going to be. Then I propose a word article for your name of section on short form of idea, because…now, we haven’t talked about any of this stuff, it’s because, and all these things yet. This is what we’re going to get to now. We’ve maybe talked about it just a little, little bit, but not too much.
In this piece, I will…stuff from travel magazine database. Anything else? All right. Then I am a New York-based travel journalist that has been working in the field. How many years I’ve been doing this? For nearly 10 years. No, I guess actually more than 10 years. For more than 10 years. My work has appeared in…let’s see, who do I want to pick? What’s I think called “USA Today”, the “Dallas Morning News”. And I’m going to leave the spot open for a publication relevant to the particular article idea.
Then the next sentence is going to be info about me specific to this destination and article topic. Would you be interested in Title? We’ll get to this probably later. Maybe I’ll do some this week. Title for name of section, for name of magazine. So now that I have this, for each pitch that we’re writing, I’m going to cut and paste the basic formula, and then I’m going to start to fill it in. All right. So this is what we’re going to do for the bones. So we’re going to start with this Beer Spas in Prague. Oh, I shouldn’t start with this because I don’t know that much about it. But okay, we’ll do it. We’ll figure it out.
Sure, I don’t remember anything about any of…these trips were like in August. So they’re all kind of equally who knows. All right. So let’s just start with this one. So Blue Wings, Beer Spas in Prague. Now, let me go pull our Blue Wings stuff out of here. Our idea footnotes. So this is Up Close. It covers one aspect of a city in detail in about 500 words. Now, I’m probably going to need to flip back over back and forth between here and the web browser so that you guys can see me looking up the different details to go in here. So let me just queue up a web browser that we can use for that. Okay, great. We can use this one.
So I’m literally entering…go back to this in a second, but I’m literally entering Beer Spas in Prague in Google right now. Of course, we’re starting from there. Because I didn’t go to one. I just heard about this from people and they all seem interested in it. And I’m like, “Okay, Beer Spas in Prague, that’s a thing. What does that really mean?” So there’s some… I’m not seeing any beer spas in Prague coverage coming up on any major websites, which is great. Which means that this is a pretty new idea.
So I’m just going to open a few links so that we have some like already loaded to come back to later and then I’m going to go back now and do this with you. So let’s take our formula. The lead. Who knows what the lead’s going to be? I don’t even know anything about beer spas in Prague yet. So I propose a 300-word article for Up Close on beer spas in Prague because I don’t know why yet. So Up Close can be a particular building, trend, or food item and in third person, includes quotes. I’m going to highlight this because it’s important. We need to make sure that we include quotes such as the owner of a building.
Recent examples include “Las Palmas: Delicious dreams”, talking about a renovated place, the style of Peking duck found in Nanjing, and a place in Shanghai and specific restoration is taking place there. Okay, all right. So that’s what we want to cover. Now, let me also on the side pull up a copy of Blue Wings. We were looking at a bunch of those the other day. So let me pull up a copy of that.
Okay, I’ll do that in a second. So let’s go look at beer spas in Prague. So first, we want to write this second paragraph. So write this second paragraph. So we want to know what we’re going to cover. So I want to say for sure, because they’re in quotes. I will interview something. I will interview somebody and we’re going to figure out who that is. So the first thing that I want to do is I want to look at, again, like we’ve been doing in the past, I want to look at an example of this article from before so that I can get a little bit more about that structure because we don’t know from here so much about that structure. So I’m pulling up an Up Close article for us. Let’s go look over there.
I know we just looked at this the other day. So let’s see what page it’s on. Up Close 22, Oyster Hunting in Denmark. So we start with the lead is going to be a quote, but this is from like a weird place. We have some quotes from the organizer of the oyster festival. It’s mostly talking about the festival on the island. I remember when we looked at this last time, we were like, “Oh, this is really general.” So this is what we’re going for. Let’s go back. And let’s look check out beer spas in Prague, shall we? So, it gets unhappy when I switch this frequently. Okay, there we go. Let’s try it now.
What can we say about beer spas? So this is how to enjoy a beer spa in the Czech Republic. Czech Republic loves beer. We know that. So maybe a cool lead to start with could be the beer consumption, right? Everybody, I think, starts with this lead but why not? How much beer is consumed in the Czech Republic? Now, they went for their culture, blah, blah, but you can immerse yourself, literally, in a beer spa. This blog post is a great list of clichés that we should avoid. All right. So there’s nowhere else than Prague, is that true? Are there beer spas other than Prague? Let’s see. Which I’m going to make this a Boolean search, on your beer spa, not Prague. Let’s see what comes up.
The problem is I’m also going to cut out articles that are mentioning like in Prague, so that might be a little difficult. Beer Spas Spain. Beer Spa Spain is the spas chain, America Beer Spas, but I’m not actually…so beer spa visit, North Iceland. So there are in fact beer spas outside of Prague, so that has been answered. Actually, I’m going to leave that open because I’m kind of talking about this as a trend piece, right? So maybe what I want to say is something about how beer spas can now be found in these other places.
Though beer spas have spread from Iceland to Spain to…and I find somewhere further in a different continent. Prague is the original home of the…do I really want to say unique? I’m not sure. Now, what are the benefits of beer spa? That’s my next question. This just seems so…it’s like all the things about spas, right? Improves your skin. Okay, let’s see what this thermal beer spa. Oh, we found a “Daily Mail” article, that’s great. See, it seems like there are more things on the beer spas than you think but not as much in Prague. So let’s see, called brew-obsessed country.
Brew-obsessed city has the most, and I want to check on this. Places to what? What are the benefits? Guardian’s not telling, but here you have unlimited drinking and random articles, or random videos. See, I would love for something legit like “The Guardian”. Oh, this is the “Daily Mail”. See, that’s why it sounds legit. So where can we find these benefits still? Benefits, benefits, benefits. Again, that’s interesting. Even the Egyptians enjoyed the natural extracts impact on the skin.
I don’t know. See, I just don’t know if I want to go with this. We’ll think about it. I’m just going to go with purported abilities to detoxify. I realize you can’t see what I’m writing at the same time. Let me go to full screen. Now it’ll make so much sense why I’m making random noises. Great, okay. To experience beer’s purported abilities to…people keep talking about the skin texture. So we’ll just go with that. Detoxify skin…which is cleanse pores and reduce acne. We’ll just go with that for now. I propose a 300-word article for your Up Close section on beer spas in Prague because the beers spas have spread from Iceland to Spain to somewhere else.
The brew-obsessed city has the most places to experience beers…that didn’t come out right, purported ability to detoxify skin, cleanse pores, and reduce acne. In this piece, I will cover… I don’t know, how many can you really cover in this piece? They don’t really do too much in these things. So maybe I’ll say, I’ll cover six places with beer spas. I don’t want to consent, reject all. I love being in the EU and rejecting cookies. Great, okay. This is a summary of Pilsen, this is central Prague, this is somewhere else, this is somewhere else. This one looks like it’s…I want to see like how many are in Prague.
I don’t know. All right. So let’s say I will cover why beer spas started, why the Czech spa tradition ventured into beer soaks to make the most of the experience, and the top places to go in Prague, with interviews with beer spa specialists. Now, it’s hard for me to tell because the font is so large but I have a feeling that this is much longer than I would want for a 300-word piece. But it’s hard to tell right now. I propose a 300-word article for your Up Close of beer spas because though beer spas have spread from Iceland to Spain to duh, duh, duh, the brewer-obsessed city has the most places to experience beers and I just can’t spell this.
Is this not a word? Is it purported? Now you get to see how I can’t spell, people. Purported ability to detoxify skin, cleanse pores, and reduce acne. In this piece, I will explore why the Czech spa tradition ventured into beer soaks, how to make the most experience, and then top places to go in Prague, with interviews with Czech beer spa specialists. I’m a New York-based duh, duh, duh, duh, and I have to think about what to prepare. Now, this is the interesting thing, because I couldn’t do this, so I’m going to just say that I have recently returned from a trip exploring the Czech Republic. Now, the Czech Republic is not its name anymore so I’m going to see what I should do about this.
How are you supposed to do this now in AP style? I don’t know if AP style has changed. The Czech Republic’s tradition and how it is modernizing for millennial spa travelers. Whoa, I actually guess I can say that I did that, but I just made that up for this piece. Okay, great. Would you be interested in… Now, what do they name these things? I guess let’s look at the database, it’s really better. So they start with the name of the city. So my subject line is going to be Prague. Let’s see what’s clever. They’re very short, urban nip and tuck, trending tastes, delicious dreams. It’s like drink your beer and soak in it too. That’s kind of long but I like it.
Now, let’s see. Tipsy Spas, I don’t know. We’ll work on that. Okay. So for Up Close, this is how the subject line is. So it’s like the title of your thing, for name of section. Okay. So then I’m going to put, “Would you be interested in Prague?” Anything instead of this? I don’t know. Anything so much better than…anybody have anything? Let us know in the chat box, for Up Close for Blue Wings.
All right. There’s one. I hope that’s the hardest. Okay. Features on modernizing spas in the Czech Republic for a Blue Wings front of book. Make these bold so that they stick out. Now, I don’t have the chat box up just because then it creates crazy mirror, beer for your body.
Yeah, Candi. They’re like two words, though. That’s why I’m really struggling here. Because you can’t do a lot in two words. If you look at this dreams one up here, where did it go? This delicious dreams and trending tastes, like they’re all kind of lame. I don’t know if tipsy spas is very attractive, maybe sudsy spas. I don’t know. That sounds a little suggestive, I think. So we’ll keep working on that. All right, next one. So we’ve got…this is also for Blue Wings. And it’s fine to write several pitches for one magazine at once, guys, because then you are queuing up like the next pitch that you’re going to send to that place. Okay, so this one is “Inside Track”. Does that sound right?
I didn’t say where, so I guess it’s “Inside Track”. So let’s pull over the text about that place. Inside Track. Inside track takes the form a round-up in about 500 words. And in third person, the place describes five to six recommendations in the same country or region. Examples from recent issues include “Call of the Wild West,” which rounds up five national parks to visit in America’s Southwest, “Smile of the Crocodile” rounding up six places to visit in eastern Cuba beyond Havana, and “Goa Bites” which rounds up six places to eat in Panjim, Goa, including cafes, restaurants, and markets. Okay, so let’s get my trusty formula down here.
All right. Let me see if I can make it so I can see you guys on the side. Okay. I propose a 500-word article for your “Insight Track” section on… So I’m going to want to know first and foremost, if the beer spa pitch was accepted, would I write without visiting? Yeah, because that section, things kind of…it’s a great question. That particular section in that magazine is super general. And I would say like because it’s a trend piece, I guess that’s how I’d put it, it’s more about the trend than it is about like one…sorry, let me get this other one, than it is about one specific place.
But what I would do is I would definitely call and like interview them. And this is the funny thing is that if you call and do good interviews, you basically end up having better sources than maybe somebody who went there but didn’t actually get information. So I would write it without going but I would actually probably, since I went for this conference and heard about it through some other places, people rather, I would hit up some other bloggers that were there and also maybe try to get some experiential-oriented quotes from them. I used to do this when I was vegetarian about meat in Italy, for instance.
Okay. So Czech Tourism which I feel like is relatively reliable, says that unique mineral springs have been used for therapeutic treatment in the Czech Republic since the 15th century. I don’t see anybody else. So next week when we’re doing leads or whenever we get that scheduled and we’re doing leads, I might pull in something…oh, they have a ceremonial opening of the spa season which is a cultural and social event. That’s kind of interesting. Okay, so I might pull that in. All right. So let’s go back to our pitch here, see if I can get everything going at once. So I propose a 500-word article for your “Inside Track” section on how the Czech Republic’s…really want to say 500-year-old, 600-year-old Renaissance.
Let’s just go with this for now, 500-year-old, and then I’m going to double check on and get a solid date. Now, everything I’m putting here in all caps, these are the kind of things that I’ll look at in that polish round we’re doing next, 500-year-old spa tradition is changing for the modern experiential traveler because with everything from your Ayurvedic facilities stocked by specialists from Kerala, India to, what? I don’t know. To itineraries specially adapted to modern, shorter vacations. The industry is poised for…I don’t know if I want to say major comeback. That’s kind of trite, but I’ll just go for that. Or major reawakening.
Okay. In this piece, I will… So this, let’s take a look at it. Third person, covers five to six places. So we want to look at the places that it’s going to cover and let’s just go back quickly to the beginning here. We can pull up one of these. If I remember correctly, this whole “Inside Track” thing was the one where they never show it on here. Let me try 29. If not, maybe it’s on 15. Okay, let’s just scroll through and see if we can find it.
We may have passed it. I remember that last week, we had trouble finding it. Okay. I want to look at it one more and then we’ll give up for now. Hey, I read his book. He’s great. Shoot, this is so irritating. I know we had this problem but I wouldn’t have included it on this list if we hadn’t seen it, right? This is why you should take more notes the first time you look at some things so that you don’t have to look again. Maybe is this thing that I’m looking at right now? I think this was an ad. No, that’s got to be an ad. I don’t know which one it is.
Let me just try this one on Hong Kong and I will give up. And don’t copy what I’m doing here. Make sure that you actually get…that you look at the thing. Okay. So because what I’m trying to…what I want to say here is what I will cover on each of these places. I want to say that I’m going to cover, you know, six places and include XYZ service information. So I’m going to say which is poised for a major awakening. In this piece, I will introduce…they’re always six. It’s five or six. Five to six venues in the Czech Republic to experience this… I don’t want to say new age, this new spa tradition including Hotel Santa Caterina where the Ayurvedic center will be opening on date…and some other interesting place that I’ll have to look up.
Now, I talked to a bunch of people in this play area called Karlo Vary. Maybe it’s Karlovy Vary, Karlo Vary, and that I know was really like the main part of this. Yeah, Karlovy Vary, of this kind of modernization. A spa slack in Karlovy Vary, but that’s old. I’m just going to take this. Now, if I was doing this slowly, I would sit here and I would read this “New York Times” article and I would think about all the things that they covered in the “New York Times” article and how I should do it differently. We don’t have time for that, right, guys? So I really specifically just want to find another place, doing something very modern.
So this is probably stuff that’s going to be part of the lead. Okay. I really love all this stuff here in this “Frommer’s” piece, so I’m going to put this up here. This talks about…I’m going to say like, you know, once upon a time…actually I might use this lead. A visit to the spa began with a consultation with a physician and the receipt of your personal cup. Cups. Are they called the cups or what do they call it? The mug. No, they just call it the cup.
All right. Let’s go back. Cup. A cup, as it’s simply called, is the constant companion of all Czech spa-goers as they drink mineral-rich thermal water or spring water. Mineral-rich spring water throughout their busy days of massages, soaks, and spa treatments. Perhaps sadly, or perhaps fortunately for the packed-itinerary traveler of today, spend the busy days of their three-or-more week stay filled with a regimented schedule of…throughout their…there we go. So like now, we got this lead based on that.
That thing from “Frommer’s”, perhaps sadly, or perhaps fortunately for the packed-itinerary traveler of today, daily life at Czech spas now looks very different. Okay, good. So like this pitch is…piece, just like need a couple things to be filled in and it’s pretty much ready. And this piece, including Hotel Santa Caterina, check spelling, where the Ayurvedic center will open on blah, blah, and some other place with something interesting and different about it.
Okay. I have recently returned from a trip including meetings with spa professionals in the Czech Republic, and a hard-hat tour of the Santa Caterina’s new Ayurvedic facility with some not-so-hard-hat time to try its new wares in the original spa. Would you be interested in…? Okay, how do they usually do these? “Smile of the Crocodile,” “Goa Bites,” “Call of the Wild West.” I don’t know, maybe your spa schedule is ready, I think that’s kind of…I would want to read something about that, but we’ll see. Okay, for “Inside Track,” for Blue Wings.
All right. That’s two, guys, and these ones, I’ve done quite…I’ve just written the leads a little bit anyway even though I said that I wouldn’t. All right. B. Inspired, “Off the Beaten Track,” Telč and Třebíč. Let’s talk about something else a little bit, shall we? Okay, let’s see how far I can get with this one. And then maybe we’ll look at doing one of these ones for “Honest Prague” and then call it a day. I’m trying to…I can’t really tell exactly from the timer how much time we’ve spent actually doing the webinar. I’m trying to make sure that we still get an hour even though we had these technical difficulties. So let me do these two quickly.
All right. So B. Inspired, “Off the Beaten Path,” Telč and Třebíč. And anybody who has to go, please, please be my guest and leave. I know we’ve had a number of technical things today. So I really appreciate everybody who’s still there. I hope it’s interesting to watch me write these. Okay. Particularly seeing that I really don’t know anything about half of the stuff that I’m saying and I’m just pulling it off the internet and trying to find a way to make it still sound exciting. Okay, B. Inspired, let’s pull this out of here.
And then this other one we’re going to look at is “Wizz Voices”. Now, if I’m not mistaken, this “Wizz Voices” one was a little bit different. Okay, so let’s see, B. Inspired. Okay. Here’s the info for “Off the Beaten Track.” Now, these are ones that like I do have a lot of really great information in my notes that you’re not going to see me pull up as we’re working on these because just for like this little bit of stuff that I need in the pitch, it’s honestly just not worth my time to go back and read and read and read, unless I really need to get something specific that I remember somebody said on the tour.
See, this one, I wasn’t so sure about because it’s quirky local. So let’s look at a different one, “Citizen’s Advice.” So I’ll do this for Honest Prague. So we’ll do “Easy Jet Citizen’s Advice.” It’s just not really worth it to go back and go through my notes at this juncture. Okay. It will be if I get the assignment but at this juncture, unless there’s a particular quote that I know that some tour guide said, but now these things are from August, so I don’t remember, right? If I wrote these right after, I would remember. It’s not worth it for me to go back through those notes just to dig up like interesting stories.
However, with Telč and Třebíč, there were some interesting thing to this Friday, but let’s see. Okay, let’s put our things in here. Basic formulas. All right. Not try to do two at once. Not really. But okay. So for “Off the Beaten Path,” Telč and Třebíč, a first-person article. Okay, I’m going to bold that to remember. Let me make this a little bigger so you guys can see it. About a destination that’s a one-to-three-hour drive from a major city. And then I’m wondering, do I need to include this like distance from the airport? In about 500 words, so I propose a 500-word article for your “Off the Beaten Track” section.
Now, I want to get the correct spelling of these two things because they have like little…I’ll spell hats and things that I don’t actually know how to do on my laptop. And let’s see, how do they do the titles here? Again, these silly little…so maybe for my title, it’s going to be like UNESCO or something. Something lame because their titles are lame. So it can cover a trip as a whole, or focus on one particular activity or restaurant. For example, I’m going to say like UNESCO Jems or Glimmers or something like this in…the names are Třebíč. It’s going to get all funky. Yes, Třebíč and Telč. Come on. Telč. Check here for “Off the Beaten Path.”
All right. Now, for the lead, who knows. We’re going to want to look at it? Okay, let’s pull some of these up. B. Inspired.
So, the Moroccan city of Marrakech may be famed for its traditional crafts, yet an influx of creatives and some new museum openings are putting contemporary art in the spotlight. So there’s got a big long lead, and that’s very kind of setting the scene, talking about her next stop.
Okay. So it’s first person, and it’s very much like here’s my trip in detail. Tuck, tuck, tuck, tuck. Okay. So this is really important to know because otherwise, I would have written this pitch quite differently. Okay. So let’s look at the map and see how these two things kind of intersect with one another because then I would start describing the drive, that’s a bit boring. Now, the thing is, do I need to say Telč and Třebíč on UNESCO treasure, rich Telč and Třebíč because…because that’s really why I’m proposing them. If there’s just such amazing things there and I saw these towns in my itinerary, was like, “Okay. All right. We’ll go there.” And then we got to these venues and they were just…I mean, I couldn’t believe it.
So I’m just going to pull up the whole UNESCO page for the Czech Republic. It’s going to make it easier for me to find those two places. I’m also going to make a note for myself that we’re using this October Marrakech thing as an example because I need to refer back to it. It’s funny because, well, this is spelled…I don’t know if she spelled it wrong or if the author spelled it wrong. But this place is like far from Bombay and then they also have this Alibag piece. So clearly, they are…or maybe she should write about the Alibag piece. Oops, let’s go back. So here’s the one that we’re copying, here’s this and the map. There we go.
Okay. So the Czech Republic UNESCO site, no. So that’s not the Telč that I want. So let’s look at how this drive is. I don’t remember it being fantastically interesting. Okay, there they are. So it’s giving me walking directions, I think that they are in Monrovia, and they’re just under three hours. Now, I want to know about kind of the… Great. Okay. Good. Not sure what happened. So I was just saying that Telč has this amazing square whereas Třebíč is like this picture-perfect kind of postcard kind of place. So this has got all the UNESCO. So we’ve got the historic center of Telč, that’s where it’s got the square and stands on a hilltop, originally in the late 14th century. So that would…I’m always really bad with that. So that would make it the 1300s, okay?
And then, this is the early 13th century. So that would make it the 1200s, because these 13th and 14th-century towns not only offer picture-perfect…small city breaks, town breaks, small town European charm, but is the Jewish Quarter. See when these were built, dah, dah, dah. Gothic style. Let’s say, but include architectural…but include impeccably preserved architectural gems that offer…not quite sure what to say. Like something view into the lives of our Medieval and Renaissance relatives, peer something, ancestors, I don’t know. Ancestors. Medieval and Renaissance ancestors of all faiths, let’s see. What magazine is this? Is it okay? Yeah, actually build their own about that.
I think town a couple times, I guess they’re cities, for your “Off the Beaten Track” section because on UNESCO-rich Telč and Třebíč because these 13th and 14th-century cities not only offer picture-perfect small town European charm, but also include impeccably and preserved architectural gems that offer…I want to say something about it being unique, without saying unique, I’ll look up for synonyms later. A unique view into the lives of our Medieval and Renaissance ancestors of all faiths. So something about these because sentences is that they can often be like a bit bland but it’s because you have to really…like this is not a place to showcase your writing. This is a place to make it exquisitely clear to the editor what on earth it is that you intend to cover. So those should be kind of like really overt sentences there, okay?
So in this piece, I will cover my recent trip through the area, highlighting the interesting things in the name of palace, and name of the square, in Telč, I’m going to put them backwards because I went to Telč first. We were just so enamored with that place. So we all just like stayed up late sitting in the square just because dah, dah, dah, and dah, dah, dah, in Telč and the…some descriptive details, stats that make…it feels like it must have won a cutest small town award. Anything else?
Let’s have a look at the magazine. Anything else? Quotes. I will include quotes. Okay? Yeah, I actually have some really cool quote, I think, unless I’m confusing which places this is. These are, rather. I will include quotes from somebody. I’ll have to see who. So for this one in terms of thoughts that I have for the lead, I think that I’m going to go heavy on the description here because these places really are marvels in places that you wouldn’t really think to go to unless you understood how great the things were. So I’m going to have the lead rely on heavy description may be of the castle in Telč. Because it’s just like room after room that was just crazy. So I think I’m going to rely on that. So I know that we’ve probably by now even with the second sort of break done an hour. So I’m going to let you guys go now.
If I were to…so we’ve got the title for this, so I’ll just put this down here so that this pitch is pretty done. Would you be interested in UNESCO Jems/Glimmer? I’ll just go with that. I don’t know. For, what is this place called? “Off the Beaten Track” for which magazine is this again? B. Inspired. So we’ve got three here, this one, I’m going to do a really quick lead on the stats probably. This one, I’ve already got a lead. This one just needs to be filled in a couple of things. This one, I have a variety of things that I need to fill in. I would have liked to have gotten to this “Citizen’s Advice” thing but I feel like that last little internet hiccup has just really pushed us over time. So I’m going to let you guys go. So the “Citizen’s Advice” section on name and name of Honest Prague, I’ll just do this super-fast, 200 words. And for the lead, I’m going to make the lead be a funny quote.
On name and name of the website, or is it the video channel? Because their irreverent approach to their home city they love has achieved an unparalleled appreciation and welcoming to visitors that the city government…I’m not quite sure if that’s what I mean here but we’ll go with that. In this piece, I will highlight first person as go to piece where the person shares six tips for where they live or are from, could include… So we want six tips, could include where to eat, shop, and what to see in the destination. Okay, cool. In this piece, I will feature last name and last names.
Favorite things to do in Prague from the continuous…let’s see. From like the hair-raising jumps on and off the continuously moving elevators in…wherever those are. There’s like only a few left. And some meal. These things I have in my notes, I hope I have them in my notes, otherwise, you can get them from the website. Now, I’m doing these kind of in a little more detail because they want tips, or they want things to do and I want to make sure that they’re good enough. So I’m New York-based, dah, dah, dah. I’m going to say, “I have recently had the opportunity to meet and speak with last name and last name.”
And again, I told you this before. So I’m going to like lie here and say I have their permission to do with the piece which I do not. So they had an interesting thing here of how they’ve actually gotten like sort of money changing places that extort people, how they’ve actually gotten them to close. Growing their coverage of Prague to the point where they have their followers boycotting has even been able to shut down exploitative… Have agreed…so this is the language here. They have agreed to participate in this piece if assigned.
Okay. That’s what you can use here. Would you be interested in…? And then I need to check on the title. Okay, guys, that’s four pitches plus a bunch of time of me talking. All right. So next time, we are going to fill in the leads for things that need leads. We’re going to look at my notes for those things that are missing and the internet for the other thing. You guys are going to tell me if I have some questions on some different leads, which ones we’re going to do. And then we’re going to run through our idea checklist one more time. All right.
And thank you guys so much, especially those of you who’ve been with me all day. I really look forward to our next set of webinars. And thank you so much for putting up with all of our internet things today. And I look forward to talking to you guys soon and finishing up this workshop. Thanks, guys.
Live Idea-to-Pitch Walkthrough #4 – Ruthlessly Auditing Idea Fit Transcript
This week we are going to do module four of our six-part “Idea-to-Pitch Walkthrough” series. So in the past, we have gone from just some basic notes on a trip or rather, you know, in-depth notes from tours, but the basic itinerary and turn that into some potential pitches. We’ve gone through the travel magazine database and we looked at a number of different magazines, both airline and otherwise, and pulled out some magazines that might be a fit for these ideas. And then in the last webinar, we started to look at the actual physical magazines to see which ones, when we look at them, really didn’t match the idea that we had in terms of tone. Or perhaps the magazine was connected to an airline which did not, in fact, fly to the destination that we were doing. That was one of the things that came up because we started, in particular, looking at the airline magazines because we had a lot of ideas for those.
