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Great. I’m just looking through the attendee list and I see some new faces are new to our webinars, some folks that I know, but haven’t seen on the webinars before, and some folks that I haven’t seen in a while. So it’s great to have everybody today. I am talking to you live from our Freelance Travel Writing Boot Camp where this morning, we have been talking about how to speedily put together pitches using a specific format. And it’s funny because somehow, this boot camp, we have ended up using Delta Sky as the example for everything under the soon. Delta SkyMagazine has got a lot of sections that are open to freelancers that are very easy to pitch, because their city guides and other type of things that have a very specific format. So when you look at it, it’s very easy to imagine how a pitch could fit into that.

So as we were looking at it throughout the boot camp, I realized that a lot of things I have in the front of the book are round-ups. So it just happens that, courtesy of the boot camp people who can’t stop pitching Delta Sky, we’re gonna look at Delta Sky today for exercises. And I’ve included some screenshots of the articles we’re gonna look at on the slides. But a lot of times I’ll also switch over to the PDF, even though we’ve got the slides going today, so that I can zoom in so that you guys can read those a little bit better. 

This is the past issue of Delta Sky. And I pulled all the pieces for today out of the January ’18 issue. I pulled three front-of-book round-ups from one issue of this magazine, and there were several other ones.

So today, we’re talking about front-of-book round-ups, okay? So two important words in here that might be new to some of you. This is why I keep checking in the call so I know what the background is. Two words that might not be super familiar to all of you are “front-of-book” and “round-up.” So if you aren’t familiar with those, bear with me. I’m just gonna explain them for a second to folks who aren’t so familiar. And as other people are joining us in the chat box, let us know in the chat box so I have a sense of where you guys are coming from. How many of you are familiar with a round-up in a magazine? Some of you might be familiar with round-ups from blog posts; that’s okay, too. Let me know that. But let me know how familiar you are with round-ups in a magazine or in a blog post in the chat box. And for those of you who are learning about writing and haven’t been published yet, it can also be that you’re familiar from reading them. There’s a lot of round-ups online, and magazine ones are different, and that’s something that we’re gonna talk about quite in-depth today. So let me know in the chat box if you are familiar with magazine round-ups or blog round-ups.

So what do I mean by round-ups if you are not familiar? So a round-up…I’ve got several slides on this, but just in brief, a round-up is an article which talks about several different places in a manner in which they highlight each of them individually. Sometimes, it’s places; this is more travel-specific. Sometimes, it’s topics. Many of you have probably seen, even if you haven’t written, blog posts where they have subheads. And so, for instance, you know, it might be something almost like a city or destination guide where they say, you know, where to eat, where to stay, where to sleep. And then in each of those sections of the round-up, they give you lots of different options for hotels and apartments and different things like that. Or for, you know, street food versus restaurants, versus cafes in the “Where to Eat” section, okay? So round-ups can be that each section is a profile of a specific thing, or profile around a specific topic, okay?

So what do I mean when I say “front-of-book” for those of you who haven’t worked so much with magazines in the past? So a front-of-book section, or the front of the book, is…comes from magazine editors use the word “book” to describe the magazine. So they mean the sections of the magazine that are at the beginning of their book or magazine. But it has more connotations than that.

So the front of the book tends to include things that are quite a bit shorter. So last week, for instance, we looked at news briefs, right?

So news briefs are very, very short pieces; they’re about 100 words. Other things in the front of the magazine or the front of the book are also short, but sometimes, they’re 250; sometimes, they’re 300 words; sometimes, they’re 400 words. And then you get into a section of the magazine which is referred to as the “departments.” And the departments are things that are more like 700 words, 500 words, sometimes up to 1,000 words, sometimes even past 1,000 words, okay? And the departments tend to be very, very specific. You’re gonna see when we look at Delta Sky, and I mentioned that a lot of people here in the boot camp are using it for this reason, that there’s a lot of things in the front-of-book that have very specific formats.

So Delta Sky has very short departments. So this is something that you’ll see is that sometimes, the line is blurred because what is the front of book shorts. So sometimes, those are only 100 or 150 words, they don’t even go up to 300 or 400 words, and the departments. So in the case of Delta, their departments tend to be about 500 to 700 words, and they also have short features; they keep everything short, and they have lots and lots of articles as a result.

Another magazine that I was gonna look at today and then I decided to just use Delta that has a lot of front-of-book round-ups…as well as front-of-book shorts, but really a lot of front-of-book round-ups that you can look at and that you can also find online is easyJet Traveller. We have looked in a past…and I’m gonna put the link in there where you can find the full issue online. If you caught our webinar on what type of articles you should be pitching, we went through a whole issue of easyJet Traveller and looked through the different articles in there, because they have so many different pieces, especially in the front of their magazine, that they go through all of the different article types.

So that being said…okay, so we’re all on the same page now about front-of-book and round-up, what are we doing with this Article Nuts and Bolts series? So if you saw in the main newsletter, or in the blog post, our newsletter specifically about the webinar today, what we’re doing in the two series is that we’re talking about the structure about how you put your articles together. And I love to talk about structure in writing because it’s not necessarily that I love it or I structure all of my pieces, but I love to talk about it to you guys because I find that one of the biggest holdups in getting your pitches out, getting your pieces written, is how long it takes to. And then this makes you not want to do so many, or feel like you can’t do so many, or feel like it’s not a feasible profession for you because you can’t do enough to make the time work out in terms of time and money, okay?

So part of doing things faster isn’t just telling you how to do it. A lot of it is helping you to not overthink things. And so, one of the reasons I really like to give these formulas and talk about structure is so that you can get in and get out and get the piece written and know “This is how it’s supposed to be done. There’s nothing else to add here. This is exactly what this sentence should say,” so that you don’t spend four hours laboring over that one sentence. Because we are not writing the next great American novel. We are writing pieces for pay as professional writers, okay?

So let’s get into what we’re gonna talk about more specifically today in the arena of the front-of-book round-up if I can get my slides to move forward. 

So like I said, today we are talking a lot about round-ups, and I gave you a little bit of a definition of what “round-up” means, but I want to talk more about how you compose a round-up, okay? Because I think especially if you come from…not necessarily a blogging background, exactly, but from writing these types of round-ups where each section is a different topic and you’re covering a lot of things. It can be easy to lose sight of why magazines use round-ups and what they accomplish, okay?

Then we’re gonna look at the types of articles that exist as round-ups at the front-of-book setting of the magazine. Do you remember I said earlier that easyJet Traveller has about 17 to 21 front-of-book articles and that many of them are round-ups? You’re gonna see, when we look at Delta Sky later, I’m gonna pull up the magazine and flip through a few that we’re not featuring today directly. You’ll see when we look at Delta Sky that there’s magazines as round-ups that are absolutely not what you would think of doing as a round-up, and this is really common. Magazines use round-ups to give people a lot of different things to jump around between if they’re not so interest or they’re not yet attached or reading through the magazine. So they’re designed visually that there’s a lot of different stuff going on, a lot of places you can look, okay?

Then we’re gonna look at the structure of a typical round-up in the front-of-book setting. And this is a bit different than a round-up that would be a feature, and we’re gonna talk about that. And then we’re gonna look at these three examples that I pulled up for you from Delta Sky.

So let’s get into what we’re talking about today, guys. So front-of-book round-ups. What is a round-up, really? I gave you a brief description of it, but how many of you heard me talk about the basket of kittens before? Who’s heard me talk about basket of kittens? Let me know in the chat box.

So a round-up, like I said, on the most simplistic description, is an article that is composed of sections focusing on specific things. So it’s almost like an article that has many articles within it, right? So you’ve got, you know, an introduction that explains how all of these different things tie together, and then you have sections that are on…you know, it can be what to eat, where to stay. It can be profiling five different places to visit in an area. It can be profiling five different destinations around the world. There’s a lot of different things that can go into the subsection…of those subsections of that round-up. But what a lot of people forget is that it needs to be a basket of kittens.

So this is something that I actually picked up from somebody who…I believe she’s back to freelancing now. But she was a freelancer in a very major New York magazine. Her friend became the editor and so wanted her…this person that I know to join the magazine that she created a position for her. So she’s a really sought after freelancer. She’s been an editor at really major newsstand magazines. And she was the first one that clued me on to this idea of the basket of kittens.

So why do we call it a “basket of kittens”? Why do we want to think of a round-up as a basket of kittens? So when you look at a basket of kittens, unless you hate cats, okay? If you hate cats, then please pull up a picture of a basket of puppies along the side, or if you just hate all animals, then perhaps your children all put together in the back seat of the car, okay?

So anytime…there’s actually a psychological basis for this. Anytime you see small things with big eyes, there is a psychological hormonal response that makes you want to take care of those things. That’s why we say, “Aww,” when we see cute babies and cute kittens, all of those things. So we are trained that this big-eyed small person/small thing set up makes us, you know, go all gooey inside, okay?

So a basket of kittens or puppies or whatever floats your boat should be irresistible, okay? It should be irresistible. That is one of the things about a basket of kittens. The past irresistibility, what makes it irresistible? Is it just the big eyes and the small, you know, the small persons or small animals? No. The concept, journalistically, of a basket of kittens…and that’s why I’m showing you guys this specific basket of kittens, is that these are all cats. Cats as opposed to dogs, as opposed to foxes, etc. These are all kittens as opposed to adolescent or adult cats. But those things being equal…and they’re all in the same basket, okay? Those things being equal, each of these kittens looks different, okay? Each of these kittens has different coloring, their eyes are slightly wider or closer together or bigger, okay? Each of these kittens looks different. But it’s still a kitten, it’s still in this basket, it’s still a cat, okay? Let me know in the chat box…I’m gonna switch over to something else that I want to show you alongside this. Let me know in the chat box if any of you have ever heard of the card game called “Set.” I’ve got it pulled up on the screen over here.

Have any of you ever heard of the card game called “Set”? This is what the board looks like. They have it…you can play it on your phone, I think, but they also have it as a card game, okay? So this is what the cards look like. But the rules are why I’m talking to you about this in the context of the round-up.

So in “Set,” you want to pick three cards, okay? So you’re rounding up three cards. And they need to be either all the same or all different for each criteria, and they have four different criteria, okay? They are the color, the symbol…it can be diamonds, squiggles, or these, like, long ovals, the number of items on there, and the shading. It can be full, it can be partial, or it can be empty.

So the way that this game works is that you look at the board and you look for a set. So this one and this one and this one are all shaded, but they’re different colors, and they’re different sizes, and they’re different numbers. But they’re similar in that one way. So I don’t want to take too much time on this “Set” example; you can look it up online very easily. Nobody’s heard of it? Oh, wow. Okay, so if you haven’t heard of it, check this out.

Because this is what we want to aim for…let me get the slides back up in one second. This is what we want to aim for when we are putting together our round-ups, okay? We want to aim for things that are all either uniformly in one destination and uniformly hipster, but are different in terms of where to stay, where to eat, what to do, and where to shop, okay? Or they can be all over the world, but they’re all food trucks, and they’re all doing a fusion mashup of different cuisines. So we want, in our round-ups, for all things in the round-up to be the same in a certain way, whether that’s geography or what they do or what’s unique about them, and completely different in other ways. If that doesn’t make sense to anybody, let me know. 

So another example…I just gave this food truck one that they could be all over the world. Right now, somebody is workshopping in the pitches that we were working on this morning in the Freelance Travel Writing Boot Camp. Somebody has a feature article idea that they’re working on around different wine grapes in New York or the Hudson Valley, she hasn’t quite decided yet, and why they are putting New York on the map in terms of having world-class wines. As opposed to a lot of cold weather places in America; they buy their grapes from other areas, from other states, maybe from California, and they make wine with grapes that aren’t their own. Here, people are using grapes from all over New York state to create varietals that you either wouldn’t see outside of America, or interesting expressions of French varietals.

So when she was looking at which wine grapes to include, all of the wine grapes….they need to be New York wine grapes, right? And because of the angle of her piece, they all need to be wines that have, you know, a lot of expression. She’s trying to say that they’re not necessarily your run-of-the-mill wines, they’re really unique. So it’s not necessarily she’s focusing on the wines being great, because she’s talking about the grapes, specifically. So it’s less about the quality of the wine, and she’s definitely not talking about wineries, okay?

So she’s looking at five different grapes that all are from New York state and that are different. So she put up a couple, and she put up Cabernet Sauvignon, which I’m sure most of you heard, Cab Sav; Cabernet Franc, which some of you guys might not have heard of, and…but some people may have heard of, and then Traminette, which I bet a lot of people haven’t heard of. And I told her, “Let’s make these grape types more similar in their unknownness, or in their less knownness. So let’s, rather than Traminette, let’s pick these ones like Baco noir…” again, you’re not gonna know any of these names, but that’s the point. “Like, Baco noir or Frontenac, or maybe Vidal blanc or something like this, or Arctic Riesling, that people really wouldn’t see anywhere else but here.” Because before, her set had some that were the same and some that were different, and that’s not how a successful round-up works, okay?

One more thing about the composition of a successful round-up in a magazine setting is that you have to make sure that you take your audience into account with the geographic breadth of your round-up. I see a lot of people that want to pitch something like…let’s take this New York state wines or Hudson Valley wines piece. She’s working on that for Wine Magazine, so that works. If she was pitching this to “Every Day with Rachael Ray,” it needs to be national, okay? She needs to talk about wines from all over the country for it to make sense for Rachael Ray. Because round-ups that are geographically specific for national markets just won’t fly with those editors, okay? The only way you can get away with that is a city guide, which is a type of round-up that we’re gonna look at.

So in a second, I’m gonna talk about the different type of expressions of the round-up that you see specifically in the front-of-book sections of magazines. But first, let’s talk for a second about how a round-up is different in this short space, is different in the front of the book, rather than in the feature well or on a blog, okay?

So when you have round-ups in any sort of online setting, first of all, word count is much less of an issue than it would be in print, even if you’re looking at a feature, okay? So online round-ups versus feature round-ups can be similar in some ways, but different in other ways, all right? So you can definitely have round-up features. A lot of features are round-ups, especially for magazines…like, I was talking about Rachael Ray. That’s a national magazine where they need to make sure they…as in the editors of that magazine, need to make sure they are covering the bases of the interests of their audience when they put together those feature selections, okay? So unless it is…we’ll continue with Rachael Ray for a second. Unless it something service-y, which means “how to,” that you can do matter where you live, if they’re gonna write something about, like, a trend of families visiting agri-tours and places on the weekend because they something to do year-round; in the fall, it’s apple picking, and later on, it’s pumpkins, and then in the spring, you know, it could be picking flowers, and then they have the new baby animals that are being born in the petting zoos, and in the summer, they’ve got strawberry picking and so on and so forth. If they’re gonna talk about that as a trend in Rachael Ray, they can’t just highlight one farm in New York or Oregon or California or wherever it is. They have to highlight ones all over so that as many of their readers as possible have options. So you see a lot of feature-type round-ups for this reason; to give readers a lot of option.

A second feature-type round-up that you see is, like, the guide. So how many of you guys have seen, particularly like on Conde Nast or Travel + Leisure things like that, “176 Places That You Want to Go This Summer”? Or “The Best 77 Beaches for Your Buck,” or something like this? New York Times puts together “52 Places to Go This Year.” So there’s often these round-up features that are many, many, many pages; sometimes, the entire magazine becomes a round-up feature. Saveur does the Saveur 100 every year where they…I think it’s the Saveur 100, where they round up 100 interesting food things or interesting utensils, or interesting destinations, or interesting trends; like, the most things that have stood out to them that year or coming down the pipeline, okay? So they can often have more things when they’re in the features section.

Now, in the front of the book, these features are beyond short, okay? Think about writing a city guide round-up in which each section of, you know, where to stay, eat, where to dine has four, five, maybe even six things mentioned, and doing that whole thing in 250 or 300 words? It’s insane, right? It’s like, how do you even have space to include the names for the different things you’re including in the round-up? So you barely have space for any more than that. And that is one the reasons that front-of-book round-ups are so different. You get in, you get out, you need to be incredibly choosy with your words and what you include to create the tone that you’re going for in this piece, in terms of why this neighborhood is up and coming. You have to show that through your selections very clearly because you don’t have time to explain it. Your selections have to speak for themselves; they have to show rather than tell. And the different things that you select often don’t even get their own paragraph, let alone sentence, okay? So we’re gonna look at some of these so that you can see exactly how it works.

But I just want to take a second…I’ll go back through and read the slide for you in a second. But I just want to look…kind of have us all together, some of you may have opened it already. But I just want to have us all take a little gander through that issue of Delta Sky that we’re gonna look at together in a minute. So I had pulled it up…there it is. Let me get it up here for you guys, there we go. Okay, great. So let me go back up a little bit.

So when you open any magazine, you’re going to have, you know, ads and ads and ads, and then you’re going to have the table of contents, right? So typically, the table of contents has one which is oriented towards the features, and then they have one where they talk about all of the small sections.

So you’ll see here, right here…hopefully, that’s highlighting for you guys as well…let me make sure, yeah, great, okay. So you’ll see here on the table of contents, “Wheels Up” is the name of the front-of-book section in Delta. So here, they talk about all these different little things they have. They’ve got this “Trending,” “My Bag,” “Time Out.” Let’s take a look at those. Some of those, we’re gonna look at in more depth. Of course, after we get through the ads and the masthead, and then they have some information that’s specifically about the airline and the letter to the editor.

So now as we enter this “Wheels Up…” here it is, which is the front-of-book section, you’ll notice that right away, the very first page, we’ve already got round-ups. So would you think of this as a round-up? Maybe not, but it is, okay? So this by the numbers, as they talk about something, and then their round-up is actually four different fun facts that revolve around a specific number about that piece or that topic, okay?

This is kind of an interesting standout that can be done as a round-up that’s not…this is a section they have called “Trending,” which is about a specific neighborhood. And then, here we go. “What’s in my bag?” Okay? Some of you might even know this person. So they have a small profile about the individual, and then a round-up of the different things that are in her bag. And down here…let me zoom in a little bit. Hopefully, you can at least kind of see it. Okay, you can’t see the text, I don’t think, unless it’s really big on your screen.

So down here, they have numbers that correspond to each of the things that are in her bag. And they actually have…for many of those, they have a quote from the person profiled here. Sometimes, they just explain what the thing is. But most of these actually have a quote. So this is a nine-item round-up with maybe a 100-word introduction and maybe 60, 75 words here. So this is 165-170 words, full-page piece which is a round-up around what this person packs, okay?

Here’s another one they have called “Time Out.” We’re gonna look at this one in depth, okay? This is a city guide to Mexico City and it has the standards. It’s got where to shop, where to eat, where to drink, and where to go for a walk, and an intro here at the beginning.

Then this one…I had to kind of glance at it twice, because it’s obviously a round-up when you just set eyes on it, because it’s got all these tiny different things. And it’s kind of a meta round-up, and you see these pretty frequently in front of book sections, where they divide things into three different sections, and then within each of those sections, they have short round-ups. So in this case, they’ve taken a profile of Tom Hanks…I’m not sure they interviewed him, I think it’s just a profile. They’ve taken a profile of Tom Hanks and turned it into a round-up by showing who he is related to. This section is called “The Network.” So who he crosses paths with, okay? So they have “Friends & Family,” “Business,” and then “Miscellaneous,” okay?

And look over here in “Miscellaneous,” they’ve got four different things, you might not be able to read it. One of them is Instagram; one of them is Head and Space, it’s about his work with the space agency; one of them is about working with wounded veterans, and one of them is about voiceover work, okay? So this is one, two, three…this is ten different, small bits in here, and they’re probably 6-point font, and that’s…you know, on Delta, that they’ve decided their readers can read 6-point font, because I know it’s very hard to read on the screen, but it also is hard in person. And each of these is maybe 30 words here. So this is actually a longer one, okay? Because this is 100 words, and then we’ve got ten of these that are maybe 30 words, and then they’ve got a couple other things going on here. So this is maybe a 300-word piece.

But look at how many sections. They’ve done a 300-word piece with ten round-up sections, okay? That’s a lot. They really pack it in. And we’re gonna look at how they do that in a minute.

So this also…even this one, they’re talking about these pictures, even this is a round-up. They’ve got the introduction. And then they speak specifically about three different features of these transparent speakers.

Then this one, actually, is also…this is “Five Minutes With…” this is an interview with a CEO who’s significant in the travel industry. Even this has been set up as a round-up, okay? And they have an interview. And then, rather than just go narratively through the round-up or ask questions, they’ve created a little sub-head for some different topics that came up in the interview, and they’ve broken out the interview, the quotes into these different sub-heads, okay?

This is another one that we’re gonna look at. This is called “Tools of the Trade.” And here, they have six round-up sections that are prefaced by about a 200-word profile of an artisanal producer at something. And so then, they kind of have two little round-ups…or you can call them sidebars that accompany it. This one is “Facts About Rice.” And then this one is about rice festivals and interpretations of rice, but this is all over the world. So remember, this speaks to what I was talking about about when you are doing something for a national…or in this case, rather, international magazine, you need to tie it in to all possible readers in as many ways as you can.

So I think there might be one more…all right, so this is another one we’re gonna look at. So this one is, again, starts with a little bit here, and has two different sections. So there’s…this is…like I said, we’re gonna talk about this one in more detail. But this is how a certain individual would recommend that you experience his neighborhood, okay?

So you’ve seen as we’ve gone by, even this political section is set up like a round-up. Everything here is so short, there’s no introductions. There’s no tying anything together. It’s “Let’s make it short, and let’s make it skimmable.”

Here’s another one that’s kind of style-oriented, like that “What’s in My Bag” section that we looked at before. But it’s not just that they have these style products, and they’re telling you that they correspond with a trend or you should do this now. They take a certain city, in this case, Berlin, and they say, “This is what to pack,” or “This is what the look is in Berlin.” But the text is actually all about what to do there. So they…again, where to stay, where to eat and shop, and what to do. So this is like a 100-word city guide round-up accompanying this style piece here, okay? And I think that that…yeah, I think now, we’re starting to get longer.

So that is what the front-of-book looks like in Delta. It’s primarily composed of round-ups. But they’re just not round-ups where they’re giving you multiple options for where to see something, or where to eat something, or destinations to visit, okay? Sometimes, they’re city guides. Sometimes, like the part of that “Tools of the Trade” article that we saw and we’re gonna look at again, they can be similar things in different areas, like “Ways to Experience Rice Around the World.” Sometimes, they’re style-oriented round-ups, and sometimes, those style-oriented round-ups have something else going on, which is, in and of itself, you know, about a city.

And sometimes, they’re a combination of all of the above, like the two different ones that I told you. And as we saw with that Tom Hanks section, they can be mixed in with a profile. You can even have a front-of-book round-up profile. Which if you hadn’t just told that to me and you didn’t stick that in my face, I would say, “Really? That’s a little much. A front-of-book round-up profile?” But these days, with the front-of-book, they want it to be skimmable. So round-ups are everywhere, okay?

So what is the structure of the typical round-up? I breezed through Delta with you guys a little bit earlier so that you could see a little bit of this before talking about the structure, but we are gonna go back and go more in-depth into looking at three of the pieces from the Delta Sky that I just showed you.

So the structure, as you may have noticed, is that often, there is an intro. Sometimes, it’s at the top of the page, or in the case of that rice one that we’re gonna look at again, it was on the side. So the intro tends to be all one paragraph, okay? And that paragraph is usually 100 words; sometimes, a little longer, but it’s usually 100 words. And with the exception of round-ups that are profiling a person…like that “What’s in My Bag?” one where I told you, because it was really small at the bottom, that the…below, when they gave kind of the description of what each of those things was; rather than describe what it was, they just had a quote from her. They just had a quote from the woman who said that this was in her bag, okay?

So that is not uncommon at all, to have quotes in profile pieces in sections of the round-up where they’re talking about each of those items. But typically, if it’s a round-up where it’s about a city or something that’s not related to one person, you will only see quotes in that introduction section. There will be quotes for setting up the background and context of why the reader is reading about this today.

So in a feature-length round-up, each of those sections, each of those highlights of what’s included in the round-up, those sub-heads, if you will, they are basically a mini article. But in the front-of-book round-ups, they’re barely a snapshot. Like I said, each thing might not even get its own sentence, let alone paragraph.

So what that means is you can’t give a lot of detail. You can’t give a lot of examples. These articles are really functioning on the strength of their information, rather than the strength of their writing. I’m gonna say that again, because it’s so important. These articles focus on the strength of their information, rather than the strength of their writing. So what that means is if you do not feel very confident about the strength of your writing, you should be doing these, okay? This is what you should do to break into bigger magazines, to get those clips, to get your chops, to get used to writing for editors. Because you don’t have to worry about flowery or descriptive language, or putting together a narrative structure or any of those things; you just have to have good facts and put them together.

And if you have your own thing that you’ve done in the past, whether you’ve been a travel agent or perhaps you have a blog or something like that where you’re recommending things and a destination to people, you have that territorial sense. You’re used to recommending things. So this is a no-brainer for you.

Now, you’ll see as we go through that there’s a lot of adjectives and even adverbs, which people are often told not to use them. But in this space of time that we have in these 170 or 300-word pieces, you have to use adjectives and adverbs, because you’re not showing as much. You’re gonna have to tell. But what that means is you do show sometimes, but in limited quantities.

And so, there’s roughly, depending on the length of the piece, the longer ones, like 300 words, will have a little bit more of this; the shorter ones will be on the lower end of the spectrum. So you’ll have, like, a 1:3 or a 1:4 or a 1:5 ratio of glossing over versus description.

So let’s look at these, and I have a feeling it’s gonna be really, really small and hard for you to see. 

So I’ve pulled it up here, I’m gonna try to zoom. I’m just not sure if the zoom will show up for you guys, even though now, we’re looking at it in the PDF. Great, okay. It looks like it’s working, great.

So this, like I said, this is the…Delta calls it “Time Out.” This is essentially how you would spend a day if you had time in the city. Let me make a little bigger. Okay, now I can’t read all of it. Okay, we’re gonna have to go down by one.

Okay, so…hopefully, many of you have downloaded it, or you’re just gonna listen to me read it, or you can successfully now read it on the screen. So like I said, this is a classic city guide round-up. So let’s look at how it starts.

“Mexico City as as many versions of itself as it does residents. Come looking for mariachis, street tacos, Frida Kahlo, and pilgrims crawling on their knees through the Basilica and you’ll find them–along with modern museums, high-rises, world-class jazz, Peruvian haute cuisine, and wine connoisseurs sipping Nebbiolo in urban vineyards. The contrasts and contradictions of this ancient metropolis give Latin America’s biggest capital its vibrancy but also can make it overwhelming for first-time visitors, especially as the city continues to rebuild after last year’s earthquakes. Digest it in small bites, taking time to appreciate the visible signs of its history while admiring all it has achieved in the present.”

So this lede, or this introduction to this round-up, seems quite general. It accomplishes, really, a lot. And it’s very easy to look at this, and because it does give you a lot of background and context, to feel like it is general. But there’s a lot of specific details in here, and so they’ve accomplished this very wide grounding in this subject without giving you the whole history, okay?

So for instance, they mention mariachi, street tacos, Frida Kahlo, and pilgrims crawling on their knees through the Basilica. I don’t know that I would think of pilgrims crawling on their knees through the Basilica when I think of Mexico City. I don’t know that I would think of that as a traditional thing. Some people might. Some people might think Frida Kahlo. Some people might think street tacos. Some people might think mariachis. I think they’ve put enough things in there that pretty much everyone will have some association, but these are going all over different periods of history and different types of culture and things like that.

But then they’ve mixed them with “modern museum, high-rises, world-class jazz, and Peruvian haute cuisine and wine connoisseurs sipping Nebbiolo in urban vineyards.” Do you remember before when I said that tends to be lists in one out of three or one out of four, one of the five of those things we expanded on? You can see that they’ve done that done here twice, okay? They’ve said, “Pilgrims crawling on their knees through the Basilica,” right? And then they’ve said, “Wine connoisseurs sipping Nebbiolo in urban vineyards.”

So even though those things are lists, they keep us from having list fatigue by expanding on one thing in each of these lists, okay? And you’ll see that in the list before the expansion, okay, one word, two words, two words, two words, one hyphenated word, hyphenated next word, three words. These are very, very, very, very short, okay? So they’ve chosen very carefully what they’re gonna say to get an image in your head quickly with the fewest words possible.

So then they go on to talk about the contrasts and contradictions. And they say, “This ancient metropolis…” I don’t know that everybody thinks of “ancient metropolis” when they think of Mexico City. So they’re influencing already again your perception of the place and its history. And they say “Latin America’s biggest capital,” so that gives us a sense of the size.

So like we talked about last week with the news briefs webinars, we talked about grounding people in the who, what, where, when, and why. So they’re grounding us now in history, they’re grounding us in the location, they’re grounding us in scale, and they’re grounding us in ambience as well, okay? So they’re creating a picture for us without using description. This is really important. So they’re doing a little bit of description, you know, with that “wine connoisseurs sipping Nebbiolo in urban vineyards.” But largely, they’re creating a picture just through the choice of what they include, okay? And this is really how these round-ups work.

So let’s look over here on the side, okay? Each of these things is barely 500 words. So let me blow it up a little bit more.

So like I said, all these small sections, all of these small sections clock in at around 50 words. So let’s just look, for example, at the “Shop” section. “Mexican designers are changing the meaning of ‘Hecho en Mexico…” and then they explain what that means, “Made in Mexico,” “from something produced in a border factory to an object handcrafted with excellence. Stop by Tenderete, the Happening concept store, or Fusion Casa de Diseñadores for local jewelry, clothes, and objets d’art. For something more traditional, try the San Angel weekend bazaar or…” ooh, I can’t pronounce this one for you very well. I’ll give it a try. “Taller Tlamaxcalli, one of the city’s last remaining toy workshops.”

So what have they done here? As you would do with a feature round-up, the first sentence of this section is introducing us to what they’re gonna talk about, okay? And they do that by saying that they’re changing the meaning of “Made in Mexico.” So they’ve created expectations around the different types of things they’re gonna include. So they don’t need to tell you details about so many of them. And then you’ll see exactly what I told you before. They say, “Tenderete, the Happening concept store, or Fusion Casa de Diseñadores,” and then they say what you can get there, okay? So they have three quick things, and then they expand. Again, here, they have two things, but then they expand on one of the city’s last remaining toy workshops.

For “Eat,” again, they start with a little bit of grounding and what type of food you can expect. “Get straight to eating conchas con nata (sweet rolls with clottted cream) or an ant roe omelet at the classic Restaurante El Cardenal.” I don’t know if I think about sweet rolls with clotted cream as the thing that you automatically want to eat first when you get to Mexico City. But they’ve told me that by saying “Get straight to eating.” They’ve done it so quickly with so few words. And you’ll see that in these front-of-book round-ups, the verbs are incredibly powerful and useful, and they tell you a lot. They include a lot of assumptions with those verbs, okay? “Or dig into rabbit stew with blue corn tortillas at chef Sofia Garcia Osorio’s unmarked restaurant attached to the Bosforo mescal bar.”

So by saying that it’s an unmarked restaurant and by choosing to include an unmarked restaurant, we immediately get a sense that there’s kind of this like this underground restaurant/speakeasy bar culture there. Okay, “Sleek gourmet markets such as Mercado Independencia provide various Mexican fare all in one place, but venturing out into the city is the only way to taste the city’s soul. Head to taquerias Super Taco Chupucabras or El Vilsito to get your sea legs.”

So you know, they mentioned early on when people think of Mexico City, they think of taco carts, they think of taco trucks. So you see that they have that at the end, but they don’t give you a lot of detail. Instead, they use this interesting turn of phase “to get your sea legs” to tell you that that’s where the seafood tacos or the fish tacos come from, without saying, “The city is known for its fish tacos and you’ll get the best ones at El Vilsito,” okay? So they’ve done that with a lot…with many fewer words, okay?

So let’s zoom back out for a second and look at these other two articles that I wanted to look at with you, but we’ll keep it on here so that we can zoom better, okay? So let’s look at this…I believe the next one is gonna be “Tools of the Trade,” okay? This is a really neat one.

So this is a profile, this particular section is a profile of somebody who works somehow with something that you know about. It could be rice, it could be pinewood. Something that you’re familiar with and is doing something neat with it. So let’s see what they have to say about Nick Kim, okay?

So “Nick Kim’s eyes shine like those of a schoolboy with a crush when he talks to us about Kinmemai white rice. Grown in Japan’s Nagano Prefecture, a region known for having clean mountain water and excellent terroir, the rice is polished using a radical process that leaves the sprout of each grain intact, vastly improving consistency and nutritional value.” Then the quote, “Texture is always key when making rice,” says Kim. “The beauty with Kinmemai is that it holds up. Texturally, it’s all there.”

“Kim and his partner, Jimmy Lau, long conspired to find the perfect rice to serve at Shuko, their omakase and kaesiki-style sushi restaurant in Union Square. The search engine when they discovered Kinmemai. Now, the challenge lies in learning the grain’s unique nuances. ‘We’re tasting the rice all the time. It’s really like a brand-new relationship. Right now, we’re still holding hands.’ But Kim is definitely smitten with Kinmemai. ‘In sushi restaurants, rice is king. We could have the best fish in the world, but if the rice isn’t good, it isn’t going to make sense.’”

Now, you’ll see next to this, I mentioned this before, they have…let me zoom in for a second. Then they have this geographic round-up of different places doing interesting things with rice, okay? They talk about a festival in Japan where oxen are decorated with flowers. They have a place in San Francisco, a sake brewery, that makes only pure varieties of sake with water, rice, and koji, a special type of fungus. So you know, they could have all things in Japan, but they’re trying to address that geographic issue.

So then they say, “At Goofy’s Candy Company in Disneyland,” right, of all places, “you can bedeck Mickey-shaped crisped rice treats with toppings.” These things seem super random, a super random assortment, and we noticed that in all of the “Tools of the Trade” ones that we looked at. But it’s because they’re trying to cover their bases. They’re trying to cover people who are interested in local-only food, they’re trying to cover family travelers. They’re trying to cover people who are interested in culture around the world, okay?

So they also, up here, have three facts more. “There are more than 40,000 varieties of rice cultivated on every continent except Antarctica. Rice has long been seen as a symbol of fertility, which is why it’s frequently showered over newlyweds. In Japanese, the word for ‘rice’ and for ‘meal’ is the same.”

Okay, so let’s look at what they did here in this piece. Like I said, this is longer in terms of the introduction for this sort of thing, it’s about 200 words. And it’s interesting because he doesn’t grow the rice, right? So he’s a chef who uses the rice. Could they have talked to somebody who grows the rice? Yes. But by talking to a chef, they bring it closer to the readers, and it seems like he…they don’t say this, but it seems like he is probably one of the first or one of the only folks in the U.S. that’s using this special rice.

So they start by setting the scene by talking about the person because this is a profile of a person. But then they immediately get into telling you what is so special about this rice. So remember last time, we talked about how you have the who, what, where, when, why sentence, and then immediately why it’s important afterwards. So they’ve done that here as well. So they tell you that it’s known for its clean mountain water and the terroir, and also, this very special process which they explain.

And then, they immediately get into the quotes. They use a lot of quotes in this section, and they use the quotes to explain things. So in this case, this guy is clearly very quotable. He talks about holding hands with his rice. He’s, like, highly quotable. If he wasn’t so quotable, they probably wouldn’t have as many quotes here. But they use this quote to move through…they talked about what’s special about the rice, and why he, as a restaurateur, why it’s important to him. They give the background of their quest to find this rice, and then they show you how it’s being used now and what the challenge is, and they wrap up with this nice little quote about “Rice is king,” right? So this is a very short “Get in, get out” piece where they’re profiling the rice and the person all in one.

So there was one last one, one last front-of-book round-up that I wanted to share with you guys, and that was this Jose Andres one.

So this is the title, “Jose Andres on Seventh Street NW in Washington, D.C.” So I actually love Jose Andres. I love all of his stuff, his Mexican food is great. But he also has things with a lot of different restaurants. And when I saw this, I was curious. So let’s look at the piece.

“In times of struggle, a hot meal can bring cheer. Enter chef Jose Andres. In the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, he and the team from his nonprofit, World Central Kitchen, have established an operation in Puerto Rico that has served more than 2.9 million meals to date. ‘We set up kitchens around the island, and hundreds of volunteers, chefs, cooks, and drivers came together to prepare and distribute meals,’ says Andres. The Spanish chef, who has more than ten eateries in and around Washington, D.C. has been providing relief to disaster areas via his nonprofits since 2010. ‘To me, food is a community built around shared experience,’ he says. ‘This is a true comfort, knowing that we have each other, friends and family around us when we need them.’”

So this is another one of those super short and sweet maybe 120-word things, okay? So they start with, like, a very short sentence to bring you in, and then they give you the context, okay? So Chef Andres is supporting Puerto Rico after the hurricane. They give specific names of what’s going on, the number of meals to date, and they jump into that quote that tells you about the why. And then they step back and they give you more background. This is the first time he’s done it. He’s done this in ten eateries. And he’s done it since 2010. And then they have that wrap-up quote from him about why this is important to the bigger picture.

Now, what did they do here with the round-up, okay? These…the point of this article is for a chef to tell you his favorite street. So this intro was to tell you why we’re hearing from Jose Andres in the first place, but the article is really about his favorite street in D.C. In this case, it’s Seventh Street where several of his restaurants are located, okay?

So he tells you other things that are there on that street that he loves. So he’s got this China Chilcano, this CityCenterDC, this Pitango Gelato, and the National Archives. And just like that my bag, “What’s in My Bag?” piece that I told you, each of the parts of this round-up is illustrated exclusively by a quote from the person being profiled. The writer, the editor has added no additional information explaining what this place is. Entirely just the words of the chef. So that means that the words of the person being profiled need to be telling you why it’s important, and what you get there all in one go.

So let’s look at a couple of these. So the newest addition to my “Penn Quarter restaurants, we tell the story of Peru by serving dishes from Peruvian Criollo, Chinese Chifa, and Japanese Nikkei traditions.” Okay, then CityCenterDC. “This development shows how quickly the neighborhood is changing and expanding. Twenty-five years ago when we opened Jaleo, there was just a parking lot. Now, it’s an urban paradise.” But he doesn’t tell you so much about what CityCenterDC is, and that’s in part because it’s a really major venue for shows, and I think they assume that people might know what that is.

So Pitango Gelato. “This is my favorite place for a macchiato. It’s just around the corner from the office. So when I need a little extra energy, it’s the perfect afternoon treat.” So this is interesting, right? Because it’s a gelato place, and you see gelato, and you’re like, “Okay, it’s ice cream.” And instead, he talks about how he also goes there for coffee, so it gives you another facet of this place.

The National Archives, also a very major thing in D.C. that people go to, a tourist attraction. So he says, “Sometimes, I’ll go and just look at the most famous American documents–the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution–and think about everything that this country stands for.” So this is something that people might know, but they might already be going to. But his quote gives you a different way to look at it. But they don’t tell you what the National Archives are, they don’t tell you what any of these things are. They just tell you how he experiences it, and this is really increasingly common in front-of-book round-ups. And I’m seeing a lot of these profile-oriented round-ups where every bit of the round-up is just communicated through the words of the original source.

Okay, so as I slip back to the slides, give me one sec, I see some questions have come in. Any of you guys that have questions, let me know in the chat box, and I’ll get to Priscilla. So these are the three things that we looked at. And this might be her question. “How do you pitch these pieces?” But let’s see, Priscilla said, “When you pitch your round-up like this rice, do you give specifics of each list to show you have the bases covered?”

Why yes, that’s right here. Perfect, Priscilla, that was a great lead-in for this. So yeah, you have to give a round-up. You have to give examples of the places you’re gonna include. And you have to give more than one, you have to give several.

So if the things that you’re including will number five in the end, you want to give at least three; if the number’s seven, give four or five. You want to give, like, a majority, but you don’t necessarily need to list all of them. So you don’t list all of them, guys. You hear me? If you’re doing a ten point round-up on that Tom Hanks one that we saw, you don’t need to have all of those things when you pitch. But you need to show that you have more than a couple, okay?

So the pitch should be crazy short. So you have a little bit in the beginning where you say why this is important, what section you’re pitching, and then you just tell them. You know, list style, “I will include this, this, this, and this.” There can be those places. And just like they did in the articles, you say “This, this, this, and this, which…” and then you explain what’s cool about that place, okay? So you expand on one and why it’s important.

So somebody asked…it’s not super related to what we’re talking about right now, but “If all pitches must be related to places where the airline flies?” With airline magazines, it depends on both the airplane and the specific section. So that’s why in the database, we include different examples of what they’ve covered in that section in the past, so that you can get a sense of if it has to be a city that they fly to, or if it can be a codeshare city, or if it can be somewhere you can drive to from them. And it’s completely different both by airline and by the section of the airline, so I can’t give a general answer there.

Donna said, “When you’re writing a round-up or other article, how do you add the side bars? Do you label them at side bars at the end, or is it up to the editor to do the side bar?” You do label side bars. They will tell you in advance that you’re doing side bars, and they should give you their preferred format for receiving them. Otherwise, you should ask the individual editor, because it’ll vary magazine to magazine what they need internally for their copy editors and for their print production process.

So I hope that you guys all have enjoyed the webinar, and I will catch you next week to talk about Article Nuts and Bolts on trend pieces.

Okay, thank you guys so much. Have a great weekend.

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So let’s go ahead and get started because we’ve got a lot to get through today. When I was pulling trend pieces for you guys, I realized that there’s so many different links and we’ve mostly just been talking about short pieces before which makes it easy for me to read the whole piece and go through it with you guys. So this is the third in our series of webinars on article nuts and bolts, how to construct different article types. And this week, we are talking about trend pieces.

So today, what we’re gonna be talking about is both the concept of a trend piece and how they fit in the landscape of travel writing, and specifically, in magazines as a whole, and particularly, how to construct them. So we’re gonna start by talking about what trends mean in the travel space.

So then we’re gonna talk about the difference between trending and trend. When you hear, “Trending,” especially if you’re online and you do social media, you probably think of in Twitter how it has trending. Right? Or a lot of websites now will show you which topics are trending. So what is trending right now is not gonna exactly be the trends that you see in travel magazines, and we’re gonna talk about that distinction. And then we’re gonna look at the overall layout of your average trend piece and how that plays out in different types of lengths.

As I mentioned for those of you that are just coming in, when I was pulling the pieces for us to look at today, I noticed that we’ve been mostly talking about front of book pieces lately that are short. And as we get into trends, those can be longer and longer pieces. In fact, you know, Carrie just mentioned a trend can be anything. And right now, we’re talking specifically in food and travel.

As I was doing some research last night, I actually stumbled upon a magazine that I don’t usually ever have occasion to read because most of my reading is work-related, “Scientific American”, which some of you may or may not be familiar with. And I was reading a piece which was actually, in fact, a trend piece but it was a trend piece in terms of the intersection of certain scientific or certain conditions that are exhibiting in the population. But it was, at heart, a trend piece. You could see the structure that we’re gonna talk about today in this like 3,000 odd word feature in “Scientific American.” So these construction techniques that we’re gonna look at you can accordion to all sorts of different lengths.

So then, at the end, we’re gonna talk about… I had mentioned a few times that this webinar series that we’re doing right now on article nuts and bolts is gonna be interrupted by a couple interstitials on different topics. And we had a lot of people chiming in with interest about talking about freelance travel writing finances. So that’s something we’ve got coming up and also, a few other things that I’m excited to share with you guys.

So as we’re talking about trend pieces this week, this is something that I think I got turned on to by force or by accident, in a position that I had writing daily news for a website with a specific niche focused around Italian travel. Because when you are working in-house or on contract with a publication, you often learn a lot of these things just by force of exposure. So for all of you guys who haven’t had that experience, you might not be so on with what all of the travel trends are. But this is really something fundamental for being a travel writer by profession. And we talked about this quite a bit in the end of the year, the annual review webinars as well, in terms of how that’s something that is a fundamental part of your professional practice of what you should be doing with your day.

And I know a lot of magazine editors and publishers, the very first thing they do in the morning is they sit down and they read what all of their competitors have published, every single other thing that’s been published in their space because they need to know what’s already been written about. And do we freelancers have the time to do that? No, but they don’t really either. So it’s about kind of getting a practice for yourself of how you can skim and be on with all of these trends.

So let’s get into it. I already asked you guys this because there’s a bit longer delay than usual in the sound, so I wanted to know what you guys thought was a trend in the context of travel and food that you might see in the magazines. So I’m gonna go through a couple here. So we’ve got somebody mentioned poke, certainly a big food trend, farm-to-table, people have mentioned Iceland, ramen, we’ve got craft cider, Nicaraguan retirement, van travel, food trucks.

And some of these, you know, might be trends that, as you see them in the chat box, you might not have heard of. Like van travel particularly, like renovating an Airstream and living out of an Airstream and driving all over. That’s actually like a really cool one but quite niche. Likewise with Nicaraguan retirement, that’s something that various among you might not have come across. But some of these like farm-to-table food or craft cider I’m sure that all of you…and Iceland, I’m sure all of you guys have heard about this.

So I put together a list on my own just as I was thinking of what you guys might come up with. And I’m gonna walk through them, and some of them you might be nodding your head right along with me, and other ones you might not have heard about. So, you know, we can think of things that were a trend and then how that trend grew up. Right? So destination weddings, at one point, were a trend. Oh, someone said street food, that’s another good one. But so, destination weddings, at one point, were a trend. But now what’s trending in that space of destination plus wedding, or destinations plus romance travel, is babymoons, if you’ve heard of babymoons. Or delayed honeymoons where you get married and then maybe you can’t take your honeymoon at that time, for various reasons related to your job or economics or whatever, and you take it later.

So then, there’s other things that have very strong economic motivators. I’m sure you guys have all heard of staycations. Another thing that was trendy a few years ago was road trips, road trips had a big uptick. But another related thing to that is bleasure, and I’m gonna write that in the chat box because I’m sure that you’re not sure what I’m saying because it’s such an effed up word that I wish someone had invented another one. So bleasure is when people who travel for work combine their work trips with their family travel. So essentially, they use the fact that their business is flying them somewhere and then they bring their family along to join them for the week, or the weekend after that, to kind of like half save money because the flight is already paid for by the company for the primary person, but also, just kind of out of their inability to find other vacation time as well. So bleasure is one that I think was coined about a year ago.

And then there’s some bigger ones that you guys probably know about. Like agritourism has gotten big again. And that’s like a larger I guess umbrella under which things like, obviously, farm-to-table but also grass-to-glass, which is where a distillery, craft distilleries are huge. Right? Where distilleries grow their own grain and hops on-site to make their own things. So they only use local ingredients in the spirits that they make. There’s other trends that happen in other parts of travel that touch all of us, right? Some people have mentioned things related to sort of driving your vehicles. But what about airplanes? Right? Air travel.

I think airline customer-service screw-ups was like a trend a while ago. But that had a trend that came before it which was cruise line screw-ups or, you know, people getting sick on cruises and things like that. So Ian’s mentioned medical tourism. There’s some of these things that aren’t so much trends as much as sectors of travel. And it’s important to know that difference because they’re not as effective to use as a peg for your story if they’re not a trend.

So let’s get into this further. I’ve given you guys some ideas but we wanna see them in real life, right? So trends that print magazines published are not gonna be the absolute newest thing. And what I mean by that is if there is… I can’t remember exactly what country this place is in, but there’s a town, I believe in the Philippines, that has repainted the entire town in this very, very colorful fashion, just to lure tourists who would like travel to take photos on Instagram. And in Asia, that’s like a relatively common thing, you go somewhere for the photos. So it’s not as quite as ridiculous as it sounds.

So I’ve read about that online but I don’t know that that’s gonna make it into print because rejiggering the entire exterior of your town is something that’s a little bit more of a one-off. And there’s this concept that three is a trend that we’ll talk about in a little bit. But that’s part of what separates things that are the absolute newest new thing from the trends that you read about in a magazine or even in a newspaper, you know, which are theoretically daily.

And I have this actually on the bottom of this slide, but I’ve read about things in the New York Times where that trend is like at least three years old. And if you look at the city guide type pieces that they do in the New York Times, or other outlets, you might feel like, “Well, you know, that city isn’t the really cool place to go right now,” or, “That isn’t the up-and-coming place to go right now.” The up-and-coming place to go is actually something else but they’re not covering that place. And then you ask yourself why, like, “Why won’t they take my picture? Why aren’t they covering, you know, Columbia or something like that?”

And the answer, in all of these cases, is audience. With all of these publications, whether it’s a newspaper or a magazine, they have very broad circulations typically and they have to think about what is gonna touch the most people. So for them, if they’re gonna cover a trend, the trend has probably become a bit mainstream when we’re looking at travel and we’re looking at a trend piece. Now you can use a trend as a way to get in to write about a business profile, which we’ll talk about later both in this webinar and also the next webinar on business profiles. But the thing is that in those cases, still the trend has to be well-known enough.

So does that mean it has to be so well-known that your grandmother knows about it? Probably not. I like to think of it as a trend that your significant other or your best friend or somebody you know who has, you know, a, quote-unquote, normal desk job, as in they work in sales or they’re an architect or they work for the city, I’m just looking around New York right now trying to think of jobs, or maybe they work in a recruiting firm, something like that, somebody who has a job that has no touching of the travel industry, they probably should have, if not heard of it, at least have heard of the precursor of it.

So that seems like, “Whoa, we’re not actually really writing about things that are trending, are we? We’re not actually really writing about what’s new.” And that’s what I mean when I tell you like, “I read about this thing as a trends piece in The New York Times that was three years old.” They have to wait for it to be big enough that they can justify to their audience that it is, in fact, trending. And I’m gonna show you, as we talk about the construction of these pieces, what does that mean.

But another really good example is… This came up a lot during the freelance travel writing boot camp, which I guess was just last week. Wow, if it feels like it was both a long time and a long time ago. Any of you guys who were there for the boot camp that are on the chat today, I miss you guys. So in the boot camp, we kind of had this running joke about the “American Way” Magazine. Because every time we looked for an example of something in “American Way,” it turned out that the writing wasn’t really that great or the trends that they talked about weren’t really trends because if they’re way past being trends, everybody knows about them, it’s just mainstream.

And so, they kind of became the example of like, “Don’t write things like this.” And sure enough, I was with a coaching student and we were doing this same kind of thing that you and I are talking about now, about looking at trends and diagramming articles and how they’re put together and all those sorts of things. And one of the pieces that she looked at was about craft cider.

Now some of you guys might not have heard of cider, like hard cider as a thing but it’s pretty established. It’s established to the point where somebody that I coached that came to one of our events just had a book come out on cooking with craft cider. So it’s not even like a guide to craft cider but it’s how to cook with craft cider. So a craft cider has been around long enough that a book publishing outfit would look for spin-offs of craft cider as a book and she could have the time to test all the recipes and write the photos and get that book out. That’s how long craft cider has been around.

And the “American Way” Magazine had as the very, very, very first piece in a recent front of book section, I think it was maybe the January issue, they had front and center this thing, “Craft Cider has Arrived,” or like, “You Should Check out Craft Cider.” So really, these trends that we’re talking about, to us, as travelers and travel writers, might feel over actually because we’re so immersed in this.

So it’s one of these ones, right? It’s like street food. I feel like street food has so many iterations, right? We could think of street food as food carts, we can think of street food as street food, you know, like in Southeast Asia or night markets. That has so many iterations. But you have to ask yourself, “Is this something that in Columbus, Ohio, everybody already knows about this?” or, “Is this something that, you know, in San Francisco or Boston or LA, people might know about it there?” And that’s kind of the dividing line. Does everybody everywhere already know about it? Or do most people kind of who are plugged into food and travel, who are not in the industry but live in urban hip areas, do they all know about it? That’s a good dividing line. So for instance, what’s cool right now in Portland, is not gonna show up in the Travel Magazine for another two or three years, most likely. Right?

So if you don’t feel like you know these things that are trending right now, that you can be pitching on a six-month timeline, because by then they will actually be trendy, how do you find out? First, you can look at what magazines are already covering. That’ll help you gauge what the level is so that you can really understand it of what is trendy enough to appear. And it’s really easy to skim through, once a month, they only come out once a month, the front of book sections of these four magazines and know what’s going on. Something that I also like to do is to get the daily or weekly, or whenever they come out, emails from these four places that I listed here.

Now it’s a slightly eclectic group, so I wanna explain it to you. So I put “Conde Nast Traveler”, which I also put up there on the major publications, but I put “Conde Nast Traveler” here because they have a really great daily newsletter, or daily sort of email that they send out, and it’s always got newsy pieces. “Conde Nast Traveler” does a lot of newsy pieces about what’s going on in travel that affects leisure travelers. And so I read that quite religiously. It’s probably like one of the few email newsletters that I get that I probably open every time. And it’s not just because I open it intending to open it but it’s because they always have a headline, they always have some newsy thing that I feel like I, as a travel writer and a teacher of travel, really need to know about to know what’s going on in travel. So I definitely recommend getting at CNT Daily or CN Traveler Daily is their daily newsletter.

And then, this one might seem a little out there… So there’s this website called Well+Good, which probably not too many of you are familiar with. And I actually got turned on to it because other writers were saying it was really great and they wanna trade for it. And so then I started getting their newsletter. And they have a very, very extensive travel section. They don’t cover it as widely in their newsletter because it’s a little bit more wellness but they have a huge travel section and they really cover a lot of what’s kind of on the cutting edge in terms of what consumers are doing that isn’t gonna appear in a magazine right now but it’s something that you can pitch in a year, a year and a half, so that you can start looking out for resources and experts and studies and statistics on that. We’ll talk more about those things in a minute.

So, for instance, a recent Well+Good highlighted… They had a piece that highlighted a website that specifically finds, I wanna say it was like co-working spaces or remote working situations for female entrepreneurs or executives of small companies. It was super, super small. But that’s like the next stage of digital nomadism is people who can work anywhere and currently aren’t having these concierge services that sort out their apartment for them, so that they’re guaranteed that the Wi-Fi will be great and they’ll have a great place to work and a kitchen, and that it’ll be near cool cafes, who set them up with meetup groups to go to, and all of those things. That’s the next stage of co-working and digital nomadism right there. And I’ve heard a couple other things like this since seeing that article. But it’s so new yet, it’s not quite ready to go to a magazine but it’s something I can file in my idea file and start thinking about where that can go.

So two other things on here that are more industry-focused are Skift, which I mentioned pretty often, particularly from knowing what’s going on with the industry. They do a lot of white papers that are very, very expensive, but you can always get a preview, like a small section of the white paper and they’re really great and they have lots of anecdotes. And “Travel Weekly”. I know some of you guys have backgrounds in travel or travel planning or being a travel agent, or things like that, on the industry side, so you might already be familiar with this publication.

But for those of you that don’t, people who work in travel, who are like travel agents, they really need to know in a very up-to-the-minute, like day by day way what’s going on in different places. Like after the Paris attack, what was the tone on the ground? Like should they tell their people to go there or not? And that is who “Travel Weekly” is targeting. So if you look there, you’re getting the information for the people who are curating the information for travelers. So that is also really a great source of what’s trending and what’s the status in different places.

So three’s a trend, you may have heard me mention this earlier. How many of you guys have heard this term, three is a trend?

Okay, I see somebody who was with us last week, two people who were with us last week for the boot camp has heard me mention it, have heard me mention it. Alisha’s heard it. Okay, it’s kind of split down the middle. So this idea of three as a trend is a journalist trick that you go around and you hear something. Right? Like this service that I just mentioned that sets up digital nomad experiences for specifically female entrepreneurs, female CEOs of small companies. And then you’re like, “Wow, I could use that,” or, “That sounds great,” or, “I should tell my friend. That’s super cool and specific.” And then, you know, it just kind of files away in your memory in the cool stuff category. Or perhaps in your inbox. I used to have, when I first started writing, I had a cool stuff category in my email and I had different folders for each place that I covered frequently. So like I had a Cool Stuff Italy, Cool Stuff Boston, all of these different ones.

So then how does it become three is a trend? This is usually what happens. After you hear the first one, at some point, you’ll hear something like that from somebody else. So a few days ago, somebody mentioned to me another digital nomad thing like this where they set everything up for you, but again, it has a restriction that they only do it in one city each month. So there’s like other people who are doing the program at the same time that are there with you. And so that one’s a bit different but it’s still got this concept of everybody setting it up.

So then once I hear two like this that are similar, I would say, “Okay, is this a thing? Are there other companies doing this?” And then I would hit Google and then I would Google around quite a bit and look for other places that are doing something similar, and particularly try to see if I can get ones that are more similar than these two examples that I gave you. Because the thing is that these examples that are kind of outliers, you can use those to talk about other variations on the trend. But it’s great if you can find ones that are quite similar for this three is a trend metric.

So like I said in here, this can be a type of facile trend reporting. So if you hear one instance and you hear another one and you find a third, can you automatically write a trend article? No, three is a trend is just an indicator that you need to look into it. Three is a trend is not the way that you write your piece, that would just be a roundup, okay? And trend pieces aren’t roundups. Trend pieces are talking about the trend itself as a piece of news.

And so, if you look up how to write a trend piece, there’s some very, very funny things that come up, and we’re gonna look at some of those in a minute. But there’s interestingly a lot of backlash from mostly writers it seems about these as being not necessarily easy or something like that, but about being the types of things that outlets like “The New York Times” should not spend their time publishing. But the fact of the matter is that trend pieces are important. They’re cultural commentaries and they’re things that those people who don’t already know about these trends wanna read because they wanna know what this thing is and why they should know about it.

And the people who already know about those trends, they get to see how expansive it is. They get to learn something about that trend that they don’t already know and they get to see how the trend originated and where it’s going next. So they’re really great pieces when done well. But the when done well is the important part. So to make sure… And this is kind of, again, one of those lines that you see between something that somebody might write unedited on their own blog versus the kind of trend piece that you’re gonna see in a magazine.

So just like any of you who have blogged, I know that, back in my prior life before I also became a journalist besides just being a blogger, I’m certainly guilty of this, okay, is pulling together things that are similar and calling it a trend but not doing any of this backup on how the trend came to be, what shows that it’s really there, and how it fits into society in a larger context. Okay? So one of the best ways to do that, to show that in your piece, is to give different types of information for people who need different types of proof. So some people, storytelling is it. Like they hear a story and they’ll believe anything you tell them. But that’s not everybody, right?

Some people make decisions only on facts, only on figures. And some people need experts. They need to hear it from somebody who either specializes in this or has some sort of degree in this area. So if you’ve ever studied logic, they call these like fallacies of authority when you use somebody who is an expert but not an expert in exactly that thing. So they don’t quite prove, they don’t quite have the weight to prove what you’re talking about. And that’s one of these cases where a trend piece can often fall flat.

So one of the pieces that I’m gonna show you later is on this topic called transformative travel. And we’ll talk more about what that is when we get to the trend piece that we’re gonna look at. But the basic concept, the basic tenets of transformative travel is that it’s travel that when you go there, you’re seeing something that’s so different from your normal life or the experience that you have, you know, saving baby rhinos, something like that, I’m not making that up, like completely changes how you feel about all sorts of things in your life when you come home. Now a lot of us probably practice transformative travel already, write about it, you know, maybe have heard the term or maybe not. But for travel writers it tends to be quite a kind of normal thing. But now some people have stuck a name on it and now, apparently, it is a trend.

So transformative travel is something where who could you take as the expert to talk about that? You could take somebody who owns a company that specializes in transformative travel but that might be a fallacy of authority if nobody cares about that company, if that company doesn’t have success, if that company isn’t very well known. You could take somebody from a major tour operator, but if that tour operator doesn’t really care, you know, so much about experiences, if it’s somebody who just kind of does like booze cruises, that also is not going to ring true in this context.