But one of the things that we ran into last time, just to refresh everyone’s memory, is that the place that we are profiling particularly with these ideas is in the Czech Republic. And it’s kind of an out of the way place. And so what happened was that some of these places were not serviced… Well, some of these airlines didn’t even service Prague, which was kind of surprising. And some of the airlines didn’t service the smaller airports in the Czech Republic and they wouldn’t take pieces for the sections that we were looking at, which is kind of the thing you have to look at. Some airlines sections will only cover the specific cities that an airline flies directly to on its own planes that it owns or rents. Aer Lingus is particularly one in this case. And other magazines, particularly Delta, this comes up a lot. They have a section called “Breakaway,” which is specifically for destinations that are, say, like two or three hours away from the airport. So there’s other magazine sections and airline magazines where we have a lot of latitude in terms of where the physical location of that place is.
But, first, the overview of what we’re gonna talk about today are, like I said, I’m gonna tell you what the series is and how to follow up at home. And then I’m gonna pull up our list of ideas so we can all refresh ourselves about what the ideas we’re working on. They kind of fall into some main categories that basically, even though there were a lot of different things that I did on these fam trips, I can show you the earlier pages if people are curious.
As we notched down from some like 40 odd ideas, there were only really magazine sections, at least that we were seeing, and we only live for one hour, you know, in the database, but there were only really magazine sections that we were seeing for a handful of those ideas. And some of the ones that jumped out were actually a little bit surprising because they weren’t necessarily large aspects of the trip. So then we’re gonna talk about what fit checks we’ve done before I went into this a little bit and what’s left to do. And I’m gonna introduce a new kind of tool for checking fit that we’re gonna look at as we get into the pitch as well because it’s a way for you to know that your pitch is both relevant and interesting that you should apply at multiple stages of the process, both when you first have the idea as well as in the pitch. And then we’re gonna attack our matches and refine them.
The next two webinars in this series involve us actually writing the bones of the pitch and then filling it in with specific details, which is something that I’ve been doing a whole lot of because we just had the financial writing boot camp last week or the week before last, and we were writing 15 minute or less-pitches right and left while we were there. So you will see how exactly we go about doing this like really fast pitch formation that we do. But before we get there, we need to make kind of a priority list of the pitches that we’re gonna work on on our pitch. So if we have one overarching goal today as we refine the matches further and kind of ruthlessly check to make sure that they are workable, it’s gonna be that I’m trying to create a list of which ideas are actually worth my time to pitch. So something that I was thinking about before this webinar today, I’m gonna tell you after I kind of refresh from the beginning about what we’re doing because it’s really central to that.
As I was saying, it’s really interesting now that we’re getting to the end of the series or, rather, we’ve just passed the hump now, we’re in four of six, right, to start to see things come to fruition. And circling back to what I said at the beginning, the whole reason that I set out to do this idea-to-pitch series is because I don’t see enough of you going through this process in, to go back to the title of today’s webinar which is “Ruthlessly Auditing for Fit,” quite as ruthlessly as you perhaps should or need to in order to have viable careers, particularly if magazine writing is where you wanna focus your time.
I’ve had several chats with people about the idea of freelance and what that means, historically. So if you’re not familiar with it, freelance literally means somebody who, back in medieval times, was a knight who was not pledged in fidelity to any particular lord or king. So his lance was kind of free to be attached hither or thither. So, this idea of a freelancer was really literally, from the inception, somebody who’s a mercenary, somebody whose lance is for hire, somebody who has no allegiance. However, I find so often these days that there’s a lot of allegiance going on. You feel allegiance to an editor that you haven’t even pitched that you don’t wanna bother her. You feel allegiance to an editor that you’ve sent one email to who hasn’t responded that you don’t wanna bother them by following up to make sure they’ve seen your pitch. You feel allegiance to an editor who has responded to you in one way or another. It’s just amazing how much thinking of others is happening here in a way where we need to remind ourselves that this is business.
I don’t say that in a, you know, Mafioso way where they dig the knife into somebody or something like that. I mean it in the way that if you aren’t hitting your bottom line, if you’re not covering your expenses, then you’re not doing this as a business. You’re doing this as a hobby or I don’t even know, for tax purposes, what a hobby is, has even changed in the U.S. recently. So maybe it’s not even a hobby. Maybe it’s like crocheting for you or something. Okay. So if you aren’t thinking about this in a way of how do I make my numbers make sense, how do I make my expenses get covered, how do I meet my financial goals, just like you would with any other type of job, you might wanna think about how to reset your viewpoint in what’s standing in the way of you doing that and if those things are more important than your actual goals in terms of the type of lifestyle that you want from the business that you’ve set up for yourself. One of the numbers that is very important to watch is how long it takes you to pitch. People think a lot about how many pitches they’re sending out.
And it was very interesting. I just had a coaching call with somebody who I hadn’t talked to in a little bit. In the beginning of our call, she very promptly reported to me all of the work that she had recently filed. She was very proud of this. And it’s interesting because I often talk to people who tell me about how much work they’ve done in more of “hours in” kind of input way. But the thing is that the number of hours that you put in in this profession, unfortunately, don’t matter at all. In fact, they are the opposite of a badge of honor. You should be putting in fewer hours and doing more traveling and enjoying your life. But most importantly, you need to be getting your pitches and your articles out as quickly as possible so that you have the best hourly rate.
So, the impetus of this entire webinar series is to show you not just how, okay, not just how to get your pitches out quickly or why, but really this idea of where your priorities should lie. And you’re gonna see this come up today because I’ve spent all of this time, okay. You know, we looked through the itinerary. I didn’t even spend that much time on my notes the first go-around, okay? Then we spent some time in the database. Then I’ve spent a little bit of time, like an hour or probably less because we do talk about some other things on our webinar, looking through the actual physical magazines. But I know we looked through like five or six, if not more different magazines in the last webinar. So I am not taking one magazine title and sitting there for two or three hours and reading back issues of that magazine, okay, because you can’t. Because it doesn’t make sense for your time. Once you get the assignment, you can spend some more time doing that. But even now, up until writing the pitch, I have been very sparse in how much time I’m dedicating to any one pitch and any one article idea because that’s the way that the game works, so to say, and that’s why we’re doing this series. So, we’re gonna move into, as I said in this webinar, checking the fit more closely and starting to create that priority pitch list.
So, for this week in particular, like I said, it’s about taking the ideas that we already have, some of which we have already actually gone through several stages of fit checking and taking them to the next level so that we are starting to assemble as well the material that we need to write the pitch. So first, I wanna check in with where we are with our ideas. And then we’re gonna talk more about exactly what fit checking we’re gonna be doing this week so that we can take those ideas further along in the process and put together basically our hit list in order of what seems like the hottest ideas for next week, or sorry, for the next webinar in this series, which I think is, in fact, next week.
So up here at the top, the very first thing that we did last time. So last time, like I said, one of the very first things that we did was we took a look at the airline magazines that we were interested in. I’ve got all the magazine sections in here. But we looked at the airline magazines that we were interested in and we looked at which cities that I went to on this trip are actually okay for the airline magazine, as in which one do they fly there.
Now, like WOW Air, which was one we were looking at, doesn’t even fly to the Czech Republic at all. So we can only pitch them a story where it would be okay that the story doesn’t cover one of their airports, okay? And then I also went and I checked for some other airlines maybe that we didn’t think about that fly into some of these smaller airports, some of these we didn’t look at the magazines for before, okay? So then what we did was we looked at some of our ideas. Now some of these ideas that we’re focusing on, just as a refresher, there’s a couple ideas that are feature ideas.
So what I’m gonna start doing now is I’m gonna start switching these and putting them by which ideas they are. And this is actually how we had it on our first one, but then we switched to looking at them by magazine so that we could quickly go through the magazines and see which ideas actually worked. So I’m gonna resave this so that we know that this is gonna be from our new call so that we’ve got every stage of our process documented so we don’t lose anything. I often find, especially those of you who work in Google Docs, for instance, aren’t necessarily saving extra versions of things. And this can be really useful because it might be that you’ve written a version of something that you really like in an early pitch. And after you edit it, you’ve lost that, you’ve gotten rid of it. And then comes a time to kind of put together the final version and you realize that you don’t actually have this really great maybe lead or something like that that you had in the first draft because you thought you didn’t like it. And now after seven versions, it’s actually your favorite thing. So always save your things as versions, guys. Okay?
So we got rid of this portion of “Wizz.” We said that one wasn’t gonna work. Now this one here looks like this is not a feature. This is a profile. And this is on something that someone pitched to me actually in the speed dating at this conference, okay. So this is gonna be a profile of northern hikes, and we’ll see if there’s some other places that we have to pitch that. Okay, so that’s in “Wizz.” Now, something else that we saw a lot of was this profile of honest Prague people. Okay. You’re gonna see, as I pull these in here, that there’s quite a few of those that seem like they would work. Now, for “Wizz,” we also had like three or four different features that seemed like they might work there. “Wizz” is an Eastern European airline magazine that we were looking at. Okay. So we have the honest Prague people profile, those are ones that we have a lot for. The other feature ideas that we’re kicking around are beer culture in Prague. Now, this is a really proto idea, okay? This is really early, okay? And this is something that, one of the things we’ll do in this webinar and particularly the next seminar, is that we’ll develop that further into a proper idea.
We also talked about modernizing the spa culture in the Czech Republic. And perhaps this culture of the underground tunnels, which, again, all of these right now are very vague. They’re very proto because we’re gonna make them specific once we start writing up the pitch and once we start getting into this idea of what…not necessarily just once we start writing the pitch, but once we start getting into the idea of what is the tone and what is the voice for the particular magazine we’re writing a pitch for. And Lindsay noted that you can recover previous versions in Google Docs. But I was talking about it less from that you can’t recover it but it’s kind of like recovering different things in Google Docs is like me going into WordPress and trying to figure out who made a mistake in the “Travel Magazine” database and when this happened and having to look through 27 versions. So I prefer to say like, you know, if I’m working with somebody on their pitch, I’ll save it as “Gabby edits February 20th” or “pitch version 2,” or “pitch with new lead” or something like that. So as I wanna go back and pull something from a different version, it’s a lot easier and faster for me to do that.
I think one of the reasons that people don’t save different things in Google Docs is that they know they can go back through prior versions using version history, but I think that nobody ever really wants to or, you know, you’ll sit there and go down the rabbit hole of self-doubt of all of these different versions of your past pitch and maybe the one you have now really isn’t the best. So good point there, Lindsey. So, like I said, we’ve got honest Prague. We’ve got these three main feature ideas that we’re looking at. Now, we had several things that looked like they could work for EasyJet, particularly for their front of book thing. We had this homeless tour idea that they had in Prague, in Ostrava. And I’m not sure if there’s other places where that’s happening, but that could be an interesting front of book pitch, okay? Some other things that we had in EasyJet were this area guide, but that depends on where EasyJet flies. And it looks like EasyJet only really works for Prague. So because I don’t really have a ton of stuff about Prague, that probably wouldn’t be the best. So I’m just gonna cross over, and I’m not gonna get rid of it just in case something occurs to me later as I’m going back through my notes.
Now, we did, however, have one place that I went to in Prague that seemed like a really cool sort of cafe idea that could work for this short thing in EasyJet. Now, this might be something that, as we start writing the pitch, I see that this is something that I can repurpose for some other places. So you’ll see, particularly when we get into the webinars, when we’re doing writing the pitch and polishing it, I’m also going to be lining up some different sort of backup, if you will, places that I can send that pitch to. This one, we decided… Oh, I’m not sure where we were with that one so I’m just gonna make it a question mark. And then again, we have these honest Prague people who we’re just gonna be pitching all day every day it seems. Now, I always tell everybody that if you wanna pitch a profile of a particular person, of an individual, or particularly a Q&A, then you need to be getting their permission first. So for the purposes of this webinar, I have not reached out to these people, I wanna say this. But it’s something that you really need to be doing whenever you guys are pitching these things, okay?
Now for EasyJet features, I had several different feature ideas. And some of them incorporate the same feature ideas that we had earlier for “Wizz” and some of these are different, but I’m just gonna put them together for now. Now, you’ll notice I don’t have a spreadsheet here. I’m not sitting here kind of, you know, like tabulating and color coding and doing all these things, not because I think that this looks good. This is like crazy and disastrous and seven different fonts and everything. But because it’s important to not get drowned in the ceremony of what you’re doing. If you have a process that works really well, then that’s great. If you are finding that you are becoming a slave to your process and that your process is taking more time than actually doing the work, then that’s something that we need to look at.
So I’m just moving again these ideas back up here so that they’re with their counterparts because, like I said, at the end of today’s webinar, we’re going to be kind of grading these for which are the best. So for instance, I’m putting together these features where the features go. Let’s just do a search for feature. It takes forever. So I’m putting together these features. Here we go. I’m putting in all these features. So for instance, I’m gonna find the feature. There’s a couple different ones that I wrote here, but it’s only this modernizing spa culture one that’s coming up on a lot of these lists. So when I go back, I’m gonna say, “Okay. It looks like the modernizing spa culture could work for three magazines.” So that’s probably gonna be the feature pitch that I wanna prioritize out of all of those feature pitch.
Okay. This is a road trip type piece. So this is a very popular thing which people talk about whenever we do workshops, but I don’t actually see so many people pitching. So this is “b.inspired” which is Brussels Airways. And they have a really great road trip section. And then after that, we’ve got, again, our honest Prague folks. Now, I had some kind of weird feature idea here about this idea of a collection driven curio cabinet and how people who travel a lot kind of focus on something that they always collect everywhere they go. And I don’t super love that. So I’m not gonna move that back up into the ones that we’re looking at for now. I’m gonna put it in Italics like I did for these other places.
So then I had another one for Brussels Airways that I was thinking about, which is a neighborhood one. So then we’re gonna double check. Brussels only flies to Prague. So again, it seems like this is not gonna work. So, those are the magazines that we had looked at already. So like I said, we did have originally a lot of different magazines picked up and besides that, a lot of different magazine ideas. So I’ll just pull those up so that you guys can see those as well. And then we’ll circle back to talk about fit. And I’m just gonna put these side by side on the screen and then zoom out to my whole screen and have you guys look at those. All right. So, hopefully, you should be seeing these now.
All right. So this is our initial ideas list. So this I went through and added up kind of both the original day trips that I went on for the conference, the meetings that I had during speed dating, and then some different ideas that came up during the tour that I was on. And then we had gone through a bunch of different magazines. You can see the magazine names are over here. They’re small. We had gone through a bunch of different magazines. And I put the different sections of the magazines that I thought might fit. And then I also put the ideas that I had, especially if there was more than one, that might work for that section.
So last time, like I said, we went through a certain number of magazines. And we actually physically looked at those magazines. We looked at “Wizz,” which is an Eastern European carrier. We look to “N by Norwegian.” We looked at Brussels. We looked at EasyJet which is out of the UK. And I think that might be all the ones that we got to. But you’ll see that in here, there’s quite a few other ones that I have. I have “WOW.” I have “Voyeur,” which is Virgin Australia. I have “Celebrated Living,” which is gonna be one of the, I think it’s the upper-class magazine for American Airlines. I have “High Life,” which is British Airways. Again, Voyeur. I have WestJet, which is a Canadian airline. I have Wings, which is a German airlines, Swissair, “Cara,” which is the magazine for Aer Lingus which is an Irish airline. So there’s several magazines that we didn’t even get here. And still, these are only the magazines that we saw when we did a quick look through the database in less than an hour.
So it’s important to remember that all that being said, I still turned up here 10 article pitches that I was ready to move forward even though I was not looking at every single magazine, even though I was not kind of going back towards the dawn of time, even though I was not reading every single magazine and like four back issues of it.
So, as you saw in our last call, we didn’t get through a monumental amount of stuff. Like I said, we only got through four magazines. We only got through adding in about 10 ideas, but that’s okay because how many pitches are you really gonna write? Like I said, one of the things that we were noticing was that there were certain ideas like the profile of those honest Prague people that just seemed to have more resonance. There were certain feature ideas that seemed like they would match more people. So that helps us to see which pitch is gonna make sense for me to write because if we’re spending this webinar series of six webinars, it’ll be six hours. If we’re spending six webinars, or six hours rather, and we’ve done a survey of all of the ideas we could possibly pitch, you know, a skim of which magazines they could go in and still we get out with somewhere like three to five pitches at the end, that’s great for six hours’ work, to think about all of that that went in there. And then that is our jumping off point.
Then we can always go back to other ideas that we didn’t pitch. We can always go back to other magazines we didn’t check. But more importantly, we can take the pitches that are now finished and we can circulate those out to more places that have more of a chance of those landing and turning into ideas, especially bigger, longer ideas. So, last time we checked, particularly the airlines where they serviced, and we looked at four of those magazines, now, I particularly noted at the end the call last time that we wanted to check on Blue Wings because we had quite a few different ideas for Blue Wings. But also, I wanted us to dive more deeply into this nine-step fit check process.
And then like I said, the real goal today, to me, is for us to take those ideas that we already have and put them in into an order of what is the highest priority, what is the best fit, what seems to have the best chance of success, because those are the pitches that we’re gonna write next time. And this is part of the ruthless audit is that we all have lots of ideas. I’m working on the essay for the newsletter for this week and it’s all about drowning in ideas and how we have… I have pages and pages and pages of wall-sized Post-Its that people fill with ideas that each of those ideas could spin off into 200 different things every time we do the boot camp. But the ideas don’t matter. Ideas are cheap. Ideas are air until we get them out into the marketplace for pitches.
So what I’m gonna do is I’m gonna go into these magazines, like I said, and have us start there in terms of what we’re gonna cover.
Now, “Lufthansa Magazine” is gonna be a little tricky for us to check because I’m not sure if they have a full issue online. It doesn’t look like it. They seem to have some random articles. So let’s just look quickly through. I’m gonna switch the screen. We’re going to look at “Lufthansa Magazine” and “Blue Wings” and then if we have time, maybe one more. I’ve also got Swiss open in terms of some other magazines that we might fit, some of these ideas, into. So parts of “Lufthansa Magazine” that are open are an interview with a celebrity, four features but between travel and aviation. They’re usually 1,500 words long. And travel feature example would be “Giver of Life,” which shows the story of a writer’s trip to Bangkok to celebrate the Loi Krathong festival with an emphasis on the modernization of Bangkok’s river including quotes from locals. Okay. Another example includes “Optimistic Outpost” in which the writer visits Athens with an emphasis on the upcoming contemporary art exhibit “documenta 14,” including quotes from artists involved in the discussion of the changing art scene.
So, I really feel like here, they wanna have a strong time peg at the festival here and this art exhibit. But they also really wanna focus on how something is changing. So I feel like this can be a good fit. Of course, we’ll have to have a glance of the magazine if we can, but I feel like this could be a good fit. And I’m gonna go add it to our sheet for today that this can be a good fit for that spa thing that I was talking about, which again, is about kind of the modernization of the Czech kind of ancient spa culture, particularly focusing on this Santa Catarina, which is sort of collaborating with an Indian spa in Kerala to open a brand new building which has a whole Ayurvedic component. So I think that could be an interesting one here. But, otherwise, there’s not too much Lufthansa that’s open to freelancers so we will leave it at that.
So I’m gonna see over here in Lufthansa if we can get one of their features open. Now, again, I’m not super sure which is a feature here just because they don’t annoyingly have their whole magazine online. So we’re sort of just grasping at straws here. Yeah. See, this is short so I’m not sure. So, sometimes this happens, guys. Sometimes you simply can’t get an actual copy of the magazine. Now I really harped last time on how important this is to actually look at a copy of the magazine. And part of that is because I’ve seen some magazine editors get really ticked recently at people for pitching…it’s not like somebody pitched just without looking at the magazine. But it’s that…see, this actually looks kind of feature-y so this could maybe work. But it’s not just that somebody pitched without looking at the magazine but it’s like very clear that somebody pitched with a certain amount of information but that they just didn’t do that last step of checking out the magazine.
So, whenever you can, even if it’s just like we’re doing that I’ve just gone on the website and I found something that looks like it could be a feature even though I’m not sure, it’s really important to do this because editors notice. Editors notice if you pitch them an idea that’s way off. And it happens for two reasons. Either you’ve pitched them an idea that you really love, that you think is in line with what they’re talking about and you’re not communicating it well, or you haven’t done your homework. And neither of those things bode well for your relationship with an editor. So, this thing that looks like a travel feature, maybe this clicking on travel would let us know, but this thing which looks like a travel feature is about the East Coast Greenway in the U.S., which, honestly, I didn’t even know about. And I’m just gonna dump this in our notes so that we have it as a potential example for later of what a feature looks like here. Now, we’re trying to see if this whole idea of the Santa Catarina spa is gonna be a fit. So, they’re talking about the trend. They’re talking about the trend. They’re talking about the history of the swamp. Again, it all seems kind of very reported. There’s some quotes, but it all seems kind of big picture and trend-oriented. They’re profiling a particular bike shop. Of course, they’ve got pictures.
I feel like I have quite a few sources for this, both from the trip that I took and also from the speed dating. And I had a massage at the place and I toured the new spa there as well. So I feel like I have a good amount here, and I would wanna check if this person who did the photos, if that was somebody who shot it just for this article, because it looks like it, because they’re all the same person. So the one thing I would need to do is figure out how I was gonna get the photos. Now, I do have something but I don’t know if I would have enough for what they would want. Or it might be that they could just send one of their own photographers to do that. And in fact, let’s even just look up this person and see. Yeah. She seems to be… Oh, she’s a photographer based in New York, right, because they shot this here. So she has a website that does not seem to work. But so she’s a New York-based photographer. So it seems like they send out separate photographers. So that wouldn’t be a problem that I don’t have those pictures. So that’s great. So I’m going to hold on to that Lufthansa piece.
So now let’s take a look. I’m gonna switch over to one of the Blue Wings magazine. And actually, it might be faster for me to share my whole screen so that we can see side by side both the magazine and my notes. So I’m gonna go ahead and do that. So here we’ve got Swiss. Let’s look at a Blue Wings. And this is our idea fit thing that we’re gonna talk about later, and let me pull up our ideas. All right. So, I’m gonna pull up the second page just so we can know what we’re gonna move over. Okay, great. So in Blue Wings, we are specifically looking for…we’re looking for this up-close. And that is to cover this idea of the beer spot, this beer cultures in Prague. We’re looking for…oops, that’s up-close again. We’re looking for inside track, and that’s again for this modernizing spas idea. I’m not sure why everything is showing up twice here. This is very strange. Okay. And then we’ve got two other ones here that are different, how Instagramers are changing natural destinations. That’s what I was talking about, about the northern hikes idea from earlier. Okay. And for sidesteps, it’s a roundup of different things to do in a destination. That could also be the beer spas. Okay. It seems like that’s all the ones that we’ve got here.
So we’re looking for up-close inside track sidesteps in an investigation. So let’s see what we’ve got. All right. So up close is gonna be on page 14. Investigation is much later, on some page 68. And then I’m still looking for inside track and sidesteps. We’ll see if those come up as we scroll through. They might be one of these ones that are written with the destination instead. Okay. So let’s go to that page 20 whatever it was for up close.
It’s right over here. Inside track, there we go. “Going coastal. With a combination of nostalgic elements and modern twist, this great seaside English town is still going strong.” Ironically, they don’t seem to tell us what it is, but I imagine that is Brighton. Okay. So for this one, we are considering inside track. We’re considering these modernizing spas. Okay. And it’s different places in the same country or region. But this one seems to be a bit different. It seems to be more things that are going on in the coast there. So I don’t know if that fits so well with this current idea. Let’s go back up for a second and see where we need to go for these other ones. Up close is on. Oh, we skipped up close. Okay. Up close is on 14. Let me see if we can just go to that and then I’ll go to 68 for investigations.
Okay, up close. This is the one that covers one aspect of a city in detail in about 300 words. Now, this one is talking about serenity in the city. This is saying about gardens somewhere in China. It’s quite short. It just has a couple of pictures. It has some very general recorded information. So I think at least just from the structure, the one that I was looking at would work there. And now let’s look at these investigations and then we’ll look at the other two issues quickly. All right. Now, for investigation, we had thought about this idea of how Instagramers are changing travel, natural destinations. After revolutionizing bike sharing and mobile payments, China now aims for global dominance on the electric vehicle market. So it starts with a lead, that sort of a profile of a particular example of this trend. It’s got some quotes but talking about some specific companies. I feel like this works. So I’m gonna hold on to this one. And I think we also feel like the beer spas could potentially work, but we need to check on this inside track. So let’s check on one more issue.
Okay. So we’ve got up closes on 17. Now, somehow we found inside track. It must have been this 19. And I’m not quite sure how to find sidestep. So maybe we’ll just try and scroll and see if we can come up to it. So I’m gonna skip ahead to 17 and then investigations on 70. Let’s just start there actually. Brain food … can handicrafts boost wellness, increase creativity and brain activity? So this one’s much more general, which I feel like kind of goes to the one that we’re thinking about more so than the China one. So I’m actually gonna just jot this down that we’re pitching something in this frame. And this one I really like. And I think this can be a cool thought piece to write as well. So I’m definitely gonna upgrade this. I’m gonna keep this as one that we’re gonna do. So let’s go back and look at those other two ideas for Blue Wings.
Okay. Up close, off the beaten path. This is talking about Delhi’s Sufi capital. So it’s sort of a type of mysticism, if I’m not mistaken. Now, within Islam, again, this is quite general. I feel like this would totally work for the beer spas and with the little that I have, I could still know enough to write it. So I’m gonna hold on to that one for beer spas. And let me just look again at this inside track if we can find it. It seems like they are not being super helpful in how they title these things here. Inside track, “Nanjing on tab. China’s former capital is home to some of the earliest craft beer in the country. And these are some of the hoppiest venues around.” So this one is a little more that it’s gone out and it’s gone more general. And it’s just profiling individual places, which is more like what we were looking about at the spa here. But it’s specifically in a city.
It looks like in the past, they have covered one that’s like five national parks. So I’d still feel like that one could work. But I’m just gonna check one more just to be safe. And I’m still trying to find this sidesteps, which is a roundup of different things to do in a destination. I don’t wanna take too much time on this. So let me just pop over here to the last of the three Blue Wings that I pulled up and just see if I can get us one more example. It’s probably gonna be 29. Let me try 29 of that inside track for us to look at. Agenda. I think it’s before Explore. Let’s see. Escape. It’s a beautiful magazine, by the way. This is the “Finnair” magazine. Oh, but they did just have a field trip to Prague. So this is the August. This is really important to remember. Field trip to Prague in August of 2018. Now, this was something that I wanted to cover today is this idea of how obsessed do we need to be of whether the magazine has covered a specific destination already or not. We don’t need to be super obsessed, guys, because here’s the thing. Up close, here we go. This is the one we’re looking at? Up close we already said was fine. Okay. I think we’re gonna just say this is sort of fine. I’m gonna get rid of the side steps because I had trouble finding it so we’ll keep these three.
So in terms of how crazy we need to go with making sure that the destination has not been covered recently in the magazine, here’s my thoughts on that. We don’t really need to worry too much unless it has specifically been covered in that magazine in the same section, okay? So for instance, if you are pitching to Brussels Airways and you are pitching this road trip piece, okay, let’s have a look at that. Let me pull back up a web browser for you guys. In Brussels magazine specifically, and all I’m gonna do is this. Go to Google. And I’m gonna run two searches. I’m gonna write “b.inspired” which is the name of the magazine and I’m gonna write České. That’s the name of the town. So, apparently, that’s also the name of an album, among other things. The magazine doesn’t even come up first. So let’s try “b.inspired” magazine. Okay, there we go, by Ink. Okay. So still, you’re gonna see that there’s not things coming up here. Okay. Now, we could go and we could search specifically within Ink magazine website. But we have to remember, most of these airline magazines that we can get our hands on are only published online digitally, as in like in flip-through versions, which aren’t searchable.
The editors know this. They know that there’s only so much that you can do in order to check if the magazine has been covered or not, or the destination has been covered or not in the magazine. They get that. They also know that there’s no way that you could know if they’ve scheduled it to run two weeks from now. But what you can do, okay… So that’s the case of an airline magazine, is if you’re searching for consumer magazine where they’re gonna be covering…they’re gonna be writing, sorry. They’re gonna be putting a lot of their writing on the Internet as well that appears in the magazine, what you can do is this. You go on Google, and you put the URL and then the colon and then you put the destination. Now, I wouldn’t expect anything to come up here. And sure, enough, it doesn’t. You see, like Rick Steves has one. But like if I put Paris here, even though without putting magazine, I’m sure some stuff is gonna come up. See in Paris. In Paris, see it goes Outside. Outside. And then it starts to go into other things. But, you know, if I put mountain biking or something that Outside magazine will definitely cover, all of the results that we’re gonna see are all gonna be in Outside magazine. Well, actually, they switched it off pretty fast. That’s interesting.
So typically, when you run this search like this, you should be getting only results directly from the magazine. So I’m not quite sure why this is working. But you can use Google rather than using the magazine’s own website to run this search a lot more quickly and to do as much searching as you reasonably need to be doing for the sake of the editor’s mindset to show that you’ve done your searching. Because they don’t expect any writer to be reading every single issue of their magazine to know what they’ve covered in every single issue. That’s their job. That’s not your job. They’re only going to get irritated if you’ve pitched them, for instance, this road trip and the very last road trip that they covered is something on the same destination or a similar destination that you’re pitching. I want to switch over now. Like I said, I wanna put together our list of the priority pitches for next month.
But first, I wanna switch over to this pitch checklist. So like I said, this is something that I’m introducing today but that we’re really gonna be using in subsequent webinars as we write the pitches even more. Now, do I have a topic rather than an article idea? Is it encyclopedic or is there a story to tell to the point at the end? You’ll notice, right now I have topics. And that’s okay because I have topics because I need to meld them to all of these details about what the magazine is specifically looking for. And this is what you’re gonna see me do in the next webinar, is I’m gonna essentially take the script of what the story arc that Norwegian likes and the big idea and I’m gonna mold it around this idea of, you know, is Instagram the actual secret to enjoying national parks, okay, or whatever it is that we’re gonna pitch them. Or, you know, in the case of one of these things, there’s so many that we came up with that are profiles honest Prague. One is a roundup of quotes from locals. One is a profile of someone. You know, one is a profile of a local in the area, but specifically covering their career, life in their city, and other interesting humorous experiences, whereas this one is a profile where the person shares six tips, okay?
So I’m gonna take my proto idea or my topic or my wider idea, and I’m gonna mold that into what each of these articles are looking for in the next webinar. Now, something that I talked to several people about today is there’s this idea of having an attention-grabbing hook that makes people want to know more even if they’re not already interested in this topic. Again, this is something that comes up in the pitch. And this is why we run this kind of now to remind ourselves of what we need to do as we set out to write the pitch. But it’s only when we’re sending out the pitch that we need to be super clear and checking these things about this idea because the thing is that, like I said, no matter how much work you do ahead of time to get to be familiar with the topic or the person or the thing or the place you wanna profile, you only select the things that fit the specific market that you’re gonna be pitching. And that’s what we’re gonna do in the next webinar, okay?
And the third step is the “tell a friend” test. So we’ll do this next as we’re writing the pitches. I’ll write a couple of potential leads and you guys can all tell me which one you think is more interesting. Then we’re gonna do this part. Have I checked to make sure this idea is 100% valid? No business is closing or going out for renovation. I was there in August. That was a while ago, right? This could be the case. So anything like this hotel that I’m basing my pitch on, anything like that, I’m gonna be checking here, okay? Is this topic too topically or regionally specific for the size of the magazine? Should it be a basket of kittens? This is something that we’ve already done. This is one where we went through the articles and we checked to see whether these ideas would fit. That’s what we’ve done in the last two webinars. Is there something timely about this topic? If not, dig it up. This is something that I know a little bit about from being there but we’re gonna do more of it when we get there. Does this idea exactly fit one section of the magazine? That’s something that we did already in the last few webinars.
Have I explained how in my pitch? That’s something that we’re gonna do in more detail in the next one. Am I shoehorning the idea into the section? That’s something that I’ve been trying to do as we go along. And for ones that we’re shoehorning, you’re gonna see that I’m not gonna prioritize them right now as we prioritize which pitches to write, okay? So now that I’ve shown you that and so I’ve laid the groundwork for what we’re gonna do next time, I’m gonna go back to the full-screen view for a second and I want us to prioritize which pitches we are going to be doing next time. All right. Let me pull these up. Sorry, for a second it’s gonna look crazy. Okay. Let’s start with this and I’m gonna make a new priority pitch list. Okay. So we have just a billion things on these honest Prague people, right? So that’s definitely one, but somehow I don’t feel like it’s like my exact number one. So I’m gonna write…I’m gonna make this bigger for you guys. Honest Prague profiles, I see at least three here.
Now, something that I don’t actually know, we have one here the features that are around like the evolution of the spa culture. But I don’t actually have any on here that are specifically profiling that hotel. Those are some of the ones that we had pulled up originally but we haven’t looked through any of these. So that’s another one that I’m gonna put sort of towards the bottom of the list, just like a straight Santa Catarina hotel profile. If we have time, that’s something that we can circle back and write. So one of the ones that I think seem really easy. I also think that some of these ones from Blue Wings seemed really easy, like this idea of the beer spas in Prague. There’s also this, as a shorter one of this modernizing spa topic.
So I’m gonna say that these Blue Wings beer spas, another one that’s easy and probably, personally to me, slightly more interesting to write than this honest Prague profile. Okay, so this is for up close and it’s beer spas in Prague. What else do we have on here that I’m particularly interested in? So there’s this place in Prague that I mentioned that we saw that was relatively interesting. And that’s gonna be for EasyJet. So this is also like a single place profile. And this is also probably something that we can repitch to some other places. I’m just gonna make a note. For some of these, it seems like they should be repitch-able but I don’t yet know where but then I imagine that we will repitch these other places. Okay.
Now this one that came up a lot was this idea of modernizing spa culture in the Czech Republic. So that’s a feature pitch. So it’s sort of a bigger undertaking, but I’m sort of a bit more interested in it than some of these other things. We’ve got this feature pitch, modernizing spas.
That can go in a short section of Blue Wings. It can go in Wizz as a feature, Norwegian as a feature. And then we also have it on EasyJet. Yeah, we also have it on EasyJet as a feature. I’ll keep this in here so that we can also see how we would change this for the different sections. Oh, we also had that for Lufthansa as feature, right. I wanna figure out where it went. Shoot, I hope I didn’t delete it. That investigation one definitely interested me at least. But I noticed I’m getting a lot of ones going from Blue Wings so I’m gonna put that one a little lower. So this was the one about how Instagramers are changing natural destinations. And that’s related to this other pitch, the idea that I had. So that’s something that I can also spin out for and by Norwegian’s big idea, and also for Wizz, the innovator. Actually, maybe…I don’t know. Maybe I’ll move that one up. We’ll see.
So, let’s go back up to the top here. Okay. So we’ve got these feature ones we went through. Those seem to be the main feature ones. We can also take this beer spas and expand it into a feature later, of course, as well. So we’ve got the three for honest Prague are gonna be for Wizz, Voices, EasyJet, Citizens Advice, and be.inspired Insider. All right. Now, I’m quite interested in this road trip to České Budějovice because that was a big part of our tour. So I’m gonna put that up here. Now, what’s gonna happen next time, it’s gonna be really interesting. Okay. So that’s basically what we’ve got for ideas. So that’s great. There were a couple other that I put down here that maybe we could think about, and I think there might be some smaller ones that are hidden in here and also some other feature ideas. So, this is one that we would have to pull the sections and double check and also put other feature ideas.
So this has now given us one, two, three…oops, real three, sorry, three, four, five, six general ideas that we’re gonna work on, which I think is totally doable. And then maybe a seventh and then I think there were a couple other feature ideas. But even though this is six general ideas, we’ve already got 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 different magazine sections in here, okay? And that’s not counting other repitch options that I might roll out here. We’ve got 6 to 8 ideas, 11 minimum sections. Okay.
What we’re gonna do next time is that I’m gonna take each of these and I’m gonna write down kind of the basic formula for what we do for pitches. And then I’m just gonna start filling these things in. And as I fill them in, you’re gonna see that for some of them, I’m just gonna write the actual text. Like it might be the about me paragraph or something like that or it might be the middle paragraph because the article is highly structured, I’m basically just copying what we talked about in the database. But for some of them, particularly for the leads, I might just write some notes like, “Could this be this? Could this be that? Here’s some things from my notes.” And that’s really what we’re gonna do in the polishing phase, is to fill in those specific details.
All right, guys. Have a great rest of your week. Bye-bye.
Live Idea-to-Pitch Walkthrough #3 – Identifying Glove-Fit Ideas Transcript
Today we are going to be talking about… This is actually our “Live Idea-to-Pitch Walkthrough” number three. I changed the title, but not the number, sorry about that. We’re going to be talking about how to identify ideas that are a glove fit. So we’ve got two webinars on this thing of checking the fit. And then we’ve got two more that are on writing the pitch. And this one is called “Identifying Glove Fit Ideas.” And next one is “Ruthlessly Auditing Your Ideas for Fit.”
So what I’m gonna be doing in this one is that we’re gonna be looking at the ideas that we have, and we’re gonna be checking if they actually makes sense with the magazine at hand. If we have time, we’ll also do some double checking, particularly for the airline magazines, on if the section is restricted only to places that the airline flies to directly. If the airline does fly the place that we need it to fly to for this article, or if the destination is close enough to the airport. Sometimes that can also be a factor if it’s a city versus somewhere you can drive to from the city that the airport serves.
And we may not get through all of those last couple things that I just mentioned in terms of checking the airports and everything. And those will go into the next one, which is ruthlessly auditing for fit. And I’m gonna introduce to you a super ironclad idea fit check chart that we’ll use in a more ad hoc way in these particular webinars. But that you can use at home to be absolutely certain beyond any doubt that this is an idea that you should hit the send button on. Which I know is something that I’ve heard a lot of you guys struggling with.
Where you have an idea and at one point, you thought it was great and you…like maybe on one point, you thought the idea was great, now you think the idea is not so great anymore. Or at one point, you thought the idea was great for this particular magazine, and now you’re not thinking that that is true, and you don’t know why you even thought that in the first place. So what we wanna do with these two webinars talking about the fit, is create a framework. And by a framework I mean a repetitive process that you can do over and over again without thinking or without questioning yourself that allows you to know if something fits.
So I’ve got a bunch of windows queued up in the background for us, we’re gonna pop over there quickly. What we’re gonna do is I’m just gonna do a quick recap of what we’re doing with this webinar series for anyone who’s joining us for this one and hasn’t caught those that we’ve done in the past. And then I’m gonna pull up that flow chart that I told you about for checking the ideas fit. So we can look at this idea of how can we be absolutely beyond any sort of shadow of a doubt sure from our side.
Because there’s stuff on the editor side that we can’t know about, right, there’s has the editor already assigned an idea like this but it hasn’t run yet, so there’s no way we would be seeing it. There’s, you know, is this section somehow in the magazine changing but no issues are out with the new changes, so there’s no way we would know.
There’s all sorts of different ways like that that we can be stymied that are totally not on us. And when I say not on us, what I mean is there’s no way in the editor’s mind that it’s our bad to have sent that pitch because we couldn’t have known about these different factors. Ways in an editor’s mind that could be our bad include if they’ve covered this destination too recently, if they’ve covered this exact same thing before, if they are very specific about what destinations a section covers, and this is not a destination that would possibly fit in that section. If the idea is either too small or too large in scope or if the idea just doesn’t jive with what they have done in the past.
So these are all things that we’re gonna be working on looking at because those are ones where it doesn’t matter even so much…and I talked about this a lot, but I’m gonna reiterate it here. It doesn’t matter so much with this fit check thing that we’re doing about the current idea. We need to think about this idea as an investment in our relationship with this editor. And that’s why I always really caution people about spending too much time pitching a lot of different magazines just so they can play stories from one trip.
Because any pitch that you send has so many internal to the magazine reasons why it might not work that we can’t know about, that we can’t be responsible that no one expects us to be responsible for. But that might keep that pitch from getting assigned, or that might keep you from getting an assignment, maybe the editor’s out on maternity leave and they haven’t been able to hire somebody else to handle the load. And so they just kind of have an intern reading the pitches, things like that, right.
So there’s so many reasons that are outside of our control that if you are only gonna send one pitch ever to a magazine, you’re honestly probably better off not even bothering. Because one pitch, the likelihood of it getting approved versus the amount of time that you’ve put into the pitch. So the gamble on a perhaps assignment, it really very much not worth your time. So I really, really recommend pitching magazines that you’d be happy to pitch again down the line because this pitch that we’re sending, as we show them that we understand the fit, that’s our audition.
Having a good idea is part of the audition, but showing that we’re able to take an idea and really craft into what fits the magazine, that’s the main audition. And I’ve heard more than once lately of editor’s assigning articles that they have generated in-house this article idea to freelancers that they have never worked with in the past. Because said freelancers have pitched them ideas that they really liked, but haven’t been able to use for X, Y, Z magazine. So they see that the person is good and understands their magazine to the point where they’re comfortable enough to just assign out of the blue an article idea that they have come up with themselves to this freelancer.
So that’s why this fit thing is so important, because that’s really what we’re auditioning. We’re auditioning our understanding of the magazine way more than we’re auditioning the current idea. Okay, so I’ll spend a couple of minutes going over this chart, and then we’ll look at where we are with our ideas now, I had indicated some next steps for us at the end of the last call. And then we’re gonna start attacking, checking these matches.
Today, like I said, I wanna just recap quickly what we’re doing with this series, which, as I just mentioned, is a bit unusual in its very live and action-oriented nature. And that’s because I want you guys to get over this thing about your pitches taking aeons. Just as I was on the call with you, I saw pitch number…let me check which number it is. Pitch number four coming from somebody who spent the last two or three weeks not writing any pitches, but just doing all this research rabbit hole type stuff. Asking herself questions, getting caught in decision paralysis, all this stuff.
She’s totally new, it’s not like she has a background in writing for magazines or something that makes it easier for her to write pitches quickly. But we had a whole come-to-Jesus chat the other day, and now it’s Thursday. And I’ve got pitch number four for this week in my inbox. Because pitching not only shouldn’t take you that long, which might feel like it’s a skill type evaluation like, “Oh gosh, pitch is taking so much longer for me than it takes for everyone else.” But it can’t, if you are gonna hit your income goals from editorial, I basically promise you that at some point in your career, you’re gonna need to be in a situation where you pitch fervently, and you can’t spend that much time on it.
So the whole point of this series is not just to see how I do these things, but to see how quickly I do these things and what I skip and what I focus on. But I also particularly encourage you to follow along at home. So if you’re gonna do that, you watch me do whatever it is in the webinar. And again, this is number three in the series. In the first series, I went through the itineraries for a press trip that I had taken and also my notes for all those things.
And I pulled out… Just very quickly because also I had spent some of that webinar talking as well, so it wasn’t even really an hour. I pulled out all of the things that looked like they could potentially be article ideas. We ended up with about 38. And then in the most recent webinar that we just did, I did the next step, which was matching those ideas to specific magazine sections that I might want to pitch those particular pieces to. And so again, in that webinar, I spent some time chatting my difference at the beginning. So I did all the matching in a bit less than an hour, maybe more like 30 or 40 minutes.
And again, at the end of that, I didn’t match every single idea we had come up within the first webinar, because some of them I just didn’t see good fits for, which happens. And which is why it’s really important to batch this matching thing, so you don’t get stuck on the ones that are hard to match forever, and keep dwelling over them when there’s easier matches hanging out, okay. And so at the end, we also ended up with about 38 or 39 ideas that were matched to different sections.
So you watch me do it and then you take that same piece of the puzzle from each webinar and you go try it on your own yourself. You can set a timer for an hour, I recommend being a little more generous to yourself and giving yourself two hours to do whatever you saw me just do.
And then if you have questions about a particular area or you’re feeling stuck, like you’re having trouble breaking down your trip, we’ve got a webinar for that that you can find in your library.
So like I said, the first thing I wanna talk about today… And I’m trying to give us as much time as possible to actually do this fit checking and not eat into our hour too much. But the first thing that I wanna do is look at the fit and how we check fit. This chart. So all of you guys who are in the coaching program, you would have received this in a little binder when you first joined. If you’re not in the coaching program, you can also find it in the webinars on how to make sure an idea is a good fit. We’ve got this uploaded as a worksheet.
So in this worksheet, it walks through, step by step, eight different questions that you can ask yourself to know if an article is a good fit. And like I said, I wanted to introduce this today, we’re gonna do it in a more ad hoc manner today, because I do it kind of more not following this checklist. I do it kind of more automatically now, which is something that I see a lot of you guys, over time, get to that point. But until you’re doing it automatically, and you feel very confident with it. I recommend if not using this checklist, then using one of your own making.
So it begins, “Do I have a topic rather than an article idea? Is it encyclopedic or is there a story to tell with a point at the end?” Now, I just had somebody the other day, we were looking at the second draft of the pitch, and it had gotten really, really vague and bland. And when we were talking about what was going on, this was the issue, she realized that she was talking more about a topic. She was trying to pitch a whole topic, and so the sharpness in her sentences was gone because there wasn’t a clear lens through which to select which journalistic details to include.
And if you haven’t caught our webinars in journalistic detail, it’s really important to the writing of the pitches that we’re gonna get into. So I really recommend going back and catching those.
The second one we’ve got on here is, “Does this idea have an attention grabbing hook that makes people want to know more, even if they’re not already interested in the topic?” Now, this is something that’s gonna come up in the fifth webinar in the series when we are looking at putting together the pitches. It might come up a little bit the next webinar as well, actually.
So this idea of a hook is something that usually comes from your research. And I’m hoping… Because for a lot of these different things that we’re gonna talk about, I’ve pretty extensive notes. I’m hoping that a lot of these hooks, a lot of these most interesting bits are actually gonna be in my notes that I took during tours that we were on, or different things like that. Now, the next thing, this is something that we can actually do in an interesting way because you guys are all here on the call, is this “tell a friend” test which is, “Is this idea interesting to somebody besides me?”
So as we get into particularly the next part of the series part four, and part five when we start writing the pitches and we’ll work on this, you know. I’ll be typing the pitches in the chat box as we go, I’ll drop them in, you can see them, and you can tell me if that actually sounds interesting to you or not. Now the next one is, “Is there something timely about this idea? If not, dig something up. Openings, anniversary, major upcoming events.” Another really easy and much more ubiquitous one is to tie something into trends. So to tie into like the trend of food tours or experiential travel or things like that, or wellness, which is a whole topic, but somehow is also a trend at the moment.
The next one, “Is this idea too topically or regionally specific for the size of the magazine? Should instead be a basket of kittens?” This is one of the things that we’re gonna look at today specifically. Which is does the scope of this idea, and this geography work for the magazine we’re looking at, or do we need to take it and make it a roundup of several different things around this theme, to address the larger geography of the magazine at hand. Since we’re looking at a lot of airline magazines that have a global reach, this definitely is something that might come up, and so we’ll be looking at the magazines today to check on this.
“Have I done research to make sure that this idea is 100% valid? No businesses closing are going up for renovation?” Now because I’ve visited most of the places that we’re gonna be writing about or interviewed people, this information is pretty current, but this is something that we still might check on again in the pitch writing process, just to be safe.
Next, “Does this idea fit one section of the magazine? Have I explained how in my pitch?” So the first part of this, does it exactly fit one section of the magazine? That’s what we’re really gonna be working on today. Explaining how in the pitch, this is a really important thing in here. I’ve often seen pitches, particularly of late where people have an idea, and they’ve matched it to magazine section, and I know from talking to them and having worked with them on this pitch for a while, how it fits in this section, but they’re not actually explaining it in the pitch. So this is something that at the end of this whole process when the pitch is written, I’m gonna go back through and we can think about this together.
Now another one that we’re gonna look at quite a bit today, “Am I shoehorning the idea into the section? How can I make it a perfect fit?” This is something that we’re gonna look at now, but it’s also important to look at the end because as you do the research to write up the pitch, you can often get a bit off track from what the section was. And because of this, I really recommend that people drop the text of the section, I’m gonna switch over to that now. That people drop the text of the section that they’re working on into the document where they’re writing the pitch because otherwise, it can be very easy to get off track from where those are.
So I’m gonna put the idea match…or sorry, I’m gonna put this flowchart away for a second. And now we’ve got this great big scratch sheet that we were working on the other day. So you’ll see I’ve got… They’re still small because I just pulled them last week from the travel magazine database. But you can see that we’ve got all of the full text of all of these different magazine sections that we’re gonna look at. And I’m also gonna have them up on the screen so we can look at them in a few minutes that way as well.
But I talked about a couple different things, adding the magazine names, I did that in between the call. So now we’re gonna look at how to check the fit for these. And one of the things that you may have noticed as we were going through last week, is that in several cases, we had magazines that had a number of different sections that might work for the ideas that we’re looking at in one magazine. But you can only pitch one magazine at the same…one pitch, one article idea at each time. You should not put multiple ideas in one email, nor should you send multiple emails to different editors at the same publication. Lots of different article ideas, both of these don’t go over very well.
So the first thing I wanna do is I know that we have a bunch of pitch ideas for “Wizz,” which is an Eastern European carrier. So I wanna do two things, I’m going to… I can’t figure out a good way to have a lot of windows opening without really overwhelming you guys. So I’m gonna do something in a different window right now, just for the second. So I’m just gonna look at Wizz Airlines, and I wanna get the map of the destinations that they serve. Okay, so it’s actually easier if you get not a map of the destinations, but an actual list. And Wikipedia has actually gotten pretty good at providing these.
I never know how updated they are, so I’m gonna look at the destinations that Wizz serve over here on Wikipedia, and I’ll bring you guys into that window. Great. So you guys are seeing it as well. So then what I’m gonna just do is I’m gonna just do a quick search, see where they serve in the Czech Republic. So they serve Brno, oh, it’s terminated, okay. They serve Prague, which I was hoping and it seems like that’s it. So they don’t serve any of these other airports around in the Czech Republic.
So what are some of the other airline magazines that we were gonna look at? I’ve pulled up a bunch because I downloaded the whole magazines for you. So some of the other ones that I have are “Blue Wings” which is Finnair, “Celebrated Living” which is American Airlines, upper class, Brussels Airways, “easyJet,” and “N by Norwegian.” I’ve got some other ones bopping around here as well we’ve got “Swiss,” we’ve got “WOW air,” and I think that’s it, okay.
So I’m gonna start looking through each of these airlines, we’re going to look for Brussels Airlines destinations. We’re gonna look for Finnair destinations, we’re gonna look for American Airlines destinations, easyJet destinations. Now, the reason that I have this list kind of easily accessible is that I’ve downloaded the magazines earlier, so that I wouldn’t have to potentially interrupt the internet connection while we were doing the webinar. Because it’s always a little dicey to be running too much in terms of downloads while we’re doing that.
So I’m doing this one live, because I made a promise that in the series I wasn’t gonna be doing any sort of prep work on the side. So even when I downloaded the magazines that we’re gonna look at today, I didn’t look at any of them to see if any of them are gonna be a fit. Okay, so we talked about that “Wizz” is gonna work, but if they need something for particular city, that it’s gonna have to be for Prague.
So I’m just gonna start another scratch file, and I know that you guys are mostly just seeing this website. So the scratch files and I know you can’t see but I’ve written in there Prague, okay, for direct. Now we’re looking at Brussels and we’ve got a pop-up. So for Brussels let’s see where we are with Czech Republic. Okay, they only have Prague for direct. Next we’ve got Finnair. Let me just open up all these Wikipedia things quickly.
Now it’s interesting, like so you see how I’m trying to kind of go through and open all these ones. I’ve actually had a couple chats with people about how to speed up different things of their pitching process. And this is a really easy one that I see a lot of people waiting for internet windows to load, and at the time, it might feel like, “Oh, that doesn’t take too long.” But waiting for internet windows to load, if you add it together and aggregate, can be a really big time suck on any sort of research that you’re doing. Whether it’s for pitch or for a particular article. So I always recommend… Okay, this is “Wizz,” okay, so they also fly to Brno, don’t know if it’ll be helpful.