So the best thing that you could do is to choose, you know, a tour company that has a certain amount of weight in the marketplace but they’re also known for experiential kind of responsible travel, like G Adventures or something like that. I’m not quite sure what you mean by your question, Carrie, but you couldn’t just throw in a random Tourism Board to comment on Transformative Travel because there’s no backup of why that person specifically is qualified to talk about this thing. So if that’s what you meant, that is the answer.

So as you line up expert sources to talk about your trend, it’s really important to remember not just that they touch on your trend but also that they have enough kind of verifiable clear backing that it’s clear that they are qualified to talk about this trend. If in doubt, you know, you can always watch like some primetime lawyer show and see how people shred witnesses that are not really good expert witnesses, and you’ll see this fallacy of authority that I’m talking about. So I’m gonna show you later a specific format that incorporates these real-life examples, hard data and expert sources.

So this piece… I’m gonna leave it up here and take a water break for a second. I seem to need a lot of water today. This piece I’m gonna leave it up here so you guys can look at it, and then I’m gonna read it to you guys sort of in a skimming way. I’ve already cut some things out of it that aren’t so apropos for the format that we are looking at today. But this piece that I put up here, it’s on two sides, it is from the “New Yorker” and it is from their humor column. And the concept here is that they are kind of paraphrasing, essentially, what is in every single trend piece. So I’ll give you guys a second to look at that while I answer Kerry’s question. HARO we’ve talked about a couple times but it’s help a reporter out, and it’s a website you can use to find sources for your pieces. Okay guys, so take a look at that for one sec.

So as you can see, this is clearly a humorous piece, as denoted by the very first line. “‘Some sexy stuff,’ says pseudonym, not his or her real name because he or she is the writer’s friend on Facebook, a vague professional from a major city.” Now what’s quite funny about this is that I have heard… I’m not gonna say a lot. I have definitely heard people who are editors at magazines or write regularly for magazines say things like… No, Alan, that’s a good question. I’ll explain in a second.

I’ve definitely heard people who write a lot, a lot of stories say that sometimes when they’re trying to get a piece done and they’re feeling stuck, they just go on Facebook and say, “Hey, can somebody give me a quote about blah, blah, blah?” And this is not uncommon. And I’ve particularly heard people who write for some of the major travel industry publications say this. And they were actually telling that to a room of travel agents to tell them why they should be on Facebook is just to get press.

But this whole piece actually, as much as it is, you know, clearly poking fun… Like I said, I’ve taken out some of the things that are a little too far in the poking fun category but it’s very specifically following the format of what goes in a trend piece. So they start with a very interesting quote and they explain who is being quoted. And then they have some other information to follow up and make the quote make sense. This is something that actually people who aren’t so used to including quotes miss, and I’ve actually had some editors of mine have to send out some kind of humorous updates to their guidelines. You should always have the first sentence of your quote and then break it up by explaining the person’s name and who they are. So if interviewing isn’t something you’ve done a lot of before, this is the format you need to do to do this.

So after that quote sets the scene, and I’ll talk a little bit more about how that’s often an anecdote, then they explain what they’re talking about. They are talking about this trend. And you won’t just see it here, you’ll see it in several other places. And then they say, “Here’s the trend, this is what the trend is.” And then they get into the hard evidence. They get into some statistics or something from…it’s typically not an academic journal in our area, though it can be. I’ve seen some and you will with the transformative travel piece. It’s more often either an industry study or the… Not just the U.S. government, but a lot of governments have their statistics up where you can very easily find them. So you can use Transportation Department statistics, all sorts of different things for that backing.

Now Alan had a funny question here which some people might not be so familiar with, especially if you mostly write online. But this concept of the fold. It’s that above the fold are the things that you see in a website before you scroll down, so it also has an application in website. So it’s like everything that comes before the first scroll, and these days, there tends to also be an ad there. So it’s like everything above the first ad.

Well, in newspapers the fold is literal, right? It’s like where that newspaper is folded at the bottom. However, these days, it tends to be that the fold has different pieces underneath it and you actually need to switch to another page. And they try to make sure that everything that happens there on that first page before the fold makes you really interested, so that you either scroll or you flip to whatever it is, like D-17 that you need to be looking at. Jade had a question, “Should we be lining up these expert interviews before we pitch?” This is a great question. Ask me that again at the end because we’re gonna talk about how to pitch these pieces.

So let’s look at the next half of this humor piece about trend pieces. So then we’ve got another quote from another person and they call them a trend spotter, a freelance expert. So this is that place where we wanna be including that expert who can speak to this trend. Okay? So we’ve had our bit of, you know, industry research or statistic or something like that. So now we need somebody that we can quote that’s both capable of and their background shows that they ought to be commenting on this. And then, the piece goes into examples.

When we talked, those of you who joined us for the piece about or the webinar about news briefs, we talked about this inverted pyramid and that further down in the piece, they tend to give like lots more examples or they talk about like kind of offshoots of this thing. This is the part of the trend piece where that happens. This is where, rather than just mentioning, you know, you may have seen it in New York or Rio or London, they give other examples. They talk about other companies that are doing this. This is where I would do kind of like a mini-profile or explanation of each of the companies that I’ve identified that’s doing this setting up executives or entrepreneurs as digital nomads in different countries, if that’s what I was doing for this piece.

And then, all of these trend pieces take another step. They show how that trend fits into other things that are going on in the world. So before when we talked about road trips and staycations, that was during a time when the economy was down and people wanted to still vacation, especially with their families, but they just didn’t have money to go very far. And so they were looking at doing interesting things in their own backyard or rediscovering their own cities or going to small towns nearby them that they would never think of visiting. So in this place, I would explain, you know, that that’s what’s happening and talk perhaps about other things that might come next or other ways that frugality… Or not just frugality but desire to experience things fully with limited means was expressing itself, maybe in the food scene or maybe in the hospitality industry. And I would touch on, you know, Airbnbs or things like that like where you could take a room in an apartment, rather than just rent an apartment.

And then the last quote, these pieces typically have three interviews or three quotes, will say something that follows in line with the previous paragraph, that they’re gonna pull that larger scale, that larger look at how this trend fits into society, succinctly into a quote that perfectly encapsulates a two-hour interview into one sentence, as The New Yorker humorously says. So I went through this but just to have it on paper, what did we see in here? There’s a lead with a quote, preferably an anecdote. So this piece that I read in “Scientific American” last night that I was telling you guys about, it was a very long piece, so it began with a very long anecdote about a particular child and talking about him. I think it was probably about five pages… or not five pages, sorry, five paragraphs was the anecdote that began that piece.

And then they talked, again, just as in this humorous look at a trend piece that we saw in the “New Yorker”, they expanded on how it’s not just this child, it’s not just this business, you know, it’s not just this airline committing these obnoxious customer service foibles. It’s happening in a lot of places. And then they move into the data and then another quote about [inaudible] context, if you can’t get a quote, but the origin of the trend. And then, that this and this and this and this list-like thing where you expand on the different examples but relatively quickly. And then, touching on the broader significance of the trend.

So this is a kind of six-point formula for what we typically see in a trend piece. But what I wanted to point out, because I don’t wanna guys to go out into the wild after this and see things and say, “That’s a trend piece but it doesn’t look like what Gabi told me,” is that, similar to what I said in the newsletter and the blog post preceding today’s call, trends show up as a time tag, as a sort of mechanism for explaining why this piece is important in really a lot of pieces and a lot of different types of pieces, especially in the front of book of different magazines.

So this is a little tiny but you don’t need to read it and we can flip over to the full version of the other ones if you want. But I’ve also pulled the text out, so they should be bigger. But I’m just showing you a couple quick pieces where a trend is the starting point. So this is from like a January or February magazine and it says, “It’s a Small Plates World.” I think we can all agree that tapas style things, or small plates, are a trend that is so ubiquitous that it’s pretty much been done. Right? So small plates have been around for a while, that’s like a trend that’s established like farm-to-table food, right?

But they’re using this as an entree for a place that’s mingling Japanese and Spanish cuisine with a Michelin-starred chef from San Sebastian, which has the highest Michelin stars per capita, and somebody with a pop-up ramen shop. So they’re taking in ramen and a place that’s super known for its food and adding that to the small plates trend and creating this piece, which is effectively like a business profile or a chef profile. But they’re using that trend as a jumping-off point to get you to look because if they just said, “Here’s a random chef that you’ve never heard of, she’s not a celebrity chef, in Cambridge, Massachusetts where you’re probably not gonna go or maybe aren’t gonna go for another year or two, doing things with Japanese and Spanish food,” you might not really care. Okay?

So here’s another one. So this one I actually pulled because it’s a fake trend piece. So you can’t see it on here, I think it got cut off when I cut the top. But this is a city guide, this is on San Juan Island, Washington, and I believe this is from “Delta Sky” magazine. And the section that it’s in is called Trending. But I wanna read for you, because I know it’s super tiny and hard to read, I wanna read for you what it actually says in here because this just cracked me up because there’s absolutely nothing trending or trendy that they have pegged this piece to.

So they said, “This outdoor enthusiast’s dream is quickly gaining cred as a serious culinary destination.” So they say, “Reachable by passenger ferry or seaplane from Seattle, the most populous of the San Juan Islands has long been a top spot for experiencing marine wildlife. Thanks to an abundance of local bounty, think…” I don’t even know what that is, “Salal berries and bull kelp, artisan chefs now are putting this remote destination on the culinary map. Satellites trek to the ‘Gourmet Archipelago’ for its restaurants, vineyard, brewery, distillery, shellfish farm, and agriculture.”

So the thing is like they’ve explained kind of the why now but like San Juan Island is not a place that is actually trending on a scale for us to just write a trend piece about San Juan Island as a culinary destination. Okay? But they’re just using that as a peg and they’re using the fact that more people are traveling for food. You know, if this piece was longer, they could’ve put a quote in about that, there’s a lot of statistics about that. And they’ve got, you know, the favorite word, “Breweries, distilleries, agriculture,” so they’ve got a lot of trends that they’ve pulled in to make it sound like this place is a place you need to go now. But it couldn’t be written up just as, “San Juan is now on the map like San Sebastian in Spain as a culinary hotspot that’s drawing in global foodies.” They couldn’t write that piece, so they’ve pulled in a bunch of different sort of name-drop trends to get you into this piece. Okay?

So I’ve got one more also city guide trend kind of thing, and I know it’s hard to read. But this is something that… Like that piece we just saw actually a city guide, this one is not called trending. But what this does is it takes a place that is very trendy, so like a name or a neighborhood that you will see come up a lot. So it’s probably gonna be, this is from “Hemispheres,” it’s probably gonna be a city that’s big and it’ll just be the neighborhood where a lot of new things are opening. And they’re tying that into a lot of other bigger trends. So there’s all sorts of different ways that trends are expressed that aren’t exactly trend pieces.

So again, this is the six-point formula specifically for trend pieces, just to remind you. And now, I’m gonna pull up…I’ve got five lined up for you of different lengths, two that are short that we can actually read through together. And then… Or maybe I only have four. I think I had five…two that are short that we can read through together and then a couple others that I can show you how this works in a larger format. Right? So we typically lead with a quote, probably an anecdote if we can, we expand on how this occurs, we move into the data, we talk about the trends origin, we give examples of it in the wild. And then, we talk about the broader significance.

So I can see that this is too small for you guys to read. So I’m gonna pull up the actual text and we’re gonna switch over to that for a second. So this one I believe is bone broth, yep? Okay. So this one is about… How many of you guys have heard of bone broth? Let me know in the chat box while I’m bringing this up. I’ve kind of only had it in Portland and then I saw it in Boston the other day. And I’ve heard about it but I’ve just never really seen it too much in the wild. So I don’t know if this is too much better to read now but I’m gonna read this to you.

So this piece takes bone broth, which is a trend that kind of came from paleo, it’s like an offshoot of paleo if we’re talking trend-wise. And someone who I know is vegetarian says, “Ugh,” and I agree. But this is not talking about bone broth as a trend. This is talking about how bone broth is now being incorporated by bartenders into cocktails. So you can often take a trend, something that you know about, like farm-to-table food or craft breweries… Oh my god, I can’t believe it’s at Costco. But you can take something that you know is a trend and show how it’s infiltrating another area, and ta-da, brand new trend piece. So that’s what this is here, I’m gonna show you that as well with the next one.

So they’ve taken bone broth and they’ve said, “Taking Stock. Bartenders trace trendy bone broth’s boozy backstory.” “Step aside, green juice, bone broth has been embraced as a hip new magic bullet cure-all, a paleo approved sipper that draws on the nose-to-tail philosophy of no waste cooking. As evidence of the trend, dedicated bone broth shops have opened on both coasts, from New York’s Brodo to the Broth Bar in Portland, Oregon. Bartenders too are getting in on the trend.”

“At Midnight Rambler in Dallas, mixologist Chad Solomon serves up a globetrotting spin on the classic Bullshot, the ’50s-era riff on the Bloody Mary, which trades tomato juice for canned broth.” I absolutely agree that it’s gross, Alicia. “His Pho-King Champ combines overproof wheat vodka, oloroso sherry, lime juice, and Vietnamese pho beef broth.” New quote, “‘The idea was to take a look at the classic Bullshot and create a new forward-thinking drink through the lens of Vietnamese pho,’ says Solomon. ‘We started with beef broth, then roast onions and ginger and use star anise, cassia bark, green cardamom, black caramel, and black pepper to aromatize the broth, which is then enhanced with sriracha, hoisin sauce, MSG, and Maggi Seasoning to boost the umami quality.”

“At La’s Pistola, Aaron Melendrez spikes lamb consomme with Glenlivet 15 for the off-menu From The Kitchen With Love. ‘I came to chef with the concept,’ he said, ‘and he thought I was sort of crazy,’ says Melendrez. ‘It took a few days of explaining to get him on board.’” Clearly the chef here agreed with you guys. “‘He then prepared me his best consomme, we paired it, and we knew we had a winner.’” “At Top Chef finalist Brian Voltaggio’s D. C. restaurant Range, broth appears on the cocktail menu in the form of ‘meat ice,’ a frozen pop made with a Bloody Mary inspired consomme that includes roasted bones, meat scraps, San Marzano tomato sauce, herbs, vegetables, bacon, and other smoked meats. Beverage director Dayne Nakamura then slides the pop into Scotch for his Vegan Sacrifice.” “‘Drinkers can stir their drink with the meat pop and slowly enjoy the cocktails, as the ratio of broth to booze switches, or take a bite of the popsicle and chase the drink,’ says Nakamura. ‘Learning what they do in the kitchen on a daily basis is an incredible way to expand the spectrum of knowledge that can be applied behind the bar.’”

Okay. So personal philosophies on bone broth aside… There’s also a recipe after this which I didn’t include which probably would have all sorts of bones and things in it. So let’s look at how the format fits into this, right? So in this case, because the piece is so short and everything always changes when things are short, they didn’t open with the anecdote, they didn’t open with a quote. They cut off that top anecdote or quote and saved that for after. So they started by telling us that bone broth is a trend and now it’s showing up in cocktails. So they essentially switched to that second paragraph. And then they get into the anecdote afterwards, okay? And this is the one about Chad Solomon and then they have his quote.

And they use this quote from him both to explain what’s happening and also to explain the philosophy behind this, which is to create a cocktail that tastes like a dish. And then, they go through the other examples. And it’s super like obvious format here, right? Like one paragraph per person, you know, it’s got the quote from the other guy, and then it ends with that quote of how it expands. Right? So they’re talking about how you can include the popsicle, how you can have it with or stir it in. But then he has this quote that talks about something greater which is, “Learning what they do in the kitchen on a daily basis is an incredible way to expand the spectrum of knowledge that can be applied behind the bar.” So that’s kind of looking forward, like what else from the kitchen are you gonna soon see appearing on your cocktail menu.

So let’s look at this other short one that I’ve got for you guys. This one takes bees, who’s seen bees or like roof-made honey as a trend? That’s a big one. And especially pairing agritourism offerings, like beer and things like that, with honey. During the boot camp, we went to a brewery where they had partnered with a local honey producer to keep… I’m totally blanking on the name but the beehives on-site and then create honey that was specifically under that label. So this one is about how Asheville is becoming the Napa Valley of Honey. That’s their deck, okay? So it’s taking this bee thing that you kind of know is trendy, and also Asheville that was trendy, and putting them together.

“Asheville boasts more craft breweries per capita than any U.S. city. Now North Carolina’s hipster hub is pollinating an even sweeter industry. From the French Broad food co-op, which keeps hives on its rooftop, to the 200 colonies nurtured by fourth-generation Biltmore Estate beekeeper Ed Buchanan, the town has gone honey crazy.” “‘We are Bee City, USA,’ says DJ Ivar Schloz, the owner and head mazer, or meadmaker, at Bee & Bramble, which produces dry honey wine. It’s not just a nickname. With colony collapse disorder decimating the world’s honeybee populations, Asheville has become the first American city to officially ban harmful pesticides. ‘I am gratified by the increased interest in protecting these lovely creatures,’ says Schloz, ‘Without their pollination effects, many of the people alive today would starve.’” That might be a bit of a stretch but it’s a great quote and I’m sure why it’s in here and why the quote is what says it and not the journalists. Because how could you back that up?

“It seems you find honey everywhere here,” continues the article, “It’s mixed into the Mountain Honey body wrap at the Omni Grove Park Inn’s spa, that drizzled on biscuits at Tupelo Honey Cafe, and stirred into cocktails at the bar, Sovereign Remedys.” It’s a great place to go to if you ever go to Asheville. “Katie Button of Nightbell uses local honey in her hush puppies with honey butter, while French Broad Chocolates infuses lavender truffles with Haw Creek wildflower honey.”

“The Asheville Bee Charmer sells more than 50 types from around the world, such as wild carrot flower honey from Italy, Manuka flower honey from Tasmania, and Jameson-infused honey from Scotland. ‘People are usually surprised at how different honeys can taste,’ says co-owner Kim Allen. ‘A blackberry honey from the Northwest, for example, tastes completely different from a local blackberry honey. That’s terroir, as the French would say.’”

“Beer too is getting in on the act. Wicked Weed Brewing makes a Melisseus Honey Lavender Ale and Mompara Honey Ale, while Burial Beer uses Haw Creek honey in its Keeper’s Veil Honey Saison and Reaper Tripel. Last fall saw the opening of Bhramari, a brewery whose signature offering is a black pale ale made with local sourwood honey. The brewery’s namesake? The Hindu goddess of bees.”

So here you’ll see an example of what I was talking about today earlier where they take… They were talking about honey before in terms of, you know, how they are producing it and how it’s being used in food. And then the way they take it sort of to the larger level is that they talk about, you know, how its also incorporated into spa products or how it’s not just their own honey but in Asheville, you can also learn about honeys from all over the world and how honey is different from one place to the next. And then, of course, they started with beer and so they tie it back into the beer.

Okay, so this is, again, an example, like that last one, where the format is a bit flipped because it’s such a short piece that they don’t have that space in the beginning to open with that quote and go into the anecdote. So first, they set the scene. First, they tell you the style, what they’re going to talk to you about. And then they have the guy who tells you why it’s important. And they touch on colony collapse disorder, which is also…I don’t know that you would say it’s trendy but I would say that it’s a scientific thing that has an amazingly widespread recognition, kind of like climate change. But some people still say that it doesn’t exist, I’m sure, in terms of colony collapse disorder.

So in this case, you’ll see that they have a lot, a lot, a lot of examples, where the last piece that we looked at had those three examples in three paragraphs. So that last piece might have been a case where the bone broth and a bartender setting is so new that it was hard to get their hands on a lot of examples, whereas here they obviously have tons. So you’ll see both of these types of pieces, ones where they have very list-style additional, you know, iterations, or ones where they have more of a single business quote explaining what they do approach, like we saw in that last piece.

So let me get the slides back up for you here. So I told you we have a couple longer ones and I cut and pasted them in, so it should be pretty easy to read. But otherwise, I can flip over to them on my browser. So this one here is from “Conde Nast Traveller”. Now I had heard of suitcases with things in them but I haven’t heard of robotic suitcases that you don’t need to push yourself. So this piece specifically speaks to the fact that it’s a trend piece by saying, “Robotic suitcases, The Trend the World Doesn’t Need.” Now I wanted to show you guys this because sometimes trend pieces have a bit of judgment in them. They are framing the trend as something that, like it says here, we might not actually need.

So here they open, again, because this is a very short piece, with a slightly overview style intro which is sort of cutting right to that nut graph style thing of telling the reader what they’re gonna be learning about. So it’s talking about self-driving suitcases and that they were seen all around the Consumer Electronics Show and how each model is slightly different but the idea is that it pulls itself. And so, then they give the anecdote here and they talk about one called the 90Fun Puppy which is, “Segway-style, self-balancing two-wheel roller.” And then, they’ve actually pulled a quote from the “New York Times”, which is quite interesting. And this is not something that you would see if you were writing this for the magazine but this is, like I said, a piece that’s from “Conde Nast Traveller”‘s website.

So then, they go on to say what people thought about this piece. They’re talking about, again, they’re trying to incorporate experts. But because they didn’t quite do the research here, you can see that it’s a little tough. So they have another quote from another article that appeared somewhere else talking about some reviewers having mixed things to say about the rolling suitcases. And then they do that listing other examples. So then they talk about three different companies that are also making self-rolling luggage. And then, the expansion. So, “Buyers should beware of the next wave because ever-changing security requirements have made it so that you often have to take the batteries out of these bags when you get to the airport.” And I saw another piece recently in “Conde Nast Traveler” about people getting totally screwed because they couldn’t take their bags on the plane.

So this is a super short piece here. I mean for online, for print this would be kind of long and that’s why it’s not quite as packed in. I would say this piece is probably around 250 words. And you’ll see that the point about the trend is not as well made as in some of these other pieces that we looked at, and part of that is because this is an online piece. So I’ve got one other piece from, I believe this is also from them, about why transformative travel will be the travel trend of 2017. Now this is a much longer and in-depth piece and you’ll immediately see the difference in the type of reporting.

So they opened by saying, “Experiential travel was the trend of 2016. What’s next?” And then they move right away with this one into… Like we’ve seen in those other pieces, they didn’t open with the anecdote. They move right away into telling you what they’re gonna tell you about. And then they stepped it into that expected, according to that format that we’re looking at, that expected thing of taking it to the expert level and having that expert tell you about what the trend is and what does that mean.

So they explain that there is now a transformational travel collaborative and they have Jake Haupert, who is the founder and president of a company called Evergreen Escapes as well as the Transformational Travel Collaborative, explain, “Today’s culture is device and pace-driven. We’re disconnecting from ourselves, our relationships, nature, and culture. The external pieces of an itinerary don’t reveal the inner journey a trip can inspire.” So he’s setting up the scene for why this trend exists.

Now I know this one is a bit shorter…or sorry, that this text here is a bit smaller. And I’m not gonna read this one in a lot of detail because I’ve already given you a few examples. But this goes into actual scientific research. I mentioned that I had one example for you that does this. So it’s talking about somebody who did a doctoral study on the elements of adventure travel that lead to deeper transformations. And it goes through and it talks about the results of that study and then they have another quote, “We’re at a point where the planet needs a higher consciousness, and transformational travel can give us that. It’s the step beyond authenticity and experiential travel that we need.” So this is that quote when we looked at in the “New Yorker” piece where they said, you know, “Trend spotter, a freelance expert says this thing that sounds really cool,” that’s what this quote is.

And then, it goes on to that listing of other companies where you can see that. “Many travel companies are already seeing this shift occurring.” They talk about GeoEx, which is a big company, they talk about Natural Habitat Adventures. They’re talking to a lot of different companies that do outdoor travel and how they are incorporating transformative travel into their offerings. We’ve got another company that they’re talking to here and then they get into that what’s next. And so, let me call over to the actual piece, so I can read you this.

They’ve got a really great line here where they explain that bigger picture, the kind of takeaway from this piece and why this trend matters to all of us and why the magazine decided to spend all this time writing it. “In our often superficial hyper-connected world, a landscape where the merits of a vacation are measured by Instagram likes rather than actual impact, it’s no wonder that the traveler of 2017 will be looking for a deeper shift that lasts long after the physical journey ends.” Now I promised Lindsey that I would get back to her piece or her question and here we are. I wanna talk really quickly because we’ve got a bit over on how we pitch these pieces.

So her question was, “Do we need to line up…” Sorry. It was Jade’s question, right? Let me find it. Yeah, “Should we line up these expert interviews before we pitch?” Now you never need to line up an interview before a piece of any kind, unless your piece will completely fall apart without that interview. So in some cases, it’s because it’s a profile, or the whole piece is an interview of one person and you simply couldn’t sell it unless you can get that person’s agreement to give you a quote. But if there are different people who could give an opinion on that, you don’t wanna necessarily say, “And I will interview this, this, and that person,” you wanna say, “I will interview people like.”

And the reason for that is that you might interview one of those people and find that they’re horrible and they don’t give good quotes and that you need to get somebody else to use in the piece. And so you don’t want to hem yourself down in terms of who you’re gonna interview but you do need to look up and make sure there are sources available that could comment on this. And when I say, “Sources available,” I don’t mean like that they’re time-wise available, I mean that they’re out there. That’s part of that research that I talked about way back at the top of the call where I said you see the second iteration of something, and then you hit Google and see if it’s a thing.

And so, in the case of that transformational travel piece, you could see that there they were just talking to other people who owned adventure travel companies or experiential travel companies. And that’s what you would do in a case like that. So if I, you know, was writing them theoretical piece I had outlined about these places that do nomadic placements for entrepreneurs, who would I interview? I would see if there’s other companies that I could talk to about that, sure. But I might also talk to somebody in a really major co-working space that’s already around the world, like WeWork or something like that. I could also talk to the people who run Remote Year which is a company that does something sort of similar but sideways. So I could talk to people who are doing related things as well.

So you don’t wanna have your pitch go out without knowing that you have a really solid anecdote, knowing that you have a really solid story from at least one person that illustrates the trend. And so that might be on the About page of one of the companies that you’re looking at. Or it could be the first time that somebody told you about this, the first time that you heard about it, so you know a person that had actually experienced this first hand. But you wanna make sure that you have a story with a compelling narrative that you can include in your piece. Unless it’s one of those super, super tiny short ones. In which case, you don’t need that. Because as you saw, they don’t open windows, right? They just get those in the quotes later on.

So if you’re looking to pitch these in your…and you’re not super sure that you’re really clear on it, I recommend starting with these not at that longer length, like that transformational travel piece that we looked at, but in those shorter iterations. They’re very formulaic, they’re very easy to write up. So don’t pitch one of these unless you’re really solid on it to an editor that doesn’t know you, especially if you haven’t done them before. But they’re very easy to write for travel trade magazines and niche magazines. So if you have an editor that you’re already working with, it’s great to try this out on them to pitch them a trend piece, especially a longer one, as a feature.

Okay, we had a question over here from Beth. Yeah, the future 100. There’s a lot of…if you start looking up travel trends just in Google, you’ll see a lot of people putting out these, you know, “100 travel trends we expect to see in blah, blah, blah.” At the end of the year and in the beginning of the year is when there tends to be a lot of those. And I always peruse those every year.

So thank you guys so much for talking about trend pieces. Next week, we’re talking about business profiles, which I’m really excited about. They’re really like a bread-and-butter piece for travel writers and the answer to questions a lot of people have of, “I’m on this press trip and I have no idea what’s write about.” So we’re gonna talk all about that next week. 

And the sun has finally come out here, I hope it’s nice where you guys are, and have a really great weekend.

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So this, we are gonna start noticing something, that all of these webinars that I’ve been doing on different types of writing structures they build. So I’d love to hear from those of you that are here today which of the past webinars in this series on the Article Nuts and Bolts you guys have caught. So, let me know in the chat box which you guys have attended already. And to remind you guys, the different ones that are available or that we’ve done in the past, or there’s one on the news brief, that was the very first one that we did. There was one on front of book round up pieces, that was one that we did two weeks back, and then the one that we did last week was on trend pieces. So let me know in the chat box which one of those or which ones of those you guys have joined us for. If you caught us live then I’ll probably just recognize you, but some of you have caught them on the recap as well.

So the reason that I asked is that you’re gonna start to now to say that 

I’m actually gonna take the format that we talked about last week for trend pieces which several of you caught. So we’re gonna take that format and I’m gonna show you how almost same format works for these business profiles. And you’re gonna see also and you’ve probably notice in the last of the webinars that we talked about with the news briefs. If you didn’t catch that one, that one was really kind of a fundamental in terms of how short pieces are structured. So, when we talk about roundups, a lot of that was about taking news briefs and making lots of many news briefs in the structure of a roundup, right?

So, I guess that as we talk this week about structure, we’re gonna talk about how the business profile structure reflects, what we talk about with trends. But first, I wanna talk to you about why business profiles, what business profiles, what do we mean about a business profile? Like what does that even translate to in the context of travel writing, okay? And besides that, once we’ve kinda talked about that, we’re gonna look at how business profiles revolve around something that is, should be fundamental in all of your pitches but is the most important in business profiles. It’s really the fundamental building block of your business profiles. And so even though you do need to have it in every single piece, this is one where you can’t get away with not having it in your piece and especially in your pitch.

And then I’ve pulled up like I did last time now that we’re not just talking about short pieces. I’ve pulled up some different examples for you guys in a lot of different lengths. So I’ve pulled several short ones that we can read completely together and then I’ve also pulled some longer examples of business profiles. Because not that I wanna go through these long ones in a lot of detail because it’s hard for everybody to read them on the screen. And obviously, I can’t read you like a 2,500-word piece and have us analyze it all together in an hour and talk about all these basic things. But because I wanna show how what we’re talking about translates on a larger scale. So I’ve got a couple of feature length things or close to feature length things that I’ve pulled as well to kind of show you how these accordion into something longer than the shorter ones.