So I also recommend using page search as much as you can, you’ll see I’m doing this page search now to search for Czech Republic and these different airlines. So this is for Finnair, so we know that Finnair flies to Prague. Now we’ve got American Airlines, only Czech Republic, and that’s seasonal, that’s interesting to know, okay. I didn’t actually double check, maybe you guys saw, but I didn’t notice in Finnair if that one was seasonal. So let’s just have a quick look there and I’ll be better about keeping an eye out for that now. That does not say seasonal, okay, great.
So it’s seasonal for American, now we’re looking at easyJet. easyJet is also seasonal and they only fly to Prague, that’s interesting. I know I told you, I’m just gonna open this up in the background, that the… Let’s see. There were two places that I wanted to write about and I wasn’t really sure what airport you would even use to fly in there. So it seems like a couple of these destinations I was looking so Telč and the other one is Třebíč are probably closer to Brno. So it’s useful for us that Wizz Air flies to Brno. So let’s look at this other town, Třebíč. The nearest airport is Brno, it doesn’t tell us how far.
Okay, closest airport is Brno, 37, okay, that’s great. So this is actually good to know because that’s quite close. So Třebíč is very close. I have this weird feeling that I might have also been to this Pardubice place as well, but we’ll just leave that for now. So then the other thing that we wanna look at is what airlines fly to Brno. Let’s see if there’s some airlines that we didn’t consider in terms of our magazines that we might wanna check out later. So in the background, I’m gonna keep checking these other ones.
So Norwegian only flights to Prague for direct. Swiss only Prague for direct. The last one I’ve got here Icelandair, I’m not even sure if this will work. No, so Icelandair does not, or WOW air does not fly to Czech Republic at all. Okay, so airlines that fly to Brno, let’s bring that up for Brno, I’m never quite sure how to say it. And then the other town that I was in that has an airport but I’m not sure who flies there is Ostrava.
So let’s open that up. Now, it’s funny, I don’t know if we didn’t get to “Lufthansa Magazine,” I think we got to it last time. But I didn’t see Lufthansa at all when I was going through the list we made last week. So I feel like there just might not have been too many fits for “Lufthansa Magazine,” which is a little bit sad. So let’s just double check if there’s any other airlines I have up here to look at. So “Cara,” which is Aer Lingus, we’ll check on that. “EnRoute” which is Air Canada, and then British Airways “High Life,” and “Voyager,” okay.
So let’s see. Virgin Australia is “Voyager” and we wanna know destinations. And then the other ones that I said were “High Life,” and “High Life” which is British Airways, and then “Cara,” which is Aer Lingus and then we’ve got all of our destinations checked.
So the reason that I’m doing this destinations… Oops, sorry, destinations. The reason that I’m doing this destinations check is that it’s gonna be impossible for me, once we switch gears and start looking at the magazines that I’ve downloaded for you guys, it’s gonna be impossible for us to make accurate prognostics about if something fits or not unless we know for any airline magazine, if it flies there or not.
Now if we’re talking about not an airline magazine, if we’re talking about consumer magazine, then we need to look at the magazine itself in order to get a sense. This is a horrible website, this is only talking about direct flights from the U.S. Okay, we’re just gonna run the search one more time. So we’re going to say airlines that fly to Brno, we’re gonna not look at Skyscanner because that’s horrible, we’ll look at its own airport, okay. And then the same thing for Ostrava. The Skyscanner sucks, guys, don’t use that for this particular type of search.
Okay, so let’s keep looking for Virgin Australia does not fly Czech Republic at all, that’s horrible. It’s like, really shocking to me, actually. I mean, I guess maybe it shouldn’t be, but they must work with partner airlines or something. We accidentally opened this twice, and we lost British Airways, that’s what happened. Now we have Aer Lingus, it looks like a British Airways again. Okay, so we’ve got Aer Lingus and it’s a Czech Republic only…or Prague only rather.
Okay. Now, who flies into Brno? Okay, we’ve got BMI, I’m not sure if they have an airline magazine, but this is something else for us to check. So right now which airport are we looking at? We’re looking at Brno, okay, so Brno Airport, we’ve got the BMI Ryanair which doesn’t really have a magazine. I think they are kind of starting one but it’s weird. Ryanair, BMI, BMI Ryanair, okay, and it seems like there’s also some Lufthansa sometimes.
All right, and then we’ve got Ostrava, Czech Republic, you know, we didn’t look at their magazine, I don’t have it in the database, and we can have a look who publishes it, and if we can find it. So we’ve got Czech Airlines, I don’t know what this is SmartWings, Ryanair, Delta, okay, so Delta flies there, that’s good to know. KLM, we looked at them, I don’t think we saw anything good there. Korean Air, that’s useful, they’ve got a good magazine. And what else did we say? We said Ryanair but we’re not sure about them.
Romanian Air, Montenegro…I don’t have a magazines in the database for any of those, so we’ll skip those. All right, so the last thing to check is British Airways destinations, and then we’re gonna dive into the magazines. So I mentioned earlier kind of first and foremost that we have a lot of different articles going on for “Wizz Air.” So I’ve got several different “Wizz Air” articles pulled up. So I’m gonna start by opening up “Wizz Air.” And so what I did earlier is that I’ve downloaded three copies of each magazine that I could get copies for.
So the reason I did that is that it’s really important to triangulate ideas. You don’t wanna just look at one issue and say, “Okay, it seems like this article is just like the one that I wanna pitch, so I’m gonna pitch it.” Because the one article that you’re looking at might be one that they ran in the past, but that’s not very indicative of what they typically run. So in “Wizz Air” there were several different articles that we were looking at pitching.
So we looked at this idea of tribes, and we talked about this hedgehog thing, which is a little hard to explain. And so I’ll explain that more as we go. We looked at the innovator, and we talked about this company Northern Hikes, which is partnering with a coffee company to create a coffee just for their hike. And we also looked at this idea of voices, which is a profile with quotes from locals, and what to do, see, eat in their destination.
And the last one, we’ve got here is a feature pitch, and I’ve got a couple different pitch ideas that might work. So there’s four sections in “Wizz” that we wanna look at. So I’m gonna pull up some “Wizz” magazines for us now, and we’re gonna look for tribes, the innovator, voices, and features. So let me open the magazines and then I’ll switch screens for you guys. And in order to read the full issues of any magazine, which is a very important part of the pitch process, we include the link to the full issues for you here in the database, so you can always find those there.
And do make sure… I had an editor that I know harp on somebody about this the other day. The database helps you to figure out the initial part of where an idea might fit. But you also should be checking the magazine to confirm the fit, which is what we’re doing right now. So you need to look at the actual magazine. Even if you’re just looking at articles on its website that come from the same section that you wanna pitch. You shouldn’t just pitch based on the database alone, it’s a tool to help you find the matches faster.
So like I said, we’re gonna start by looking at tribes, and tribes has been explained as, let’s see… Oh, I wonder if they don’t run tribes every issue because I’m not seeing it. And it’s October issue that we’re looking at here. So let’s keep scrolling and see what happens.
Okay, so in The Insider where to go and what to do this season, we’ve got lots of different little things. And so I’m wondering if this tribe thing is hiding in here and that’s why I didn’t see it. I don’t see it here, but they do have this, the innovator… Oh, here’s tribes, okay. This one is on Vienna. And if we were to kind of encapsulate what this is about, it’s about how “Vienna’s waltzing scene is still alive and kicking after 200 years.” Now in the database that we say about tribes is that it covers an interesting group of people in Wizz destinations. Such as a sports team, club, or trend with a loyal following.
In about 500 words the article explains what the interesting tribe is, and more about the people involved. There are quotes throughout the description as well as up to 10 quotes from players or locals on why they are involved in the tribe. So I think one of the things that we’re gonna notice here right away is that they wanna do Wizz destinations, and they did do a piece covering a place called Castells or no, they did something on Castells which are the human towers in Barcelona, but the other places they’ve covered in the past are Budapest and Prague.
Now, this place with the hedgehogs where they make the hedgehog beer and everything that I was looking at, I don’t think will work for here because as we determined Wizz flies to Prague and to Brno, but it doesn’t find any of the smaller towns, of course. And they’re a little bit outside, and I think they really want it to be city oriented. And you see that these quotes are like a really big part. So even if I were to try to do this hedgehog piece, it seems like I would have needed to get these quotes at the time, or I would have to do a lot of phone calls to get them down.
So I’m not super sure that this hedgehog idea in terms of the hedgehog beer, and the hedgehog culture in this small town is gonna work out. So I’m gonna move this to… I’m basically gonna take the pitch I did, I know you can’t see because it’s on another screen. But I’m gonna take this pitch idea, and I’m not gonna delete it, okay, because I wanna keep this section in case it reminds me of something later. And I’m just gonna make it cross out on our big pitch list that we were working on.
Now the next one we had is for this innovator section. So you’ll see that one comes up next. So for the innovator, the one we were looking at, again, was this Northern Hikes. So this is, “Meet the team working to ensure Moldova’s rich heritage and identity is understood both by locals and tourists.” So one of the things I’m doing is I’m using this one issue of the magazine kind of as a first pass to potentially cross out ideas. But I’m going to then to validate the ideas to make sure I like them, I’m gonna look at several issues of the magazine, okay.
So I feel like this idea is in line with this Northern Hikes because there are also people who want to kind of preserve these natural areas. So what exactly is the innovation here? That is what I’m kind of interested about. So I guess it’s a company or this idea of this Caillou Mia [SP] and they’re talking about how it’s, you know, run by 10 women and volunteers, they are talking about a festival that they run. So it seems like this actually covers kind of like a lot of different things that this organization does. So I actually think that this could be a really good fit for this idea that I had. But we’re gonna check it with a couple other issues of the magazine to be sure.
Now, after this innovator idea, we had two more sections that we wanted to look at. One was the features, and I’m trying to figure out what the other one is. But my text editor has paused a little bit. So let’s jump ahead to the features, and if we see the other one along the way, we can remember. I think it was voices if I’m not mistaken, let’s just go check that we didn’t miss the voices in the last one. Okay, so this one, I think, is the interview. So she’s a pop star and the person that we were thinking about interviewing, they’re like a big blogger, and so I’m not quite sure.
All right, so for Wizz, we were looking at this as-told-to profile pitch, and they actually have a super long section that they do for this voices area. Which is quite cool and I think this actually could be good fit for them, so I’m gonna make a little asterisk here, and we are gonna check that out in another issue to make sure that it is, in fact, a good fit. So then we had a couple of different feature pitches that we were looking at for Wizz. We were looking at obviously several with the Czech Republic angle because that’s what we’re trying to do in this webinar is that we’re trying to go through the ones from this one specific trip I was on.
So let’s have a look at their features. So we’ve got, “Bright light city. As tourism numbers at Tromsø have boomed, Northern Norwegian City has become a hotbed for novel ways entertain its visitors, from spa boats to Arctic distilleries.” So this cool, Tromsø is like a super, super northern destination. So what we’ve got for pitch ideas are the interesting iterations of beer culture in Prague, beer styles, etc. I think that’s actually super similar to what they’re doing in this Tromsø piece.
So I’m gonna note down this October issue that this idea is similar to the October issue Tromsø article. The other ones that we had were this modernization of spa culture in the Czech Republic, I think that’s also a little bit similar to this but it’s kind of got a larger geographic area. So we have to see if it’s possible to do something with a larger geographic area. So let’s keep going, this is a pretty long feature, as you can see. It’s got a lot of interesting sidebars, but let’s call that like a single destination piece, and it’s not a major city.
So here they’ve got, “From posters to pottery, from fonts to furniture, Poland is behind some of Europe’s most impressive design icons.” So this is featured on the Annual Poland Design Festival which is taking place in Warsaw in the autumn. So we can think of this as something that’s focused kind of on an individual event, but then the feature is set up as more like mini profile pieces. And that’s kind of an interesting take. And, you know, I wonder if we can say that this would be similar here, we have to see if there’s some sort of annual festival we could tie in.
This is for the Poland design roundup layout. All right, so what else have we got going on here? They should have one or two more features, let’s see. And then we’ll pop over and take a look at a different issue of this magazine to double check the ones that we think might be a nice fit. This one is the best of British cuisine. So, “Meet the new wave of London chefs proving that British food is about much more than fish ‘n’ chips and fry-ups.” So this is like a very trend kind of piece. We can think of this as being a bit similar to this modernizing spa culture in the Czech Republic thing.
And this is good because we were wondering if Prague was too much of a big city because they had Tromsø as the other feature. But now we’ve also got something that’s more in terms of a specific major city of London. So I think that this is a great example. And this also they have as a kind of
round-up style piece. So it seems like they also do round-up styles of like multiple profiles in one feature as well. So this could work for the spa one.
Okay, great. So I think we’ve got some good information here about Wizz. I feel pretty good actually already about feeling like these features are in good alignment with what they offer here in Wizz. But let’s just pop over and look at a couple other issues. So the ones that we thought could be a good fit is this kind of cover story on an individual and a place, and also this innovator profile.
So what we’ll do instead of going through the individual articles is that we’ll just look here. So they’ve got for the innovator, “Iceland’s fishy innovators,” okay, all right, that’s interesting. And then for the features, what have we got? We’ve got, “Flying high above Romania’s most spectacular scenery.” “Tel Aviv, how the city chefs are upgrading its street food,” “Budapest, meet the players of Hungary’s latest sports craze, Teqball,” and, “Discover why Vienna is Europe’s unsung wine region.” And then the local one that we’re thinking for the honest Prague people is, “This issue’s cover star shows us around the Portuguese capital.”
You know, I think that all the ones that we said seem pretty good from these. I’m gonna put “Wizz” to bed for now. So let’s move on to another one. So this is our big list of idea matches that we looked at before. And a lot of the ones that we… Let me just make sure we’re all on the same page, okay, good. A lot of the ones that we talked about… Great, okay, good. A lot of the ones that we talked about earlier…I noticed as well we had a lot of “Wizz,” and we also had a lot of “easyJet.” So I’m gonna pull out the different “easyJet” ones here, and I’m gonna open some articles or some “easyJet” magazines as well.
So let’s pull out all the matches that we had for “easyJet.” Okay, this is features, I’m gonna put that towards the bottom. On the map, this is a roundup of interesting things around a theme in worldwide destinations. Okay, we’ve got area here, we got several of them here, this is great. Let’s see if there’s any other “easyJet” ones that we’ve missed, and then I’ll make the font bigger, so it’s easier for you guys to see “easyJet.” Okay, we’ve got this pack it in, and this pack it in is like a packing tips oriented one. And I didn’t have a great idea for this but, you know, I just realized now that this could be something in the spa, like what to bring on an Eastern European spa trip.
All right, let’s see if we’ve got any more “easyJet” here, we looked at the features, great, okay, we’ve got all of it. So as with the other magazines, I’ve downloaded some “easyJet” magazines for us to look at so let’s open these, and I’m just gonna double check and make sure that everything is still showing for you guys, okay, great. This seems better than yesterday, cool. So the different sections that we wanna take a look at and see if these are a fit for “easyJet,” again, are on the map, area guide, scoff the lot, it’s a weird name, pack it in, citizen’s advice, and the features.
Okay, so let’s have a look around. And easyJet’s got kind of like an interesting front of book where they’ve just got a lot of different things going on. So I’m not sure if every single one of these appears in every issue. So it might end up being that we’re gonna need to look at some other issues as well to check on this. So let’s have a look here. So we’ve got this is, the list of 13 things you need to know this month. Citizen’s advice, all right so this for this one, it is a very sort of standard profile piece, we were in, we were thinking of it…or rather not a standard profile piece but a standard celebrity favorites. And we were thinking of this with the guys on this Prague.
So let’s see here. This is a fashion designer, I don’t think she’s super internationally known, it’s an interview with her and she just mentions a couple of things that she likes. So I think this looks great so this one, I’m gonna put some asterisks next to this, so this one seems to me like an easy pass. Okay, so let’s look at some of these other ones. What we’ve got here? On the map, okay. So on the map is described as, “Rounds of interesting things around a theme in worldwide destinations, usually those easyJet flies to.” And again we said that easyJet flies to Prague for direct flights, okay.
So, “Articles are written in third person about 300 words long.” Example are, “The Best Festivals are Far-Flung,” “Some Runs are Actually Fun.” Right now we’ve got, “The midnight hour is close at hand. Spooky season has arrived and these eerie events are all but a brief broomstick ride away.” This is actually kind of long, we’ve got one, two pages here, and it highlights about three different things with a little bit of a…oh, four actually because it’s got Manchester here.
So this one I’m not sure yet because it’s very seasonal and we were thinking about this for homeless tours, okay. We’ll have to have a look at this one in a different issue and see if this might make sense because it doesn’t seem like they’re always so seasonal. But these are also very much events. And you know, as I look back at these, it seems like they might always be a little bit event-y. So let’s have a look in some of other issues and see if that will work. Okay, what’s next? We’ve got area guides, scoff the lot, and pack it in. Okay, let’s keep looking at these we’ve got Q&A, this is taste test, hot right now, figure it out.
I’m wondering if I’m skipping over them. If you see me skipping, let me know. This might actually be… So this isn’t a name section, okay. Take my advice. So we might not have it in here. So if we don’t have these particular sections, like I said, we’ll check back in one of the other issues. So this is the story. So this, I’m pretty sure, is their feature articles are called the stories. So we were talking about maybe being bowled over by all the 13th-century design in Třebíč. So let’s look at what we’ve got here.
Okay, so this is “Double-O heaven. It’s the new museum of all James Bond things that is masquerading as a super villain’s Alpine layer.” So this is really focused on one particular destination, but not just destination, one attraction in that destination. Okay, so what else have we got here for the stories? This is a weird story. Beer, okay, Ale tales. Beer is better than ever. Craft beer revolution. But what is this really about? “The world’s coolest brewery has become even cooler.”
All right, so these seem to be very, like, single attraction oriented things. And, you know, we had the James Bond Museum, and now we’ve got what I would call like the very sort of hipster craft brew scene. And they’ve got several stories up here. So we’ve got this Holy Ale which is the sacred Abbey of Monte Cassino in rural Italy. It has a 1,500-year-old brewing tradition is being revisited after decades of neglect. Okay, so we’ve got like something old with a new take on it, okay, so this actually could be a cool corollary. I’m gonna make a note here.
Because this town that I was in does have some interesting newer things going on that we can maybe tie in. But I have to do a little more digging there to make this work. Okay, so this one is Karma on tap. This is London’s Nirvana beer, has yoga and alcohol-free brew. Okay, so you’ll notice here also that they’re definitely doing like a package of stories on beer, and I’m not sure that they would be doing that always. So this was a totally for feature, “In the middle of the Swedish forest, a chef is trialing a new way of living that’s as sustainable as it is delicious.”
So I think, again, one of the big things here is that they’re single attraction focused. So this actually makes me think that we should be pitching them that Santa Katerina Spa that I went to as a feature for how they’re weaving in the older Czech spa style with the…they’ve got that sort of Stonehenge-y rock formation. And then they’re also bringing in the Ayurvedic team from Kerala. So this actually seems like…because they do such single attraction focus, this could be a really cool feature for “easyJet” actually.
So let’s see, I think that’s all of their stories. And then they have some back of the book stuff. Let’s see if there’s any other ones for us to look at. But I feel like I’ve got a good sense here, yeah. And then we’ve got a couple other types, okay, great. So I feel like I’ve got a good sense here that this could definitely work, the citizen’s advice, one could definitely work. And then we’re not so sure yet about the on the map, we have to see if it it’s always so seasonal. So let’s have another look here. So on the map here is a horde of new museums. Okay, so that I feel like works with what we’re talking about, about the homeless tours, that’s something that’s, you know, not a specific festival type event, like we were seeing earlier.
Now, what about some of these other ones that we weren’t seeing? So I wonder if we need to update the entry, so I’ll check in with Vanessa about that because I definitely don’t see this interesting scoff the lot one, for instance. And then let’s see what they’ve got going on for their features in this issue. Did I not list them or did I miss them? Oh, in the stories, right. Okay, “Hammer time. Smash up cars (and get away with it) in Amsterdam.” Again, like a single attraction. “French food without faff. Meet the Paris-based YouTube chef,” again, super single attraction.
“Storyvilles. Visit places that inspired your favorite reads,” that’s a bit more general. “Ravomieni Finland, the town where it’s Christmas every day.” That’s kind of like a general destination feature. So I feel like maybe this Třebíč thing would work but I would need to really tie it in. Actually, what could work better here maybe is this hedgehog idea, because it’s tying in the hedgehog history with the beer that I was talking about. Okay, so that’s another feature idea for them. Okay, cool.
So now we’ve got “easyJet” squared away. So what else do we have over here? So we talked about “easyJet,” I’m just gonna put the ones that we’ve already looked at in italics. We talked about all these “Wizz” ones. Here, we’ve got an “N by Norwegian.” Let’s see what other “N by Norwegian” ones we’ve got. This one, we were also looking at this Northern Hikes one. And then we were also looking at a potential feature on the modernization of the spa culture.
So again, you’ll see that as I’m looking through these, like there’s certain ideas that just kind of bubble to the surface that are working for a lot of different places. And that tends to be how it works that even if you have this big trip, and there’s all of these potential stories that you could be doing from it, there’s a few that just end up being the one that works. And what will happen is that I’ll work on these, you know, with a particular magazine in mind, but then, I’ll also turn it around and I’ll take that story idea that I’ve already got the pitch written up, and I’ll look at how we can make it work for several different magazines.
So for Norwegian, we’ve got the big idea and the feature. So let’s see what we’ve got here. We got a lot of ads, that’s what we’ve got, right. So many ads, all right. So let’s get to their table of contents, shall we? Okay, I guess they kind of skipped over it. Oh, it’s coming, okay, great. So for, “The big idea. Are oysters the key to protecting coast from storm surges?” Okay, I don’t know…just looking at that, I’m not so sure if what we have fits. Let’s look at what they’ve got going on in some of these other table of contents here. Okay, here we go, “The big idea. Is cultured meat the answer to ethical eating?” I’m not sure… Okay, so let me think then.
So with this Northern Hikes, what they’re working on is they’re trying to figure out how… And right here they’ve got “The Microsoft product that’s making gaming accessible.” So this is like very specifically about one product. So what we could kind of do is like phrase it as a question, right? Is Instagram, you know, actually the secret to enjoying national parks? Something in that vein. So I actually think that we can find a way to make this work. Because like I mentioned, when we first came with the idea, something that this Northern Hikes company had done is that they were working within this park to get tourists to not be overcrowding certain areas, and to redistribute them better throughout the different trails in the park. So that, I think, could actually works, so I like that one, so I’m gonna keep it.
So let’s look now at this other thing. We were looking at features and we were looking at this idea of modernizing the spa culture. So what have they got going on in their features? “Meet the daughter of one of Britain’s most famous coronary dynasties as she opens her first restaurant.” So that’s like a single restaurant type thing. “Our pick of Christmas gifts that benefit the community of the world.” “The rise of Insta-culture. New York’s pop up museums where selfie opportunities replace art.” So we can reference this as sort of the counterpoint to the rise of Insta-culture feature that they did.
All right. So this is kind of also like a larger trend thing. So I think that, you know, we can say that this maps to what they did with this other piece. “Inside ‘The Chocolate Box.’ Take a trip to La Bombonera, Argentina’s most intense footballing experience,” Okay, so it’s like a single destination. “Skiing in Spain? It’s on the up, we’ve got the lowdown on the on all the great resorts.” I think the skiing in Spain one is a great corollary to what we wanna do with the spa culture one.
Okay. Great. “French Guiana by Norwegian. Our guide to beaches, history and/or space tourism in the new destination.” Okay, so that one doesn’t map so much. Let’s see what else we’ve got over here. In depth, “How to be neutral. Copenhagen is going all out to be the world’s first carbon natural city,” not so much. “Rise of the robot builders. How one London architecture is changing the way we design and build cities.” “The gamechangers. We discover the local institutions that can provide global solutions.”
All of these are kind of like trend things. “Return of the commune. Fifty years on, people across the globe are embracing group living once more.” This we can maybe incorporate here. I’ll have to have a look at this later in one of the future webinars. About this idea of how they’re trying to get people in Western cities to take a whole month off to go to the spa. “Salvaging the future. Could land reclamation help states cope with population growth?” And, “Berlin by Norwegian.” Okay, what else have we got here? We should have one more.
In depth. Okay. “How the Youth Olympics in Buenos Aires are providing a lifeline for locals.” “Meet the Jordanian who’s aiming to spend six days submerged in water.” “Local tells us why Austria’s capital’s most livable city in the world.” “We join a group that recreates the Viking life and hikes into the Norwegian wilderness.” That’s very cool but doesn’t line up with any of our things. “Raising the tone. Being colorblind doesn’t stop the ski photographer from getting epic shots.” “What happens when a small French museum discovers a 1,600 euro scam?” “Adventures on the Italian Riviera.”
So I feel like…having looked at these, I feel like we can make this feature idea work. And it doesn’t have to be super, super time peggy. So I think that we can pitch them a version of that spa culture idea. So I’m gonna keep that for here. Okay, so we looked at Norwegian. So what else have we got going on? I know we have several going on in “B Inspired.” So let’s hop over now and look at these different ones that we have for “B Inspired.” Because we had a couple different articles there. And I’ll highlight these as I go.
Remember, every time we’ve done this, we don’t have to do every idea, right. We’re looking to get enough ideas that are easy that we can start writing our pitches. So I’m gonna look at “B Inspired” and then take one more look over our whole document and see if there’s anything else that we were super, super excited about that seemed like a great fit. And otherwise, I’m just gonna move on for now because I can always come back, right? I mean, not in this webinar because I don’t wanna keep you forever. But I can always come back to the work of pitching this trip and pick back up right where I laid off, because I’m doing things like this, right? I’m highlighting the ones that I’m investigating so that I know.
So we’ll just go through and do that really quickly with the other one. So all the “easyJet” ones I’m gonna highlight, “N by Norwegian” I’m gonna highlight. So I’m gonna know now that these ones they’re done. Just this really simple thing I’m doing is gonna help me to know that I’ve already checked on all of these. Okay, so that way later, when I come back at some totally other time to work on pitching these, I’ll know where to pick up again. Okay, so this is a really important and really easy trick that you can do for yourself. Okay, I think there’s one more “Wizz” one as well, there we go.