So, then at the end we’re gonna look at what we’re talking about coming up in this month which we’re finally into about taxes, which I know a lot of you guys are excited about. And it’s like a reminder for me that I issue my taxes as well, which I’m sure is the case for a lot of you. 

Let’s look more at these business profiles. So, how many of you guys when I say business profile I wanna know what is that mean to you guys? Like what do you think of, what type of article does that spring up for you? Because there’s different types of profiles.

I’m gonna look at different types of profiles in a minute, and I don’t wanna kinda give that away before hearing what you guys think but I wanna hear from you. Let me know in the chat box what type of article or what subject matter do you imagine is encapsulated by these business profiles? Because the thing is, I was doing some, obviously I was doing some reading before this call, getting ready for the call, but also I was looking through a number of airline magazines to pick out the articles that we were gonna look at today. And I tried to choose some different magazines this week because I feel like we’ve been using United, American, and Delta in part because those are really good ones. Because they all have pretty solid front of book sections, and a lot of us are familiar with those airlines or the destinations that they go to and the roots that they fly.

But I wanted to look this week at some different magazines to really show you how these appear everywhere and they often appear in ways that we wouldn’t think about especially in the travel context. So, in terms of a business profile, I think Carrie made a good point here about that if often seems like it’s about the people, right? It’s really common that there is something that is a profile of an individual who has a business or who has started a movement, or something like that. And that is a very common type of profile but that’s more of a person profile.

People also call it an individual profile than a business profile. And Elizabeth had a great point here in the type of profile that she’s mentioned. She said profiles will include locations, services, and information of the owners. That’s more of a type of profile that you would see in a visitor’s guide or maybe in a listing kind of setting. But the type of business profiles that we’re talking about, this is why they are kind of like the greatest secret. The type of profiles that we are talking about are taking a place like a hotel or a museum, or a single shop and writing a piece about just that one place that is not what Elizabeth said. It’s not necessarily talking about the services or the background of the business.

What the business profiles that we’re gonna look at and that make up a large, I would say like often at least 40% of the articles in the magazine up to 80%. The profiles that we’re gonna look at that make up this large percentage are a variant of a trend piece in a way. So, one of the reasons that I asked you guys earlier, which webinars in the series you had caught. And I mentioned that this was gonna tie into trend pieces, and that everything keeps building upon itself is because this concept that we talked about last week in terms of trends is very important for these business profiles. So, the way that a business profile differs from something that’s just about a single product or service, or that’s the story of the individual who started the business.

The way that it differs is that it’s really a microcosm of a trend in a lot of ways. And so what I mean by that, when we talk about trends last week, we talk about how a trend is something that is typically somewhat established. Most magazines won’t write about it until it has some legs, until there’s a certain recognition that this thing is happening, like food carts or farm to table, or grass to glass which is like craft distilleries. You know, there’s craft breweries. We talk about a lot of different trends last week and how those tend to appear in print as a trend piece once there is a momentum. But what a business profile does is it essentially takes us people who are more at the tip of the sphere of those trends that we looked at, who are doing something that is different and not being widely done. And profiles that “trend” but in the context of a specific business.

So, don’t worry, we’re gonna look at a lot of examples if that didn’t kind of immediately jump out to you as making sense. But this is kind of the framing for those of you who caught our trend piece breakdown last week. That the business profiles that we are going to look at, the business profiles that as travel writers we can just do tons of, are ones that take a business. And that business can be a lot of things. That business can be a shop, that business can be a service provider, that business can be a hotel, that business can be a tour operator, that business can be a manufacturer, that business can be a fashion designer, that business can be all sorts of things.

But they are essentially doing something that could overtime grow into a trend. It’s the kind of thing that is new and interesting. And if you had enough examples of it, it wouldn’t be a trend. But right now, it’s just this business or just a couple of businesses. So that little tweak in terms of not just explaining what a business is, what they provide, you know, how it got started. But thinking of a business profile as like a proto trend piece is a hook. That is the sticking point for people that keeps them from successfully pitching business profiles which is a shame. Because the thing about business profiles, like I said, is that they make a huge portion of what is appearing in magazines, really a huge portion.

And so if you don’t quite get how to pitch them, you’re cutting yourself off from a lot of the articles that are opportunities for you as a freelancer to pitch in a magazine. But it’s not just that you’re cutting yourself off from those opportunities, it’s that you’re also underutilizing the research that you’re doing on your trips. And in particular, you’re underutilizing it in terms of not taking things that you’ve already heard about. So like interviews that you’ve done, places you’ve visited, things like that and getting the most mileage out of each of those little tidbits of information. So, I mentioned the stat too already. 

And so yeah, so I said you can imagine these business profiles, let me just write this in chat box, as the tip of the sphere of what could be a new trend. And so I’ll just use as an example that one of the longer pieces that I said I had included for you guys, let’s flip over and look at it for a second. One of these longer pieces is actually a feature. And one of these hybrid pieces which happens quite often. And what I mean by hybrid piece is that it’s a trend piece, or sorry, it’s a business profile and a feature, and a little bit of another type of format mixed in. And that format is a quest piece. So if you haven’t heard me talk about quest pieces before, we talked about this a lot more about features. But a quest piece is when an individual in the context usually of a long story sets out to find something.

So, this story that I have queued and we’ll circle back to is called Welcome To The Weird Hotel. As hotels become increasingly “smart,” we travel to Japan to see how the latest in high tech stays compares with a break in a traditional ryokan inn. So this is a story where they are looking at hotels that are very, very high tech, right? So it’s not a trend piece in terms of profiling a trend of super high tech hotels that’s taking over the world or even taking over Japan, but it is profiling a few hotels that are in this movement, so to say. But that movement hasn’t reached a saturation point yet where it would be called a trend. So this writer in a quest format, which means they have a goal that they’re searching for which is to see how they compare to a traditional inn, in terms of having a “Japanese experience.”

This writer is investigating by profiling these different establishments, this proto trend, right? So this thing which is not yet big enough to be a trend. Chelsea had a great comment in here. She said she was reading Sunset Magazine last night and I’d love to hear from you Chelsea later offline if that’s the new version of Sunset or not because we’re waiting for the new one to come out. Sunset recently fired its entire staff for the second time in two years, for those of you that don’t follow magazine news quite as closely as I do. And she said she noticed a lot of their content is business profiles and that’s super true. Sunset is a really good example of that in terms of one of these very major news and publications that you often think of as having a lot of service information.

Service information and magazines, and again service means kind of how-to or advice content. Service and information and magazines often takes the form of business profiles. And this is weird twist that you don’t necessarily think of but is one of the roadblocks that I see a lot of people who come from blogging have when they get into pitching magazines. Because today, a lot of service content or how-to or advice content has moved online. And so to differentiate themselves, one of the things that a lot of magazines have done is to do less of that or do it with a different slant and that often ends up being a business profile.

And so what that means is that, you know, rather than have a piece about, this is not made up, this is actually a thing. Rather than have a piece about how to incorporate alpacas into your wedding because they’re absolutely adorable and very photogenic, and Instagrammy, and well-behaved, and the perfect little, you know, side show to have at your wedding. Rather than have the how-to about that, they’ll have a profile on somebody who is a business that specifically works for around, bringing alpacas to weddings. She works for different alpaca farms in different areas and she works with the venues, you know, to make sure that the alpacas have a place that they can, you know, eat and go to the bathroom and do their alpaca thing that doesn’t mess up the wedding, and all of that stuff. So it’s the service-y angle for the bride of incorporating this and what you need to know and all of that.

But rather than sell it as a “15 Things You Need to Know Before Bringing an Alpaca to Your Wedding,” it’s, you know, profiling Suzy, you know, Smith who does this as a business and all of her tips through this profile piece. Okay? So thanks for mentioning that, Chelsea, that’s a really great point. So, when people come into magazine writing, when they come into travel magazine writing especially from writing online whether it’s more content writing, blogging for yourself, blogging for others. I used to be primarily freelance blogger for other people, you think a lot in terms of these service pieces because you aren’t profiling businesses in the writing that you’re doing because your writing is explicitly kinda for a business. Either your own blog which is a business or a business that you’re writing for or something like that.

But in journalism, this concept of the expert is huge. And I often see people kind of come into story ideas, positioning themself as the expert. Positioning themself as somebody who has experience with this particular topic and they’re going to bring that experience into the service piece or into the feature or whatever it is. And then kind of getting gum-smacked by the interview process, how many interviews they have to do, that they’re expected to do. The level of detail and different things that their editor is expecting.

And that is because when you are writing for magazines, you as the writer are never the expert. But that’s great because it means that you don’t have to learn so much about different things. You don’t have to become that expert. You can rely on other experts. And business profiles, if you’re not familiar yet with that type of relying on other experts, business profiles are a really great way to get into that. As I mentioned in the blog post and the newsletter today, that if you’re not so familiar yet with doing interviews and not just using them for the story at hand, but taking any interview and turning it into 5, 15, 25 other stories by pulling little bits out of it for different markets.

Business profiles are a great way to train yourself to do that while getting paid to produce pieces, okay? So, we talked about how business profiles work in travel writing kind of in the abstract in a couple of different ways. But I just kinda want to summarize again that they appear in different sections. So I’m gonna show you later when we look at the individual pieces. We’re gonna look at some very, very short things that are from both the front and the back of the book of different magazines, and also some departments which are those things that are so still in the front of the book before the features. But they’re getting longer and they tend to fit into a certain rubric structured part of the magazine that appears in the same way every month, and then features.

Business profiles can appear in any of these different magazine sections and that’s part of why they’re so ubiquitous. Because they’re in article format that can accomplish all sorts of things. It can tell an inspiring story, it can tell an interesting story, it can touch on a trend, it can show something new, and it can give service information all well relying on one expert. You don’t have to do so many interviews. So it’s a really great fodder for filling the pages of magazines whether it’s written by a freelancer or by a number of staff. These are things that are quick and easy for members of the magazine staff to do just as well as they’re quick and easy for you guys, okay? So, just to unpack that a little bit further, I said that they can appear on the front, in the departments, in the features, and even in the back of the book.

We haven’t talked so much in our webinars either in this Article Nuts and Bolts series, or more generally about the back of the book which is everything that comes after the features, okay? So I’m gonna write that in the chat box just so people have it. The back of the book, that’s the term, not the beck as my typing previously said. The back of the book is everything after the features. Now, any of you guys that have ever picked up an airline magazine, I’m sure you’re very familiar with a certain type of back of the book filler or back matter is another phrase for things that occur in the back of the book. So another type of back matter is airline information, right? All these roots, you know, movies, what you can get from the drink cart, you know, different news about where the airline is expanding.

Those little maps of how to get to your gate and different terminals. That’s another type of back matter that you see very commonly in airline magazines. But it’s not the only thing and consumer magazines actually tend to have a lot of back matter that comes after the features as well. Some other back matter that you see that doesn’t matter, pardon the pun, but a different type of thing that doesn’t really concern us is that there’s often these types of business listings that I believe Elizabeth mentioned before. Where they talk about, you know, different businesses in a different area or airline magazines often have this, on the plane also has it where they just kinda have these city guides that are pulled straight out of, you know, various stock things where they say like, “Stockholm, here’s what to see in spring.”

Or, you know, like, “Stockholm has this many people as an archipelago. It’s a capital city. It dates back to blah, blah, blah.” That type of back matter, those kind of lifting type things are sometimes written by freelancers. They tend to be written in-house or like in the case of when you find it stolen from existing content. So those also don’t concern us. But the type of back matter that does matter especially for discussion of business profiles right now is the editorial. And it’s a section of the magazine, the whole back of the section that writers often, often overlook, okay? And they overlook it because you kinda forget that there’s other things there. So I encourage you especially after this webinar today on business profiles to start to be really attentive of all of the stuff that’s not junk, you know, that actually matters.

It comes after the features, okay, because it’s very common to notice the back page. There’s often like a kind of cover story like thing where there’s a big photo and then just a little blurb about it that’s really eye-catching on the last page of the magazine. But there’s other things that come before that that are still part of that back matter section and a lot of business profiles factor into that. And especially in airline magazines, this is often where they live. Like they might have a whole section of like 12 business profiles, it’s just all stuffed in the back of the book in that part of the magazine. And this is definitely something that came up with one of the magazines that I’m gonna share with you guys. That I’m pretty sure is the Brussels Airways Magazine that they’ve got big features, they’ve got some short newsy encounter things. And then at the end, there’s just like 12 solid pages of profiles and this is not uncommon at all.

So these are some different places, different parts of the magazines that you would see business profiles in, different ways that they iterate in terms of what they look like in real life. So let’s get more into how they look on the page. So for those of you that weren’t with us last week with the trend piece, I’ve noticed some other people trickling in so I had asked earlier just for those of you who are joining us late. I had asked earlier anybody who has attended one of the past webinars in this series on Article Nuts and Bolts, just let me know now that you’ve joined in the chat box which prior ones in this series that you’ve caught, because they’re starting to really build on one another.

So, for those of you that were here last week for the trend piece, so recognize this and we talk about this a lot. But I wanted to take another look at it and talk about how this trend piece structure translates to business profiles. Because as you may have noticed that I said over here on this other slide, a trend piece is in and of itself a type of profile. It’s a profile of a trend, it’s a profile of something that is happening. So let’s look at this. So they often lead with a quote, preferably an anecdote about the trend out in the world, like an iteration of that trend. You know, whether it’s some…a person who has experienced it or somebody observing it or someone who owns the company that practices that trend.

And then they expand on other instances when that occur to say, “This isn’t just a one off thing, it’s not just this one person, this is happening everywhere.” So once that’s happened and then starts to get into more data to say it’s not even just these three instances. Here is, you know, factual information by authoritative sources that say that this trend is happening. And then once they’ve established this is a thing, they go back into telling you how it became a thing. So, you alternate between kind of the now and the background information, okay? And then they get into more now after they give you the background of the thing. They give you different examples of that trend out in the wild and then they take it to the next step. They explain the broader significance of a trend.

So let’s look at how this works at business profiles, okay. And business profiles, that structure that we looked at before isn’t flipped on its head or changed completely, or anything like that. It just revolves very solidly and singularly about the why. So what that means is that in this last one about trends, you know, we talked about other instances, you know, more features. We talked about the origin. None of this about the whole business matters. We don’t care in these business profiles, about the entire back story of the business. We don’t care about every service that the business offers. We don’t care about statistics, about how many sales the business has on all of these things unless it ties in with the why. So, what is the why?

So if you’ve taken any of our idea or Pitch-A-Palooza programs online or in person, you heard me talk a lot about this. The why is really the key that separates pitches that get, you know, a proper or a second look from pitches that don’t. So the why here is not the time peg. I try not to use that word because I find it’s really confusing to people this whole time peg concept. So forget time pegs, forget anybody ever told you about time pegs, forget about needing a time peg, forget about trying to find a time peg, none of that matters. It’s not that it doesn’t matter because you don’t need to show the editor that this piece needs to be published now. It’s that it’s not about or not always about, or not specifically about or it’s not helpful to think about it as something that just has to be about being timely, okay?

It’s much more about giving the editor and giving her reader a reason that they are interested in this thing. And that’s usually not gonna be an anniversary. It’s not always even gonna be that the thing is new, that’s not really the why. Like I live in New York and I use to live in Boston, and if you compare the size of the cities just by population, you’re looking at at least, you know, 10 to 20 times bigger depending on what population metric that you use. So in Boston when a new restaurant opened in downtown, we cared, we all care. We wanted to know, we wanted to go, you know, there’s gonna be a line. We wanna know if it was worth going. Here, new stuff opens all the time and I have absolutely no clue or care even if it’s opening, you know, just down the block across the street from me, because there’s so many new things opening.

For me to care about something specific that’s opening, that’s new, it has to be pertinent to me, right? It has to be not just that a coffee shop has opened, it has to be that it is a coffee shop that has good coffee, that has good food. That that food is both sweet and savory, that it’s easy to take to go if I’m on the way to the airport. That it’s a nice place to sit, that the baristas aren’t like horrible, annoying people that will ruin my day by being bratty. Like it has to have all these things for me to even care. So this is the level of kind of specificity that we need to think about in terms of this why. So this is why, sorry to reuse the word, but this is the reason that we can write so many different business profiles about just one business for all sorts of different markets.

Because that why should be so narrow, not the business profile, like not the scope of the business or whatever. Just that why should be so narrow that it is a perfect fit, it is a perfect head nut, it is a perfect of course, this is right for my magazine pitch. And so what that means is that you need to not just be clear about what is interesting about the business that you want to pitch, that you wanna profile, but you need to be clear about the audience of the magazine that you are pitching and why this matters to them. So you’re gonna see when we get to the examples that I’ve picked a couple of things from Oryx which I’m blanking at this moment, I’ll have to double-check. But I’m pretty sure is the in-flight magazine for Qatar Airways but I’m gonna check that, or Qatar Airways.

And you’ll notice that one of the profiles that I picked has a very specific Middle Eastern slant to it. Could you pitch something that’s that same topic, that exact same story but not either about a person of Middle Eastern origin or something happened in the Middle East. Probably not because it’s not gonna matter as much to those readers. So this is the reality of why a lot of business profile pitches fail or people aren’t able to conceptualize them in the first place, is that they’re just not clear on the why of the story. And what happens is that, we’ll talk more about how to pitch these and after we look at the examples, okay? But what happen is that editors can spot that from a mile away, that you don’t know what the story is, that you don’t know what’s interesting.

And what’s happening, I’m seeing a lot of pitch rejections that are coming back and being about this. That the writer isn’t clear, that the writer isn’t sure, that they don’t know what their story is about. And if you don’t know what the story is about, there’s no way you can know if it’s interesting to the magazine’s audience or not. And understanding a magazine’s audience is the absolute number one thing that editors ask freelancers to do. Any panel with editors ever, any conference for those writers, the first thing that they said is get to know my magazine. Please do not pitch me things unless you understand my magazine. And people often ask me, “Well, how many articles do I need to read before I pitch?”

None, you don’t need to read tons of articles. You don’t need to read entire issues or multiple issues. You just need to be very clear about who that audience is and you can do it the database, you can do it by just analyzing one article like we do a lot as an exercise. You can do it in a lot of different ways. The enough gauge is only as high as the amount of time it takes you to really understand the people, the person, a single persona and what they care about that reads this magazine. We’ve got a whole week of exercises on that in Idea Fest, just around analyzing one article so that you can really understand how that tells you about the audience of a specific magazine, okay?

So, this why, right, it has to be interesting. It has to be interesting specifically to the audience of that magazine and this is cornerstone of the entire business profile. So you’ll see, I basically took that thing that we looked at before two slides back for trend pieces. This is the structure of trend pieces that we talked all about last week. And I haven’t just, you know, replaced a couple of words but we basically take out everything about the trend and we make it all about the why. So we lead with a quote, preferably an anecdote about the why of this business. The why, is this interesting to you? Why did you care about this? Why does this matter? Then we explain about why this why is important to the reader in a larger context. And sometimes that’s clear right away from the quote and sometimes it’s just clear kind of because it’s like a hot issue.

So somebody that I coached had pitched this incredibly salacious kind of scandalous story, not salacious in a sexual way but just it’s like a huge, huge, huge scandal. And she pitched it somewhere and the editor wrote back and she was like, “Whoa, has this really not been covered?” And so there’s times when your why on its own is just so hot, it’s so clear that you don’t really need either in your pitch or in your piece to explain why it’s important in a larger context. But then you’re gonna move on into either numeric data or examples of how the business implements this why, so you’re gonna show. So first, we show with, you know, a quote or an anecdote, something like that. Then we tell why it’s important and then we move back into showing, showing how the business does this.

And then there’s typically another interjection there that goes from, you know, the microcosm back to the macrocosm, which is either a quote from the business owner or some additional context. And then they move on to more examples and these examples can be from that same company. But sometimes these examples, these example section is examples of other things that other companies are doing that are similar. It could be other things that that company is doing that are also interesting. When we looked in the, I believe it was in the front of book round up section. We had an example that we looked at which was José Andrés, who’s a big chef in D.C. But the piece that we looked at said nothing whatsoever about his restaurants.

It was specifically a piece called “My Favorite Street” where he’s detailing the different things that he likes on the street where a lot of his restaurants are located. So he was telling me about other businesses that he likes. But in the introduction, it was so narrow. They didn’t tell you how many restaurants he had or how famous he is, or what awards he had done. All they talked about was his recent aid work in Puerto Rico. And how many people he had sent down there and how many meals they had served to different people in Puerto Rico. And when they expanded, they only talked about aid work he had done in other places because that why for why he was being featured that month, why you cared about José Andrés’s favorite street in D.C. was all about his aid work with Puerto Rico.

It was all tied into Puerto Rico but, and, you know it was kind of new because it was his aid work with Puerto Rico specifically. But the things that they touched on as the greater examples were his other aid work. So that’s what I mean when I say this stuff gets really, really narrow, okay? And then just at the end there, you touched on the broader significance of that why which can be for that business, where that business is going next. Other ways that that matters to the reader, or you know, the broader significance tying into other examples of this in the industry in terms of where this, you know, tip of the sphere trend or proto trend as I said where that’s going. So let’s start to look at a couple of examples. I think that they’re big enough, at least these short ones that we started with, that these are big enough that you can see them here on the screen like this. But if not, I’ll switch over to the non-slide view or we can zoom in a little bit. So, just take a look at this and then I’ll read it and we’ll analyze it together.

So I saw this and I was like, “Oh, great. I saw it in the table of contents and I thought this is a great little profile.” And you’ll notice, this is a bit more a product profile. And I told you we were gonna talk about business profiles, it differentiates from profiles of people and profiles of product. And so I wanted to show you a couple different examples and how they’re all a bit similar even though we’re mainly talking about business profiles today. So this is specifically a product profile and this is, like I said, from Brussels Airways which in the back of the magazine just has a ton and ton and ton of profiles.

And when I saw this I just laughed so hard because it is something, an environmentally-friendly sunscreen that I have seen a couple other places and I found completely didn’t work. And when my husband and I were on our five-year anniversary trip in Greece, we got sunburned so badly we couldn’t go back, we couldn’t go outside again during our trip for like three or four days. Because this environmentally-friendly sunscreen did not work at all even though we had reapplied it several times. So not the one that’s been referenced here in the piece that we’re all looking at today but this other one that we had tried. So, I bet you that this one is doing something quite different than your average, you know, Aveda or wherever you see of sunscreen that is, you know, completely eco smart.

So here’s what the piece says. Slip slap smart. London scientists believe seaweed could form the basis of the first environmentally-friendly sunscreen. The importance of sunscreen isn’t going to diminish anytime soon, yet its molecules have been detected in fish and dolphins, suggesting it’s damaging our marine and coral life. So what they’re saying is a totally different take which is really interesting, that you and I, we’re all using sunscreen when we go on vacation and then we’re going swimming, right? And that that sunscreen is getting in the water and negatively affecting all of those marine animals that we’re there to see in the first place. So that’s the why. It’s very cool, it’s very different.

And the readers of this magazine would be interested in that why, okay? So it’s why scientists at King’s College London are working to develop a new, environmentally-friendly version made from seaweed extract. Having observed organisms living in sunny, shallow water, the team extracted a substance called 2 from seaweed and tested on human skin cells. They found the antioxidant absorbs harmful rays from the sun and can protect skin against potentially carcinogenic damage, just as man-made sunscreen does. “Products with nature’s sunscreen may encourage greater use because there’s a growing public demand for natural products,” says Dr. Karl Lawrence from St. John’s Institute of Dermatology at King’s College, who is working on the natural sunscreen.

Seaweed-derived sunscreens in tune with nature could be beneficial for both human health and marine life. So, like I said, this is super tiny in a product profile but I wanted to use it to start so we can look at the structure because it’s very nice and short. So, lead with a quote, preferably an anecdote about the why of this business. Something that we noticed last week when we’re talking about trends is that often when the piece is really short, they issue that quote and they just get right into this first part which is telling you what the why is, and explaining why it’s important in a larger context. So this does that very fairly, so they tell you that environmentally sunscreen, environmentally-friendly sunscreen through the environment, not just to you is important because the sunscreen we’re using now is damaging our marine and coral life.

And that scientists are working to develop a new one, so we know the what and the why. And now, we are getting into the how, as in like what they’re doing and how they’re doing it which is what we look at here. I don’t know how to make you see where I move my mouse over but this is the moving into data and examples of how the business implements, right? So they’re telling you that King’s College London is working on it. They’re saying how they got the idea, what they did, they extracted this specific substance. They tested it and what they found. Okay? So that’s moving through how they implemented it and the quote or context.

And then we get, or sorry, then we get into this quote. And the quote is accomplishing several of these tasks as well and you’ll see this is a very short piece. It’s about maybe 125 words so I’ll dive all in this very quickly and we’ll gonna look at this in some longer settings as well. So the quote explains the impact of what they’ve done and then it takes it larger, right? So they’re saying that their research finding this might not only be good for the environment but it might also be good for industry because there’s a growing demand for this. So it’s really a win-win-win for everyone. It’s a win for the environment, for businesses, and for users, okay? So let’s look at the next one.

So this one is, I’m pretty sure this one is also from Brussels Airways, yep, because we see that same thing in the bottom. So this is also from the Brussels Airways section and I see this one is a little bit harder to read here on the screen. So let me flip over to the PDF view so that we can see it there, but I got to find that one. Let’s see. Oh, got it, I believe. Yep, okay, great. Okay, let me flip over to that one for you. And like I’ve said, they’ve just got tons and tons of these back here. They just go on for pages and this section is called Business Digests. And it says it’s innovators and news from around the globe. So this is a ski one we’re gonna look at right now. There’s another one on the convenience store.

Here’s that sunscreen one that we looked at before. And then they specifically have one on Africa as well that they go into. So, like I said, Brussels Airways is a great source for these. So, okay, so let’s look at the ski one that I have pulled up for you guys. Okay, so it begins. It was a search for the perfect pair of skis and failure to locate them that made skilled carpenter, architect, and ski nut Florian Kohlbecker start designing and making his own. It wasn’t until 2006, when the German’s architecture firm, Kohlbecker Black Forest Architects, started designing a ski resort and jump in Sochi, way ahead of the 2014 Winter Olympics, that Kohlbecker got a proper taste of the ski industry and decided he wanted in.

So in 2008, he founded Black Forest Skis, a company that combines traditional technology with cutting, or traditional design with cutting-edge technology and he hasn’t looked back since. So what have they done here? So, I’m not able to flip back and forth between the different slides for you now, so I’m gonna kinda just pull them up on my own on this side so I can walk through these with you. So as we talked about, they are starting with an anecdote or a quote. And in this case it’s an anecdote. It’s that this guy, Florian Kohlbecker, himself was looking for the perfect pair of skis and couldn’t find them so he made his own. And then it goes on, right, that he has his own architecture firm and they were already getting into building things in Sochi for the Olympics when he decided that he wanted to switch gears entirely from architecture into building these skis not just for himself but for other people.

So the why here is that people who want to find the perfect pair of skis previously had no way to do it. They might have even tried to make it on their own but now they have an outlet. Now, if you want the perfect pair of skis, you too can get them from Black Forest Skis. So, then we’ll go on, and the article goes on to expand on other instances and talk about how the company does exactly this. So let’s look at that. So, based in Gaggenau, Kohlbecker’s German hometown, a few hours west of Nuremberg, the pieces all designed by the architect are made from 100% white ash wood due to its durability, and individually handcrafted to ensure “that every pair is one of a kind.”

Construction starts in workshops in the Czech Republic, before the skis are returned to the Black Forest Ski office to be oiled, bound, mounted, engraved, and personally checked by Kohlbecker. The whole cycle takes up to four months to complete, with the skis retailing at around €800 per pair. “We use only the best materials, so the best stainless steel for the edges, the best carbon and glass fiber for the top and base,” he says. It’s only possible to work this way when you have a small production system. So he’s moved right in that quote like I talked about. So this whole portion in the middle here, hopefully you can see me moving my mouse over the screen, is going through exactly everything that we were talking about in terms of the format.

Is that they move into the specific data in details, and example of how this business implements this thing. So the why here is that you are getting a handcrafted, perfect fit ski, right, that’s the why. There’s now an option for you to get a ski that’s designed specifically for you. So when they talk about the detail of their process here, everything relates back to it. Everything relates back to how every pair is one, you know, one of a kind. They tell you specifically the steps to show you the work that is going into making the ski just for you. That it takes up to four months because it’s so specific, because it’s so individualized, and they show that not only are you getting the best thing because it’s designed specifically for you, but they’re also using the best materials. And that’s where they incorporate a quote which is I had in the format that we walked through earlier, that’s where it typically goes in.

So then they move on to the more examples, right, and end with touching on the broader significance of the why, so let’s look at that. Indeed it’s bespoke business, with Kohlbecker assembling just 125 pairs of commercial skis per year. The rest of his business comes from private requests, such as professional skiers wanting a custom-designed product they deem to be better than high street ski brands. “It’s all about craftsmanship rather than commerce.” Kohlbecker maintains, adding that he enjoys spending time with his clients to work out what exactly they want, and is happy to cater to their wildest whims. “Mountaineering has become a lifestyle, and the idea of having perfect material for your hobby, combined with the beauty of nature, makes it very appealing.”

This is in broader significance, right? It’s, you know, it’s following that format perfectly and I really, really love this one. And if you wanna check it out like I said, this comes from the B Inspired magazine and it’s from the February 2018 issue. And this, I’ll tell you what page it is also. This is just the picture perfect example of this format that we’ve been talking about. Let get the page for you. Oh, it’s the first one in this business digest section and it’s page 74 of the PDF. So this is just the picture perfect example of this from the placement of the quotes to, you know, the quote about the broader significance, right? Like this is so great. You know, we’re talking about how now you can get the ski that’s crafted exactly just for you.

But he makes it bigger, the writer takes it to that next level by saying that mountaineering is a lifestyle. And the idea of having that perfect material with the beauty of nature just takes it to the next level, right? And that quote takes the piece to the next level. So this is just such a great example of this format. I was really excited to find…

I’m gonna take a look at this question from Lisa that came in. So Lisa asked, “I feel like every trend out there is something that’s been going on a while, and I missed its entry into the world. How do you stay on top of those things? How do you know? Like how would you know about this guy who makes these unique skis?” So for Lisa’s question, I would definitely recommend listening to the webinar about trend pieces that we did last week, because I talked a lot about both how to find these trends and where to read about them, as well as, you know, the fact that they are often things that have been going on in the world for a while.

But I wanna talk about what she said right here about how would you know about the guy that makes these unique skis, right? So, you don’t know about this guy but you know about the person who makes soaps using goat milk from their goats, that they also use for wool and makes these cool covers that they put on the soap. It allow you to essentially have a loofah with the built-in soap because you met that person on a press trip. And you are walking through the store where they sell their wool and you saw these things and you asked about them, and then you found out about this cool product. And then you can write a profile about that product. So, you won’t know about this guy with the skis, but Lisa is in Kentucky and she travels in the south a lot.

And she has a Masters in European history. You’ll know about things that you read about in your research in Europe or that you found going around your town or other places nearby. You’ll know about the ones near you. And so what happens is that you don’t need to know about the same ones that editors sitting in their glass towers in New York know about because they already know about those. You need to know about this guy who sells very, very few skis and is based in this little place outside of Nuremberg. You need to know about the people like that that editors would never come in contact with. And then you need to know how to take what they’re doing and turn it into an article and that’s all about focusing on this why.

And that why is all about what is unique about what they’re doing and a business can be doing several different unique things. So we visited this alpaca farm when we were on…when we were doing the freelance boot camp and every time we visit a place like that, I always just see so many different things that they’re doing that could be different profiles for different markets. And so I wanna use this one as an example. So that soap thing that I mentioned, that’s something that they had done, okay? So that was just something that we noticed in their store that somebody asked some questions about which right there, that can be a product profile, okay, for, you know, a magazine for a beauty or family, or any sort of different stuff like that.

But then the fact that they had this shop that was so beautiful, it looked like it should be in Soho or something, it was so well curated, it had really amazing products. That’s something that you could do a business profile on for all sorts of settings. About how they are able to attract a different type of customer to something that’s essentially a farm visit and a farm stand that you usually think of being very rustic by having this store. And you would include quotes from them about how they source different things, you know, how they got that idea, what type of customers they get, things like that. But in the meantime, that’s just, you know, some articles that you could do about what you saw in the store, right?

There’s all sorts of other profiles that you could do on about what we learned when we were up there at the farm itself. So, for instance, they have this alpacas that they use for wool but they also show them, they take them to a lot of contests. And this is something that you could do as a profile for a business magazine about how, even if it feels like take, investing your time and resources as a brand new business. This business I think is barely even five years old in getting very big awards. Even if that feels like it’s sideways to the fundamental marketing that you need to be doing as a new business, it can pay off hugely. So that’s the message, that’s the why but you’re using this alpaca farm as a profile to show that. So that’s just one of the, you know, or three of the different types of profiles that we can get out of that. But I wanted to get to the other slides, I don’t want to take too long on that.

Jade asked a question, is there a general rule for how close to an airport city these businesses need to be? That’s a great question. There’s no rule, it’s different for every section. It’s not even just different for every magazine. I’ve had a bunch of people who are pitching the very sweet editor who I encourage you to all pitch, she’s really lovely. It’s called Cara or Cara, the magazine for Aer Lingus. She is really, really love and gets back to everybody. And so I’ve gotten a bunch of information about this…for her magazine specifically so that’s why I’m using her to use as an example for this question that Jade had asked. So she has, most of her sections need to be not only about a city that the magazine, the airline, in this case Aer Lingus flies to.

But they need to be about something that literally Aer Lingus flies to on the planes that Aer Lingus owns. So not that Aer Lingus is a coach or a partner, so flights that to you would look like Aer Lingus flies to. So other magazines are more lenient that they also cover places that their partner airlines fly to on a coach or a flight that you can purchase through United or Scandinavian Airlines, or something like that, but Aer Lingus isn’t. And there’s a couple sections where they can cover cities that they don’t fly to directly. But other magazines like this one that we just looked at about Brussels Airways, I doubt Brussels Airways fly to Gaggenau. But the fact that they say that it’s a few hours west of Nuremberg makes me think that they probably fly to Nuremberg.

But with a business profile, it’s a little different because if you can buy that thing or you can learn from that business or hear about that business in other ways, like online or something like that, it’s less important for the editor that is accessible to all of her readers. So there isn’t a hard and fast rule, it’s very different for every magazine. But there’s more leeway with a business profile than a city guide is kind of the moral of that story. Okay, so since we’re already overtime I wanna…and we had this little interruption. I just wanna get back to looking for you guys at how this plays out with a couple different types of magazines. So, and this is from Oryx which is that Qatar Airways magazine that I had mentioned.

And this is something where it is a sort of individual profile, it’s a little bit about her business. And so I wanted to show you how this is different when it’s an individual but talking about the individual’s business. So, it’s says Hope In A Bottle. When Aviselle Diaz’s childhood dream to study Arabic in the Middle East began to drift out of reach, she put a clever idea into action. Aviselle Diaz is proof that with a little determination dreams come true. The 20-year old from Miami, U.S.A., first fell in love with Arabic culture at school and made it her mission to study in the Middle East. “I read books and watched film, and my curiosity grew,” she says. A documentary about the late King Hussein of Jordan introduced her to King’s Academy, a school based in Madaba, the city of mosaics, in Jordan. “I knew it was exactly where I wanted to be.”

The one problem however, “My parents supported my dreams but couldn’t afford the tuition fees.” Even when the institution reduced its fees, her goal remained out of reach. Diaz contacted hundreds of large companies worldwide asking for financial support but nobody offered their help. “It was frustrating,” she says, “No one seemed to understand my passion to learn about Arabic culture.” Then came her light bulb moment. She’d throw 100 glass bottles hand-painted with a Madaba-inspired mosaic design into the Atlantic Ocean with a message inside asking for help. “I felt like I was stranded on a desert island and my dreams needed rescuing,” she said.

Her story was picked up by Miami Herald, and both, an anonymous individual in Jordan and Qatar Foundation International, a global body dedicated to Arabic language and culture, offered to fund her. “They were moved by my determination,” she said. “I was overjoyed.” One of her bottles is now on permanent display at King’s Academy, “as a reminder that dreams come true,” says Diaz, who is now studying in Georgetown University in the U.S. and has just completed a semester in Doha. “I’m eternally grateful for the generosity of the Qatari people. They made my dream come true.” So, this is one of these things where it is a profile and it is about something that, you know, in this case, she’s young and she’s trying to go to school, right? So her business is education.

So, this is kind of like a sideways thing and I already mentioned that this is an example of how an individual profile in that business kinda thing interplay. Where you’re talking about somebody’s life work in an individual profile and those two things kind of combine. And so you’ll see that when it’s more about the person or the founder that’s at the center of this business or life’s work as it were, that there’s A, a lot more quotes. And B, there’s a lot more narrative which happens very naturally because you’re telling to lead up the story of how the person accomplished something. But you’ll still see that it starts, you know, with the why here to us might not be so obvious, right?

But this is something that’s very fundamental for a Middle Eastern leadership that people from the U.S. so desperately wanna learn about Arabic culture that they’re doing these crazy things. That’s the why here, that her dream to learn about Arabic culture was so great. Okay, so that’s the why. And you see it, you know, kind of spelled out and then we’ve got that quote from her. And then we go into that, you know, step by step how does it happen? How did she do it? And of course right at the end of that, we have that quote that, you know, always ends up in that spot. “I felt like I was stranded on a desert island and my dreams needed rescuing.” Then we have the bigger picture, what are the next steps? How does to expand past just her?

Her story was picked up and talked to the people who funded her, and then it goes on to that bigger picture. Which is that what seemed to her, you know, as an individual mission now is on display at King’s Academy which is not even where she went, right? It’s a place in Jordan then she went to school in Doha, and now she’s at Georgetown. But her dream is continuing to inspire others because it’s on display in the King’s Academy. So that’s where that steps out into something greater. So, I mentioned that we have…we talked last week about trend pieces. There’s three kind of different types of profiles. There’s the product, the business, and the individual, and this is kind of how they all play out.

I wanted to show you a short example of each of them. But this next one and I’m gonna kinda show it to you but we’re not gonna go too much into it is a, I call it short-ish. This is, I’ve got three slides or sorry, this is a short one that were just not gonna look at. Oh, no, no, no, sorry. This is the beginning, okay. So this one I’ve got three slides which is a short-ish profile. Okay, this is of an aquarium which is in Gran Canaria. Okay, and I was right it’s these three, not the prior one. So this is an aquarium in Gran Canaria, and as you’ll see, this is probably gonna be more like a thousand words this piece and there’s a lot of images that I cut out so that we could kind of see it here on the screen. But this is really a straight business profile and it’s one single attraction, okay, so it’s one aquarium.

And like I said, it’s not just a knock that something is new. You often go to things that are new and then say, “I still don’t know what’s right about this just because it’s new,” right? You need that why also. So, here, what’s the angle on this or what’s the why? She meets snoring sharks and wayward shellfish, so the why here is that this new aquarium through their different new conservation efforts is shaking up, it’s changing the perception people have of how animals live and how you can visit them in a museum. So the very first line is the scene unfolds as though in slow motion. So we’re starting with that very typical anecdote here, right? And then we’ve got this quote which is from her, “Does this kind of thing happen a lot?” she asks.

So this anecdote that’s happening is something that plays right into that why. It plays into things that she doesn’t expect to happen in a museum. Okay? And then the museum’s curator arches an eyebrow in response. Okay. She then goes into these details, the details about the size of the aquarium, what they’ve changed, how conservation became the top of the agenda. She’s showing you the how, okay? And then there it is, just there’s always is that quote. This quote is from the vice president of the company that founded it and he’s talking about how they’ve changed it and why they’ve changed it into this interesting conservation angle. And then it goes back into those details.

Before we can save the rest of the ocean, however, we need to return the runaway safely to his digs. So it goes into more details about how they’re interacting with this particular fish, then it start to talk about a crocodile. Then she said around another bend, she’s seen the world’s biggest curved aquarium window. So she’s got three different things, things always come in threes, right? Three different examples of other animals that she’s seeing, and then we’re gonna start going out. We’re gonna start going out into the larger implications. It’s all well and good gawping but I want to know what it takes to realize an aquarium of the scale. How do all the different species alive on the island and how do they get on, right?

So now she’s going on a bigger level and she talks about that, about how they source and choose the fish. And then at the end, we get that bigger picture. “As I head for the exit, I pass my sideways-walking friend off on his constitutional again, clad in his snazziest shell suit. If he carries on like this, he might just pull a mussel.” Bad pun, right? But this is to show you that, you know, the whole point of this piece is that museums like this, or not museums rather, aquariums like this make you rethink what the lives of marine animals are like. And here, she’s gone full circle, right? She’s a completely personified, this crowd, and makes you the reader now imagine all of the animals, all of the marine life that you’re seeing in your aquariums as people, as people that you’re seeing walking down the street.

So this is a piece from easyJet Magazine if you’re interested in looking it up later, again from the February issue. So, we had two really classic business profiles that I looked at and we already took a sneak peek at this piece, so I don’t wanna tell you about it too much. But it’s something that you can also check out, this is also from the February easyJet issue which is available online. And I’ll grab that link for you if you’re interested in looking this up later. So this other one, this Welcome To The Hotel Weird. This is one of those hybrids that I was telling you about which is a feature that has a quest narrative format. And that other one that I just showed you, that also had a bit of a quest approach but the format became a business profile, right?

So this next one with the weird Japanese hotels, like I said this is from easyJet and I’m gonna pop that in the box for you. You can find it here if you wanna read the whole piece. So, this is one where they’re really profiling this tip of the sphere thing, they’re profiling this high tech hotel but they’re doing it in the guys of a writer being on a quest. And the point, the why is if you’re going to Japan, where would you rather stay? Would you rather stay in a high tech hotel or a traditional ryokan. And she’s figuring that out for you, that’s the why of this piece. And you can check out that full feature there in easyJet if you’re interested in looking at that. So let’s just look quickly at the pitching process of these pieces.

So in case it wasn’t clear, I’ll say it one more time, it’s all about the why. You can literally send a one-sentence pitch about these businesses. You know, as long as you have a why that pops, and what I mean by pops is the why that immediately goes ding, ding, ding, ding, ding to that editor that this is exactly something that her audience would be interested in. So what that means is that as you’re out, as you’re listening, as you’re cruising the internet, you know, whatever way you’re pulling in information, that you wanna be on the lookout not just for places, not for things, not for history, before those fascinating little sentences. Because those are the quotes that go in that piece and your pitch, and those are the linch pins of these business profiles.

It’s not about the business. You can’t write about the business unless they’re doing something that’s fascinating to the audience of a specific magazine. Well, what that means is it’s also how you take a place that’s been around forever like the Alcatraz Museum. In a recent event somebody asked me they found a feature on Alcatraz and they’re like, “I just don’t understand why this person got to write this whole feature on Alcatraz, it’s been around forever. Why did they get to write this? Like why is it here?” And this is why, because they’ve pinpointed something that’s just so uniquely fascinating to the readers of that magazine. So Jade asked the question which we’ve touched on in a couple of past webinars as well.

Do you need to reach out to business owners to interview before pitching? No. If you’re writing a piece where you could be interviewing a lot of different people, you don’t need to interview the owner. You can interview somebody who works there, a customer, a lot of different things. You don’t need to secure that interview before your piece and it’s usually better if you wanna do a profile to get the assignment and then contact the business once you have the assignment even if it’s something big. I’ve done a lot of pieces about casinos. Casinos really are accustomed to thinking that every bit of press is bad press and it’s really hard to get them on the phone. But when you have a story, you can always, always get people.

So thank you guys so much for bearing with me. I know we had that little interruption in between and we went a little long, but we covered a lot of different types of articles that you guys will be seeing in magazines and hopefully soon if you’re not already writing in magazines.

So I hope you guys got a lot out of this. So have a really great weekend you guys and I’ll see you soon.

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Hey, guys. So today we’re going to be talking about creating your plan for the year ahead. So if you’re just joining us, make sure you grab that worksheet.

Today we are gonna get really focused on our activity because we’ve spent a lot of weeks doing the groundwork for this moment, right? We’ve talked about why people get stuck specifically in travel writing and freelance travel writing. We’ve talked about all the different road blocks that can come up. We’ve talked about how to pull together the numbers and the data points from your past year. And we’ve talked about how to look through that information and put together a list for your self of what strengths you have going into the year ahead, as well as what you need to look out for. We’ve talked about how to think consciously and holistically about what you have going on in your life and what needs you really have from your freelance writing to set a course for yourself for the year ahead. And now we’re into the actual task bit of it.

So a few of the things that we’re gonna do today, like I said, we’re gonna be really focused on the exercise. And I want to get through as many folks as we can. So I actually changed the schedule around a bit.

Originally, I had one that I had done a few years ago when I was just straight freelance writing. And I walked through how I put it together and then talked about what didn’t work out. And we can totally talk about that as well, but as I mentioned, I want to be able to get through as many of you guys live because I think seeing me go through it with those of you that are in these different circumstances, which in many ways touch on pieces of each of your freelance lives is really the best way to see it.

And I’ve actually got a blog post that I’m working on about this, but it’s really not impossible, but it can be hard to learn just from somebody telling you the right way to do something. By the way, I see we’ve got some new folks joining us. If you’re just joining, make sure to download the file that we’re gonna be using today. And if you can, somebody printed it. That’s a great thing to do. Otherwise, just recreate it for yourself on paper or you can do it in PowerPoint, as I did.

So as I was saying, it can be really hard to learn the best way to do something just by hearing it. You may have heard in the past this idea of learn it, do it, teach it, which is used in medical school quite a bit. And you might see this, if you watch “Grey’s Anatomy” or some shows like this, but we really learn best by doing, of course, but does it really mean that we need to make all of the possible mistakes to find the best path? No, but when somebody just tells you the right way to do it, you’re not always gonna do it right the first time around. I can tell you until I’m blue in the face that if you want to get more work, you need to send pitches.

It’s not just gonna come to you, but that doesn’t mean that you guys are all gonna run out on Tuesday, January 2, and send 50 pitches that week. So one of the best ways that I’ve seen, besides me just telling you and besides you doing it yourself, is to see what other people do and to see how things affect other people. So that’s one of the reasons that I’ve chosen a specific range of folks to workshop their…your plans today. And then we’ll do whichever ones after that, that we have time for. So we’re gonna walk through the process.

I’ve got three that I’ve put together that we’re gonna work on. And I specifically am not doing the slides in the slide viewer this week. I’m doing it so I’m screen sharing with you because I’m gonna be typing things in as we go along. And part of the reason that I wanted you guys to have that sheet is so that you can see the January, February, and the setup on the side there because I know that the text is gonna get a little bit small as we go into those slides.

So like I said, I’ve got three queued up. And we’re gonna do more as time allows, but first let’s talk about what we’re doing. 

So first and foremost, because this is really important for what we’re doing right now, how do you guys feel… And tell me this in the chat box. This is a chime-in situation. At this moment today on December 21st with, you know, 10 days left in 2017, how are you feeling about the prospect of 2018? How are you feeling about the fact that January is coming? You know, people keep using the “Game of Thrones” quote, “Winter is coming,” but right now, I feel like this concept of January coming is freaking a lot of people out. I had one coaching call today where the person was like so gung-ho about working for the next couple weeks to get so ready on January 2nd to hit the ground running, but I have had other calls where folks were just like literally the word used was an aversion to planning her year.

And this is totally not just okay, but important to take note of, how you feel going into the year ahead because what we’re doing today and what we’re gonna talk about is setting out that plan. And whether you feel an aversion to planning like this person that I had mentioned or you just are feeling really not ready for the year ahead, that tenor of how you approach, obviously, this process that we’re gonna do today and this call. And if you didn’t feel like talking about it today, you just catch the replay, of course, but the feelings that you have going into it are really important to keep in mind because sometimes they’re temporary, but sometimes they’re larger.

We’ve got a couple people chiming in, but I’d love to hear from more of you about how you’re feeling right now so I can get a sense of the temperature in the room, so to say, but it’s really important to keep this in mind because sometimes those feelings… And we talked about this all the way back in the first webinar in this series, sometimes those feelings are belaying a very important thing going on underneath. The very first thing that we’re gonna look at as we go through and start to set out your year ahead in a more mapping oriented way is gonna be those things that are already there, those, you know, rocks in the stream that we just can’t get around, that we need to know that we can go through them. And we need to make sure that we are working around them consciously. We need to know about those things. And sometimes those things are just that you are burnt out. This is gonna be the case with actually several of the examples that I have. And we all get burnt out for different reasons. And so if you just feel kind of vaguely burnt out right now, let’s look at the things.

We’ve got a lot of positivity. Awesome. Like I said, if you weren’t interested in talking about this right now, you’ll probably just wait for the replay. I know the elections were a big thing for a lot of folks. And it was interesting because, obviously, the elections took place in November, but, you know, I think the feeling was different in January. And I think the feeling’s gonna be different this January, after the tax bill is passed, which even a lot of Republicans I know are not very excited about.

And for those of you who aren’t in America, maybe you have your own opinions about a depression about the American system, as I know many folks do, or maybe you just don’t care, but I went to a writing conference in January. And I swear to God, every single session, all people could talk about was how the elections had impacted their creativity. And while it’s certainly important to acknowledge, like I said, feeling overwhelmed or feeling burnt out, it’s also important to pinpoint the cause of that because when I was at this conference, I really felt like a lot of people were using this as a crutch.

They weren’t necessarily people that would have a high production. A lot of these were essayists and novelists and things like this. They weren’t necessarily people that would be having a high production right now anyway. 

And they were almost using this as an excuse whereas it might be more that the issue is that rather than a malaise that was affecting their ability to be creative, they were actually spending more time on social media and more time checking the news or generally doing other things that weren’t working. And that was what was actually affecting their production, but in terms of being burnt out, as I said, you’ll see in several of these examples that we’re gonna look at today, you’re gonna see a couple different things that can contribute to being burnt out.

And when I say things, I mean, obviously, life experiences, life circumstances, but also things going on in your freelancing and your freelance business. And the thing here is to notice when they are things that you can do something about and when they are things that you can’t. For instance, I am so stressed out right now in going into the end of the year that I could throw up, but I know that it’s because I’m leaving for India on Saturday. And every time I go to India, I get sick. I throw my back out. We have our own apartment. It’s not like I’m staying in a super Third World situation. It just seems like everything always happens. So I know that I am stressed out about this unknown, this thing that I can’t put my finger on. Something legitimately might happen every time I go. I could get malaria. You never know. And so there’s something that is making me nervous about getting a good start to the year, which it’s actually there.

All of these things are a possibility, but sometimes people are just stressed out by the fact that time has passed. And so as we go into this process, make sure that you take a minute to notice, to say, “January 1st is in less than two weeks,” to yourself and see how that makes you feel. And make sure that you can separate that or incorporate it into the plan that we’re making so that we can make sure that your plan is gonna be one that takes into account those fears or that excitement because don’t forget, excitement has the same issue. Excitement, just like fear, is also fleeting and can also be connected to different things.

You might be excited right now because you just love Christmas music. And two and a half months of Christmas music is just not enough for you or you might be excited right now because you finally started getting your pitches out, whether they are letters of introduction to trade magazines, pitches to print magazines, or pitches to companies. You might just be on this huge high right now of getting your first responses to pitches. Whatever those feelings are, make sure that you, you know, take a moment and mentally catalog them as we go into this.

So I’m just gonna take one second to go through this, to go through what you guys said. Yeah, I know it can be really overwhelming, if you’re trying to pull a lot of things together. Yeah, and Ingrid’s actually one of the ones we’re gonna be sharing today. She’s got some great notes on that. Great. Great. So for those of you… A quick survey in the chat box. How many of you have either caught with me last week… I recognize some of the names, but some names are new. How many of you have caught last week the webinar with me or in the replay? Let me know here in the chat box, because I’ve got for those of you who didn’t catch the webinar last week, I’ve got a little important bit of last week’s webinar that I wanted to make sure those of you who didn’t get it, get a chance to engage with.

So again, let me know if you haven’t already, if you caught the webinar last week, which was the one on getting clarity on the year ahead. Oops. And these words that I’m putting in the chat box now, if you did not already, if you didn’t catch last week’s webinar or you didn’t already do this exercise, the words that I’ve put in the chat box, these are meant to help you pick some guiding principles. You can think of them as principles that guide your decision making.

You can think of them as themes for the year. You can think of them as, you know, reactions to things that didn’t go well last year that you want to work on, whatever they are, but these words that I’ve put in the chat box, you want to pick three of these. And these principles are gonna help us in terms of setting our path for the year ahead. So that’s what those are. 

So this week, we are gonna be doing something, like I said, with that handout that I gave you. I can see a few more folks have joined us. So if you’re joining us late, make sure you grab that handout that we had, which looks like this. And you can either download it and print it. Some folks have printed it because they have handy printers at their desks. You can recreate it for yourself in PowerPoint the way I did it. It’s just 13 columns wide by 4 rows tall or you can just draw yourself a little, you know, graph on your own piece of paper or perhaps you have a planner that you can do this in. I personally like to do it not in my planner because you often kinda like go through and make some changes as you’re working on it, as you’ll see when we go through. 

And I like to put the final thing in my planner, but this is what we’re gonna be working with. So if you don’t already have this up, keep this up so that as I refer back to it from other slides, you know what we’re talking about.

The three sections that we’ve got on here, the top one I just say what’s on. And what I mean by that is what is going on? What is something that we know is going to or is probably going to occur during this month, during this period, that’s going to affect the things further down? So you’ll see that the trajectory on this sheet here is that as we work through filling it in and we started with what’s going on… And then we put in our benchmarks for this period. And I’ll explain a little more as we get into the specific examples of folks what that means. And then we’re gonna break out how we’ll make that happen.

So what this means is that our rocks in the river are gonna be this section up here. I’m gonna talk in a second about what we’re gonna be filling in there. And then once we have those rocks, the immovable rocks, you know, the trips, I’ll tell you more about what those things are in a minute, then we start to put some other rocks, although these rocks are the ones we’re putting. So they’re not quite as ingrained as the ones that were already there. So these rocks are gonna be our benchmarks for ourselves.

And we really want these to be as achievable as possible, which is why first we’re gonna talk about what goes in this “What’s On” section of your table here, okay, but these benchmarks that we set for ourselves, we want them to be sure, things that are, you know, that are ambitious. I mentioned in the last call this concept of BHAGs. And I’m gonna spell that out in here because it’s one of those weird terms that people are gonna want to know how to spell it. So it’s BHAG. It means big hairy audacious goals.

So as we put these benchmarks in, they might feel quite audacious for you, especially, for instance, if you’re somebody who only just started doing any type of freelance travel writing at all in the past year. I’ve got a couple of folks like that I coach. I’ve got somebody who is just totally fresh. And we’re doing really, really a lot of really high intensity, high paced learning with her.

And so if you have never done any of this, even saying that you’re gonna get one magazine feature might be really ambitious, but if like some other people that we’ve got that we’re gonna workshop on the call, if you’ve been at this for a while, having the goal of earning $1,000 a month, which is, you know, on the way to 6 figures, that might be what’s really ambitious for you.

So these benchmarks on their own in a vacuum are gonna look ambitious, but then what we’re gonna do is we’re gonna fill in this “How we’ll make it happen” underneath so that you see how to hit those benchmarks. So depending on how much stuff you have going on in your life, you might end up with this “What’s On” section is kinda small, the benchmarks are very short and to the point, and then this “How we’re gonna make it happen” is very long, but if you’re somebody, for instance, who is really in that getting into it point where you have a full-time job doing something else, you have a lot of other things on your plate, then you might find that your table needs to have slightly different dimensions., that instead, the “What’s On” is quite a bit bigger and the benchmarks are smaller and we have little steps that we’re using to work up to that. So that’s how this might look differently for each of you. So let’s look at this “What’s On” section.

What kind of goals do we put in here? So for now, for a second, ignore any sort of benchmarks, objectives, specific things that you wanna get done, projects, things like that. And just think now about what is going on for you in 2018. So typically when I do this, my very, very first things that I put in are conferences. And that’s because, and I’ve talked about this before, I use conferences to plan things that… Essentially, like I’ll pick lets say TBEX, for instance. TBEX is a conference that takes place in a lot of different locations. And they have trips attached. So they have both pre and post-multi-day overnight trips. And then they also have tours attached.

So I know if I pay whatever it is, $100, for the ticket to TBEX, and then get myself to that conference, I’ll have quite a lot of travel that I can get in just for that one ticket. And then I can either spend some time myself in the destination outside of that or go somewhere else nearby. And I can essentially plan a whole month of travel around that one conference. Another conference like that, that has a lot of trips involved, is Travel & Words. I’ll write that down. So TBEX is the first one that I mentioned. And they’re gonna be somewhere in Africa. And I feel bad that I don’t remember.

So TBEX is gonna be in Africa, the Finger Lakes and somewhere in the Czech Republic. And I think I’ve just misspelled Czech Republic, but it’s hard to type and talk. So that’s where TBEX is this year. And then Travel & Words is in Washington State. So these are two different conferences that have trips attached so that you can go to the conference, but have a lot of your travel planned just by way of the conference. And these are two different types of travel writing conferences. TBEX is more writing for a blog outlet. And Travel & Words is more around writing for a print outlet.

So I often like to, personally for me, choose my initial rocks in the stream, my initial “What’s On” to be conferences, but for you that might be other types of trips that you have coming up. For instance, somebody that I coach has a real interesting thing that she does in February every year. She goes to the U.S. Virgin Islands and she cooks for a program that someone else runs. So she cooks for I want to say it’s like a yoga… It’s some sort of retreat. And it goes for several weeks. And she knows that she’s gonna be in the U.S. Virgin Islands. And basically, she’s working while she’s there, but she’s already paid for the ticket to get down there. So she can tack on some time before or after. She can go somewhere else nearby with an inexpensive regional ticket.

This might also be another way to do these travel pegs as, for instance, if your spouse travels for work. I think I’ve mentioned before that my husband works for Google. And he often has to go back to the mother ship, which is, you know, the main Google campus in California. And we both have family there. So I typically go when he goes. So these are all different travels that you might peg yourself around.

As you’ll see, some of the folks that we’re gonna be going through their plans on later in the call, what if you have travel that you want to do, but they’re not pegged at any specific time? And I feel like this is probably something that applies to a lot of you. Perhaps you have… I know a lot of folks that have transitioned into travel writing as something that they’ve done post-retirement from another career. This is their second or third career. You might have a bucket list of places that you want to go to and you know that this is the year that you really want to check Italy and Greece off your list or Antarctica or wherever it is. So what I recommend for you, if you have places that you want to go, but you don’t have a necessary time frame to go to that place, as you are filling in your sheet, I recommend that you make the most optimistic, the best plan.

You want to go to Italy? Don’t go in the summer. The weather’s horrible. Everything is-God awfully expensive from the flights to the hotel room. And you can’t see anything because the crowds are just atrocious. Go to Italy in May. Go to Italy in October. So figure out when is the actual best, as in the least expensive and the best on the ground experience for the place that you wanna go and put that in your calendar. Put that in as one of these rocks in the stream that, like I said, isn’t as ingrained, but we’re gonna roll with it. We’re gonna plan around it and see if we can make our plan work for that.

So travel is the very, very first one. And like I said, these initial linchpins that we’re using, whether you’re gonna be planning around a trip of yours or your family’s, I have a friend who has very little vacation time. And so she saves it all. And she bundles it with the holidays. And she goes somewhere big every year, whether that’s to Machu Picchu or to South Africa for a wedding or something like that. So whatever your linchpin is or if you’re gonna create an artificial linchpin, put that in first. That’s the first thing we’re gonna put in that top “What’s On” section. And then what happens? The next one, and I say this not because I think that any of you are unwell, but because this is the single biggest, even ahead of travel, thing that I see change in people’s plans for the year, okay, is health, health issues. These might be your own. They might be members of your family.