So now if I were to come look at this, I can see really quickly and easily which are the ones that are still hanging right. Okay, so let’s find the rest of the inspired ones and look at that, and then we’ll check in with where we are, and where we’ll pick up next time. Okay, so we’ve got those two, three, have I gotten all of these? No, one of these is missing. Insider, stories, okay, we’re missing off the beaten path. Oh no, we’ve got that, okay, great. So let’s have a look at some of these “B Inspired.”
All right, so we’re looking at the features, insider, and off the beaten track. Okay, so let’s have a quick look here. Okay, this one doesn’t have such a useful table of contents as the last magazine did, so we’ll have to do a little scroll. Okay, so off the beaten track and insider we’re looking at the front trying to find those. Right now we’re in Belgitude, lots of Belgitude in here. I’m hoping I don’t miss them because I see that these… You know, this is one of the things, sometimes people tell me like, “Oh, I couldn’t find X, Y, Z section,” but often it’s because there can be multiple sections on one page and so they can kind of get lost. So that’s something to watch out for because I can see that I’m probably skipping a number of these by accident.
Okay, so still we’re looking for off the beaten track. So interestingly here’s on the map which is a similar name but not quite the one that we’re looking for. Let’s keep going. This is art or what’s this one up here? Wellness, art, insider, okay, this is what I want, it profiles an interesting local. So here we’ve got a Ukrainian DJ on her favorite haunts in Kiev. Yeah, this super standard. Yep, we don’t know who this person is. “B Inspired,” I don’t know that Brussels people would know who she is, so I think that we can definitely use our honest Prague people for this.
Okay, let’s take see if we can keep finding off the beaten track, and if not, then we’ll just bump ahead to the features. Oh, here it is, okay, “Barcelona’s December shopping frenzy can make a city escape appealing,” that’s kind of a really loose times peg okay. So it’s a first-person article about a destination that’s a one to three-hour drive from a major city.
So let’s see what we’ve got here. This is mainly focused on one place, Montserrat, which really fits with what I was looking at doing, which was to focus on one of these two places which is Telč or Třebíč. So I think that that’s gonna work for this, so I’m gonna put our little moving forward, happy asterisk over here. And then let’s just have a quick look at the features, for this I was looking at this idea of how to have collection driven travel with the Curio cabinet. So this was kind of in the sense of like an essay type thing.
“Why eco-friendly toys are the gift that keeps on giving.” “Meet the skiers scaling dangerous new heights.” “Lights Camera Action, behind Benin film scene,” and, “Discover the latest member of the Canary Island Club.” So let’s see if this eco-friendly gifts if we can kind of go that way. “As more parents turn their backs on the throwaway, plastic products from the biggest toy brands, a new wave of Belgian start-ups,” okay, this is quite specific, “have been busily developing sustainable alternatives that are good for children – and the world – just in time for Christmas.”
Okay, so this is kind of like a company profile except it’s got a couple different companies going on here. So let’s see what else have we got in their feature well. “New kid on the block. The Spanish islet La Graciosa has officially just become the eighth Canary Island. But unlike its sibling – which are packed with tourists year around – the rocky outcrop offers a very different experience.” Okay, so that doesn’t track over with what we were thinking about. Although I wonder if we can use this to do that resorts in Katerina feature we were thinking about.
“All over resorts this winter, the skiers will be pushing themselves to greater heights, thanks to the extreme new version of their sport. We explore the thrilling, dangerous world of steep skiing.” Okay, so it’s like a super photo-driven piece, kind of trendy based on a group of people. Okay, just like the first one was based on a group of businesses, this one is based on a group of people. So I’m gonna write down a group of businesses, group of people.
What else have we got in here? We’re still in that skiing one. “Coming to a screen near you.” Okay, so these are the Benin film industry ones. “West Africa’s film scene is getting on the map, partly with a pioneering new festival.” This is also like a group of people/movement with an event focus. So for the Curio cabinet one, the idea that I kind of had was maybe to interview people who are like frequent travelers. You know, like maybe people who are big instagrammers or… I’m just gonna take some more notes here. Instagrammers, flight attendant type people, we’ll also have to think who else and talk about this collection-driven travel idea.
So maybe people who own like a pop-up shop, there’s a really cool pop-up shop in New York that I know about or like, I guess as a shop, where they only feature things in their shop that they pick on their travels. So let’s have a look, we think that both of these are a good fit. So let’s just have a look here, we’ll see what pages to skip ahead to just to check out the features and see if we can make this different feature work. Because it’d be great to have this other… Okay, so 39, these are stories.
Would be great to have this other feature that we’re working on the pitch for because we’ve got several different kind of feature concepts. So this will give us a different one to work on. Okay, so this is one of these stories, I think. This is about the diamond industry in Antwerp. Okay. Also with some business focuses. What have we got next? We’ve got lots of ads. “Eat, stay, love. From suites that make you feel like a Hollywood legend to award-winning cuisine, our network is packed with high-end hotels and restaurants. We pick a few.” So this is just kind of like a luxury, round-up type thing very different, okay.
“What is it like working for the super-rich? We meet five people who know all too well and persuade them to share their experiences.” Okay, so this is interesting. So we can maybe kind of do this corollary of like the five people type pitch. A collection place. Fashion statement, okay. “One fashion event is on a mission.” So this goes back to that event focused. It’s interesting their event focused ones keeping Africa articles. I don’t know if you guys noticed that, but that was just one trend that I sort of picked out.
So let’s see, because the third one is the one that proves them all right, so let’s have a look here. So the stories are around 43, let’s go there. We’ve got “Skate of art.” So these are artistic skateboards, it’s very cool. And it’s a social enterprise. “Can skateboards heal social divides in the developing world?” Okay, neat. So I feel like there’s a lot of social agenda to these, I’m also gonna make a note about those. Not sure how we would incorporate that into the pitch that we’re thinking about for this, but I will have a think about it.
So then what else have we got here? “Chicken run. A simple chicken restaurant in the sleepy village of Guia in the Algarve has become a must-stop for foodies from all around the world. We sent Hannah Summers find out why.” So that’s really a cool thing, and I wish that there was something on our trip that would tie into that, but I can’t quite think of any. But that’s a cool article to pitch them something in that vein if any of you guys have a similar idea.
So what else have they got in this issue? We have, “Football players in Africa are lighting up the English Premier League like never before. As Guinean midfielder Naby Keita settles in at Liverpool after his record-breaking transfer, we look at the massive impact African EPL footballers are having on their countries of birth.” Okay, so another Africa story. This one is not so adventure event. Let’s see what the last one is. There’s usually four, right. And we’re done, we’re in the business digest. Okay, so I’m a little on the fence about this, it might work out so we can look more at that next time.
So let’s have a look at where we are, we’ve got some that we didn’t go through here yet, right. We didn’t look at… Oh, Barrio was in the same magazine but we skipped it. Okay, let’s see things in a particular city. Okay, so this is one that I’ll just make a note that we didn’t check on this, but it doesn’t fly there, I’m pretty sure. We can check on that next time. Okay, so are there any other ones that we skipped? We’ve got this one which is leaders of the pack, a profile of a frequent flyer in “EnRoute.” I didn’t check on that yet. “Blue Wings,” we had a couple different ones.
So next time we might wanna check on “Blue Wings,” we’ve got maybe six different potential stories in there so that one might be worth our time to go check. We’ve got…the rest of them are just kind of one potential story from magazine. There’s a couple in “Voyager,” and then we’ve got like these hotel pitches, right. We have quite a few different ones that we could try on the hotel pitch, but we don’t have one that we picked out that’s a good fit yet. Oh, we do have that feature story, right. So we wanna find another one. Do we want to find another hotel section or just stick with that feature?
We’ve got several ones to pitch for that honest Prague idea. We’ve got some other features to work on for “Wizz,” we can really work on any of these. So maybe we’ll work on the beer culture for them, because we found an opportunity to do the spa culture for someone else. Now, for “Voyager,” we had this idea for the feature and we’re already going to work up a pitch about this Instagram thing, so that’s great. We have something for the Curio cabinet. And the rest of these are other features that we can pull in once we do the pitch.
So great, I think we’ve covered most of our bases. We didn’t get to this underground thing. We do have one so I’ll just make a note, underground tunnels. But that might just be because it’s not as good of an idea. So how many asterisks do we have going on here? We’ve got 1, 2, 3, I think we ended up saying that this one, okay, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 but this is kind of the same pitch, 9, 10. So right now, we’ve got 10 pitches from before, which is great.
We’ve got a couple other ones that we’re gonna just check on quickly. But that’s a great number, I was hoping we could get like maybe five or seven pitches that we’re gonna pull all the way forward to completion in this series. So 10 is a great number to move forward from this round. Okay, so next week or next time rather, we convene to do these webinars, what we’ll do is we’ll take these ones that we’ve got asterisk and we’re going to go back through what we were looking at the other day and I’ll just pull it up again so that you can see it. By the other day, I mean early on this webinar, sorry about that.
We’re gonna go back and look at this idea of all of these different things that we need to check. So what we’ll do next time is that we’ve already done business idea exactly fit one section in the magazine. But we have to still explain how in our pitch, right, we have to make sure that we aren’t shoehorning, that it’s a perfect fit. We have to make sure as we write the pitch, but also, you know, as we’re checking into it, if there’s a point to the story, we have to make sure that it’s interesting.
We have to make sure…we did a little bit of this, right, is it too topically or regionally specific for the size of magazines? We spent a bit of time on this. And there’s something timely about the idea, we might have to dig into this a little more. So what we’re gonna do in the next one is I’m gonna take these ideas that we have that seemed like a potential fit, and we’re gonna go through them a little more closely. We’re going to write out some notes for the idea. We’re gonna write out some notes for how exactly that section is gonna be put together in the magazine. And we’re gonna start moving towards that pitching stage, all right.
And we’ll also just check on these other things, see if there’s one we wanna promote from “Blue Wings,” there’s gonna be a lot of ideas there. And see if there’s one in particular that we wanna work on as a shorter hotel pitch. So basically, what we’ll do next time is we’ll take these and we’ll make it into more of a to-do list. What pitches are we working on? What are the next steps for each pitch, and then we’re gonna start knocking that down.
So we’re gonna turn this into a pitch to-do list and start knocking down the to-do list. So what we’re gonna do particularly in the next webinar as I mentioned that the topic of that webinar is going to be “Ruthlessly Auditing the Ideas for Fit.” So we’re gonna come back in January and we will go through this webinar “Ruthlessly Auditing the Ideas for Fit” like I talked about.
And then we’re gonna start working on creating the bones of each page. And you’ll notice that as I’m doing, as I mentioned, the auditing for fit that some of those things start to come into play. I’m taking notes, you’ve already seen me taking notes on what they look for in that section. I’m also gonna be taking more notes on the idea, and we’re gonna also start to go back to my notes that I took when I was out in the place and pulling those interesting first sentences, those different things that we’re gonna include, we’re gonna pull those things there. And then we’ll polish that up in the last webinar and hit send.
So thank you guys so much for joining me.
So I hope that you guys have a really wonderful holiday season, we’re gonna be closing ourselves for the holiday and I will speak with you guys again in the new year. Bye.
Live Idea-to-Pitch Walkthrough Part #2 – Matching Raw Ideas to Real Magazine Sections Transcript
Today, we are gonna be talking about or rather we’re gonna be working through the second phase in this very special webinar series on how to work all the way from super raw ideas to pitching. So this is gonna be a very different webinar than we usually do even a bit different than the last one, which was kind of all over the place in my email and lots of different spaces where ideas are being kept. So what we’re gonna do in this webinar is the focus today is on taking these raw ideas, and I have this in the slides, but I’ll just pop over and show you again this set of raw ideas, I believe there were about 38 out of them that we’ve generated in the first webinar in this series.
So as you’ll see, these are very, very piecemeal. Some of them are names of companies, some are just thematic, like this whole thing with the hedgehogs. Some are specific types of article ideas and some I’ve mentioned maybe a particular outlet. Some of them are just places with a particular type of article it could be. So then some again are ones that I wrote down as, okay, here’s a pitch idea while I was out. I was like, “This has gotta be something. I should just figure out where to put it.”
Now I know a lot of you, let me pop over to the slides. I know a lot of you have idea list like this that lurk around. Sometimes you have several of them. Sometimes you have many more than several. Sometimes you have dozens and dozens of them for different trips or just on different pages, scratch pages in your notebook or on your bullet journal. Things like this. It’s really common for those of us who have ideas who are in this profession, but who are good at coming up with ideas to have these lying around. The real challenge is what comes after. A lot of people come to me and they feel like they don’t know how to come up with ideas or they don’t know how to find out what’s for ideas, but that’s really only the first step.
So the work of being a professional journalist, and particularly when I say professional, I also mean paid, but one who is getting assignments with regularity is what comes after in these next webinars in this series that we’re doing. But this matching piece, we’re actually gonna do over three webinars in a way, which is that today what we’re covering is matching the raw ideas to real magazine sections and those qualifiers are used very specifically. So I’m going to be doing again quickly, but also on a high level possibility. We’ll see if this works kind of way in terms of what the idea is and also the quality of the fit, but the importance is that I’m pegging it to an actual real magazine… Once we have that concrete frame in terms of what’s possible, can we start to edit that amorphous blob of what that idea is into something realistic? Because, otherwise, if you don’t have that realistic framework, you just keep spiraling. You’re like a theoretical physicist or something. The possibilities are endless.
And somebody put this really well to me on one of the coaching calls yesterday. I can’t remember who it was that I was speaking to it, so it could be a number of you on the call. I can’t remember exactly. But this idea that somebody had a profile piece that they were working on pitching and they had an email out to the person they wanted to profile, not only to confirm that the person would participate in the piece, but also to get some information from that person which was necessary journalistic detail to put the pitch together.
And the person told me, ”You know, I’m sitting here working on this piece and I don’t know why I’m working on this because it’s literally physically impossible for me to write the pitch without these pieces of information, which I simply don’t have. So why am I spending time trying to write this pitch?” And this is something that happens with the detail like she was talking about. But I see it happen way more often with people in terms of not having a magazine section.
So I say this literally about any piece of written communication or even verbal communication too, but the specific words don’t exist. They cannot exist. They’re impossible until you know the audience. This is huge. Okay, so what we’re gonna do in this webinar is that we’re gonna find the name of that audience, but in the next two webinars where we’re gonna refine this match, we’re gonna be finding the characteristics and the needs of that audience because it’s not something that we do all at once. Okay. So you’re gonna see how that pans out. So today it’s all about the raw idea and the real magazine section, but you notice I am not saying anything about perfect fit or polishing or sure fire match or anything like that because that’s not our work today.
So the way that we’re gonna go about this today is that I’m gonna give a little recap. I’m not sure how many of you who are on today have caught the first webinar in this series, but I wanna make sure to kind of lay a little bit of groundwork of what we’re doing and why. And also how I recommend that you guys, especially those of you in the coaching program and Dream Buffet programs follow on at home because this is a really great opportunity to force yourself to do what I’m doing on a time pegged kind of fashion, which you don’t always have even in the coaching program because we don’t wanna always Czech in exactly like every single week in that same way.
And then I’m gonna talk about the process that I’m gonna use for looking for the matches because I spent too much time thinking about this whether what I wanted to spend a bunch of time telling you guys more in a lesson format about how I do the process, and what I decided is I’m gonna give you a little bit of an overview and then you’ll see me do it. Because a big thing that I hear from people when they tell me an article idea or not even an article idea. Something they don’t know yet is an article idea.
But maybe they tell me about a trip that they went on or situation they were in. Is that I say, “Oh, you know, you should look at that for this place and such and such place as a section on blah, blah, blah.” And the question is always like, “How do you do that?/Well, I could never have so many idea matches because I don’t know all the magazine sections like you.”
And the funny situation is now, I don’t know all the magazines sections like Vanessa who audits the database for accuracy every month. And so even I find myself feeling like, “Wow, I don’t really know where this thing can go.” So I’m gonna show you the way to do it without being me because now I’m not even to me that, that people envision that I am anymore. So I’m gonna show you the way that I do it when I need to figure out ideas, when I really don’t have any sections in mind.
And part of the important thing, and I’ve got a slide about this, I’ll talk about it more then. But part of the important thing is that right now we are not using a magazine-first approach to generating ideas, which is what I really, really recommend. And I’m working with a lot of you guys on that, that we have a list of magazines we wanna target and every time you’re supposed to be working on pitches, you only look at those sections of those magazines and you come up with ideas that already fit a ready audience.
What we’re doing right now is an idea-first way of generating magazine pitches, which is not the most effective. I wanna make sure to say that, okay, because I am doing this as an exercise with you because I know a lot of you are working this way, and obviously, we go on trips and so this happens that you wanted to take a whole trip and turn it into a bunch of article ideas, but this is not the most effective way. So we are still going to be dialing in in a way to that magazine-first way. And the way that we do it is what I’m gonna show you today, but in brief.
The idea is that we’re gonna remind ourselves what all the pitch ideas on the table are. And then we’re going to go look at a bunch of magazines that may potentially be outlets for those pitch ideas. And then we are essentially working magazine-first, but with a defined set of article ideas to choose from, but with a larger set of magazines than you would usually look at.
So I know that as I explained that in words, it doesn’t necessarily attract, but the idea is that even though this whole webinar series is about an idea-first, as in we have the ideas and we don’t know where they’re gonna match rather than we have a magazine we wanna write it for and then we figure out what to pitch them. So even though this whole thing is an exercise in idea-first pitching, you can’t proceed one idea at a time through all 500 magazines in the database or even a small subset of them through 40 ideas and come up with your best shot at pitching. And the reason for that is that some ideas are easier, some ideas fit better, some ideas simply have more opportunities to be placed. And the faster you narrow in on those and ignore the other ones for the time being until you just magically, like, run into a good home for them, the better off you will be.
So not every idea, even the ones that I wrote down when I was on my trip, like this is a story idea to do something with this, these ideas that I have on this list, these 38 of them, they will start to fall away. Some of them will multiply, some of them will take different directions for different formats and different narrow slices in order to become different pitches for different magazines. But some of them will fall away. And that is the work that we’re doing today, okay?
So we’re gonna look over the idea so we remember what they are so that as we start looking at the magazines, we have that subset fresh in our mind. And then we’re gonna do a sprint search and I will show you the sprint search as we go through it. So as we dive into this content that we’re gonna talk about today, I told you I would just wanna take a second to talk again about what this series is and why exactly we’re doing it. So I mentioned earlier as I was outlining the topics for today that I do not recommend that you pitch idea first. A lot of you guys still do and I’ve had a couple of interesting calls this past week with people that I’ve been coaching for a little bit kind of looking back on the last year or what progress they’ve made, you know, what they’re proud of, what they feel like they’re still not doing. And I find that a lot of it boils down to not having a consistent way to bubble up pitch ideas to get them out on a regular schedule in a professional type of cycle.
And one of the reasons is that if you’re really strictly idea first with your pitches like we’re doing right now, but you don’t have some sort of structure to it, it can just take forever because you don’t have that same framework of, “Oh, I have to pitch these same three magazines this week because I pitched these same three magazines every second week of the month or first week of the month, and this is the time when that editor needs a new idea for me.” So without that framework, idea first can just start to wear on forever.
So the idea of this webinar series is that over the course of six webinars, I’m gonna take a trip into completed pitches in front of you, so it’ll be six hours basically. So you can see exactly how to move from one point to one point to one point to get this done and what should fall away. Like I’ve said, some ideas aren’t gonna come through along the way in order to make something be accomplished because sometimes the ideas that you’re so close to that are really dear to you that you were really touched by when you’re there, you don’t have the emotional distance yet to see how to turn that into a story. And that’s okay. It will happen eventually, but right now to be professional writer, there are pitches that need to go out the door.
So that is what we’re doing with this series. And I really recommend that you follow along at home and here’s how to do it. So first you wanna watch the webinar and like I said, if you haven’t watched the first webinar, it’s really sequential, so definitely don’t try to take these piecemeal one at a time. So watch the first webinar in this series, any webinar in the series, you watch the webinar and then you try it at home with your Travel Magazine Database subscription.
So for this step that we’re doing right now, like I said, the key to actually accomplishing something in this trajectory that we’re on of this idea-first pitching from trying to harness whatever we can from one trip and turn it into some actual pitches is to try to match all the ideas with all the magazines. And that doesn’t sound very sane. I get that. It does not sound like a very good idea to be trying to hold 40 different article ideas in your head while looking at 40 plus different magazines and find some fits.
But there’s a reason for that because I want you to have a thin grasp on these things. I don’t want you to become too attached to any of them until they’ve become concretely feasible. And what I mean by that is that the idea has a home, which bounds the, you know, the limits of your imagination on what you’re thinking about in terms of how that sort of go, and you have made sure that that home is a very, very good one in the same sort of set of rigor that the government might do to make sure that that a child should actually be adopted by XYZ family, okay?
So those parts of the rigor of the fit check, we will be doing in the next two webinars. So here, we are only in this phase of having a very tenuous grasp of how a topic could develop into an actual article idea and matching those with again, tenuous grasps on what particular magazines or looking for. So what that means is that the idea is to stay a bit general, a bit high level. Okay. And only once we have some things that seem feasible, we dive deeper down.
So let’s start looking at what that looks like. We wanna take a quick look to remind ourselves even me, right? I had to find these ideas because I couldn’t find them on my computer, but I have not looked at them. I have not thought. Even yesterday before bed, I started thinking, “Oh hey, you know, “Brussels Airways magazine has this road trip section this to be… No, I put a stop on it. I didn’t even write it down, okay? I have not generated any ideas, any matches, even looked at any magazines or any of these ideas might fit outside of the confines on this call because I really wanna show you what can be done in exactly six hours, okay? So we, myself included, are going to take a minute to re-familiarize ourselves with the ideas that we pulled out the other day.
So I’ve got four slides of them. I’m just gonna kind of run over them really quickly just so that we’re familiar with them. So there’s this town, Český Těšín, which is set in two countries, so there can be all sorts of different things here about a destination guide of hitting two countries in two days. There’s a lot of the history. For six months it was the capital of Austria, a particular hotel, maybe there’s a profile there. Then there’s this river that separates the Polish and Czech sides where they have this cool international film festival. Then there’s a totally different place, not Český Těšín, which is this meeting point of three countries.
Maybe there can be an essay around that. Then there was this crazy villa that we went to where the tour had all this neat storytelling. But that also made me think of, because they have accommodations, perhaps a pitch on different country accommodations in the Czech Republic, like they had a watermill, a chateau. Maybe that could work as a piece for afar that only touches on the Czech Republic on different kinds of mills. Then the results also this place, Karlovy Vary, which has 650 years of spa tradition that was really trying to figure out about how to get North Americans have very little vacation time to take an entire month to go to the spa. So those are some day trip type ideas that I had.
Now I had a few ideas from the meetings that I had with companies at TBEX. So one of them was this place in Northern Hikes that has done some really interesting marketing stuff. They’ve partnered with a coffee company to develop a coffee just for their hikes that maybe could work for a business section, maybe of an airline magazine. Then they also did this thing where they work with like a national park. I believe that’s in the Czech Republic and they particularly were aiming within the park to find a way to avoid some of the environmental issues that are happening with people who are going, whether they’re Instagram influencers or just individual people taking photos for Instagram to kind of off the path places in these parks and taking photos. So they brought in Instagram influencers to find new scenic spots that weren’t so over touristy to expose people to different parts of the park and take some of the loads off of those areas. So that’s one.
And then there’s also kind of different spins off of that, like should that be done or should we not be bringing more visitation of these wild places? And then also there’s the chance to look into are there other places that are doing something similar. So then I went on this multiday fam trip. And from there, there are a bunch of different story ideas. There is this whole thing of the hedgehog, which some of you have seen the little hedgehog mascot that we now have.
But there’s this interesting thing with this town that we visited and the hedgehog as a thing of identity and connection in that town. Then there was this whole underground culture with all these different tours. There was also this really neat Jewish quarter tour that we went to with that made me think of maybe a roundup of pre-World War II Jewish living sort of house museums and things like that in different parts of Europe.
Then there was a couple really beautiful towns that we went to that have a lot of UNESCO heritage that I was thinking of maybe for like a weekend piece or a destination guide. I was also thinking about this idea of an essay around Czech food because like we all at the beginning of the tour, we’re talking about how he really liked Czech food, but then, you know, four days into it we’re like, “Oh my God, give me a salad with chicken. I cannot eat one more read dumpling or I will die.” Then like I was saying, there’s a lot of interest in UNESCO heritage here, so some of that might meet work out as a profile of an individual place. So “Renaissance Magazine” for instance, has something of castles.
Then again, I mentioned this earlier with Karlovy Vary, we have already, but there’s this resort culture. We spent a day or two at this resort, St. Katerina, but they’re also really modernizing the resort cultures. They’ve got this crazy Stonehenge thing. They’re also teaming up with a spa from Kerala in South India, so there could be some different stories around there and the spa venue. Then some other sort of more general pitch ideas that I had from the trip are the idea that I got from another writer which was of a foreign currency curio cabinet, which she has and then she was talking about and I actually collect Christmas market mugs from all over the world. And I was thinking of this idea of like these modern day curio cabinets have different souvenirs. I know somebody else who doesn’t magnets from each place they visited. And one time I tried to bring them a magnet they said no, it has to be only from somewhere we visited. So that could be a more essay type thing and I know “Travel and Leisure” has a section that might be good for that for instance.
There’s this place we went to in Prague that could be a good idea for a wedding section. Then there was this idea of beer spas, like actually soaking in beer, which just seem crazy to me. Then, not my fam, but another fam trip went to a nuclear bunker hotel, which is exactly what it sounds like, a former nuclear bunker. Then some other essay ideas in here on walks not taken. That’s kind of like a more esoteric thing that I could explain. Someone else talked about how the Czech Republic is the second most drinking country in the world with 12 solid liters of alcohol per month and the first, first smoking cannabis, which was one of these kind of totally unexpected things.
I’m not quite sure where we would go with that. Then there was this idea of they have some tourist guided by homeless people that I had absolutely never heard it before, but might be happening in other parts of the world. And then also I’m not quite sure what I meant by this some story and being bowled over by all the 13th-century things, so that might be more of a tonality or a focus for a future article.
So are the ideas that we have at hand. So we’ve got about 25, 30 minutes now that I’m going to change a screen over and I’m gonna try to show you my whole screen so I can be writing down ideas while we’re looking at the magazine database. But if that seems too crazy, that might just show you the magazine database, screen hands, and then I will write notes in a different page. So let’s give it a try.