So if you are in the sandwich generation, this might mean things that are going on with your kids. It might mean things that are going on with your parents, anybody that is close to you that you would be involved in the caregiving of. No, I’m not talking about doctors’ appointments here, Kerrie [SP]. I’m talking more about surgeries. I’m talking about hospitalizations. I’m talking about things that involve a lot of home care, if you are the caregiver, or of you staying out of the game for a period of time. So, obviously, there’s things that you can’t foresee like car accidents and things like this, but I’m telling you, this is the single biggest wrench in the works that I see with anyone and everyone that I talk to in terms of setting your plan for the year ahead.

So what if you don’t know anything? What if you don’t have anything like that coming up? You know, barring, of course, you know, like let’s all pray this doesn’t happen, car accidents and the like, what are some other times that you might be delayed in your work by health things? Do you know that every time you travel, you get a cold? I just talked to somebody like this. They know that every time they travel anywhere, they get a cold. 

That’s just how it works. And if you come back without one, thank God, but otherwise, you’re always gonna pick up a cold on a flight or something like that. That means that every time you’ve got a trip on your top “What’s On” section, you want to make sure you tack on an extra week to that in the category of this is time I may or may not be able to work at full capacity, but if it’s something like I said like a very specific medical incident and you know when it’s gonna be, make sure you put that on there. This is the same for your kids.

If you know that your kids always get sick at the beginning of school year when they go back to school or in February during February break, whatever that is, put that in there. Breaks, likewise, I don’t have that in here, but this is something that’s kind of trips and not trips. So if you have times that are family breaks from school and you have kids and you know that you are just out for that period, that’s also something to put on there. So if you have kids that are in a dual break situation or they’ve got a February and an April break, note that on February and April that those two weeks or those two months, there’s gonna be a week that you’re more or less off, okay?

Other things that commonly come up, but aren’t planned, if you have a blog and you know that you often get invited to press trips in February because you cover the Caribbean and that’s when they come up and you tend to only know three weeks in advance and have to decide in February, right, a potential press trip. Let’s say you cover a ski area. Then that might be something that would come up in November or December. So inventory those things that tend to come up in your life that you don’t know about in advance that cause you to take days off work.

So like I said, if you have a blog, press trips, or a big one like that, we already went through ones related to, you know, you or your family’s health, but think of other things like that, that might require you to take time off work. I had somebody this year who had a very strenuous process. I think she’s on the call right now, involving thinking that she was going to move back from somewhere. She had been living abroad. And then she wasn’t moving back. And then she was moving back again. So if you’re living somewhere where your living situation is tenuous in one way shape or form, you’re either on a teaching contract, perhaps you teach abroad or you’re nomadic and you know that every two months, you change location, but you don’t necessarily know where, those are also things that you want to put in that top “What’s On” situation.

Now, the last one that needs to go in that “What’s On” section is any other work that you have going on that has certain crunch times. So, for instance, I mentioned I think in another webinar that this time of year is actually the biggest season for anybody who works in nonprofit because there’s constant campaigns going out to do year-end fundraising because they’re trying to get people to give donations so that they can write it off on their taxes. So this week is a huge crunch time for people who work in nonprofits to get those letters out, to be interacting with any return emails from customers with questions, and to be doing the financial cataloging of those things.

If you, for instance, are involved in the farming community in some way, as I know a lot of folks are, or in, you know, the local food scene, the spring, depending on the area, between say March and May, is a really big time for getting the plants in and doing a lot of outdoor work. If you have a teaching type job, I know a lot of folks that follow us or a good portion of folks that follow us are doing some sort of university level teaching of some kind. So this would be the kind of thing where you put in when you need to be grading a lot of exams, not necessarily homework because that’s normal, but, you know, you would put in that in December you have exams and in May you have exams or however that works. So those are other things that you would put in the “What’s On” column.

So there’s not a super awesome way, unless if any of you are doing this kind of on your computer and typing it in, let me know because it’s really easy for us to share what your screen looks like. So if people are typing this on your computer, let me know because that way you guys can always come in and share. So as you’re adding these things in and going along, you’ll find that rather than this, this ends up looking like now you’ve got a trip A. You’ve got a trip B. You’ve got a conference. You teach, so you’ve got grading. You’ve got grading. We’ve got kids’ break. We’ve got kids’ break. Perhaps you, in addition to teaching… I’m thinking of somebody specific. In addition to teaching, you have a museum exhibit that you’re working on that goes live here.

This is the museum opening, which is gonna be really big for you and take up a lot of time. So as you go along, these months start to get filled. You start to see these boulders that are in the way, but more importantly, you also see the places that are more open. And you can also think about how many hours that month you realistically have to work because this influences not just our benchmarks, but really this “How we’re gonna make it happen section,” okay? So as I mentioned if you have something like a situation where you have children who are of the age that they have both February and April breaks and you typically work 30 hours a week, rather than having 120 hours in these two months, you’re gonna have that week off and probably the Friday before and the Monday after that are gonna be kind of squishy, right?

So you end up losing 8 days out of your… There’s about 22 or 23, depending on the month. You lose 8 out of 22 or 23 working days. So that’s basically… Not eight, sorry.
You’re losing seven, but that’s basically a third of your month that’s gone. So here you’re gonna be at two-third capacity for these two months, okay? And let’s say this other trip that you have going on here, this is going to be a two-week trip. So maybe you end up just having a one-third capacity on this. And in this month, you have zero capacity, this time that you have a conference, maybe this one here also at one-third capacity. This one here, at two-third capacity, okay?

So this is how you help to set the ebb and flow for yourself consciously of the year of how much work it makes sense to give yourself because one of the things that you’re gonna see as we get into examples is that it can be so easy to set these BHAGs, right, these big hairy audacious goals, but we’ve spoken in the past about lining those up with what’s feasible for you based on the year that has passed, as well as based on your analysis of your own strengths and weaknesses and what you’re capable of, but sometimes, given what’s on your plate, even if those other analytical tools have made it look like these BHAGs are possible, when you actually line it up, it’s just not. And I know several people who have the sandwich syndrome where they’ve got kids to take care of and ailing aging parents that just feel like they aren’t getting as much done as they want.

And this is one of the things is that if we don’t set our plan around that, then your plan is gonna start to fall apart, sometimes sooner, sometimes later, but once the steps in your plan start getting missed, it becomes much, much harder to get back on track, obviously. So that’s where our three words come in. So, again, I had posted them in the chat box, if you missed them last week, but those three words help us decide not just how to make the plan now as we get into it, but also what to change as things fall off. So let’s start doing an example, okay?

So I’ve got three queued up for you. I’ve got somebody who’s been writing full-time for quite a bit, somebody who has been doing freelance type work, but is transitioning more into the writing bit of it, and somebody who has… You could kinda call it… She does a pastiche of different things, but that are more in the education vein and she’s trying to switch over as much as possible into doing full-time freelance and full-time freelance writing. So we’ve got three very different situations in that way, but also different situations about the other things going on with those people. So let’s dive right in. So Jade, who is with us today, is a freelance content marketer. She’s got five plus years of experience and an aspiring novelist.

In the last year, she cut back on her paid work to devote significant time to revising her novel and trying to land a literary agent. She hasn’t succeeded yet. And she earned about $5,000 less in 2017. And I have to say as I was reading this, having done something very similar myself about two years back, I was actually really impressed that she had scaled back what she was doing and only earned $5,000 less.

And it can be really easy when you embark on a new education path like this, if you want to get into content marketing and you’ve only been doing editorial or vice versa or you want to get into books and you’ve only been working with magazines, to feel like you are taking just a huge chunk of time away from your earning, but in this case, I really feel like Jade’s probably earned more, significant… She says, for going forward, she’s burnt out on content marketing. “It feels like being on a hamster wheel. In 2018, she wants to find better paying writing work and increase her passive income flows so she can continue to focus on getting her book published while earning more money, not less.” So this is really important to note also, that we talk a lot or actually I should talk more

So I was talking about Jade. I was just reading Jade’s thing out for you here. So she was talking about how it’s like being on a hamster wheel. And I was talking about how with novels, you have to write the whole book before you can shop it around, which is the opposite of what happens with nonfiction books. So what that means is that for her to work on getting a novel published really means a lot of upfront time without pay that can potentially come very quickly down the line. So Jade, if possible, while I’m talking about your next bit of information looking towards the year ahead, if you can chime in for us what’s in your “What’s On” section of your sheet, those things that are coming up for you in the year ahead, that would be great. And I’ll go through the next bit of your information with others.

So let me tell you the next bit of Jade’s equation. So for this coming year, she wants flexibility, stability, and wealth to be informing her year. So in terms of flexibility, right, she said that she wants to have better paying work that allows her to focus more on her book. So that’s what the flexibility plays into. Obviously, the wealth points to that, as well. And stability means having other things going on so that she can confidently focus her time on working on things for her book.

So what she wants to look at going into the year ahead, this is her kind of long list of benchmarks, is to get regular income coming from travel trades, to get published front of book, and feature articles on places she’s traveling to in 2018, getting a literary agent, and then there’s some more that we could call them squishy or soft goals, right, conquering self-doubt, honing her pitching process, transitioning from lower paying to higher paying clients, and having more free time to focus on the type of writing that she wants to do. So I feel like we could almost split them in half. Like I said these are more of the soft and these are more of the column goals, but like I said, we’ll go with benchmarks.

So let’s look at breaking these out. And okay, Nancy can hear us now. Great. So in terms of the things that go on Jade’s sheet, she said she’s got a writers’ conference in January, as well as family obligations in January and June, a summer camping trip she’s not sure when it’s gonna be, and something else in August. So I’m going to start filling this in for her. Oops. Let’s not go too far. Okay, great. So in January, she’s got a conference, oops, conference and family. I’m gonna try to get both of these going up side by side so I can see the chat box. Okay, great. Okay. She’s got conference and family. She’s got let’s say maybe this is her camping. She’s got a trip here. She’s got family obligations. And then she’s got another conference in March and then holidays.

Looking at this, we know that she’s got a good chunk of time here, but let’s look back at her benchmarks, right? This is the thing that we want to fill in first. So she wants to have regular income in travel trades. She wants to be publishing front of book and feature articles on places she travels in 2018. And she wants to get a literary agent. There’s always going to be one of these that is the one around which all other ones need to be planned. So the thing about her list is that getting a literary agent obviously jumps out to me as the one that that’s gonna be, but importantly, like I mentioned, her novel needs to be finished before she gets an agent. So Jade, let us know in the chat box how far you are from your novel being finished because that’s gonna inform getting a literary agent, which is gonna be the linchpin of these others.

So as she is letting us know about that, I’m gonna pop in some of these other ones. So we want to transition from lower paying to high paying clients, right? And part of that I think is gonna go here, it’s just getting a regular income from travel trades, as well as the features from the things which she’s gonna be traveling to in 2018. So let’s look at this. So if she wants to get regular income from trades, there are certain ebbs and flows in the market that inform when are the best times to get into certain things, how long it takes you to ramp up with editors, and all of this. So at this time where we are right now… Oh, great. Jade’s book is totally done. So that’s great. So Jade’s book is all ready for her to work on pitching agents.

Let’s say that we want her to have her literary agent by April, May, June. Let’s put it in May. And I’m gonna say this for a reason because as I said, in different segments of the writing market, there’s different ebbs and flows. And literary agents, like a lot of editors, love to go on summer vacation. So they are essentially out from June to August. They don’t want to hear from you. And they’re not gonna look at your queries. They want nothing to do with you. And the same things can also go for editors. So we might even want to put this in April that she wants to have this done so that her literary agent can be in touch with editors.

So what does that mean? That means that in this period, she wants to be working quite heavily on getting her literary agent, but let’s backtrack, right? Her words were, “Flexibility, stability, and wealth.”

She wants to have more time to focus on the type of writing and she also wants to increase her income. So there’s a trade-off here, right? The earlier that we get her a literary agent, the earlier she has some income coming from her book and that is off her plate, but at the same time, it’s time that’s going to come away from working on the magazines. So we need to balance those two things, but as she said, she’s working on another novel and continuing to query. So what I would say for this is that, as I mentioned, this is a dead zone for agents, as well as editors.

So really, it makes the most sense for her to make herself the benchmark that she wants to get her agent by April or May. So that means that she needs to… I assume the conference that she’s going to in January is probably going to be helping with some education component about her querying process, but it means that in January, she wants to really bone up from the education perspective on… I’m gonna make the type a little smaller here, which I know is gonna make it hard for folks to see, but I’ll tell you guys what I’m writing just so we can fit things in here. So in January, she wants to bone up on the education component around what’s holding back her query. And query is the word that’s used just like pitch for getting her book placed with an agent, okay. And the reason that I want her to start in January here with what’s holding back is that she says she’s been querying for a bit and not getting anywhere.

So the “How we’ll make it happen” for her for the book front in January is figuring out what’s not working now so that she can hit the ground running because unlike the editors for magazines where we can pitch them a new idea and a new idea and a new idea, when you strike out with a book agent, you’re out. You can’t pitch them again. You’re just out. So you want to make sure that you’re sending your absolute best pitch the first time around to each agent. And then in February, she’s gonna be working on getting those queries out. And so what that means is now she’s gonna have a new version of her query letter. Unlike when you’re pitching magazines, you tend to have just one for your book. So this is gonna be query palooza for her and query palooza here.

And so what do I mean when I say, “Query palooza for her?” How many do I mean? In this case for books, like I said, you send pretty much the same one. And if you’re interested in books, the resource in terms of where to find editors is called “Publisher’s Marketplace” or rather agents and editors, “Publisher’s Marketplace.” And this is something that “Micro Magazine” database, you can get a monthly subscription to. And you can see every single agent and every single editor that exists and exactly what type of books they work on.

So in this case, what I would do for Jade is that this query palooza, part one, she’s gonna really focus on identifying, okay? She’s got her letter ready. And now she’s gonna focus on identifying the folks obviously that she hasn’t reached out to yet because she can’t pitch them twice, but she’s gonna really mine who are the closest hits for her in terms of her book being a match for what they cover. And she’s gonna get those out in these next two months with the goal of having somebody in line by April, at the latest May. And if I were to give a number benchmark for this, I would say she wants to be hitting somewhere between 50 and 75 of these queries out each month. So what does that mean then looking back, right? In January, she’s got a lot of stuff going on.

We’ve tempered that by focusing on the education. February’s a month where she doesn’t have too much stuff going on. So she’s gonna really work on killing it with those queries and continue that into March, but how does that play off for her freelance writing, right? This is where the money comes from. Right now her book isn’t making any money until somebody buys it. So two of her things are conquering her self-doubt and honing her pitching process. And I think that those are actually quite entwined because for folks that have heard me talk about pitching a lot, one of the things that I have mentioned and that I see really frequently with people who aren’t sending a lot of pitches is that it just takes them a long time. It might take up to two and a half hours to write each pitch letter.

So let’s go back, right? So she wants to build up her confidence. And I feel like, like I said, that’s gonna come once it’s easier for her to do, but also once she starts getting responses. So we’re gonna address this conquering self-doubt through those two things, through getting more out and making sure that we’re getting responses. So in this January period, she already has some content marketing work going. She’s got some other stuff on her plate. She’s gonna be working hard on improving her query. And we’re also gonna give her from the freelance writing aspect work on this pitch process. And so what do I mean here is that she wants to go through for herself and take a time tracker and work on a couple pitches and see how long she spends on each phase of that pitch process.

That means how long does it take her to come up with the idea, to match it to a magazine, to write the first paragraph of that pitch, the second paragraph of that pitch, and the third paragraph of that pitch. And then once she’s tracked each of those things, she’s gonna look at which part’s taking her the longest. And then she’s gonna go read up on that. What is she supposed to write in the second part? How can she better match her ideas to magazines? And just like how we’re tweaking her pitch letter, she’s gonna work on tweaking her pitch process here.

So the same way where we said February is a great month for her to get a lot of work done, and I also think February’s a great month if you live somewhere cold because you don’t want to go outside, this is where she’s going to start building that confidence bit. There it is, the conquering self-doubt bit, by getting those pitches out. And so which pitches is she gonna do? She hasn’t taken her trips yet. So these are gonna be ones from her trips from the last year. So in this month, she’s gonna make a master list of everywhere that she has traveled in the previous year, so that would be in 2017, and what she did while she was there.

And she’s gonna start matching those up to magazines and getting those out. So the same way where she has the query blitz for her book, she’s gonna start doing a pitching blitz with her new pitch process. And the reason that I’m gonna have her learn about it and then blitz is that this allows her to practice those things that she’s just learned to really solidify those pitching muscles, that new pitching process, in a focused way, but this shouldn’t be hard to do two at once because, like I said, the query that she’s sending out for her book she’s not gonna be tweaking that query every time she sends. It’s quite similar as opposed to pitching for editors, which is gonna be different for each one.

Well, what about LOIs? We haven’t gotten into that yet. And there is a reason for that, okay? So at this point, she’s working on her pitch process and her confidence. And then this is gonna help her transition from lower paying to higher paying clients. She’s gonna make sure specifically that as she’s working on her blitz, she’s not pitching those people who are at the same place that she already is. She’s specifically pitching to bigger markets than what she’s working with right now. So that’s gonna be part of this process. Now, I mentioned that we were saving working on the LOIs, the letters of introductions, for trade magazines. And again, that goes back to these ebbs and flows in the markets.

The same way that editors are totally out in June to August, a lot of writers are, as well, which means that in these months, trade magazines editors are trying to fill in who’s gonna do the work during that time because a lot of writers aren’t gonna be around. So in April is where she’s gonna take this same great blitz energy that she’s got going and carry it over and start getting those LOIs out to trade magazines. And again, this is great to do en masse because it’s much easier to get that machinery going for yourself, to get that letter of introduction going, and send it off to 10 similar magazines while it’s fresh in your mind than to be sending 1, 1 week and 1 the next week because it’s all the same kind of stuff, okay?

So I’m not giving her a second bit of things to do here on March because she’s got this conference, as well. And so she’s hopefully got her agent lined up. And then she’s gonna move over into trade magazines. Pitches don’t always come to fruition right away, guys. They tend to take a little bit of time for either maybe that first idea doesn’t work and you come back with a second idea, a third idea, and maybe even a fourth idea, before you get an assignment with an editor or maybe your pitch was in maybe purgatory and now the editor’s finally gotten back to you. So we’re hoping that by this April, May time, these pitches are starting to come to fruition, but she’s also sending out these LOIs. So what’s gonna happen is that as the fallout… This is really important to remember.

Any time you’ve got something really new that’s shaking things up, whether it’s another job that you’re taking on, a part-time job, if you’re doing yoga teaching training, somebody told me about this, if you’ve got a book that you’re signing an agent for, there’s gonna be other stuff that comes along with that. So we want to give this period space because she’s gonna be doing reworking of her book with her agent. She’s gonna be working with her agent to prepare materials that are gonna go out to the editor. And, like I said, these pitches are gonna be starting to come to fruition. She’s sending out these LOIs. So we’re gonna let this period kinda chill out.

And then in June, she’s got some family obligations, but this is where she’s gonna start hitting those pitches again because like I mentioned, this is the period when a lot of other writers aren’t necessarily gonna be working or aren’t necessarily gonna be sending pitches. So this is a great time for her to circle back. So she’s obviously gonna be following up with the editors that she reached out to her because you pitch, follow up, pitch a new pitch, follow up.

She’s gonna be following that cycle, but this is where she’s gonna be looking and saying, “Okay. How did this go? What was my hit rate with these editors?” And then she’s gonna start looking at what worked for her and what didn’t work for her and be pitching to new outlets, okay? So this is where she’s gonna look at what worked before and change her horizons, okay? So as we’re going along here, she’s working on the trades.

Now, what about the front of the book and features for the places she’s traveled to in 2018? Now, she’s starting to go on these new trips, right? So this is where she’s gonna be pitching to new outlets. And she’s also gonna be pre-pitching, okay? She’s gonna be pre-pitching for the trips she’s got going up. So this is gonna be a great way in June for her to focus her pitches around the other trips that she has coming up this summer. So then as she’s on her trips, we’re gonna give her some space for all this other work that she’s drummed up early on. And then she’s gonna hit it hard with pitching the trips now that she’s back, okay?

So as this is working out, you’ll see I haven’t touched on the content marketing work, which she already has. She already has freelance work that’s lined up that she’s gonna be working on at this time. And now we’re into this great period in October and November where, like I said, she doesn’t have other boulders in the stream lined up. So what’s going on? So she’s hopefully gotten a literary agent by then. She’s got her pitching process down. She’s been working on pitching out before her trips and after her trips. She’s gotten her LOIs out.

So what’s happening now? I’m not putting anything in here because this work should have panned out for this point. So what happens now then is that this is when she starts to look at dropping clients that are not worth her time, okay? So this means that by now, she should have panned out her pitches into a point where she can look at her content marketing clients, if she hasn’t already, or her editorial clients that pay less and say, “Hey, you. You pay $.25 a word, but now I’ve got this person who is paying me $.50 a word regularly. I don’t think it’s time for us to work together any more, unless you can pay me more money.”

This is when that transition really happens. So this is what Jade’s year is gonna look like. And again, like I mentioned, everybody’s got slightly different stuff going on. And Jade was really heavy with her book work. So let’s look at somebody different.

“So in May, 2017,” this is the words of the person, “I decided to move my food and lifestyle writing, to incorporate travel and do less food writing. I spent a few days thinking about the cross-over potential of existing relationships and began to investigate the world of travel writing, which is how I found Dream of Travel Writing. While there are some similarities to what I do, there are some definite differences. My pet died in early August. And after a few challenging weeks of back and forth to the hospital, all in the midst of my first press trip. I took a little time to grieve, but also kept my trip, the people I met, the things I saw, tasted, and experienced all fresh and alive in my mind. I formulated pitches, began small, and started to send them out. Prior to sending them out, I had spent time building a spreadsheet of publications, the focus of the publications, how much it would pay, writer’s guidelines, etc. I lost two monthly content clients in the past year. One business closed and the other went to a large PR firm. And I have been trying to recoup that income, with the caveat that it is an industry I enjoy and is line with my current and future career path.” So this is important. So she did lose some clients, but she doesn’t want to just replace them with anybody. And she has earlier, like she said, been working on those editorial pitches. “I’m still actively pitching one-offs and know I can do a lot more with that one single trip, but discipline is my forever challenge.”

So the one thing that I want to note on this is that you typically can do a lot more with a single trip. I’ve spoken several times about this gentleman that I had met in the UK who typically will try to do at least 10 stories out of each trip, even if it’s just a weekend trip. So there is typically 125 odd, if not more, stories that you can get off of each trip. However, it’s important to also note when you are beating a dead horse with your pitches, when your pitches become one note, when you’re just pitching one thing over and over again.

And so often, if you’re pitching the same sort of idea to a lot of places and you’re not getting traction, it might be because you aren’t really focusing enough on what an idea is. And so this is a great time. Somebody had just mentioned, “What’s the difference between LOIs, pitches, and queries?”

So query and pitch are sort of the same thing. For Jade, we were using that to talk about a pitch that you send to an agent to get your book published, but pitch and query pretty much mean the same thing. An LOI, which is a letter of introduction, you can also think of it as a cover letter. It’s something that goes to trade magazines, but in terms of a pitch that you send to an editor for a single article, I’ve seen various pitches come across my desk lately.

And I’ve been talking to people about ideas. And it’s really important to remember that you need to be pitching an editor something that fits into the size of the space that they have. And so in some instances, people are pitching the kitchen sink. They’re pitching everything. And in some instances, people are pitching things that an editor looks at and says, “Okay. That’s two sentences. Where is the rest of the piece?”

So if you feel like you’re pitching a lot of the same thing, whether it’s the same trip or the same topic or whatnot, it’s a really good moment to go back and see if what you are pitching bears a resemblance to the type of articles that go in there or not, not that I necessarily… I haven’t seen Stephanie’s pitches. So I don’t know if that’s the case here. So let’s look at the goals that she has. And we’ll start getting into her sheet. And Stephanie, I think you’re on the call. If you’re here, can you let us know any of those big rocks you have in your calendar so I can fill in that top “What’s On” line of the sheet here or if you have yours… I think you said you printed it. If you have yours and wouldn’t mind turning on the video and showing us, that would also be great.

Here’s what she’s saying about her goals. So she said she realizes, “The correlation of the time spent networking and pitching and how that equates to paid work. That’s exactly how I’ve secured new business and how clients have come to me with ideas they were paying for in the past six months. I’m not spending enough time on revenue generating work though.” And this is something really important to note. I just had a call with somebody about this earlier today where we talked about how, if you’re not used to pitching, once you get into pitching, it can be really satisfying to make pitching your job. Like every day you have some pitches that you’re working on. And you’re thinking about them. And you’re really working on these pitches. And you’re exploring new publications. And that can get really actually fun and easy.

And when you’re not yet in the phase where you’re getting anxious that people aren’t getting back to you, but as Stephanie very accurately says here, it’s really important to know when you’re not spending enough time on revenue generating work. So she says that she’s such a creative and adventurous personality that meeting deadlines… Oh, sorry. Okay. So she says she’s a creative, adventurous personality and not Type A, but meeting deadlines isn’t an issue. So she likes the idea of using targets, even though that’s not necessarily always her style. So here’s her benchmarks for the year ahead that we’re gonna start putting in.

So her words are adventure, like she said adventurous personality, adventure, growth, and mindfulness. So this is really important, right, because adventure is out there. Growth is going big, but mindfulness means being careful about how she does it. So these are the things that we want to incorporate as we set out her plan. So she just let me know in the chat box her rocks in the stream. So I’m gonna drop those in. So she’s got a conference in March, an overseas trip in April, and I assume overseas means it’s a bit long. So we’ll put long trip here. Overseas trip, October, also July. And then possible move. Oh, this is a big one, right? So I mentioned that somebody I coached had a big disruption because of that.

We were just talking about how that actually affects about half of her year, guys. So anytime you have a possible move, this is something worth backing up. So this I’m gonna actually put in November, as well. Prep for move? Okay. So let’s go back and look at her benchmarks that we’re gonna start slotting in. So she mentioned that she had one trip before that she went on that she’s been trying to get a lot of mileage out of. So traveling on these kinds of trips and pitching them is big for her. So we really need to make sure that as we’re looking at her trips that we really put in adequate time to pre- as well as post-pitch those trips. So it’s resulted in eight stories, which is fantastic, by the way. And congratulations on that. You guys should also congratulate her because that’s really excellent that her first press trip had eight stories. She has gotten a 100% response rate from her pitches. This is brilliant.

And, in fact, this is really super useful for all of us who are looking at making this kind of sheet, this kind of plan is to know your pitch response rate. I was just chatting with somebody on a call about this recently, that even if you’re pretty new to pitching, even if you’ve sent 5 or 10 or 15, having that pitch response rate helps us. And we’re gonna do this with Stephanie’s now, helps us dial back and know okay, how many pitches do we need to send to what numeric end to make sure that we can hit our income goals? So she said, “Some of these were yes/no or maybe, but they all responded.” So in my view, if somebody responds, then you respond back.

And then they respond back and you respond back. And they respond. And it keeps going until you get an assignment. And then you keep responding with that assignment until you get the next assignment. So once you’ve got that foot in the door, it means you keep going until you get another assignment. So whether or not she has already gotten an assignment from each of these pitches that she sent, those are all avenues that she’s gonna pursue. So this is something that I’m not gonna necessarily plan that she’s gonna get 100% response rate all the time, but we can plan on going forward as she’s sending pitches that those are avenues that will eventually be leading to assignments at a very regular rate.

So she wants to develop relationships with editors and tourism boards that result in recurring work and openness to pitches. And remember, this is… The way that it’s written is, “Looking back at your last year.” So that’s why it’s in past tense. So this is her pretending it’s December 2018, as we did in last week’s call. So her biggest accomplishment in 2018 that she wants to see is realizing that she can do the same amount of work for better paying outlets than for free or no paying outlets, right?

This is super important. And I’m so glad that she mentioned here. “Pitch and strike out in the majors, but keep playing in the major league.” I’m totally gonna steal this and tweet it. That’s a brilliant, brilliant line. Thank you so much. Kerrie’s asking me, “Can you ask for assignments in pitches or LOIs?” I’m not sure if I understand that question. So if you want to elaborate more, then I can try to answer that. So back to what we were working through here with the benchmarks. So she has a numeric goal of $5,500 per month with 70% income coming from her current clients. So this is a bit specific, right? And this is something that we can work on. And I’m gonna outline how to work on it, but you’re gonna see here when we get too many goals, and especially when we have more than just one number that we’re working towards, that things can start to get a little bit hairy when we map it out. So let’s get into mapping it.

So she’s got three trips. So I imagine that this is pretty much taken care of. She’s got three international trips. And any other trips that are domestic trips I’m assuming that she can do on weekends. And she hasn’t told me. So those are either the trips you’ve already got on here or they’re just kind of coming along on weekends. So we’ll plan around the three trips that we have, okay? So this is stuff from last year that is useful for us to know. So I’m gonna X that out for now.

This is what we are looking for, for the year ahead. So let’s look at this goal, $5,500 per month minimum income. She’s got a pretty much 100% response rate. So what does that mean? Something that I like to do, and I’m just actually gonna write this is the slide that we’re on, because calculations are such a pain to discuss out loud. So here is the calculation. If you want to earn $5,500 a month, and your pitch response rate is 50%, then you need to be pitching… Oh, this isn’t Excel. Okay. So you take the number of your goal and you take your pitch response rate. And then you’re gonna end up with the amount that you need to be pitching towards. So that means to hit this, if her response rate was 50%, which it isn’t, she would need to be pitching towards $11,000 a month. Now that seems totally scary, you guys. I know, but this goes back to what Stephanie said, which is so important, to pitch the big folks, the big paying outlets, to hit that. So then what does that mean?