So this new notes file is gonna be specifically for matching ideas with sections, okay? It probably looks really small to you, but it’s hard for me to…well, I’ll just make this a little bit bigger. Okay, great.
So down here we’ve got the notes on the different ideas that we talked about before and I also made some notes last time about some different things that we were gonna go into. So I’ve already opened for us a couple different categories in the Travel Magazine Database for us to start with.
So the first one that I opened is airline magazines, I’ve also opened history. I haven’t open architecture yet, so I’m gonna just quickly find the architecture tag for us as well. Actually, I’ll find the architecture category. Let’s do that. But if you’re not familiar in the Travel Magazine Database, if you scroll all the way to the bottom of the page, you can get all of the different categories. And so that’s how I’ve opened up the ones that we have here, but you can get adventure, architecture, art and design, you can get different areas, but then at a certain point the page loads to catch up with you.
So basically the Travel Magazine Database is set on an infinite load so that as you keep scrolling down, it’ll keep serving you more magazines. So somebody told me the other day that they discovered a bunch of magazines they’ve never known before because the load was too slow for them or something like that. So if you feel like you have gone to a section where you should be seeing more magazines, it might just be that you need to wait for the infinite load to come in.
So right now as you can see I’m in airline magazines. You’re probably seeing a lot of familiar faces here from “Voyeur,” which is from Virgin Atlantic and “High Life” which is British Airways. And I’m just going through, like I said, we wanna match all the ideas to all the magazines. And I’m just opening up the airlines that I think maybe would work for Czech Republic story. So there’s ones that I’m skipping, particularly international ones. There’s some one’s within Europe that I’m skipping like “Celebrated Living.” This is American Airlines. I would skip the main American Airlines magazine, but I’m opening the “Celebrated Living” just for the luxury element, okay? Now “N by Norwegian” is another European one, “Blue Wings,” this is for Finnair. So you’ll see that I’m opening pretty much all of the airline magazines for the main European carriers. And Delta “Sky” I’m opening in united hemispheres just to see. I’m not really sure if there’s gonna be anything for us there, but I’m opening these, again, I’m having you watch me open them just so you can see what choices I make and which ones I skip.
I’m gonna open at Etihad because I know they have a big luxury focus and there might be an opportunity for our spa thing there, but I’m gonna skip this Indian publication because I don’t see them as a mature, same for this Vietnam one as those as markets where they’re mature enough and how much travel they do that they would be going into the Czech Republic.
So I’m basically kind of looking at these and thinking about does this airline fly there or would the audience of who’s reading Thai Airways be an audience that would come to the Czech Republic because I’m opening Air France, but I’m not, I’m not super sure, but. So I’m for sure gonna skip this Hawaii oriented one. “Wingspan is Japan, so I’m going to skip that and as you’ll see now we’re getting into the infinite load, which gets a bit slow. So this is Malaysia. I’m gonna skip that one as well. WestJet, I don’t know. I feel like maybe we can seek them for some Canadians going into the Czech Republic. Lufthansa, I’m gonna open for sure. And you’ll see that with the stories that we’re working on right now that these airline magazines are gonna start to give us a lot of traction.
So one of the reasons that I really recommend starting with airline magazines when you are figuring out what to begin to think about pitching is that it can be really time consuming to take a purely topical approach not just in the database, but in life. Like let’s say you want to look at all the food magazines, you’re not just looking at each magazine to see if it’s a fit, you also have to figure out what geographic area they cover.
But with the airline magazines, it’s really fast to figure out what that geographic area is. So I’d like to start with this because it’s a way to get traction that is feeling like you’re getting some matches going and work is actually being done quickly as opposed to if I were to go into history or something else like that. I not only have to see if the magazine fit, but I also have to think about does the geographic area in which the readers might be traveling for this magazine also fit in with the place that I’m pitching. And that’s really not gonna be so often the case, okay?
So that’s why I like to start with the airline magazines because the geography is so clear and that, as you’ll see in the next couple of webinars in this series, is gonna be one of the things that’s a big sticking point or really big sticking point for editors, okay? Is are you pitching them an article idea that they just could never cover? It simply just like no way shape or form. It just wouldn’t make sense for them to cover the type of geographic area that you’re pitching. Okay, so I’ve gotten to the bottom of airline magazine, so I’m gonna close that now and I’m gonna go in here and start digging in so that we can start thinking about where some of these ideas would go, okay?
So this is Wizz. Wizz is essentially European airline. As you can see on here, the magazine itself is London-based. So let’s see what sections are available to freelancers. Okay, tribes. Tribes cover an interesting group of people such as 14 club or trend with a loyal following. I don’t know that we have something about this, but I’m just gonna put this over here because I just wonder. I have this hedgehog thing, right, that I was talking about. I just wonder if maybe that city where I’m really interested in this whole hedgehog idea, I wonder if we could maybe work for that, okay?
Now “The Innovator,” a person or business who’s doing something new, unusual or innovative. Now, do you remember I talked about that company that was doing the thing with having…they’re hiking tour company, but they worked with a coffee company to create a coffee like just for their tour? I feel like that could be a cool thing here, so I’m gonna put Northern Hike because that was the name of the thing. Coffee tour and then also they did the thing with the Instagrammers, right? So “Voices” is a roundup of quotes from locals on what to see, do, eat in their city and the cities that they mentioned here. Okay. They’ve got Munich, Moscow and Varna, Bulgaria, so it seems like a mix of large and like not so well known cities, so like maybe this would work with some of the places in the Czech Republic.
However, I feel like I’m not so sure about this because Prague is like super over touristed, and then this other city that we went to Ostrava that was a bigger city is just people don’t super think it has a lot going on. It doesn’t really have a lot going on and everything else was really small. But I’m just gonna put this in here for the note because there were some people who run this blog called I believe, Honest Prague, something like that who did the closing keynote at TBEX who could be a really cool source at least to get started with this “Voices” thing.
“The Interview” takes the form of celebrity profile. I didn’t really run into any interesting celebrities on this trip, so I don’t think that’s gonna be the case. For features that cover trends, food, people, things to do in destinations in the airlines network. So in the past, they’ve done “Cool Britannia,” about ice sculpting in London, “Welcome to the World…the Land of Willy Wonka Brewing,” about Reykjavik, and “Gourmet To Go,” profiling chefs in Tel Aviv. So I’m trying to think if I have any features that could be cool for this. So to be honest, this cannabis thing in the Czech Republic actually was really interesting. Now the question of whether that cannabis is always an interesting line of like what magazines are okay covering that and what aren’t. So that could maybe me work here, but I’m not 100% sure.
So what would we do I have any other feature ideas that might be interesting for this magazine? Let’s see. This whole thing about beers and beers spas, could I tie that in? You know, I think that could kind of work. Well, they did this brewing thing in Reykjavik kinda recently, so they might not be too keen on beer. So that would be something to figure out, but I feel like this whole idea of like the beer culture, I’m gonna write it down. Beer culture taking kind of interesting directions in Prague could be one to play with. So like interesting iterations. I know that has gotten small. I apologize of beer culture in Prague. So beer spas, and then we need to kind of know like what else? Like what other… Is there enough for that to make sense? Let’s see if there’s some other ones who’ve got going on here.
Now would this be a place that we could maybe do something on this modernization of spa culture? Could be, could be. I think that could maybe have some legs because that like I can incorporate this Karlovy Vary place as well as St. Katerina Resort that I had gone to. Let’s see, what about this underground tunnel thing? The underground tunnel culture could maybe work here as well. Okay. So I’ve got three potential pitch ideas for this one feature section. Now, one thing that I always love to remind people is once you’ve got a solid feature pitch that can usually go to a lot of different places, and let me bump up this text for you guys. So a feature pitch is a feature pitch is a feature pitch.
So what’s happening here is that I’m putting in the future pitches that I think could go with this particular magazine. But as we get to the point where I’m writing these up, they might be things that I can then spin off to a lot of other airline magazines. So I might even as we go along, as I’m dumping in the feature sections of other airline magazines, I might also just cut and paste some of these articles there as well. Okay.
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So “Voyeur, this is for Virgin Australia. Now, I wasn’t so sure, I opened this because I wasn’t so sure if they cover only places in Australia or further afield. So they do have this hotel section which is around up. So I’m gonna put this hotel, the St. Katerina resort place that we went to in here because as I mentioned, they have this really interesting thing where they’re partnering with this spa from Karela to bring together both the Indian spa culture and the Czech Republic spa culture. So food is a roundup of dishes, restaurants.
The only food idea I have here really is an essay because that’s not gonna work. How different destinations in Australia that they fly to probably not. Locals guide a city around the world. They’ve got Dublin. That’s something in Texas, Austin. So I’m not super sure if this is something where it has to be in their network and the most likely thing here is Prague. So I’m gonna try putting this up here as like another thing that might make sense with those honest Prague guys that I was talking about because I think Prague is probably the only place that would make sense for that to be, okay?
So travel, seven feature articles, they can be all over, but they need to be Virgin Atlantic’s route. I’m not so sure about that. “Navigate” is gonna be a trend in food, travel or business. I’m not, I’m not so sure that I have something for this. But just as an exercise, I’m gonna put down here, I’m gonna move this so that all the ones we have at the bottom. So I’m gonna put down here that I think that this might work as this idea of like interesting ways that either business and/or the environment like national parks and companies that work in them maybe are adapting the Instagrammers because I was just reading some interesting pieces with this as well. I might finished writing this down and then we’ll move on or drafting. Okay.
So now we’ve cruised through two magazines. All right. So “High Life.” This is British Airways. Now this is, I believe, British Airways main cabin publication. I also opened their business cabin publication and we’ll look at that as well. Okay. So “My London,” absolutely out, “Connection,” Q&As;, profiles, third person pieces about a destination person or humorous topic. Do we have any humorous topics? I mean, okay, they’ve got this humor piece. Okay, this seems like a weird one, but I feel like that Q&A or profile.
So I was trying to think of this thing about getting like getting sick of the food that you think you like on vacation could fit in here, but I still think it’s a bit too essay-oriented. All right, so then the next question is do we think that this spa resort can go in this hotels piece? I think so. So we’re gonna add this to…see now we’ve basically got a section going on hotel pitches.
You see how these things start to kind of fall into categories. So I’ve got this hotel pitch section where we’re also going to be trying to pitch this St. Katerina Resort. Okay. Now we’ve got six features and features and destination, third person. They take things like, okay, this is the profile of an actress. Would you go on a holiday with a stranger? Which is a growing thing about apps? Caledonia dreaming about the writer’s experience in a Scottish countryside, ahead of a new museum opening. I don’t know if I have a feature that quite seems to fit in with the type of things they’re looking for, so I’m gonna pass on that for now.
So “b.inspired” was one that I mentioned that I already had the beginnings of a match of an idea for this, and I wanna make sure that they’re still doing this section. It seems like they might not be. They used to have a road trip section that I thought this would work for. So let’s look what they have in here. Smart Belgian is out, Altitude is out. Barrio is on different cities around Europe. Interesting things to do in that city. So I don’t know. I’m on the fence about this. I feel like we could maybe do the place where the TBEX conference was held for this barrio thing. So I’m gonna drop that in here and see if Ostrava worked for that because I have a feeling, I’m gonna write here. We need to check if it’s only destinations that VA flies to directly because of Ostrava does have an airport, but I had kind of a pain in the front time figuring out what airline I could take from London to get there. So one of the things I’m gonna do as well is double Czech which airlines fly into those Ostrava for and I’ll do that. I’m making a note up here because it’s something that I’ll do in that checking in type thing that we’re gonna be doing in the next couple of airlines. Okay.
“Insider” profiles, an interesting local from one of the airlines and networks. So this again, I’m going to drop in that section. Basically, we have again growing here we had hotel pitches but now we have basically a growing as told to/profile hitch on the Honest Prague people. We’ve got a bunch of different articles that are going on in there, so I’m gonna drop this in here as well. Okay, great. What else? “Off the Beaten Track,” that was a lot of my tour, right?
A destination that’s a one to three hour drive from major city. Okay, so this is where I was thinking about, this was this road trip piece. Okay. So this is one that I think for sure would be great with all of those tiny little cities that I went to. Like this down here you’ll see Telč and Třebíč that had just amazing sort of UNESCO type things going on, but that you really have to go to by car and they’re not super close. And there’s all other kinds of interesting things to do around there, but it has to be done more as a road trip piece.
Okay. “The Big City Guide,” this was not a trip where I had a lot of city stuff, so you know, apart from Prague, which I really didn’t spend a lot of time in that is not gonna work here. So four features in the “Stories Department.” So these kinds of things are 10 winter activities in Toronto, “How to Take Travel Photography Using an iPhone,” profile of a beekeeper in Copenhagen, a Writers Trip to Rwanda. I’m trying to think what magazine are we looking at here at, “b.inspired.” I don’t know. I’m not sure if any of these feature pitch ideas that I have are super measuring up to their idea of what do they call it, the stories. They do want, some sort of how to do oriented things. And so I was wondering about this curio cabinet. I don’t know actually, you know, that’s maybe an idea. Okay, I’m gonna put this in here. It’s a weird pitch, but…we’ll then say this, the story is, and what I’m really drafting off of here is this servicey element of How to Take Top Travel iPhone in terms of like How to Have Collection Driven-Travel or something. And that’s how I’m going to pull this curio cabinet into it and I’m not really sure if it’ll work, but it’s a concept so we can look at this. So this is this curio cabinet idea, so we’ll… So that’s like a super.
I’m not sure if that’ll fit, but it’s an idea. So that’s gone. Okay. So “En Routes,” this is Air Canada. So for this I’m like, I’m not really too sure how much stuff we can get with Air Canada, but they have some nice section so I figured I’d try. Okay. So we’ve got a celebrity one. Nope. Profile or frequent flyer. Oh my gosh, I actually have a great one of the US from this trip. So I’m gonna pull this over and I just hope it’s not problematic because this person is a flight attendant for a different airline.
So somebody that I actually traveled with the press trip is a blogger and I guess I could sort of focus on how she’s a blogger. But she’s a blogger and a flight attendant and just a really awesome frequent traveler who has really cool tips on shopping in different places and things like that. So she might work for that. Okay. Insider’s Guide is a profile of the Canadian who is now based abroad. You know, I would, it would seem like I must’ve met some of these but I don’t know who they are at the top of my head. So this is one of those things that you really wanna have like on your pocket magazine Cheat Sheet so that you actually remember when you run into random Canadians abroad unlike my case where I completely don’t remember. So we don’t have anything for that features. I’m gonna say that probably nothing that I did on this trip is going to be a good feature here.
So I’m gonna put Air Canada “En Route” to bed for now and I just realized that I did a horrible thing in my haste here, which is that I have not been writing the names of the magazines with these match to, which is gonna come back and bite me in the butt later on. So this is just something that I’m letting you guys know. I’m not cheating, but I’m gonna have to go back through and write the names for these magazines and afterwards or it’s gonna be really disastrous to do the next webinar. So I highly recommend you do at least what I did here, where you put the name of the magazine and not only the text of the section though you can take like a few words of this and chuck it in the search on the Travel Magazine Database and find it later, but it’s just a little more painful.
Okay, so “easyJet Traveler.” Let’s see here. We’ve got citizens advice, a profile of someone interesting in a destination, right? Where does this go? This goes in our Honest Prague keynote or profile section. So you’ll see these as told to or I have a webinar on them called “Celebrity Favorites.” These celebrity favorites pieces come off a lot and if you find a person you can really turn off a bunch of these. Okay, on the map, interesting things to do around the theme in worldwide destinations. So that makes me wonder, is it one destination or multiple destinations? ”The Best Festivals are Far Flung.” Okay. Five around the world. ”Some Runs are Actually Fun.” God, that’s a horrible name. Five interesting races around the world.
Okay, so this is a roundup thing and I feel so sure that we had one of these. It was though about different places to stay, like in different mills that I was thinking of maybe as an idea for an afar. So I’m not actually sure if that works here unfortunately. But this homeless tours, I feel like that could maybe work here. You know which magazine is this easyJet homeless tours that could. It could work. Okay. So that, that could be a really interesting take on what they’re looking for here are. So we’re gonna write easyJet so we don’t forget what magazine that’s for. So easyJet on the map and we’re gonna do Homeless Tours. We saw them in a Ostrava, someone else mentioned taking them in Prague and we need to look up where else in the world they’re happening.
And totally unrelated, but that just reminded me that there’s this museum hack tour or something like that that I took in New York, which is like this after-hours museum tour of the Met. And so that might be something like that that we can find to do another places. Now, I feel like there was something else that I had in the notes of pre-World War II living in various parts of the world. I’m not sure that’s quite interesting enough for this section, so we’ll skip. Okay. Q&A for a Celebrity that’s out, area guy, he street neighborhood or district in a city served by easyJet.
I’m gonna pull this over with the super caveat that I’m not sure if any of these smaller cities that I went through are served by easyJet, so I’m just gonna put here, where is served by you easyjet? because if one of those smaller cities like culture week that I went to that has a lot of UNESCO sites, I did get a lot of information on those, but I just don’t know how that would work from the flights. Okay. Take my advice, a first person essay. That’s something humorous that happened on the writer’s travels, often was something going wrong. God, we must all have so many of this right? Do I not have something that went wrong on this trip? I feel like I don’t. This was actually like a really great press trip. I feel bad letting the section goes. I hope all of you who have had some humorously bad happen on your travels. Pick this up.
Okay. So cover destinations or sorry, features are covering destinations shared my easyJet. Okay. The other city of light about Pula, Croatia, a pilgrimage in Spain, but a different one. Okay. So these are cool, like off the beaten path things. So I’d love to get something in here. And I think that’s gonna be this being bowled over by all the 13th-century things that renter beach. But this is one of those things where we’re gonna have to see, does easyJet actually serve some of these areas? I’m gonna write that in here with this caveat in our feature section.
Okay. Check in here, a hotel. Okay, so that’s gonna be a for sure yes for our St. Katerina hotels. I’m gonna put that up here in our hotel pitches section. Get a room around it for hotels by four different contributors. I don’t know if that would be quite so much as a fit for this because they seem like they’re very specifically in cities. Covers a restaurant, the atmosphere, the decor. Okay. I think this could be a cool option for this place that I went to in Prague where I mentioned it as the place that could be for wedding piece, but they had these really amazing cakes. And I don’t know if I have the name of it. Here it is, Style and Interior.
All right. Step up to the plate. This is covering three restaurants. Nope. Okay. Pack it in. Suggestions of things to pack for a particular trip. The best buys for a Balkan adventure. Amalfi coast, St. Tropez. I don’t know, could we make that work? Could we do a trend, a Czech Republic thing there? I feel like we could try. I’m not exactly sure what would go into it or what the angle would be, but let’s give it a shot.
I’m just gonna put like big question marks here. All right. The big idea, an interesting or innovative product or company. So I don’t think that Northern Hikes and I’m kind of using for this would work quite here. Okay, the knowledge. 25 short articles way different contributors, often roundup suggesting places to eat, drink or see and cities in the network. Yeah. These are a little too roundup I think for what we’re talking about. So I’m going to have to let those go. Okay. So I just wanted to take a second. It’s gonna make that crazy looking thing for you guys for just one second. So I apologize in advance. I just wanna see how we’re doing on time.
Okay. I’m gonna take five more minutes on the finding ideas and then we’ll be done and those are all the ideas that we have available to use for the whole rest of this workshop. And you’ll see that I’m still in the middle of airline magazines and we’ve still got a bunch of airline magazines. I haven’t even started going into the history of magazines that I’ve pulled up. But I’ve already got 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20 sections pulled out to pitch, guys. Okay. So we have no dearth of sections available, but I’m gonna take five more minutes and see what else we can find.
Okay. So we’ve got. This is “Celebrating Living.” This is like the higher end for American Airlines and they are sometimes first person. I’m really looking at this for the hotels, so they’ve got Tuscany, which is not exactly next to an airline. So I’m gonna throw this into our hotel section, which is really like the whole reason that I opened up this magazine in the first place. So here’s our hotel pitches. Okay, great. So they’re in the hotel pitches, the city and favorite things in their hometown. Again, here we go. That goes for an Honest Prague folks.
So you see how like as I’ve started looking at the magazine section, so there’s a couple ideas that have stood out as having a lot of options and some that haven’t even come up yet, right? Okay. So celebrated voices as a celebrity, nope. Covering travel destinations. Okay. What would we do for these features? Fashion Designer, a Denver’s cultural Renaissance, Bahamas. No, we don’t fit those destinations. Okay. “N by Norwegian” I have high hopes for you, but let’s see. The experience. One, experience or activity worldwide. It could be a tour class or element of a writer’s trip. Ski like a royal on a budget, Husky sledding, Chroma yoga. I feel like we must have something. There’s this beer spas, but I didn’t actually do it so I can’t write it as a first person thing. We didn’t really have too much experience. You will staff on this trip, so I’m really just not sure. So I think that’s gonna, unfortunately, have to take a pass.
The neighborhood covering a different neighborhood in the city worldwide. Munching doing browsing, I’m not really sure I have a good neighborhood idea. Okay. The big idea covers quirky or unusual projects. I’m gonna throw this over with that those ideas that we had for those Northern Hike people like they’re interesting product and see if that could maybe work for this big idea section. All right. One feature in the name of city by Norwegian. Now, what cities have they covered before? Lanzarote, Austin and Chicago. Like they’re kind of off the beaten path but I don’t know. I think they still have to be big. So I think that that won’t work.
Okay. But what about the uncategorized features? We’ve got destinations, trends, interesting people, the growing food scene in Providence, Rhode Island, the Hyman Archive in London, Narvik, a little-known see ski destination in Norway. Do we have any feature pitches that could maybe work for this, something that would be kind of trend-oriented? I’m not sure. I feel like this could maybe go with this modernization of Czech spot culture idea. So I’m gonna throw this in here. I’m pretty sure we have some notes on that. Okay, great. Okay. We’re done with “N by Norwegian. “
“Blue Wings,” so this is Finnair, okay. So also like not too far. Wise craft a creative business and its own. Gosh, you know, I wish I could say that I met some of these and like I usually do a lot of this kind of stuff on press trips, but I don’t really have too many ideas on this one aspect of the city in detail in 300 words. So delicious, so old chocolate factory in Los Palmas, peking duck dishes in Nanjing. Oh Man. Okay. This is the beer spas, right? Like, that’s pretty clearly gonna be the beer spas in Prague. And then I didn’t go to these but I can do some reporting on these and pull that up. So there’s gonna be beer spas in Prague. And this magazine is what’s this magazine is gonna be “Blue Wings” Finnair and now I’ve lost our poor thing. All right, let’s try to get this back. There we go. Okay. So, let’s see. Did I put it in here yet? No. Okay. This is “Blue Wings” and beer spas because it looks. Yeah, it’s written third person quotes from those involved, so don’t even have been there. Great.
Inside Track, around up with six recommendations in the same country or region. Oh, this is cool. Okay. So this we can do to take in that modernized spa perspective. No, we are on “Blue Wings.” Field trip trends and travel and destinations, Arctic rising popularity of trips. Traditional, eco-friendly Nanjing. I feel like this could also work on the modernizing spa things to be honest. So that would mean that as I would work up this pitch for this magazine, I could tell them, I can see it in either thing. But it might also mean that as I’m starting to look into this section, I see that one is more clearly a fit than the other.
Creative Corner, people in the same industry or related topics such as a business in the same neighborhood. I don’t think we really have anything for that. A roundup covering things to do or seeing a destination. You’ve got Northern England, near Helsinki, near Helsinki, icy waters of Finland. I don’t know. I’m wondering if this could also be for that spa idea. I think as we look at these, we’re going to see which one that’s gonna have to be. Investigation covers one aspect of lifestyle or travel often discussing a rising trend problem or interesting cultural story. Okay, cool. So this one I see for sure being this whole how Instagrammers are changing destinations. Okay, great. So we’re gonna say bye, bye to “Blue Wings.”
And then since we’re short on time, I’m gonna get rid of a couple of these and the highlight on a few. Okay. So let’s set a “Cara.” This is the Aer Lingus magazine. And I was hoping that this would have some fits, but some of their sections are really specific that they have to cover places that they fly to. I know this 5 best in 48 hours and have that problem. So I wonder what this business and life. So this is kind of a guide to a city, so I’m not too sure if that would work. Recommendations around a theme. They’ve got food markets, mountain resorts, barbecue. I wonder if we could do like experiential tours here and incorporate the homeless tours, but I’m not entirely sure. And then they’ve got features which I think is also…they do have something in what to do in Ojai, California and they certainly don’t fly there. So their four destination-based features and one roundup of interesting people in Ireland around a theme, I don’t know, you know, I think we could try to pitch them this Telč, Třebíč area that I was talking about and see if it flies just by, like, not spending too much time on it and reusing a pitch that we’re gonna pitch to somewhere else.
Okay. So let’s look at Air France. I don’t have super high hopes for them, but let’s just have a gander. Okay. Hotspots, they cover hotels and spas. Okay. I’m just gonna throw this into our hotel section even though I’m not super sure about it. Culture, it’s more about art, different things like that. Okay. Lifestyle, elegant getaways, fashion history, what to do in Berlin during Mercedes Benz fashion week, French Riviera. You don’t know if any of the stuff we have is quite cool enough for that.
Okay. WestJet, they’re pretty adventurous travelers. Let’s see what they’ve got going on. Behind the scenes profile and interesting person sometimes have linked to Canada. I’m gonna throw this in our Honest Prague section again. Seat stays is three accommodations on a theme, but let’s see. Can they all be in the same place? I don’t know, but let’s… Oh, they’re usually written by three different contributors. Okay. I’m gonna put this in here as a thought for WestJet as a thought for something that we can maybe do with the watermills piece and we’ll see. Okay, this has to be WestJet network. This is just an in destination, how to get to the destination with WestJet, WestJet destinations. I think the rest of these are all maybe Westjet destinations except for this feature one. Let me just check. Yeah. Okay. So what about the features? Is there anything we can do here? They seem to focus a lot, I think, like on North America, so I think I’m going to take a pass on that.