Let’s say she’s gonna be pitching only outlets that pay $1 a word and only for things that are least $1,000 a word. I know it sounds dreamy, but let’s just say that. So that means that she needs to pitch 11 stories for $1,000 each for $1 a word, okay? So this is if she had a 50% response rate, okay, but, like she said, she has a really high response rate. So that means she would be needing to pitch 5.5 stories for $1,000 a word or for $1 a word or $1,000, or she’d be pitching 11 stories for $500, 500 words per $1 a word, or she could be pitching 11 stories for 1,000 words for $.50 a word. So I’m spelling this out because I know the math can always get hard. So let me know in the chat box, if that is sounding difficult to you.

And I’m gonna answer Kerrie’s question in the background, but let me know if all that math I just did made sense. So Kerrie’s question was, “When pitching and asking for assignments in the future or letting them know I’m available?” I’m still not super sure if I understand the question, but pitches you’re pitching a specific story idea and a letter of introduction, we have several webinars on that. So I recommend checking those out, if you’re not quite sure how those work.

Stephanie’s saying that some of that amount can be content marketing, but it must be in the travel or lifestyle industry. So this is a great addendum, but I wanted to make sure that we all understand that as we’re setting pitching goals, these are how the variables work out, okay? You can pitch fewer or more stories, fewer or more words, and fewer or more dollars a word, but the goal of what we need to pitch to is determined by your goal amount divided by your response rate, okay? That’s gonna go away now. I’m just gonna put it in the chat box so everybody can see it later because I know it’s kind of confusing.

So let’s go back to what Stephanie’s got here. So she wants to have 70% of her income coming from recurring clients. And that can be a mix of editorial, as well as content marketing. Content marketing clients are really great because you know that that money is coming in every month. So I personally think that’s fantastic, especially if all of your money is coming from your writing to know that that money is coming in every month.

So she wants to have $3,000, sorry $850 coming from her recurring work, which leaves… Of course, now I just closed my calculator, which leaves a certain amount that I’m gonna give you in a second that comes from one-off work every month. And this is a great vision to have because if you don’t have one-off work coming, it that means that you don’t have new editorial clients or new potential content marketing clients that you are working on.

So let’s break this out. These ones are gonna be new publications, okay? And then let’s break out her recurring income between content marketing. We’re gonna put TCM for content marketing and editorial, okay? So let’s say that because we’ve got this much which is coming from new publications, we’ll call this editorial, let’s give her another let’s say $1,500 that’s gonna come. And that could be higher, but it’s gonna come from recurring publications work with editors that she already knows, okay? And then that leaves… Math on the fly. It’s so much fun. That leaves $2,350 that’s gonna come from recurring content marketing work, okay? So you can definitely get gigs that for $1,000, $1,300 from one single client.

Because Stephanie is new to these clients and new to this whole area, I’m gonna break this up. And we’re gonna say that for her, this means four clients, okay? She’s gonna have four clients that she’s doing some kind of content marketing work. You can also definitely get this much from a single editor you’re working with usually after a while. So we’re gonna say that this means she needs two editors she is working with on a recurring basis, okay?

And then, according to that schematic that we looked at before, given that she’s got a really high success rate, she’s not necessarily gonna be needing to pitch a ton of places for this, but let’s just say she needs about three assignments each month that are around $500. And then this is how she is going to meet her goal. So we’re gonna back this up, according to her trips, okay? So she wants to turn up four content marketing clients that are each for around I think it’s about, you know, $680 or something, okay? Around $680 each is what she is looking at for this. So with content marketing, especially travel content marketing, food content marketing is a little bit more forgiving, you really want to be getting those things out in January before the year picks up.

That’s why we have our travel content marketing event going very, very much at the beginning of January. It’s the 12th to the 14th. So for her, I want to look at having these four… You can totally line up four clients in a month. I’ve seen people do it, but we’re gonna give her a little more space for that because she’s gonna ramp up and learn how to do it, right? So we want to have her hit this number of having her four travel content marketing clients that run this much recurring. We want to have them signed by April. We’re gonna give her some time on this, okay? So that means that in January, she’s gonna be busting her butt doing… I’m gonna make this small again so we can fit everything in here.

In January, she’s gonna be busting her butt learning… She’s got that pitching down, right? She’s doing really well with the pitching, but now she’s gonna bust her butt on learning her travel content marketing ropes, okay? So that in January, and also in February, she’s continuing to hit really hard pitching her content marketing gigs, which means that she’s gonna start having some phone calls even in January. She’s gonna have more phone calls in February. She’s gonna be getting those contracts signed, you know, getting people returning them to her, negotiating, doing those phone calls.

We’ve got a whole webinar on the phone calls. One of my coaching clients just listened to it yesterday. And she was like, “Oh, my God. I didn’t realize there’s such a gold mine about how to communicate with clients in here.” And I really recommend checking out the proposals and client phone calls webinar, if you haven’t, because it will save you so many hurdles about things that come up with clients down the line if you don’t address them up front, okay? So a little bit in January, but especially in February and March, she is sending out those pitches. She’s got the phone calls. And she’s getting the contracts done so that in April, she starts with these new clients, but what does that mean? This is important, right? She’s got this long trip in April. And April is when she’s starting with these new clients or maybe in March, right?

So what that means is that she needs to know that she needs to be able to, during this long trip, be able to do this work, be able to do her new content marketing work. So she needs to be pre-working on stuff in March as much as possible. So she’s gonna be pre-working here on her content marketing. So what that means is if she’s pitching her April trip now and getting these contracts finalized and starting with some content marketing people, she’s gonna lose her mind, right? She’s also got a conference going on in March. So what does that mean about her April trip? It means that she wants to start pitching her April trip in February.

So what about getting those recurring editors that we’ve talked about, right? Like I said, with travel content marketing, she’s kind of stuck in that time thing, but she needs to really get going on it before the season kicks in. So working with those recurring editors is something that she’s gonna peg to go after that. So what means is that she’s gonna be pitching her April trip starting in February, but in March and April she’s gonna focus on getting that content marketing stuff up and running. And then when she’s back from her April trip, this is where she’s going to be continuing to pitch that April trip, but also… Sorry. I can’t type and talk. This is where she’s also going to be focusing her pitching on the editors that she wants to build recurring relationships with, okay?

So what that means is that rather than pitching things specifically related to her trip, she’s going to be pitching editors whose publications are things she feels like she can write for regularly, okay? So this is editors she wants to work with recurring, okay? So she’s gonna work on pitching the April trip, writing those stories. She’s gonna continue working into her content marketing work. And she’s going to be pitching those editors. So then she’s got another trip going on in July.

So what does that mean? It means in June, she’s going to be continuing to pitch those editors she wants to work with regularly while pre-pitching her July trip, okay? So what have we got going on for her, okay? So we are working on those one-off pitches. Like we said, she’s got a great response rate. So as long as she’s getting those pitches out, that’s gonna be fine. Yes, she needs the time to write the articles, right. And so in April, that’s the only thing she’s got going on. She’s not doing anything else. May and June she’s also got time to do that, as well.

So this is going fine. We’ve started working on this. And then she’s gonna have that wrapped up by April. So that means that July, she’s got her trip. In August, she comes back. And by now, these pitches should be panning out. So she’s following up, which I abbreviated as FU’ing which sounds like, you know, FU in a different way, but that’s how I write following up. So she’s FU’ing continuously with, following up continuously, with the editors she wants to work with as she is continuing to pitch her July trip. So what this means is that she is going to hit, but Nancy pointed out, that she’s just got too much work going on, which is brilliant, because it means that she can be continuously, as we talked about with Jade, dropping those people who pay less and focusing on the people who pay more.

Now, part of the reason I front-loaded a lot of her stuff is that she has this potential move later. And she’s also got this other trip going on in October. So this is the path that I would suggest for Stephanie. And we’ve got one more who is also with us on the call today that I want to make sure we get to. So I call her the transitioner in here. So I say this because I mentioned way up top that some of you will be in the position where you’re trying to come full-time out of doing something else, but you’re also doing that alongside of moving into your freelance writing. So Stephanie and Jade both have other type of freelancing that they’re already doing that they’re partnering this with, but this person still has a lot of other work that she’s got going on.

So she says, “In January 2017, I began working part-time as a freelance copywriter when I was hired by a B2B car wash supplier to rewrite their website, an e-newsletter, a monthly blog and establish their presence on social media. I plan to supplement my career by pitching magazines and getting some travel content marketing clients, but then I officially became a member of the sandwich generation taking care of my elderly parents on top of my young children. With each hospital stay that my parents made, I became more distracted from my travel writing goals. And I have trouble recovering mentally and emotionally. Pitching was the last thing on my mind or my priority list. I started pitching travel content marketing companies now. And I’m doing better with time management, but I only made about $12,500 for my income from writing in 2017, which is less than half of what I had originally intended to earn.” So I just want to say though that, as I mentioned, she’ got a bunch of other work that she’s doing. She’s teaching. She now has like a part-time in-house thing that she’s doing with a museum.

So to have that much money come from one’s writing when you’ve still got a bunch of other stuff going on is absolutely fantastic. And I’m so proud of her for doing that. So her words for the year going ahead are… And by the way, if you’re still with us, I know we’ve had some people dropping off because this is a long webinar, but the call-in ones always are. And I’m gonna be here as long as you guys are. So if you’re still with us, go ahead and drop in any linchpins that you have. I know you do a lot of camping and things like that in the summer. So drop that in the chat box so I can start popping all of that in as we go along.

So her words for the year ahead are simplicity, which totally makes sense. She’s got a lot of different stuff on her plate. Growth and security. You’ll notice growth is a really commonly recurring one, but you’ll often see growth coupled with other things. So here we see growth with security. Before we saw growth with mindfulness. So these are important things for us to look at going forward. So for her, having recurring work is really important, but also not having too many clients. And so you’ll see that on her specific goals, as well. So she wants a minimum of five to six recurring travel content marketing jobs. She wants to establish herself as a regular contributor to some travel trade publications. She wants to attend at least one conference and network and make connections, but remember, this is gonna have to fall in line with what she’s got going on. So for her, it’s definitely gonna be better if it’s domestic and something somewhat nearby, okay?

And she’d like to get a regular pitching schedule to get some bigger name glossies so that editors start to recognize her name and accept her pitches. So one thing that you’ll notice about what we’ve got going on here on this list is that there’s a lot of different areas going on. And so on the one hand, that seems like a bit of not necessarily a disconnect, but perhaps obstacle or something that we need to look at to this important goal of simplicity. So I’m gonna keep that in mind as I map this out.

So on Jade’s, right, like if we go back up here, with Jade’s we had things going on side by side, right? She had her own content marketing ones that she was already doing. She’s working on her book on getting her book queries out. She’s working on pitching new and different, better paying magazines. Likewise, over here with Stephanie’s. So on Stephanie’s, we were working on travel content travel marketing while we were also pitching editorials. She’s got some trips going on. So what we want to look at now as we get into Ingrid who, thank you for dropping those things in here, and I’m gonna put these in as well, what we want to look at here is that she’s got a lot of different things that she wants to do, but she’s also got a lot on her plate.

And we want to make that as light, not necessarily in work load, but in terms of context switching, which means going back and forth between different, you know, types of work, as well as between different things, whether it’s travel and lots of computer work or working and pitching or whatnot. So I almost had it right with your museum opening before, didn’t I? So the museum exhibit opens in August. So am I right in saying that… What time in August is the museum exhibit? Will you be able to travel in August as well or not so much?

Okay. And she’s got trip, trip. She intends to do some camping. Okay. And in May, her parents are moving to a new home. So that goes back into this moving thing, right? So this is something that’s definitely going to take a big chunk of that. Okay. So in March, she’s got kids’ break. And then April, she’s got a conference. Great. So the conference is already settled, unless that’s a conference that’s relating to teaching or the museum. If so, let me know in the chat box.

Okay. So let’s start filling in these benchmarks, right? So we’ve got the kids’ breaks on here. We know we need to be mindful. Parents moving home. So this is a big one that she needs to really have some space for. And thankfully, it’s not too close to her museum opening, but it is quite close to these months that are all of her trips. So if we look at this, it basically means… I’m even gonna change to a different color, if I can. It basically means that this whole period here is gonna be hairy for her and that this is really important for us to look at as we go towards it. I guess that’s the best I can do. All right. So how are we gonna break out these multi-faceted benchmarks that she’s got and put that into the time that we have? So she wants to do five to six recurring travel content marketing gigs. So this is, ah, Travel & Words. In fact, that’s the one I was gonna tell you to go to.

So this means five to six travel content marketing gigs. We talked before… And so I’m just gonna in some way wholesale copy this over. We talked before about how there’s sort of a certain duration on this just because of the way that the industry works. Now, she’s a little bit ahead because she’s already got her pitching going on. She’s done a ton of work about learning how this works. So she is now already in the pitching phase. So she’s going to be pitching. And for her, hopefully February is gonna be the end of when all of those things are lined up. So what does this mean?

She doesn’t have too much else going on in January, except for the other work that she’s already doing. So January should essentially be for her, because she has that other income that’s not necessarily freelance income that she needs to be pitching for right now, that’s gonna be time where she’s focusing entirely on getting those pitches out, getting as many pitches out as possible.

And with travel content marketing work like letters of introduction, which are similar in terms of that you have one body of text that you send with small changes out to each person, just like with Jade’s book query that we talked about before, when I say, “Send out tons of these,” you can literally be sending out 100. A hundred seems like a really scary number, but you can send 25 a week, which is 5 a day. And if you’ve already got that text typed up and you just have one sentence that needs changed on each of those, that’s just one hour a day, right?

So I know for Ingrid, her schedule is a little bit different because she’s not necessarily doing her travel things every single day. So we’re gonna say that two days a week, she spends about two and a half hours getting her travel content marketing pitches out. So that is her goal for January. She’s already got her pitches. She doesn’t need to write them, but she needs to be very specific about, “I have X’d out on my calendar that at least two days a week, I need to spend this much time on sending these pitches out,” okay? So this means that she can hit the goal of getting 100 pitches out the door.

So the reason for her that we have 100 pitches is that she’s just starting to pitch. She doesn’t know what her acceptance rate is, right? So if you don’t know what your acceptance rate is for anything, whether it’s travel content marketing or pitching magazines or what have you, 5%… I know, it’s so much lower than the 100% we were talking about for Stephanie, but 5% is a best case scenario pitch success rate ratio to consider, if you have absolutely no data for yourself.

Like I said, 5% can seem really low, but if you feel like your pitches don’t go anywhere, it’s higher than 0%, but it’s a good number for us to use for these travel content marketing pitches because, like I said, travel content marketing pitches are not the same as editorial pitches. You’re sending basically the same letter everywhere you’re sending it. The same number holds for other similar letters like pitching to jobs on job boards or sending letters of introductions out to trade magazines.

These are things where you need to basically get by obviously on the merits of your pitch and how good your pitch is, but really on the chance that the person needs something when you hit them. There’s all sorts of variations that you don’t know. If you’re pitching a company to do travel writing for their blog in January, it might be that they just hired somebody in December and those posts haven’t gone up. There’s a lot of reasons that have nothing to do with you and the strength of your pitch. So 5%, even though it sounds low.

These are really cold pitches that we’re sending, as opposed to magazine editors who are accustomed to receiving pitches from writers and to assigning pitches from writers, travel content marketing pitches just have a lower success rate out of the gate for that reason. Now, I have found quite regularly for myself and for others that a 50% success rate is much more common for just starting out with travel content marketing pitches, but we’re gonna give her the goal of 100 to hit her 6 to 8 that she needs.

And when she starts getting too many responses, she can just stop, but we’re gonna give her a goal of 100 and a 5% pitch rate. Remember, we did that math before for Stephanie, as well, about how many she wants to place. So we’re gonna set that goal. And once she starts getting too many, she’s got too many contracts signed, then she gets to stop. And then February is when she starts working towards that.

So don’t forget, we’ve got this chunk of time here starting in May when she’s gonna be more or less off limits to do new work. So that leaves us February, she’s gonna be starting to get those new travel content marketing clients set up. And then March and April, she’s got a little bit of travel going on. So what else can we fit in there? We have attacked this, right? This is the big one. We’re keeping it simple by keeping her focused for January and February around setting that up. She wants to establish herself as a regular contributor to some travel trade magazines. She’s already got her conference set up, as well.

So let’s look at this one next. So setting up a regular pitching schedule is something that’s gonna come as part and parcel of setting up these travel content marketing pitches, and then these letters of introduction that we’re talking about because she’s gonna get used to pitching, but she does say that she wants to get into some bigger name glossies. So this is something that we’re gonna save for a bit later in the year because for her, the security is a big thing. So the travel content marketing gigs are things that she’s gonna have on contract. And the travel trade publications are places that are gonna give her work every month. So that’s why I’m focusing on these two before we get into this, which we’re gonna do more at the end of the year, okay?

So let’s go back now and let’s look at letters of introduction for her and I’m sorry, now this is hers. Remember, we’re keeping this really simple. So we’ve got two months where we’re focusing on getting that travel content marketing set up. Now, knowing that she’s got her kids’ break in March and that she’s got some new contracts that she’s starting, we’re gonna ramp her up slowly.

So what that means is that this month is where she’s gonna be learning about trades and which are good for her and working on her letter or letters… Sometimes she’s gonna have multiple ones, if she’s got different ones, different types of trade magazines that she’s focusing on. She’s gonna be working on her letters of introduction. And then April is the time that she’s gonna be getting those out. And like I mentioned earlier, and both with this slide and with other slides… Oops, let’s see. There we go.

Getting those out, again, we want to look at the 5% success rate, but she doesn’t need to have 5 trade magazines lined up, right? She said for her, a couple is fine. So if she wants to get 2 and she’s totally new to working with travel trades, that means she would be looking at sending out letters to 50 magazines, right? Now, that sounds like a lot, but again, that letter is gonna be basically the same letter for every single magazine. It’s just a function of making that list.

So the first thing that she’s gonna do is work on that list, the list of magazines, okay? That’s her next how she’s gonna make it happen. And then those letters just go out. And that’s gonna be something where once she’s got that list, she only needs to be, you know, sitting down maybe even two two-hour chunks. She can get all those letters out. So to compile that list of magazines, we want to get to 50 magazines on her list, right? So it’s very important when you’re making lists like this, whether it’s for travel content marketing which is something she’s already done, or for these trade magazines.

And I want you all to hear this, that you don’t spend too much time making lists of who to send letters to. If it’s a pitch, that’s different. You need to focus really highly on the magazine and exactly what type of section they have, the voice, everything, but if you are sending these kind of very cold letters that are standard letters, don’t get super obsessed in that list-building stage.

Get obsessed learning about the ones that get back to you and they want you to send some actual specific pitches or they want you to work on a piece or they want you to work on an idea that would develop into a piece, but don’t get obsessed. So what that means is that Ingrid has a background with history and with a lot of things in the West. She might go looking into art. There’s a lot of different areas that she might look into, but she’s gonna look up trade publication and a word. She’s gonna go through Google. She’s gonna pull out all of the related ones that come up.

She’s gonna find the name and the email address for the editor. And that’s it. That’s what goes on her list. She doesn’t need to be looking at how often they come out every year. She doesn’t need to be looking at how many different sections… She doesn’t need to be looking at any of that stuff right now. All she needs for that 50 because, like I said, we’re working on a 5% hit rate because this is a very cold type of pitching. All she needs is that very basic information. So it’s actually not gonna take her as much time to get that list of 50 together as we talked about, but it still might be… Let’s say, you know, she’s able to pull up… The last time I did this with somebody, like I put together a list of like 25 in like 20 minutes just using Google, but she was in a slightly more fruitful field around food.
So let’s say it’s gonna take her 5 to 10 hours to make that list. And then like I said, to then put those letters together. That’s probably gonna take her let’s say another four to five hours. So this is only gonna be 15 hours over the whole month that she’s working on getting this out, right? And then she’s also working on that content marketing stuff she’s already got. And then she’s going to her conference. So that should be just enough for her, okay?

So then like we said, this whole bit of time, she’s gonna stick with the work that she already has. And we’re not gonna put anything else on her plate. So these months, September and October, these are the golden months where we’re gonna start hitting that next goal of hers, which is getting some bigger name glossies going. Now, here’s the rub. So because she’s got this other trip in April, which as I mentioned, is a conference that has some trips attached to it, she’s gonna have some material from these trips, as well as her summer trips, that she can start pitching. So in this time when she’s on this trip, she can be making lists of… Whoops, that doesn’t need to be in all caps.

She can spend a couple of hours here and there making lists of magazine sections, look for ideas, while she’s on the road, okay, but she doesn’t need to be working on those pitches. She doesn’t have time right now. She’s got her other travel content marketing work and hopefully some work from trade magazines that’s coming up in those times, as well. So this is the stuff that she’s gonna be doing in the background while she’s on the trip, but what that means is that when September and October come around, she can hit the ground running because she has already got the magazine sections. And while she’s been traveling, she’s been thinking about ideas for each of those magazine sections.

So at this point, this is when she wants to be sending I would say about 20, maybe 25, pitches over the course of the month, okay for both of these months while she gets a chance before we get into the holidays. And this is also a really great time to be getting in front of editors because they’re looking at planning out their calendar for the next year. So by pitching folks in the September, October time, this is where rather than hearing from an editor, “Oh, we’ve already filled that section for the next year,” you get to be one of those people that fill that section. So again, 20 to 25 pitches here. And what that breaks down to is about five pitches a week. So even if you’re taking two hours to write each pitch, you can still do one pitch every day in your writing time apart from your other work, but I know that she’s gonna be faster than that. And she’s worked faster than that.

So she’s gonna be working on sending out at least five pitches a week during this time in addition to her other stuff so that she is marking off all of these goals. So, you know, I’ve already gone through this. So seeing that these… Oh, and I didn’t put the benchmarks in for her and not for Stephanie either. I’m sorry, guys, but as you’ve seen as we go through these, it doesn’t actually look like she’s got a ton of tasks here on the bottom. And in Ingrid’s because she’s got other full-time commitments, I broke these out into how many hours and how many work sections there are so you guys can see how they’re achievable in that time, but as you look, this “How we’ll make it happen,” it’s not obscene. We don’t have a ton of things here. And I’ve written them out as specific tasks.

And this is really why I like to approach planning out your year this way rather than with goals that need to happen by a certain time. And you just look at that and you’re like, “How is that ever gonna happen?” Because when we don’t think so much about the goals or the benchmarks or the targets or what have you and instead we just say, “Okay. Two days a week, I need to spend two and a half hours getting those pitches out,” or, “I need to spend…” Where is the other one? “I need to spend 5 to 10 hours sometime this month putting together a list of 50 magazines,” those are small projects. Those are tasks. Those are things that you can actually schedule out in your calendar. Okay, I need two hours here, two hours there, two hours that you put in your calendar. It’s locked. Nobody else can have that time.

And that’s how you can inch along and meet all these benchmarks, these BHAGs that we’re looking at, without it feeling like this onerous, vague thing on the horizon that you just keep seeing it, but it’s like that oasis mirage where it never seems to get any closer. So I know we’ve gone super, super long, but I hope that’s gonna make up for the fact that I won’t be talking to you guys for several weeks now, as I’m gonna be going away and in a bad time zone for doing webinars.

So what that means is there’s no calls coming up for the next two weeks. And then we’re gonna come back in January on January 11th with a new series that’s gonna go for a couple months on how to put together different types of articles. And we’re gonna start small. And we’re gonna get bigger. And so we’re gonna start with looking at how to put together a news brief. And then we’re gonna look at how to put together a front of book roundup. And part of the reason why I’m starting small, why I’m starting with these small articles, is that writing tight, writing succinctly, concisely, and getting a lot of detail in a few words is something that I see a lot, not necessarily you struggling with. It’s not that I see a lot of you struggling with it. I see it not happening. And it’s a big gap between folks that are writing for high-paying outlets versus people who can’t break into those outlets or who are writing for lower-paying outlets.

And especially if you’ve been writing for your own blog or for lower-paying outlets for a while, it’s a really important habit to cement, to be able to write short and packed and concisely. So that’s why, aside from the obvious short to long trajectory idea, that’s why I’m starting with these short ones because people often overlook them, but these front of book sections are the way to break into big magazines, they’re the way to practice writing great writing. So I really want you guys to be doing more of those. So that’s why we’re gonna start there.

Thanks for bearing with me for so long. And I’m glad we didn’t have too many technical hiccups today and we were able to get through workshopping everybody that I had lined up for you. I hope that you pulled a lot out of that. I tried to pick some really different people to workshop in a lot of different ways, whether it was what they had going on in their life or their goals. You know, we had somebody that had a book, which I know is something that we don’t always talk about here, but a lot of you guys have going on, you know, in the background somewhere. So hopefully, those all sparked some things for you. You were writing along in your own sheets at home. And it’s gonna be a little while, guys.

So I’ll see you in a few weeks or talk to you in a few weeks. And have a really great holiday. I know we’re all probably… Those of us who are traveling for the holiday are leaving tomorrow. So I wish you a happy holidays and safe travels, to anybody who’s traveling. And thanks so much for sticking around. And have a great rest of your evening, guys.

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We’ll get going. So, like I said, today we’re going to talk about something that is not on this slide because I didn’t finish updating it. So I’m just gonna go back to the title slide while we talk about that. So the things that we’re gonna focus on today, like I said, are about SWOT. And we’re gonna talk about SWOT and what exactly that is. But the foundation of it is doing an assessment not only of yourself and what has been going on with you in the past year that can be improved, which is what the focus of last week’s webinar was, but also looking at the world around you, whether that is your own personal world or the greater freelance world.

And so we’re gonna talk more about what SWOT means and how it works, but I’m also gonna give you a lot of different ways that you can do your SWOT analysis. So SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. And like I said, we’re gonna go way, way into what that means. But this is the kind of thing that I think a lot of us as freelance business owners find to be quite, you know, esoteric or “business-schoolly” or just generally not something that we need, that it’s too much for us, like doing a big long business plan or a big long book proposal if you’re just doing a self-published book.

But the thing is that I find that a lot of times this SWOT analysis, which is actually just a very very quick thing that you can do rather than something really long and involved like putting together a business plan, is often misconstrued in terms of its effectiveness because people think they need to do it for their whole business. They think that, you know, oh my God, well, how can I possibly come up with every single strengths, or every weakness, or every opportunity for my business. And so one of the things that we’re gonna look at is a lot of different points of your business that you can use this to analyze. And we’re gonna talk about how that can help you make some really solid and significant steps forward.

So as we move into what we’re talking about today, I see in the chat box and people have been talking about, what does the O and SWOT stand for or what is this. And like I said, we’re gonna break that down in a lot of detail. But one of the things that we’re gonna talk about today and then I wanted to kind of highlight is that the whole way that we’re going about this SWOT analysis is to look at what is specific to you.

And I’ve actually had I think because of some podcasts I’ve been on and a couple things, a lot of people asking about my book, “The Six-Figure Travel Writing Roadmap” recently. And the thing is that even though that book clocks in at 400 pages, and even though I do map out a plan that if you follow it will take you to six figures with your travel writing, everybody does have unique circumstances. And someone wrote me the other day saying, you know, “I know this, that, and the other thing, but I have a very unique set of circumstances.” And I hear that all the time.

And when I was first working on the book, a lot of the reasons that people gave me for not getting as far with their travel writing as they thought that they should, were tied to these unique circumstances. But what I found talking to people who are successful by their own in terms of success but also by what anyone else would consider financially, or in terms of the number of clients they have, or the stability that they have with those clients, those people all follow a similar set of, not rules per se, but a similar set of actions, but they just apply them differently to their own circumstances.

So a lot of what we’re looking at today are things that you really need to take this technique and see how it fits you. This isn’t gonna be one of these things where I say, “This is exactly what editors wanna hear,” or “This is exactly the things that I would pull out of this press trip to then pitch.” This is gonna be something that’s highly personalized to you.

So first of all, I know I usually have, before we get this train moving, and I asked a question, you know, that’s more of the basis of why we’re talking about what we’re gonna talk about today. But it’s really important for me to know as we move through this series how many folks on the live call, and for you to think about if you’re attending at home, have caught the earlier webinars in this series? Because like I mentioned in the newsletter, they’re very sequential. And even, as I just said earlier on this call about Chris Guillebeau’s Sheet of Goal Setting, you can certainly not do any of this prep work and then go make goals for yourself, but I can’t guarantee to you that they will be so useful.

And this is one of the issues that I think a lot of people find, not just with their freelance travel writing business period, but also just with, you know, goal-setting or following some tips from some writing teacher, writing coach, or business teacher, business coach is that if you implement part of an approach to something, especially if it’s been created really as a wholesale way to go from point A to point B, it’s not even, like, I can’t or those people can’t guarantee your success, but you’re really doing yourself a disservice. And so this isn’t, you know, a sales pitch like “Please buy this and that for me.” But I just really want to say in the year going forward that as much as we are all different, we all have our own circumstances and everything.

If you are embarking on something that has been well-crafted, you are doing yourself a disservice to jump past that intro stuff. Because especially as I, and I know some other of you have been doing this as well, get really into writing books, especially nonfiction books, you really come to see why there are like two, three chapters that just kind of seemed like introduction in the beginning. I used to do, not debate, but mock trial when I was young, and I took some classes and involved debate. And one of the first things that you do is you set the definitions, and you set the problem, and you get everyone on the same page in terms of the word that you’re trying to use, and the things that you’re trying to solve.

And so what this means to say is not just about this annual review that we’re doing, but say that you wanna write for magazines. Are you reading magazines? Are you looking at what magazines are publishing? Are you looking at what they’re publishing by freelancers? Are you reading FOLIO? And I’m going to write that because everyone always asked me. So FOLIO is a website, which is for people who work in the industry. And it says, “When thing close, or when things open, or when, you know…” Time just got purchased by somebody the other day. So if you aren’t doing this building block type of work to see how the magazine industry works, then you are doing your magazine pitching a disservice.