Okay. Let’s just look quickly at. I’ve got a couple that I want to look at really quickly. Okay. So “Scandinavian Traveler,” the only thing they’ve got open right now is shortcuts, which are a bunch of front of book things and their feature well, which includes some profiles deeper dive on a boom town. Sometimes showcasing a Scandinavian region, probably not the best fit, so I’ll skip. Okay. Let’s have a look at. Swiss, Swiss has got a feature city, city’s culture, art. Okay. This is one where I want to look at and see if we can do they fly to some of these smaller towns like to a beach. On a plate, I don’t know again if we have particular dish-oriented ones, but this short trip. No, that seems to be two major cities. That’s a no. Living abroad, no, that also wouldn’t work. Okay. They’re done.
Two last European ones. “Wings” is Euro Wings. Okay. They’ve got the question of the month. This actually could work for that curio cabinet thing. “Wings,” question of the month, curio cabinets, “Why Do We Collect Particular Types of Souvenirs for Everywhere We Go?” “What’s Trending From a Business Angle?” I think this could also work for this idea of how businesses are dealing with Instagram. Okay. One more European airline that I wanted us to look at. Lucasville. Let’s have a quick look here. Okay. Interview with celebrity. Nope. Features split between travel and aviation? Uh, Bangkok. Athens in before an art exhibit. I don’t know. I don’t know if I love any of this for the features that we have.
Let’s just check, oh, KLM. Let’s have quick look at them. Business lunch. Don’t off the top of their field. Bollywood, Singapore and. No, they’re all over the place of their features. Anything to do with wow. And then we’ll cut it off. Okay. They’ve got features, they cover kind of odd things. What’s an odd thing that we’ve got that could do a feature on? What odd features do we have going on? Let’s see. We’ve got this curio cabinet thing. What they tend to be a little more destination oriented. So I wonder if we could do the shorter feeder here says, wow, we could do the shorter feature on the beer your spas, etc and Prague.
Okay guys, let’s see where we are now. We’ve got 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39. We’ve got 39 sections that we’ve pulled. I’m gonna make this… I’m gonna zoom us all in on this one screen quickly. So pardon me for this mirror effect for a second. Okay. So we’ve pulled these 39 sections. So I just want us to think quickly about what are the next steps here. So step one is that I obviously have to fix my idiotic error of not writing the name of the magazine all the time, to add the magazine names. There’s an important reason for this I’m gonna go into in a second. But step two is also that I wanna batch the ideas that we started to see multiples of that aren’t already batched. So that are the same ideas for multiple magazine because then we’re essentially writing one pitch, but in a few different versions and that can make things a lot easier. It can also show us what to focus on as we start moving into writing pitches, but also as we start moving into familiarizing magazines.
And then the second thing that we need to make sure to do is to also have a list of which magazines we have multiple pitches for because we’re not gonna be pitching one magazine multiple ideas at the same time, right? We wanna be sending only one magazine to each editor or sorry, one pitch idea to each editor in one time spot. Okay. So we also are gonna have to choose which idea is the best, the most apparent fit each magazine that we’re looking at, okay?
But you’ll see here that I had all of these ideas. Well, I guess you can’t see on the screen anymore, so let me flip over there. You’ll see that we started out with. There it is. We started out with all this stuff like I actually didn’t end up with any ideas for this Český Těšín and I wonder, you know, this is probably something to look at. Are there airlines that fly there because I didn’t even think about that because we drove? We just assumed that there weren’t, but if there are, that could work for some city sections, okay? So likewise. I would really love to do thing on this film festival, but I didn’t quite see anything that would be a fit. Okay.
Now a lot of these other ones like these neat tours to this villa, these were things that can become elements of some of these stories that we saw that we might pitch. I ended up finding a lot of ideas about these Northern Hikes companies. But a lot of these things like this, like the particular type of feature I need to do on this Jewish heritage, the magazines that I was looking at, I just didn’t get the sense that it would be the right fit for those places and that’s why we didn’t zoom in on those. But the Třebíč and Telč, these two really interesting places along UNESCO sites. I see some potential for them, but it’s gonna depend a lot on what works with the individual magazines that we have queued up. Same thing for the St. Katerina Resort. There might be some magazines without really only cover hotels like in certain kind of major destinations or that have something like exactly super new or that are close to an airport or something like that.
And then there’s some things that could be cool essays like this curio cabinet thing like I was saying. It’s probably a good fit for “Travel and Leisure,” which I’m just gonna write it down here for later. Name of that section I’m thinking of is called Beyond, that I just didn’t even have a chance in this hour to open up the magazines that did that. Beer spas we saw a lot for. This nuclear bunker hotel, you know, maybe that could go with some of those magazines for hotels. But I’m not sure because they seem to be a lot more from a luxury standpoint and one of the notes I had on there is that you have to share rooms. So some of these things like cannabis, cool ideas but hard to place, right?
So these are just some of the insights that I have is now having taken a first pass of the magazines, looking back at the articles that we actually match and I’ll flip back over to that one now that we look back like what are the ones that we did match and what are the ones that we didn’t match and why. It’s really useful to take this moment and pause and do that before you go too much further.
But also like I said in this series, the whole idea is to do these things in a confined amount of time. I absolutely could, and I see this with so many of you, keep looking through the database after this, but I’ve got 39 sections. I don’t need to keep looking to get things that could work for the five or seven pitches that we’re gonna write together in this series. I’ve got plenty for that, okay? So you need to put a limit on yourself at some point of when you take what you have and say, “Okay, I gotta start moving some of this stuff through the pipeline.”
So next week as we’re identifying Glove Fit Ideas, that’s where, well I’m gonna do this magazine name adding without you guys in between because that’s my bad. But that’s where we’re gonna start with these steps. Okay. We’re gonna start with looking at them from this level and then we’re gonna dive into looking at the magazines. So I’m gonna download the magazines for you guys in advance just so that we don’t have to waste time on that. So I’m gonna download full issues in the magazines and we’re going to look at these sections to really see what they’re actually looking like to see which of his ideas actually work out with what the magazine really covers as opposed to just sound like they could potentially be a fit. And then from there, this 39 is gonna be a much smaller number of ones that are actually worth moving to the next stage. So that’s what we’re gonna do next week.
And then the following week, once we have that smaller number that seem like they’re worth moving to the next stage, then we’re gonna really check, does this thing actually exist? Is it closing? Have they covered this place recently? Do they really absolutely cover destinations that are more than you know, 20 miles from a major city? That’s where we’re gonna make absolutely sure that the ideas that we’re gonna put forward to pitch are worth pitching in the first place. As we’re doing that, we’re gonna uncover great information that’s gonna make great why sentences as we start to put together the bones of the pitch and then fill in the details and hit send.
I look forward to moving these ideas forward with you next week. As you can see, I’ve only scratched the surface of what magazines we could even look at to how to place these ideas. And I’ve got 40 sections to work with and a bunch of ideas that look like I should definitely write up those pitches because there’s a bunch of magazines I could work for.
So I hope you guys have taken away some things whether those lessons that I just highlighted or something else about the way you’re approaching your pitch process on today’s call. And I hope that you emulate a little bit of what I’m doing at home and come back with some questions for next week or some successes. So tell us how you were able to do something so much faster or differently, or you finally got some traction on some trip that you were having trouble coming up with idea placements for. So I will chat with you guys more next week.
Live Idea-to-Pitch Walkthrough Part #1 – Turning Your Trip Notes into a Pitchable Idea List Transcript
So today we are kicking off a brand new very different, very special series. I’ve been talking to people about this for months in fact, particularly on the trips that we’re gonna use as the fodder for this series. So the idea of this series, is that I’m going to literally go from my notes from tours that I have been on, or meetings that I’ve had at a conference in the Czech Republic, and in over the course of a number of hours, walk through every step of the process with you guys live on the screen. I will do no part of this outside of our webinars. It’s the only thing that I have done so far, is I just moved all of the emails of my notes to a specific folder, I didn’t read any of them so that we can look at them together today.
So I’m really trying to strictly adhere that I won’t do anything outside, so you will literally see everything that I do. So you will see how long it takes me to do something, you will be able to ask me why I’m doing something this way or that way. And most importantly, you will see when I say okay, this idea is okay, but I can’t find a home for it. Or it’s too hard to figure out if this is true or not, or whatever that is and I move on. Because that’s something that I see a lot of you guys struggling with, is when do you just cut bait on something for now and move on.
So what we’re gonna do is particularly today, I’m gonna be laying a little bit of groundwork because the part of this process that we’re covering today doesn’t take quite as long as everything else. But I wanna just actually go through… I have this slide at the end. But I just wanna go through with you guys the trajectory of what we’re gonna cover in these webinars, so you can see how we’re gonna go through.
So today, we are going from the notes, so the very raw tons of typos I’m simultaneously transcribing at tour guide while I’m out on a tour, type of notes, we’re gonna go through those. We’re gonna go through as many as we can, as many as we’re interested in, as many as we need to, today, to get a pile of potential article ideas. Now what happens next week, is that we take those article ideas and we turn to the database and we say okay, what magazines could these possibly run in. And we’re gonna do that a couple of different ways.
So what I see a lot of times people do is that they take an article idea, maybe a couple, or maybe like a place that they’ve visited, or a concept, or a topic that they wanna cover, and they start looking for magazines for that one thing. We’re actually gonna do it slightly differently, which is that I’m going to open up a bunch of magazines. And I’m gonna open them before our call, at least some of them so that they’re loaded, so we don’t have to wait for that. I’m gonna open up a bunch of magazines that could potentially cover the Czech Republic basically. And I’ll open up magazines in some sort of different areas, but mostly airline magazines and things like that.
And then what we’ll do is with the list of ideas that we’re making today, we will kind of have them side by side and start scanning magazines with the entire list of ideas in mind, rather than one idea at a time. And that’s one of the things that make it go faster. And then we’ve got two more webinars which seems like a lot, just about the idea phase, but there’s a reason for that. Because as we are making sure that an idea actually fits a magazine, that’s where we do these checks to see first of all, if we’re wasting our time even writing this pitch, because the editor is gonna say no, because it really doesn’t belong in that particular magazine.
But we’re also learning about the idea, we’re learning more about this idea, so that when you go and sit down to pitch it, you know not only if it’s solid. But you also have enough details about it, whether from your notes or otherwise, to be able to put that pitch together. And then the pitch writing itself happens very quickly. So that’s why we spend so much time on the ideas, but they happen in these three phases. The webinar we’ll do today, and the second one are much more about the raw idea generation and matching. So it’s kind of like you know, we’re out… to use a really sort of you know, old-fashioned expression. We’re out you know, getting the ore, and then we take it in and we refine it, but it’s still kind of crude. And then it has to be you know, mixed with something else to become steel, and then forged with a sword.
These are all different steps, so right now, we’re just gathering those very crude raw materials, and deciding which of them to keep. So what that means is that today, we’re gonna go through the notes and have a really basic collection. But next week, when we match the ideas to the magazines, that’s also a step of deciding which ones to keep, because if we can’t find a home for something, we don’t wanna dwell on it. Okay, this is really important, and I see this happen a lot.
So the other things that we’re gonna do today are talk about how you can follow along at home. Because I know it’s the end of the year, and some people have… actually I had a number of people I know are going on really big trips this time of year, and other folks have big commitments for the holidays. And other folks have you know, otherwise just travel commitments, family, whatever. But I’m hoping that at least with one trip, with one pitch coming out at the end, you can follow along with me in this process. And we’ll talk about how to do that as well.
And the other thing I’m gonna do because I’m not sure how many of you have seen this webinar, is I’m just gonna do a very quick refresher on the different types of magazine articles. Because as we’re looking at raw ideas right now, I’m always looking at them with the lens of is this gonna be a profile, is this gonna be a feature, is this gonna be more about the person? Do I have enough already available from the notes that I have, from when I was on the ground to make this a pitch without doing more research? Or at least without doing an onerous amount of research, like doing fresh interviews, or God forbid having to go back somewhere.
So one of the things to know for this series is that I tried to pick something that would be kind of very realistic circumstances for all of you guys. So I’ve picked… and in fact, I’m gonna go to the next slide for this. But I have picked a time period in which I was on a trip somewhere where I do not know the country very well. I have been to the Czech Republic which is now known as Czechia, but I’ll just say Czech Republic because more people are familiar with that. I’ve been to the Czech Republic in the past for a pretty decent period of time, not like I lived there but did a long visit, but I have not been out of Prague. And I don’t have very deep cultural knowledge of this country, like I would with Italy, or Spain, or something like that that I’ve been to and covered a lot, over the years.
And in the case of this trip, I had a mix of different experiences. So that allows us to touch the types of experiences that many of you would have. During this trip, it was for the TBEX Conference over the summer. I went on a couple different short day long or half day trips that included tours of different attractions that were guided. So in these settings, we would be going to a museum, or a historical monument, or something like that, and using the guide that was on-site in that place. So this is something that any of you guys can do.
Say you’re coming to an event at our retreat house in the Catskills, I was just doing a bunch of work there yesterday. And you wanna visit the Eleanor Roosevelt home, and the Roosevelt Library. That’s the kind of thing where you can go and you can get a national park service tour. And that’ll be very much like the types of things that I’m gonna talk about in the context of those day trips. But then after that, there was the conference itself. So these shorter trips that I was talking about happened before the conference. And then at the conference itself, we had speed networking.
Now I’m not sure how many ideas… I know there’s a couple potentially interesting ones in there from these, but I’m not sure how many ideas we’ll pull from those sessions. But what happens with the speed networking is that they are very short meetings, where you’re just getting kind of the barest hint from somebody, about what it is that they do. So this would be like if you are at a Travel Massive or some kind of networking event, and you meet somebody from a company, or say or at the New York Times Travel Show or something like that. And they start telling you about what their company does, and you feel like you wanna do something with that. That’s the corollary of that portion of what we’re doing.
And then the third thing that I did that we’ll also be looking at, is that I went on a multi-day, I think it was four, five days fam trip, where we made quite a few different stops. And those included historical monuments, also some cultural things, different things like that. So that was a multi-day thing that we can pull a lot of experiences from. Now, I mentioned this almost in passing, but something that you may have noticed me kind of being nervous about earlier, and also when I mentioned the series. Is that we’re gonna be looking at my notes from these tours.
So some of you… I don’t know about some of you who are on this call, but some of you who are in the coaching program and things like that, have traveled with me before. And when I travel I really actually do take mostly as much as possible verbatim transcription notes of tours that were on. And I do that because that allows me to do what you’re gonna see today. Which is that it’s been months, I went on these tours in I believe July and August, so let’s see, yeah, July and August, and I have been many places since then including several other countries. So having notes and this depth of detail, allows me to be able to figure out what on earth was going on. If I thought a particular thing was interesting, and now I can understand just from my like scrabbled, misspelled on my phone notes, I can read a little bit more about what the tour guide was saying and try to figure it out.
So as we’re going through this is a very… I take notes in front of people a lot, but I don’t share my notes with people very often. So this is gonna be a very interesting look at kind of what that actually looks like. And so it’s an experiment, I do this kind of stuff in our live events quite a bit, but not with my notes. I do it more with other people’s notes and other people’s trips. And so this is a whole new thing and I’m really excited to share with you guys. And the premise really is that I talked about how you will follow along at home, in terms of how you can do your own version of this later. But what I also really wanna encourage is as I’m doing things, I know I talk quite fast and I’m trying to get through this series in a reasonable number of webinar hours as well, so I’ll talk a bit fast because of that.
But ask questions about what I’m doing. Obviously, there’s gonna be things that I mention, that have to do with the article idea itself. Now it may kind of surprise you to hear this, but it really doesn’t matter even when I’m coaching you guys if I know what the article idea is. And in that same way, it doesn’t matter if you guys really completely understand the article idea, especially on this webinar. Because what happens is as you go through these steps naturally of checking things here and there and against what the magazine has covered, and against the reality of you know, what you can find online and things like that, it naturally becomes clear whether an article idea is legit or makes sense or not.
So what I wanna show you particularly with this series, is that there are so many ideas out there, there are. There’s just so many things that could become articles, but the things that you should be spending your time on, are the things where you can see where and how to pitch it
And when I say how to pitch it, I mean you got that information, it needs to go into the pitch available to you and ready to go. And that’s really what I want for you from this webinar. Because the reason that I’m doing this, is I see so many of you getting really caught up on so many of these things that we’re gonna walk through. And that’s why I have structured this webinar series the way that I have. I really wanna highlight the areas, and how to get through the areas where I see you guys getting stuck so that you don’t have to do it anymore.
And so you’ll see me doing, you know, what could be called shortcuts, or perhaps I might have done something like how I take really transcription-type notes before this, which could be conceived as a shortcut, ask me about that. Ask me about how you can take those shortcuts as well. Because here’s the thing, you’ve gotta be able to do this, this is the difference between having a career that you enjoy, and just ending up. I see this again, happen quite a lot too, I don’t wanna say all the time, but having a career where you get out there, you do some pitching for gigs, or magazines, but more likely gigs, you get something going and then you just keep writing for the same people and you get stuck with them. And that’s not what I want for any of you.
Being able to not just having the ability to, but also having the wherewithal to, continually pitch yourself is what allows you to move in the way that you wanna move into new markets.
That’s what allows you to move into new markets. It’s what allows you to take your career in the direction that you want it to go, so that you end up where you want, rather than turning around and being like, oh my God, I can’t believe I’ve been a freelance for five years. And this is what I’ve been doing all this time, like how is this… this isn’t what I left my job for. I don’t want that for you guys.
So very interestingly today in terms of what being a freelancer could look like, an intriguing thing came up when we were putting together our job board that I wanna show you in this thing. So all of this stuff that we’re talking about today, and next week, and probably the week after that, and the week after that, until webinars six. So a little bit of what we do today, and then everything until webinar six more or less, are things that somebody who is not you, could be doing. And here’s what I mean by that. I know it’s a little blurry for you guys.
But I came across this when I was looking at the job boards today to pull together the jobs for the newsletter. And at first, I didn’t click on it, it just says Cassie Shortsleeve, Inc, and I thought that was a company name not a person’s actual name, who knows if it’s her actual name or her pen name. But then I saw it on another board, on another board, and I finally got this little snippet and I looked at it. “I’m a Boston-based health and travel writer and editor for major national websites and magazines, including “Men’s Health,” “Shape,” “Women’s Health,” “Condé Nast Traveler,” “Men’s Journal,” furthermore for “Equinox” and other outlets.
This is the kind of person that we’d all like to be right, maybe you don’t necessarily wanna do the health so much, but those type of outlets right. She says, “I’m seeking a resourceful solution oriented passionate editorial intern to help me with story research, organizational work, of story documents, story setup, and administrative tasks, interview transcriptions, idea generation.” That’s what we’re doing today, right? “And website updating. This job requires handling multiple deadlines at once, and I’m looking for someone who lives and breathes all things health, wellness, and travel. The best candidate is a fast, passionate worker with a go-getter attitude, who is interested in a career in digital publishing/magazines. This is an opportunity to learn how health and travel stories are researched, reported, and published.”
Now important to note, paying $11 an hour, is a remote position. I have seen quite a number of journalists who are in this type of position as she is in terms of outlets, who have a person like this. I, in fact, was looking to set up a person like this particularly to help me get my interview set up and to interact with people to get photos, and things like that. And that’s the thing, is that a lot of the stuff that you guys are spending a lot of time being stuck on… first of all, we’re gonna talk about just how to remove that. But I also want you to start to see how much of this stuff you can go through very, very quickly because the decisions are very binary. Which means it’s this or it’s this.
How can you, and how should you, or how could you, if you so desired, follow along with what we’re doing in the series at home? So the idea is that… we’re gonna split this up so that we’re gonna cover… we’re gonna be doing about two to three webinars in this series a month. So what you can do is you can watch me do whatever I’m gonna do that week, and then in the intervening week, you can go and do the same thing.
So today we’re gonna take some notes, and we’re gonna take an itinerary, and we’re gonna make a big list of ideas. So you pick one trip that you’re going on, it can on a weekend trip, it can be a day trip, a half day trip, and you go do the same thing.
So I told you that I was gonna recap a little bit before we got into matching ideas about the different types of articles. And the reason for this is that I wanna start priming the pump as I’m going through… again, I haven’t looked at these notes. I’m reading them almost as fresh as you guys except it will kind of jog my memory, but who knows we all had heatstroke this summer, right. So I want to show you now the types of article ideas to prime the pump so that as you are looking with me at these ideas, you like I am doing are starting to think about where these can end up by thinking about what types of articles they can be.
So what do I mean by that? So the same thing can very easily be… I’m trying to think if there’s any. Okay, so basically up to here. So pretty much anything you find without a doubt can be all of these. And I’ll go through each of them individually quickly. Getting a personal essay, or an atmospheric postcard piece, or a narrative feature, out of something, can be a little more difficult. And a service or how-to piece depends on who might be available for you to get to interview. So the reason it’s important to be keeping these in mind when you’re coming up with ideas is that you don’t want to see something that could work one way, as in it could work well as an interview, or it could work well as a narrative feature.
But you’re too stuck on thinking of it as a news brief, or as a personal essay, that you miss the opportunity to potentially match that to a great clip in a great magazine. Because you’re not quite conceiving of that idea and it’s varying different formats, okay. So you may have in the past heard me talk about… I’ll just use of little flowers here. About the triangle that is an idea. So what that means… let’s see if we can make some lines here. What that means is that a triangle has three sides okay, so the base of the triangle, this is gonna be your content, okay. This is gonna be whatever it is that your topic is.
So you know, if we were to be doing… you know, let’s just look at this photo. This photo is kind of like one of these Instagramy, bright color flower arrangement type things. Let’s say we wanted to talk about how to produce the best you know, home decor pictures for Instagram. That’s often how people come to me with an idea, but as soon as you slap how-to on it, that means that you have put a format on it. The topic is interiors for Instagram, or floral design for Instagram, or whatever it is.
And once you put that how-to on it you’ve made it into a service piece. You could do an interview on how to design your flowers for the best Instagram things. You could do a business profile on a company that specializes in creating Instagram bouquets for restaurants. You could do a news brief about this company launching, or about how it’s now become a trend that hotels, for instance, are not just looking for bouquets, but they’re looking for bouquets with that special pop that will make someone stop and pose for an Instagram photo. You could do a profile of a person who has made their living through an Instagram based upon beautiful floral arrangements and so on and so forth.
So that format particularly, is where I see people neglect a lot of the other different types of article ideas and get stuck when they don’t necessarily need to. So what is the third leg of the triangle? We’ve got as I told you the bottom is the content, our topic, and then that one side is the format or the type of article. And then this third sides here that is the audience, and that’s what we’re gonna get into next week when we look at matching these ideas with specific magazines.
In that audience bit that we’ll talk about next week, is one of the really important things again that I see a lot of people neglect. And then they sit down to write a pitch and they get really stuck on the writing bit. And it’s because there isn’t a good way to warp or mangle the particular either topic or format. But usually, the topic that you have in mind, into something that fits for that particular audience. So the different types of articles that you can look at in our webinar libraries, you also have the opportunity to watch. We’ve done a huge long series this year on exactly how to put together each of these different types of pieces.
So if you feel like you aren’t up to writing a particular type of article, I really recommend checking those out. Because I’ve heard from several people on the coaching program that they feel much more confident with pitching pieces that they didn’t think they could write before. Because now they have a really solid understanding of how to write them. So different pieces that you can write our news brief is usually gonna be… it can even be shorter, but usually about 100 to 300 words. And it’s typically about something that is, as it says in the title, new. And so this can be a trend, or it can be a particular thing opening, or it could be somebody who’s doing something new, launching something new, or innovation something like that.
An interview usually takes the format of a Q&A type thing, where you actually see the questions that somebody is asking. As opposed to a business profile which is more telling the story of a business, and how it came to do what it does, and why that’s important, and what takeaway there is for others. Whereas a profile of a person, is almost more of a vignette, you’re trying to capture all of these different facets of somebody, right. You know, we can think about all the love poems of the ages and all that, that you know, you can’t get what is it? The shape of the leg, and the curve of the… whatever. You can’t get every single aspect of a person’s physicality, personality, history, manner, you can’t get all of that into one thing. So a profile of a person is really a snapshot.
Then we have a couple different types of features. There’s two round-ups you can do. And this is another thing where when we’re looking at this phase of pulling ideas out of something, you might see that I’ve jotted down ideas, or it’ll say an idea, which is only tangentially related to the thing at hand. And that’s because something can be the inspiration for a basket of kittens. Which is when you have a number of things that are all similar and all awesome, but that live in their own universes.
So for instance, one idea I saw when I was pulling together my list of notes for you guys, was something about a trip that I took to Iceland. Where I went to all the attractions like at midnight, and it was still light out, but there was nobody around. And clearly, something that happened on that trip that I took in the Czech Republic was sort of similar to that, and it made me think of that, okay. But unfortunately, I didn’t in my notes put what in the Czech Republic made me think of that because otherwise, I could make a basket of kittens or something like that in the Czech Republic.
Something like that you know, about walking like you know, around the Louvre or through like the main squares of Paris at night, or in Florence, or something like that. And so I could have like overcrowded cities you know, that are best experienced at midnight., and I could do a whole round-up on that, as a basket of kittens. And another type of round-up is the destination guide which is something that is very easy to pitch, but it has to be to a magazine that has it.
Now narrative features and postcards are very much similar things, but there’s something that has quite a bit of atmosphere to them. And in the case of a narrative feature, it has a story, it has a beginning, middle, and an end. Whereas a personal essay is much more of a thought piece, something happened to you, you’re thinking about the implications of it, and you usually have some realization, or maybe you don’t, but it’s an exploration of thinking.
So those are ones where occasionally, I will have an idea like that, and it’s very fully formed. If I have an idea for a personal essay, I’m usually gonna start writing essentially whatever is the beginning of that personal essay in my notes, as I’m writing down the idea. Because it’s kind of a thought exploration. If you just have an idea for an essay, and you don’t start to get it down you’re usually gonna lose it. So that’s really important to know, as well, if you’re out and you feel like you have an essay idea.
And service or how-to pieces are of course pieces in which you’re telling somebody how to do something. And these are things that it might seem actually hard to pick up while we’re out traveling, but once you kind of have your mind around this idea of looking for all the different types of articles, it can be easier than you think.
I told you that this trip that I took had a couple of different pieces to it. I’m just gonna open up for us a file of notes. So this is where I’m gonna put my ideas as we generate them from the particular trip. And I’m just gonna title it “notes,” so that it’s very easy for us to find, and keep it on my desktop so we can find it again next week. And I can’t cheat because you can see the last modified date right. So this is gonna be my file of notes, for this trip, and you can see all of my other things up on the screen.
So here we go, we got the notes, and we’ve got the chat box. So this trip was composed of three things right. So we had the day trip that happened beforehand. Now I’m trying to see how small everything is for you, but it’s hard to tell. Okay, I’m gonna try to make it a little bigger so you guys can see it, hopefully, that’s good. All right, so we had the day trips that I took beforehand, we had the meetings with companies at TBEX. And then we had this multi-day fam trip that I took. Now the multi-day fam trip, this is the itinerary for it, and I just wanted to go over it with you, so you guys could see a little bit of what we did.
So I guess it actually was not long, I would say it was about three full days, and there was one day before this that was all travel. Where we didn’t really do much, but we were kind of together as a group and we talked a little bit. So on this first day, we were actually staying in the Gustav Mahler Hotel. So Gustav Mahler is a pretty famous composer. Now even though I have in the past played violin and sang classical music, and done ballet, as well as many small girls do, I don’t have like a huge sense of Gustav Mahler’s music. So that didn’t particularly strike me as something that I had a lot to do about.
But this Jihlava Town was really interesting, and it seems an odd thing as the take home and thing that you wanna write a trip about. But I’d love to try to do something, and I really don’t know what around these hedgehogs. So the hedgehogs in this town, they have the stuffed animals for them everywhere, and there’s beer named after them. It’s just like the mascot of the town, it has been forever. And they’re very unclear, there’s kind of like a mythology around it, they’re not sure why everything is named for hedgehogs. It might be that there were some hedgehogs in circulation kind of when they first moved there and then they all left, but they’re not sure.
And it was just this kind of thing that seems weird, but it made the town have this personality. Every historical monument that you went to, even if you were going into this mining system that went underground and connected it from people’s houses, they had these little-stuffed animal hedgehogs as the town mascot. So I’m just gonna write here that that might be an essay, or might be a narrative piece with something about identity or connection. I don’t really know, but I feel like with the hedgehog piece whatever that becomes, that’s the kind of thing where… it’s one of those things that I just kind of have a sense about it. And then once we see what magazines are available, we’re gonna see what happens there.
So as you’re in this town, I mentioned that we went to this underground. So the underground thing was really interesting. And this is something rare I feel like there’s gotta be potential for a round-up here. So what happened was this… how it actually some of the other ones that we went to in the Czech Republic, had an underground that connected different storehouses. And people would basically move down there. After there was a fire that destroyed the town. And there was more to it, so it was even like the Royals would have their food brought underground from the field, so you know, the town wouldn’t see all the rich things they were eating when everyone else was starving in riot, and all sorts of very you know, pre-revolution things like that.
And these tunnels were quite extensive, but also the different uses of them in the different time periods were really interesting. So that’s the kind of thing where I think we could with the right magazine, and the right setting, look at something that’s more of a round-up of these underground as a way to sort of you know, time travel. I have to think of something smarter than that. So that was something that we did with underground and of course, I have specific notes from these places that we’ll look back to as well.
Now something else that we did in this Jihlava town is we also kind of climbed up these historic walls, and it was interesting but I don’t quite think I have a good piece about it, unfortunately. It was really that you climbed up these old stairs, and he went up into this tower, and it’s kind of like the highest place around for miles. But well, it was a really cool experience you really wouldn’t send somebody there just for that. So I think we’ll just kind of let that pass unless I see something cooler in my notes. So then, we went to this town of Trebic.
Now, this was a really interesting experience that can definitely be pitched to a lot of places and we’ll have figure out where. So I think there’s… so there’s this idea of the Jewish quarter in Trebic in which they’ve done… I can’t tell exactly off the top my head when they started preserving it. But they’ve put together a really lovely… homage is not the right word. But they’ve put together a really lovely remembrance of the Jewish life there before the few families that there were taken away. And I’ve not quite seen anywhere for a town of its size… because it’s really like a hamlet. This is a very small little town, very picturesque but very small.
I’m not saying something of that size have such a sort of well-planned well thought out, and well interpreted. By that I mean well-guided Jewish experience. So I’m gonna put in here that I think this could be a piece for “Hadassah” which is a Jewish magazine. But I know we don’t actually have it in the database, so that’s something that I’ll have to look up, I’ll make myself a note about that. And what exactly the story would be I don’t know, I would have to look there more specifically. So I’m just gonna write Jewish quarter for now.
There could be a larger round-up here about these more home-oriented, let’s call it, Jewish museums. And by home-oriented I don’t quite mean like the Anne Frank House like a place of hiding. But they took a house that used to be a store and a home of a Jewish family, and they kind of completely redid and recreated the interior. So there might be a round-up of you know, pre-World War II Jewish living in various parts of Europe. And so you know, that could bring in some Aryans in Rome. And I’m sure I can find some other ones I don’t know so well. So that’s another thought there.
Now another thing that you’ll see on here is this… oops this Romanesque-Gothic Basilica. So this Třebíč is like this adorable little town, it’s just so picturesque on par with one of those Italian villages or something. And it’s got this very unassuming, but UNESCO I believe designated Cathedral. Which was quite old and really fantastic. And I feel like this should be a good kind of day trip or kind of weekend trip piece, perhaps for something in an Easy Jet or something like that. But that will boil down to where exactly we can find a home for such a piece.
So this would be a very sort of smackdown destination guide, style or piece that we’re looking at there. So, by the way, just as I’m going along here… sorry, I shouldn’t click there. As I’m going along here, I just wanted to mention that… nope now we’ve lost our notes. That what I’m doing right now is the very sort of quick overview part from here. And we’re gonna go to my actual notes and see some ideas that I’ve written out explicitly here. But this is the kind of thing where if you have an itinerary from a fam trip, you can go through like what I’m doing quite quickly because everything’s laid out there.
But if you have taken a trip of your own, and you don’t have something like this that says exactly where you wanna go, that’s step one. You should go through whatever trip you took, and makeup something like this, which says each place you stopped. Because that’s really how you start to get into this sense of being able to say okay, yes, I remember because that’s the most important thing. Any time we’re looking back at putting together pitches, based on a trip that we took… this wasn’t even super long ago, right, this was four, five months. But it’s out of your mind now, normal life, other trips, work preoccupations, family preoccupations, other things have come into your head.
So we want to start jogging our memory and going through the trip list rather than looking directly at your notes, it’s really a great way to do that. All right, so we just finished Třebíč and we were talking about that as a destination guide.
Now it’s interesting because I don’t have so much on this next town, I just don’t remember it very, very well. Except now that I look at it, it kind of comes back to me that this town also was just incredible in terms of picturesqueness in a different way that this town Třebíč was. So Třebíč with kind of very much like an Italian mountain town kind of spilling down around this river.
But Telč had this… what do I wanna call it? It had this massive Square and all around it were these older houses that had interesting facades from different periods. So it was very photogenic, the kind of thing where we could maybe even do like an Instagramable city piece for a web outlet. Because it was really hard because most of the buildings are still private homes. It was really hard to get specific information about the buildings because nearly all of them are homes.
And so what that meant is that I’ve got great pictures of this place, and I also can get other pictures from other people who were on the trip. But I don’t have so much of the history of these individual buildings. Now they also had an underground tour as you’ll see here, but that was much smaller, and they also had an observation tower as well. But with that town, it was really more about the ambiance, so that could be something that was also work for a destination guide. But it just seemed smaller than Trebic, when Třebíč also had that UNESCO site. So there just wasn’t quite as much going on here.
Now it says here typical Czech culture atmosphere. And you could start to kind of also as you’re looking through this remind yourself of different cultural things. So something I didn’t mention, for instance, was Czech food. Now I write Czech food here without really writing too much else. Because what I was thinking here is more something in the vein of an essay. Because what happened is that all of us at the beginning of the trip, we all really liked Czech food, it was something that we talked about, it was something that we all liked.
But at the end… actually not at the end, but by the time we made it around this day, and particularly even for lunch, they had a chicken salad on the menu. And we were all like, “Oh, thank God, we can’t have any more bread dumplings and beef, and Berry sauce. It’s all we’ve had for lunch after lunch, after dinner after dinner.” And even though we really liked the food. And so this was something that we were all talking about quite a bit.
So I feel like there could be an essay there on the foods that you can eat all the time, and the ones you can’t, and how new foods make their way into that. So again, this is something that will begin… this is an essay that can begin with anecdotes from this trip, and they can be woven into there. But it wouldn’t be something where the essay is entirely a narrative piece about the trip itself if that makes sense.
So one other thing that there was in Telč that I forgot about is… it says Castle Telč here, and the castle there was… I don’t know exactly how to describe it. But the interiors were really something else. And when I say something else I mean just sort of like paintings of hunting scenes and different things. I mean something else like you just wouldn’t find that kind of thing today anywhere.
Now I don’t know exactly what kind of piece we would do with that, but the thing that stood out to me the most about this castle was the interiors, and the wall art, and things like that. And the frescos and things like that. So off the top of my head, there is a magazine that pays very little called “Renaissance Magazine” where you can do something which is about a renaissance castle, and it’s kind of just a write-up, almost like a profile of the castle itself. That would kind of be the low end of what I would wanna do with this, it’s a really lovely site.
But the problem is anytime something is a pretty well-known site, then you get into the idea that if it’s pretty well-known, it’s probably been written up different places. So it’s hard for you then to figure out where else you can pitch it. So I’ll just put that down here as a note, so other things we’ve gotten here.
Now I could not tell you what this specifically geographically valuable landscape is. I do remember that we had a hike somewhere that was a bit underwhelming in terms of the hike. And that kind of created actually this interesting thing with our group, because the people leading the group from the tourism office wanted to do another hike, but the rest of us wanted to get to this resort.
Now, this was not a resort in the sense that you might think of a resort. And when I say by that I mean this is not Disneyland, and this is not Hawaii. It was an old-timey not in a 1950s way but in the, you know, 100+ years ago, way. This was just a perfect emblem of the resort culture of the Czech Republic modernizing. So what I mean by that is that you know, we’ve probably heard of whether it’s Bath or Baden-Baden, which also means Bath but is in Germany. There’s so many old spa towns that people used to go to, to rejuvenate, revitalize, rest, whatever “R”, they needed.
And today, many of them… and I’ve seen this particularly in the Czech Republic, are looking at how to return to the glory days of the spa tradition. And so this hotel, there could be a trend piece there on the resort culture of the Czech Republic modernizing. But they also have a couple really weird things. So they have this Stonehenge that was designed by a landscape energy designer, if I haven’t missed my mark, who himself is probably worthy of a profile. And the site itself should probably be profiled, but I’m not sure how.
So it could be places that look like Stonehenge around Europe, or it could be landscape energy sites I don’t know. So this particular spot was put in, and it really is like a ring of stones, it has a very Stonehenge look to it. And then it’s got one stone in the middle in particular, that you can go climb on, and they hold yoga classes there. And it’s part of this resort that they’ve put in, as part of this modernization. And beyond that, you kind of just have to see it. But it’s the kind of thing where it stands out to me that it’s quirky and it’s interesting, and there must be at least one story there and probably many.
But until I go and see the magazines, until I see what the magazines are looking for, it’s hard for me… and I say it’s hard for me, because I’ve kind of trained myself. But it’s not so hard for you to go past that, and to start to envision what the story about the Stonehenge place is. And that’s because I know for myself, that I don’t wanna get attached to some story that’s not sellable. I don’t wanna get attached to a story that doesn’t have an audience. And to be honest, it’s not even just not wanting to, but also knowing that it’s not so worth my time. Because a story comes out in the world because it has a home.
So it’s simply quicker for me to write down oh yeah, this cool Stonehenge thing and what I remember about it, and a couple of notes, and then to see where the magazines take us than it is for me to sit here now in a vacuum without knowing who’s gonna be on the receiving end of these pitches, and to start to try to come up with 12 different ways to write up that Stonehenge thing. So this, in particular, is a thing really important that I wanted to you guys think about.
And then the other interesting thing that I wanted to make sure you get down here is that this resort has partnered with a whole spa team from Kerala which is in India, that they have brought in to create a sanctioned via this other institution in India, but a center for ayurvedic medicine in the middle of the Czech Republic. So this is part of the resort culture modernizing, but I think this is its own entity itself. And perhaps obviously, I didn’t do this when I was there, so this is something that I would wanna go back and do, but to interview or profile the owner of this resort specifically about why he’s doing these different things.
So this is the overall itinerary for the trip, but now I wanna pop over to my notes where you’ll see that I’ve stashed already… well some specific ideas. And I also wanna show you how in my notes as I’m taking notes in the tour, I delineate things that may or may not be ideas. So what we’re gonna do is we’re gonna kind of just scroll through the notes, there might be some other things in there. But right now we’re gonna end up with… I don’t know it depends how much time we have, but you know, five to 10 pitches out of these seven hours that we’re working together. So it doesn’t matter that I go into absolute detail in my notes right now. So we’re just gonna kind of zip through them.
Okay, so I made a folder just for us of this Czech Republic tour notes. And it begins with those day trips that I mentioned that we were talking about.
Now on my first-day trip, we went to this place Český Těšín which has so much interesting stuff going on. So this Český Těšín place is at the border… it’s gonna get very small I think. But it’s at the border of Poland which I actually hadn’t been to, and the Czech Republic. And we also in another one of our tours went to a place where I believe it’s Poland, but there’s three countries that touch on. I believe it’s Poland, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic. And to be honest, you know, I’m not sure… and this is when I mentioned that I was using this trip in part as a demonstration because it’s not a place that I am overly prepared for. It’s not so easy for me to just churn out ideas for this area, as it is for other places. Because I don’t know the historic background as well as I do other places.
So this is an interesting trip, because… I’m gonna see if I can write this slide correctly. So this was an interesting day trip because most of us didn’t even know really until we got there that we were gonna be visiting two countries on the same day. So this could be an interesting piece as well as a destination guide type thing for perhaps a website. I’m not quite sure what the audience would be, could even be “Delta” or something that has a lot of millennial readership. But of the idea of hitting two countries in one day.
And that would also fold in the history both of it being this capital of Austria for six months as well as the other history of its role in the Czech Republic and the larger region. So I mentioned this just that this Český Těšín had got quite a few different things going on as well. And so there was a hotel in the main square that was the place where all of the dignitaries lived, when it was briefly the capital of Austria. But one of the most important thing, or one of the most impactful things I thought about this visit was there’s a river that separates the Polish and Czech side, sides rather. Where they have an international film festival.
And the festival, it’s just got so many beautiful stories around it. But basically, the thing with this festival, is that it started out during the Cold War when there was the ability on one side of the river, in one of the countries to get these films from different places, and not so much in the other. And they would set up a projector, and they would show the film in one country and people would come on the banks of the river in the other country, to watch this film. And it’s evolved over the years as it’s become not only easier to get these films of course, but also there used to be a border that you’d have to wait potentially three hours to cross to go back and forth between the two countries. And so now you can just walk across without even realizing that you’re changing countries.
So that film festival, it could be you know, a news brief about what they’re doing right now, it could be a profile. It could also be a more narrative feature which could focus on some particular individuals involved. So there’s really a lot that can be done with that film festival.
Now, I went on a couple different tours, this is the one that was about Český Těšín which I mentioned. And I’m just gonna skim through here, if I have a particular pitch idea, I usually pop out of my notes and email it to myself separately, but sometimes I also put some notes in here as well. Now, you’ll see that in here I just mostly have notes, notes, and you don’t see like a big arrow saying this or they’ve made a bunch of stars, or that I’ve made… you know, said pitch idea or something like that. Now I do have an entire bit here on this three-country meeting point that I mentioned. And this is actually part of a different tour.
And the three-country meeting point could be a nice essay. I have to see what would be in a culturally appropriate way to handle it, and something that wasn’t just a personal essay, because of the history and what not. But it’s interesting in how not a big deal actually it is, in terms of there’s like a little-covered place where you can have a beer, there’s a hotel going up. The bridge between one side and the other is down, but it’s okay because you can kind of run around and cross the river. It’s a very nonchalant sort of things where these countries meet. And part of that is because that border used to not be there.
And so I found that to be kind of a really interesting moment that could become more of a personal essay type thing. But would take quite a lot of digging and reporting to make that into a narrative piece. And this is the type of thing I often see people blow up and hang onto that they’re so much there. But if you don’t have it yet, you’re better off writing pieces that chip away at fragments of it so you’re getting paid to learn more about it, than you are sitting down and trying to just do that big piece. Because the pitch won’t come across if you don’t have enough background.
Now I believe it was on the same tour, one of the places that we went was a… I’ll have to get the name. So there was a villa that we went to, had a very interesting history of all the families. So on the one hand, the villa was…the storytelling of the tour was fascinating, in the kind of way where I would think of doing it almost as if not any round-up of museums, where they tell the stories of inhabitants of the houses and such detail. Which if any of you guys have been to the Tenement Museum in New York, for instance, they do a really great job of investigating the history of the past tenants.
But it could also potentially be more of a how-to piece, or an inspirational piece, for more of an… sorry, spelling. For more of a museum type of audience in terms of people who are pulling together exhibits. If you haven’t seen, we actually have in the Travel Magazine Database we have quite a few different art oriented publications that are for the art world. So as you’re going to museums and you’re seeing different in like this, you can also think of servicey pieces in terms of museums as well.
So within the villa several of the stories that they had revolved around like these very interesting marriages that shouldn’t have taken place between nobility and not nobility. Things happening around you know, women running enterprises who typically shouldn’t have. It was just really great storytelling, but it’s really hard to just do a profile on an attraction. So it’s something that we can keep an eye out for, but usually, that profile of an attraction would have to be wound into a larger destination guide. But that villa wasn’t in really a place where we would do such a guide. Sorry about that.
So what that means is that sometimes you will visit an attraction, and no matter how wonderful the attraction was, there’s just not that much you can do about it. And it’s a shame, and it’s the kind of thing that you can feel bad towards the PR people who took you on these trips all you want. But in order for you to publish things in a magazine setting… obviously, in your blog you can do anything you want. But in order for you to publish things, it’s always gonna be at the behest of what editors are looking for, okay.
So here is the type of thing I do when I have a specific pitch idea. So one place that we went to they showed us several different types of unusual accommodations. So we toured this water mill there’s also the opportunity to stay in that chateau/villa that I was talking about before. So my next bunch of notes on here, these are gonna be particularly meetings that I had during TBEX.
Now, this one place had some really crazy collaborations that they did in order to get coverage. So it’s called Northern Hikes, and I’m blanking on what country they’re in, but I think it’s Switzerland. But they actually partnered with a coffee company to create their own coffee for people to have on the hike. Now, what magazine that would go in? I’m not sure, but there’s often a lot of business section in a lot of these magazines that this might be an interesting point for.
The other thing that they did was they brought in Instagram influencers to find new Instagramable spots in these location, because the main Instagramable spots were being overrun. Now there’s a lot you can do there to talk about whether that should be done, whether more places should do it. When I say whether it should be done, I mean because then they’re bringing our visitation to previously wild areas.
Now another thing that I had mentioned earlier was this idea of the spa culture. Now there’s this area Karlovy Vary which is very famous for its spa culture historically. They have more than 650 years of spa tradition. And they had actually also mentioned something that would tie into that piece that we talked about before of the modernization of spa culture. But what they’re looking at right now that I found was really interesting, was how to get North Americans who have very little vacation, to understand the idea of going for two or three weeks to the spa in a way where you’re not sightseeing, you’re not going to the city. You have a schedule of treatments, you have multiple massages and different things every day. And you’re so tired from all your treatments that all you wanna do is go to sleep. And how to get North Americans to understand that.
And that’s the kind of thing where again, we’ll have to see what that could be, it could be a piece about how they’ve marketed to these people, or different things that they’ve added, or could be a profile of some people that I would find out from them of who’ve gone. It could become a whole narrative feature, but I’ll have to see what the magazines will take. So a couple other things on here. Starting here we get into all of my different notes that are from the places that we went on our fam trip. So there’s a couple in here that I wrote down kind of fully-fledged as they say you know, Athena from Zeus’s head or thigh and all that. So I’m gonna drop those ones in here in particular.
A couple of these are actually ones that another writer who’s more of a blog than magazine writer and I discussed when we were having lunch in Prague that day. And a couple of these, in particular, the ones that are from Prague are weddings at this place, and the idea of a beer spa, although we saw that at several places. As well as this nuclear bunker hotel where someone was going to stay in a place that was… to go back to that bunkers piece that we talked about. They have them everywhere these underground places in the Czech Republic.
So there was a hotel that another fam trip actually stayed in overnight help them because I would never do that. So God help them for not having enough claustrophobia to do that. But did they actually stay that’s formally a nuclear bunker that’s now a hotel. So those were some things that I kind of had as full ideas kind of fully flung. One here was… this is kind of a hard one to quite exactly say what the idea here for the pitch was. But it was something around the person I was talking to telling me about this company that she really enjoyed their food tours, which was called the Eating Europe. So that would be more of a company profile.
And I’ll blow this far and back up for you guys. And we’re just about done with these. So you’ll see here…. and I’ll kind of count them up at the end as well. I’ve got an essay idea here, which I don’t quite have enough words here though to make sense of what I’m trying to do. So that is something that we’ll all have to look back at as we’re pulling things into magazines. And the rest of these are… again, you’ll see the familiar style from the first couple fam trips. These are all just my really raw notes, and these are gonna come back into play, later in the series, when we’re talking about how to fill out your pitches, and how to check the pitches for accuracy. So this is a really interesting one down here at the bottom.
We were told in this town Telč that the Czech Republic is the second most drinking country in the world, and first for smoking cannabis. And that people just grow it in their backyard and even the grandmas use it in their creams like their lotions and everything. And this guy as he was leaving had said, “I don’t grow marijuana” as in I don’t sell it as a side income. “So I have to go home now and cut my own firewood, but I’ll see you guys tomorrow for a tour.” So this is the kind of thing where if I wanted to do that as a narrative piece, or a traveling pitch or something like that, I’d have to do a lot more reporting. But this would be something that we can instead turn into more of an essay idea.
So when there’s something like this that that comes up where you have some limited experience with it, but you don’t quite have enough, where you have scene by scene by scene, to make that into a narrative feature, that’s the kind of thing that’s gonna become more of an essay idea. And then we look for homes for those by clicking on the essay tag, and then Travel Magazine Database and seeing what’s coming up. So as you’ll see these other ones we’re now going back through those places that we talked about when we went through the itinerary.
This is that chateau with the crazy family history. This is the castle that had all of the different stags and things like that on the walls. This is the Jewish house in Třebíč where they have the Seder board and all these things. And I don’t have any other things kind of popped out on here, I don’t see anything that I put in all caps, where I said pitch this, or you know, this is interesting, or something like that. See this is one of the sideways notes, can you visit Gregor Mendel’s Garden, I’m not quite sure where I had that idea, right. But it was a related idea that I had in the middle of all these things.
So here’s one of those essay ideas that I had, and I don’t quite have very much written down. I said some story in being bowled over by all the 13th century things. So I’ll have to think on that as I’m going through matching the ideas and try to see what that means.
So I think now this is the last one, and I said it’s really nice here how all the museums in Jihlava have things in English as well. And when we were going through writing down different trips, I didn’t mention Jihlava as a place for more of a destination guide. We talked about Jihlava as being the hedgehog place. So I’m just going to add up here all of the museum signs they’re in English as well so that I have.
So you’ll see now I’ve got a couple other still in smaller text, so let me blow this up for you. But you’ll see how I did a little bit of preamble so we didn’t have a whole hour exactly. In fact, I think we’ve really started talking about pitch ideas more like 30, 45 minutes ago. So you’ll see that I’ve come up with… these are from the day trips, and I went through these quite quickly because I didn’t pull up the itinerary right. So we’ve got about 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 ,10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 20, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32.
So at the end of this time, from about… let’s say we’re gonna have to travel, I’ve got 32 raw ideas. And then I’m gonna pull it off of the all screen thing here so you stop seeing that, great. And then from all screen ideas we have this idea of the types of articles. I’m trying to switch back to PowerPoint from you. There we go.
So what we’ll do next week is that these 32 raw ideas that we have, as we hit the Travel Magazine Database, we’ll see how can we break these different ideas out into different types of articles. How do we take them and say as I’ve done… you can’t see now. But as I’ve done with some of these this could be a profile of the business, it could be a profile of the person who started this business, it could be an essay based on my experience there. It could be a news brief on something new that they’re doing.
The way that we do that is not by doing in a vacuum, we do it by doing it with the magazines. We do it by seeing what’s out there. So like I said there was a little bit of not exactly cheating because I did it when I was out in the… like in the destination. But you see there’s about eight or so ideas here that I already had written up, but all the rest of this, I just brainstormed with you guys going through and reminding myself what we did on those tours.
So what we’re gonna do next week, like a said, is that we’re gonna look at magazines that are likely to cover these geographic areas. And then we’re gonna look at magazines that are likely to cover the topics that we’ve mentioned here. So that’s gonna be history, architecture, other things like that. And then we’re going to look through the magazine based on article type. So there was a lot of essays that I mentioned we’ll look for that. We’ll look for city guides, we’ll look for business profiles and things of that nature. And that’s how we will start to quickly without just taking one article idea and spending you know, hours and hours just looking at matches for that one article idea. We’ll start to quickly get some matches going.
And what’s funny is that once you have an idea and you match it to one outlet, you start to work-up that pitch, that idea becomes more solid. You kind of take that you know, clay or Plato whatever metaphor you wanna use, and shape it into something more recognizable. And then you actually start to see, or you learn more facts that help you to see, how it can fit into several other different types of magazines, or different magazine sections even.
So what we’ll do next week, is we’re gonna go deep, deep into the database, we’re gonna take all those ideas, we’re gonna see what matches we can get. We’re gonna not worry about the ones that we can’t and we’re gonna see how far we can get in one hour of going through the database. And then we’re gonna start to go through to make sure the ideas really work, to make sure they fit the specific sections, and to make sure that the idea itself works. That there is something new to talk about or that this is the only one of its kind, whatever we wanna say. And the process of doing that will help us get our facts together to write the pitch.
So thank you guys so much for joining me. And I look forward to plowing through some more progress with you on these pitches next time. I hope it’s been helpful, to see me go through the trip but I know that next time to go through the database is gonna… hopefully, you’re gonna start to see all sorts of new ways so that you can attack your ideas. So I look forward to chatting with more of you guys about that later. Bye, guys.