And one of the things that we talked about in one of the earlier calls in this series, I think it was last week, was really getting up on the industry that you serve and how that helps with ideas. And I’ve been working with some people in the various coaching programs this past week or a couple weeks on writing LOIs or…I’m gonna write this in the chat box as well. Or a letter of introductions, letter of introductions, really, for…Yes, Kerwin, I think that’s right. Let me just check. Letters of introduction for travel trade magazines.

And we have a couple of webinars in the webinar library on working with travel trade magazines. Because this is a really great way, especially if you have travel industry knowledge, to get recurring work where you don’t have to pitch the editor every single time. And so I’ve been working with some folks on that, and the editors of the magazine have been responding favorably to their letters of introduction, and say, “Hey, send me some pitches.” And then everything grinds to a great big halt. Because not that they don’t know in the industry that they’re pitching for, but they don’t know what type of pitches a trade magazine publishes, because they’re not up on what magazines look at.

So whether it’s setting your goals right now or the work that you’re gonna do in the year ahead, make sure you’re not shorting your opportunities for success by skipping those intro steps. And that’s actually kind of all of what we’re gonna talk about this week. I’ve got a really great quote that I want to start us out with.

But those of you who have joined us in the past, last week we talked about pulling together the specific numbers of what we had achieved in terms of earnings, what we had expended, in terms of investing in our education, in terms of business, the ebbs and flows of those month-by-month, and if you haven’t joined us for that in the past, then you’re gonna just kind of be thinking back on your year as we work through these questions. But it is very useful, like I said, to pull together those numbers in terms of your specific income month-by-month and client-by-client as well as your expenses.

So as we have that data, now we have to figure out how to analyze and how to pull it apart, how to draw things to it, and how do we do that. So this SWOT analysis, and we’re gonna go through, like I said, 25-point what do those things mean is a really great way to do it. And here is why.

So this quote is from “The Art of War,” which it’s just amazing how this book continues to be such an enduring point for business owners, for military leaders, and other strategists for literally centuries and centuries, that the wisdom within this book is relevant no matter the errand amount of the circumstances. And that goes, like I said, to this idea, or rather this realization in really coming to terms with that no matter how specific your circumstances are, everyone has specific circumstances. And learning how to know which ones cause a change in your strategy and what times you should just follow what everyone else is doing is part of this battle, is part of this concept of coming to terms with your past year and where you really are in your freelance travel writing career.

So as Sun Tzu says in “The Art of War,” I’ve got a lot of sort of breaking out and emphasis on here because it’s really important for the work that we’re gonna do today. So it says, “So it is said that if you know your enemies and know yourself, you can win a hundred battles without a single loss.” But “If you know yourself but not your opponent, you may win or lose.” However, “If you neither know yourself nor your enemy, you will always endanger yourself.”

So the trajectory here is basically, obviously, that knowing yourself and your enemies is the best course, right? And so that leads into this SWOT analysis that we’re gonna talk about today, which, as I mentioned, is looking both at yourself as well as at external things. But the reason I wanted to include this whole quote here is that it’s really important. If you only know yourself, you might get somewhere, okay? If you feel like you really have a solid sense of what you’re good at and what you’re not good at and you proceed with that, you might do well. But if you don’t know the market, if you don’t know what editors are looking for, if you don’t know what other people are or aren’t doing, you can’t guarantee that success.

But the next part of that is if you don’t even take the time to know where you really stand, then you’re pretty much guaranteed to not get anywhere. And it sounds really horrible, and I talk a lot about how, like, most people that I encounter who aren’t where they wanna be have this, this, this, and this trait. And those traits aren’t set in stone. These are things that you can change. But self-awareness and awareness of your standing in terms of your business is really one of the best things in terms of changing where you are. And that doesn’t seem like something that’s very easy to learn, right?

I feel like, especially as, you know, someone who…my husband is a computer scientist, like, I probably would have been an engineer if I didn’t take some writing classes when I was very young, both my parents are engineers, and as somebody who has that background, I think a lot of times people are told that in today’s society particularly that your amount of self-awareness is somehow, like, genetically wired, or it’s the product of how you were raised, or this or that.

But the thing is that this is something that you can absolutely move the dial on. And you need to. And as we go through the different parts of the SWOT, which one of them is weaknesses, if you feel like you don’t have a good understanding of where you are with your abilities or in relation to other things, that’s something that you should definitely put in one of your weaknesses.

So let’s dive into that. So, like I said, SWOTing allows you to ask, realistically and in a self-aware manner, various questions of yourself and to gain that knowledge. And this is really one of the reasons why I’m dedicating a whole webinar to this today. It’s not because it’s a fundamental technique that people who go to business school use, or who are in high-level executive positions use, or that it’s a very easy little chart that you can draw for yourself. I don’t even include the chart in this webinar because I don’t like the chart version of the SWOT.

So the whole reason that I’m teaching you SWOT is that it teaches you to be self-aware. That’s literally the whole point that we’re doing this. It is a mechanism to start to force yourself over time, first by doing it kind of manually or painfully depending on how you view self-analysis, to think about these things. But then it will become more and more natural and automatic.

In fact, when I first started learning about it, when I used to freelance-write for…or go straight, rather, for website about freelance writing for a business professor and we were talking about this, I realized that I had never seen it written down, but a lot of people who write pro and con lists are sort of doing this thing but in a slightly less structured manner. And part of this, you know, realization that I had that it is something that a lot of people do self…sorry, subconsciously is that they can’t actually pinpoint where SWOT analysis came from.

There was somebody who started using it, but he didn’t know where it came from. It seems to be something that a lot of us have done anecdotally. And that to me really pinpoints to why it’s such a great technique to use. Because it evolved organically, it’s very organic for people to use, it is very adaptable, and there are a couple of things that people think of as downsides to this method that we’re gonna look at the end and how to mitigate those.

So as we’re going through this, the concept that we wanna keep in mind is that this helps us become aware of things. And, again, I talked a bit about why that mattered, but particularly in this context, it helps us become aware of things that will affect the goals that we make for the year ahead. And we wanna know these before they affect those goals so that we can make plans around them.

I read a really great quote tonight, and I literally just have piles of quotes around planning and reviewing now from all this research I’ve been doing for you guys, but I read a really great one that was, I believe, from Eisenhower, if Eisenhower was also a military in addition to a politician. But I believe it was Eisenhower saying that “Plans in battle are absolutely useless. You basically never use them. But that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t plan.”

And this goes back to that circumstances thing that I’ve talked about a lot because I know that this is one of the things that rears up for a lot of people. Like, oh, well, I know I’m supposed to do that, but it doesn’t work because my mother is very old and sick. And, you know, I just had to totally can my plans for two weeks to take care of her. But those are things that you can factor into your plans in the first place. So that’s really why we wanna do this is we want to make plans that are realistic for you for where you are.

I feel like this is, like, all we’re talking with this week. But I didn’t just find this graphic out of the blue. I looked for it particularly. And I wanted to touch on this point as I’m talking about circumstances and everything. I think that there has been this, in popular culture, a lot of people misconstrue this concept of being special. And I think it’s because a lot of millennials when they were young we’re told like, “You’re special. You’re special.” All the time. And a lot of people who aren’t millennials joke about, you know, kids getting awards for everything or how everyone gets an award.

And I think that there is now, like, this double-edged sword of your circumstances, or what’s special, or what’s different about you that’s out there. Is it on the one hand people might feel proud of it, but on the other hand there’s this general diminishment of being special. And a lot of people say “Don’t be a special snowflake.” Have any of you guys heard that? Don’t be a special snowflake? Like, I have literally been on group tours I’ve heard that people say this to each other. And sometimes it’s when somebody has, like, a legitimate medical issue or something like that. They said, “Don’t be a special snowflake.” They mean don’t ask for special treatment.

But here is the business secret, okay? About two, three, maybe four years ago, there were a lot of small business coaches that came out that we’re talking all about what is special about you, not this whole thing of, you know, what is the intersection of your passion and your skills, which was a little earlier in terms of business trends, let’s say, but what is special about you and super pushing that. Push on all of your eccentricities, push on everything that is specific to you. And then you will only find the customers, the clients, the tribe, whatever word you wanna use, that love all of that that, that get all of that. And then at that point, that is how you have a really successful business.

Well, there’s certainly aspects that you need to keep in mind in terms of communicating professionally, and running your business, and treating your business like a business, and all these things. There is a lot of strength to that sentiment that I’ve seen happen again and again and again, that as people really reach a point of stability in their careers, it’s because of embracing their special “snowflakeness,” or their special “unicornness,” or whatever you want to call it.

And so this is one of these things that I really want you to dig into as we do this SWOT analysis, is that there are, and like I said, we’re gonna get really into what each one is, but there are positive things. There’s strengths and opportunities. And there’s negative things, which are threats and weaknesses. And I think each of you, depending on what is going on in your life and your own personal disposition, are, you know, predisposed to focus on the strengths or focus on the weaknesses. And that in it of itself is going to be a strength or a weakness. You know, probably a weakness because you should be looking at both.

So that is also something to be mindful of as we are going through this. Are you being too glass-half-full or too glass-half-empty. Okay, so I feel like I’m teasing you with all these different letters in SWOT, but I promise we’re gonna get to them. As I looked at these slides, I kept trying to move the slides where I talked about what the S, O, W, and T were up, and then I just kept thinking, no, no, no, we need to talk about all these other things first. So before, still before, we get into what the SWOT actually stands for and how you work through each of those letters, I wanna talk about what you use this analysis to analyze.

So as I mentioned way back at the top of the call, I think a lot of people find difficulty in using this type of analysis as small business owners, or as freelancers, or people who are currently hobbyists or bloggers who are looking to move into a full-time freelance business because they try and analyze everything. They try to analyze their whole self, their whole business, the whole world of writing, every different type of travel writing, every different opportunity that they could possibly have.

And it doesn’t fit. It doesn’t fit on one piece of paper. But it also doesn’t fit in terms of one goal-setting session. It doesn’t fit in terms of one year. It doesn’t necessarily fit in terms of one lifetime. But it certainly doesn’t fit in terms of one person’s circumstances. So before you start walking through the steps of these SWOTs, you need to think about what your objective is gonna be.

So there’s a couple other business concepts here that I’m gonna sort of briefly explain, but you don’t really need to know too much about them. But a lot of folks talk about the Four Ps, which eventually became the Seven Ps, and the Eight Ps. And they also talked about the Four Cs, and there’s actually two different types of Four Cs. So all of that sort of nomenclature doesn’t matter, but I’ve put the ones that are useful for us to consider up here.

And I just want to look at them quickly. Because as I was saying in the email newsletter and the blog post that preceded this call, one of the biggest failings in people who fail to get their freelance business off the ground is not treating it like a business. And so it’s really instructive for us, not just to do something like a SWOT analysis, but to know what type of things, you know, “big businesses” or “real businesses” are considering when they do this. And so some of these words feel a little awkward for us as freelance writers, right? Commodity, in particular.

But you’ll notice that a lot of these kind of math across, we’ve got product and commodity, price and cost, communication, which can be like promotion, channel, which can be placed, consumer, which can be people. But I really want you to consider these because you may never have considered them before. You may have never thought about yourself in terms of process. And by yourself, I mean your freelance business. But yourself as a business owner as a freelancer, do you have a process that you follow every single time when you write an article?

I know a lot of people who have blogs may have one in place for how they blog even if it’s somewhat, you know, non-codified but something that you just do automatically as you’re putting your blog post together. You know, first you take an idea from the list of ideas that you keep for yourself. Then you do some research. Then you write an outline. Then you write the post. Then you find the photos. Then you set it up in WordPress. Then do the metadata, etc. Etc.

So you might have a certain process just like you probably go process for how you take a shower. Like, I’m quite conscious of the fact that I do things in an exact same order every day when I’m in the shower, but you might not be. You probably have a process to a lot of things that you do. But do you have a process for the parts of your freelance business where you’re struggling? I bet the answer is no. And that is probably one of the weaknesses that you’re gonna wanna put on your analysis.

But all these different things that I’m giving you here are different areas that you can focus on in your SWAT, but there are also just things that you might want to consider as you think about your strengths and your weaknesses particularly as well as your opportunities and your threats, okay? So I’m gonna skip past aside. If you guys have any questions about other specific things on here, now is a good time to ask them. We can always come back this slide if you have questions after I move on.

But like I said, there’s some particular ones in here that I want you to focus on. And so, product or commodity, I also talked about it a lot as an offering, is one to really think about. Do you know what your product/offering/commodity is? Do you have one? Do you have several or are you just doing whatever work comes your way? Should you do a SWOT analysis just around pursuing a specific type of product commodity offering?

Likewise, with consumer, are you targeting only, and specifically, and effectively, and with a process a specific type of consumer, who may mean editor, who may via trade editor versus a consumer editor, or a national editor versus a regional editor? They have different me if. There are different types of consumers, okay? So, for us, what are some things that might make sense as freelance travel writers to focus our analysis on, okay?

It might be a new initiative. For instance, I’ve just picked things that I see a lot of you guys talk about to put in here. So it might be whether you wanna move specifically into travel content marketing. You may have been doing freelance blogging before but not necessarily under the umbrella, and the flag, and the ground of travel content marketing. And working with CVBs, say instead of companies or vice versa.

It might be moving in to a different type of content marketing. For instance, if you’ve been writing blog posts but you want to work into writing, move into writing, white papers, or doing social media management, or perhaps take things even further and work on doing overarching strategies almost setting yourself up like a mini digital agency that works with smaller CVBs that don’t have the budget to go to an agency.

You might want to take a look at what magazines you’re working on or you have taken a look last week. Found that you have been getting a lot of work from a certain type of magazine but it’s just not something that interests you. And that there’s a different type of magazine that you want to move into but you haven’t had success so far or you simply haven’t been pitching them. So you want to see what is going on with that. Is it really feasible for you or not?

There might be things that you’re already doing, such as if you have a freelance business now, you probably have been over the years acquiring clients in some fashion. So you might wanna do a SWOT analysis on how LinkedIn is working for your business, or going to conferences is working for your business. This is actually something that I’ve been working on this week as we’ve been going through, you know, our different expenses for the year and things like this.

I have been thinking, and always think a lot about because they’re big investments for us, about what conferences we do. And I even just got an email today about a situation that I need to kind of look into. I’m working on a very special trip tour kind of thing with the Women in Travel Summit where it’ll almost be like a mini version of what we do at the Freelance Travel Writing Boot Camp, where in the morning I talk to you about how to come up with ideas, and what magazines you’re looking for, and then we go out on a tour, and then we come back in the afternoon and we talk about where to pitch them. And I just got an email that seems like something totally different than what I had in mind. And so now we have to have kind of like a mini SWOT analysis of if it makes sense for us to do it in the manner that they’re asking or is that not going to be a good long-term fit for us.

So these are the kind of different things that you can be looking at with your analysis. So like I just mentioned in the case of this Women in Travel Summit opportunity, you can even do this kind of like a pros and cons sheet, like I mentioned earlier, with new opportunities that come in. For you for instance, I have something that I was doing just before I got on the call with you is that I’m actually like a little irate. I’m trying to talk calmly about this.

But I have a full coaching program member who had this company that she had pitched for some blogging work. The company took forever, the owner, to get back to her with the contract. So the contract had been set up with certain dates, and then she just didn’t sign it for a while. And so, then the freelancer billed her for, you know, the dates in the contract, which she had signed, and is trying to then make up the work to get back on schedule. But now the person won’t pay the bill even though it’s two bills that are due now, and now is pushing off their meetings and wants to get on the phone and talk about probably, but we can’t tell because she won’t put an email, changing the terms of what she already agreed to. And it’s just like boiling my blood that this woman signed this contract weeks and weeks late, putting this freelancer in this position, and now is trying to change the terms.

So this is the kind of thing where we were figuring out today what makes sense to do here. Like, what are the potential things that could come down the line of acquiescing of this situation, you know, how does it affect her if she just drops his client entirely, and so on and so forth. So these are different things that you can do a SWOT analysis on.

So that’s why I really wanted to make it clear up front that this is something that you don’t have to do for your whole business. You shouldn’t even do it for your whole business. And you can do them throughout the year. But right now as we’re working on putting together our goals for the year ahead, it’s super important to use these in a resilient manner, to not just use them to evaluate everything, but to use them to evaluate some things that we’re thinking about so we can really take into account all of these factors around that issue, or initiative, or whatever it is as we make our plan.

So now we’re gonna talk about what S, W, O, and T stand for. But I just wanted to remind you that on the vein of plans, in the two webinars that are coming up in this series, that’s where we’re gonna get really into the plans for the year ahead. And for those of you that have been following us for the previous two webinars and this one as well, I hope you can see we’re really digging in and we’re really gonna make some things for the year ahead that you can follow, that you’ll have no trouble following, and you can excel with.

So next week, we’re gonna talk about how to make goals that fit and that are resilient. And so, like I’ve talked about earlier with the little special unicorn special snowflake bit, is that your goals really need to be unique to you but you should pursue them in the way that works for everyone. And, like I said, you know, I use the example of somebody whose mother is very ill, that your plans should be resilient for the things they already know about. But it’s also important to make them resilient for the things that you don’t know about, good or bad.

Somebody who had joined us for the Idea Fest event in the fall has gotten a book that now she’s spending all of her time working on to get out as soon as possible because it’s quite related to contemporary events. And so things that totally change your plans can be bad or good, but it’s really important, like I said, with this, I think it’s an Eisenhower quote, that you have those plans in place in the first place, that you have thought about all of these factors to go into those plans. Because that’s how you make good decisions when your circumstance has changed down the line.

So let’s look at what to think about. So in the first two parts of the SWOT analysis, our Strengths and Weaknesses. And the reason those are the first two parts is that you start with internal factors. And then after that, you move to external factors. And I’m not sure why they set it up like this in the first place. You know, obviously SWOT sounds better than OTSW. I don’t know what you would even say that as. But I think it’s important because once we psychologically start considering what’s going on in the greater world, it can give us a lot of sort of jitters about our self, and our standing, and things like that.

So that’s one of the reasons why I find it really useful to start with these internal things. And like we said in the last couple slides, to be focusing in on specific things. Because otherwise, it’s very easy to not find or to find too many, depending on your disposition, strengths or weaknesses to consider. And the ones that you find might not be relevant to what you actually want to analyze.

So as we launch into this, tell me in the chat box how many of you have, in some work context or another, performed some sort of SWOT analysis in the past.

So, yeah, we’ve got a lot of nos. A couple people who have. Great. Oh, great, great, great. 

So I have an example. Lenora, hello. I have an example coming up in a couple of slides that I’m just gonna skip to first for those of you who have never done this before so that you can kind of get a picture of what this looks like if you’ve never done it in the past. Because I know that it feels a little obtuse and esoteric as an analytical framework if it’s new to you.

So for this fake SWOT that I’ve done, so, like I said, we’ve got strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. So for this fake SWOT that I have done, for this fictional travel writer, I didn’t even base this on anybody I know even in the most remote sense, okay? So we can talk about it, you know, as nitty-gritty or constructive detail as we want because it’s not based on a real person.

So in this one, I have constructed a writer who has been content marketing for agencies basically. And in this case, I’m using somebody who’s been doing it in-house rather than somebody who, perhaps, like some of you, has been doing freelance content marketing for these third-party connectors who, you know, might work with Hilton or Hertz or whoever it is to the contract, and then assign those things out to writers that they might have already in their system. Then they work through a content management platform, and they have various levels of editing to make sure that they provide the thing for the writer.

So those sort of setups as we’ve talked about a lot before, Contently, Demand Media used to be one of them, Byline is one, those systems can be kind of hard. So in this case, I’ve chosen somebody who let’s just say worked in-house for a content marketing agency that was doing various types of writing for big clients like Priceline, things like that. So this person has decided that she definitely has the chops to quit her job. And she knows how to do that, she knows I get this work done, she knows what the client atmosphere is like because she’s seen, you know, the salespeople in her own company in the types of gigs that she gets. And she’s decided that she has a really good idea how this works and she wants to go freelance.

But then as she’s looking into going freelance, she’s decided that she actually wants to write for magazines because that’s more of the type of writing that she envisions herself doing if she’s gonna leave her well-paid job. And so as she’s making this transition, one of the things that she also decides is, because she’s not married, or perhaps newly divorced and doesn’t have kids, that she wants to move abroad. And she has background, family background in Eastern Europe and has visited several times.

And Montenegro to her is just one of the most beautiful places in the world. And so she’s decided that’s where she wants to settle, at least temporarily, as she makes this switch. Because the cost of living is very low, and there’s a lot there that she feels that she can write about because there aren’t really any, you know, writers or big blogs that are covering it. And in fact, in preparation for this move, she’s been writing a blog about traveling to Montenegro for about 18 months or so to establish herself in that niche. So that’s our setting. That’s our fictional character.

So what we’re looking at in the SWOT analysis for her is if she can hack it. If it really makes sense for her to set herself a BHAG. And I’m gonna write this down because I’m sure people are gonna ask, but we’ll talk to him about this next week. So BHAG is a Big Hairy Audacious Goal. And I cannot tell you, and I don’t know if I can feel audacious while speaking, I cannot tell you where this term came from. It’s something that a lot of corporate types use, which seems funny thing for a corporate type to say hairy in a normal business term. But that’s what it is. So she’s decided to check out if it makes sense for her to set herself a Big Hairy Audacious Goal around magazine writing or if she needs to just stick with what she knows. So that’s the purpose of the SWOT analysis for this fictional writer.

So in her strengths, she knows from her previous experience that she can handle quick deadlines, that she knows how to do the research and get the work done. So she feels like even if she has to take a large amount of lower paying work to get started to make sure that she can make ends meet in the short term just writing for magazines that she can make that work. She feels very comfortable with that, and she knows that that’s something that she might have to do. Another thing that I didn’t put in here is let’s just say that from her previous corporate writing work, she’s got a pretty good amount of savings left. So she’s putting in here as a strength that she doesn’t need to worry about hitting income goals in the short term.

Now this is something that I didn’t write on here initially because I’ve often seen people think of that as a strength that they have money saved up from when they’ve left their corporate job and instead find themselves just kind of tootling around for a while. Not that they aren’t working, but that they are doing a lot of research, and learning, and different types of things, but they’re not focusing on bringing in income. So then they get used to kind of living off of their savings. And by the time they get to the point where, you know, they’re at the three-month or even the two-month countdown of running out of money, they just don’t have an adequate system set up to replace that income in terms of a pipeline of clients.

So I didn’t write that on here in the first place. And so it’s up to you to consider whether you find that to be a strength or not. But I personally have over the course of working with different people seen that it tends to lead to a sort of I’m-on-a-grown-up-gap-year type of vacation sensibility. And I really like that term grown-up gap year. And I think I’m gonna write it up…write it down. So those are her strengths.

Some of her weaknesses, though, are that she’s not accustomed to working from home. And another weakness that I didn’t put on here is that she has spent a lot of time in Montenegro but not in a long-term way and always staying in hotels. And in her experience, she can find a reasonable internet but she’s not necessarily sure what it’s gonna be like in apartments. So one of the weaknesses might be that her internet is spotty or that she doesn’t have internet when she goes into rural areas to do.

But not being accustomed to working from home is gonna be a really big weakness for her that I recommend those of you who are in a similarly transitional setting in terms of wanting to move out of other full-time occupation into full time travel rating consider. Because this is a big jump. Even people who have been at it for two or three years, unless you’ve had some kind of intervention in a productivity forcing way, it can be really hard to make the same sort of daily production goals that you would in an office setting for a lot of different reasons.

I’ve spoken with people lately who use housework as a tool to clear their mind, but then find that it can easily become something that they do to feel productive instead of getting their work done. You know, there’s the obvious temptation of Facebook. I used to never ever watch TV during the day because I thought that was, like, the worst thing ever to be working for home and watching TV. And then, ironically, I’ve started watching TV during the day because it helps me in that afternoon sometime when I would otherwise not get work done because I’m just not very productive at that hour. And so not knowing what your limits, your weaknesses, and strengths specifically about working at home is a type of weakness in it of itself. They can definitely affect your freelance writing.

So another weakness that I have in here for her is that she doesn’t have any experience in doing her own sales and marketing. I mentioned that this fictional person in her fictional life had spent several years working in-house at a content digital agency, and so she’s been exposed to a lot of these sales and marketing people, and she knows what kind of clients they learn, and for what kind of things. But those aren’t gonna be the same to her clients. So there’s a single person, as a single freelancer, she’s gonna land. So even though she does have exposure to that, she really doesn’t have experience, and she doesn’t have processes in place.

And then another liability for her, liability is another way to think of your weaknesses or threats. I kind of like the word liability because I feel like it makes it more of, like, you have to do something about this. But another liability for her is that she does have this blog, which she had set up before leaving her job, with the intention for it to set her up as a specialist in the region. But what she’s found now is that she just gets a lot of people asking her questions essentially for, like, free travel advice or, like, what do I do here. So she has a certain amount of maintenance that her blog requires even if she’s not putting up new posts.

Okay, so that’s the stuff that’s internal. That’s specific to her. So as I had looked at on this other slide, before we jumped ahead, there’s internal parts of your SWOT analysis, but then there’s external parts. So the external parts are quite different because they don’t have anything to do about you or your background and your circumstances. This is a really important line in the sand to draw, that those external things need to really be things about the larger world, the larger market.

So in this case, you know, she’s chosen Montenegro. She’s moved there because it’s just a really stunning area that is still quite inexpensive for the type of beauty that it has, especially given that Croatia had now become completely overrun to the point where…Dubrovnik is one of the city that’s right up there with Venice and Barcelona that have the most issues from tourists’ visitation overwhelming the local population. So unlike Croatia, Montenegro also has, you know, coastal as well as these amazing mountain settings, but it’s much, much, much cheaper and that makes it a really attractive offering for a lot of different magazines as long as she spins her ideas correctly.

Okay, so that’s an opportunity. But I wanted to mention that there’s a corresponding threat, which is because this isn’t Paris or Venice, it’s not something that a magazine, a specific singular magazine, is gonna be able to cover every month. So that means it’s gonna be difficult for her perhaps to work regularly with the same writers if her focus on Montenegro is too narrow. And this is something that I’ve seen people get caught in, not necessarily because they have geographic areas that they write about but they can’t write about too regularly, but because they get sick of them over time. And I had this myself with Italy, which seems like it’s so big that you wouldn’t get sick of it.

But this is one of the reasons why when we talk about diversifying your clients, or diversifying your type of writing, or should you pick a niche, I never recommend choosing just one. Actually I recommend a kind of a battery approach, that you have geographic topics that you specialize in and more topical area of interest things that you specialize in. And that you have three of each so that you give yourself a lot of leeway, and you can kind of get bored of one for a while or find that it’s not as interesting to people, and focus on another one. But that you have the ability to jump around and keep yourself interested.

But in this case, she’s really established herself about Montenegro. And because it’s quiet, let’s call it off the beaten path, it’s not something that one magazine specifically is going to be able to cover more than once every 18 months at a minimum. So this is actually gonna be a threat for her as well. So it might be easy for her to get one-off gigs, but it might be harder for her to get recurring work, okay?

So, however, one of the things that might mitigate that in the opportunities area here is that there are several new Eastern European magazines, that are airline magazines specifically, that are opening up. So those might be some opportunities for her to write regularly about this area.

But then a corresponding threat particularly for her to establish herself with these magazines is that there are other writers who have lived in this area longer, who have bigger publication credits, who are already kind of the go-to person for a kind of Travel and Leisure on that area.

So I walk through all this stuff for a fictional person. So I want to just check in with you guys now about questions that you have about this fictional example before I go back through and explain each thing and exactly what you should do. Because that will help me guide what I’m saying about each of these things. But in this fictional example like you’ve seen, we made really, you know…this is a short list that I have on here, but I’ll talk to you more in depth about each of them, but I were really trying to kind of give, not a balanced perspective per se, but to take as many different points as possible into consideration here.

And you’ll notice that one of the things that this SWOT for this fictional travel does is it doesn’t tell her exactly what to do. And that’s really important. Because that’s not the purpose of the SWOT. And that’s why we’re doing SWOT before and hand-in-hand with doing our pre-prep of pulling together the data and looking at the data for our past year. And then next week, we’re going to work on our goals. And the following week, we’re gonna work on the actual roadmap for the year ahead.

So this SWOT, like I said, it’s an awareness mechanism that’s part of your plan, an integral part of your plan, but it’s not a plan in it of itself. And so it’s different in a lot of ways than a pros and cons lists also, because even though we’re calling them strengths and weaknesses and opportunities and threats, it’s not the same as dos or don’ts, right, or, like, pluses or minuses, right? A weakness can be something that you can work around. It doesn’t have to affect you. A strength can also become a liability in a different setting.

So this is more of an inventory that we’re doing about the factors that are affecting this decision that we want to make. So I’m not sure if the time delay is caught up but it looks like you might not have any questions about the example that I just gave. So let’s go back through and talk about the different things that I took into account on each of these now that you’ve seen kind of a picture of how this works.

So the Bare Bones Basic, the BBBs of how the SWOT works. So like I said, we start with the internal factors. And I talked about why I prefer to start with the internal factors. I really think it’s easier. And I think is a little harder for you to get to them if you do the external factors first.

So as you start in the external factors, you also do something that psychologically makes it easier to move into this, which is that you start with the plus sides. You start with the positives, okay? And anytime you do any sort of annual review anything, if you look at Chris’s annual review, or I’ve looked at a lot of other people who do similar annual reviews, you’ll see that people always start with what went well in the past year. If you’ve ever been in a class and done some free writing, professors don’t, or teachers, writing teachers don’t usually start with something super, super negative because it makes it hard for you to be in this brainstorming process. So we start with the strengths.

So another way for the purposes of this discussion to categorize or to call your strengths is the characteristics of your business that give it an advantage. So you can also call this Advantages. And that, I think, can also be an easier framing mechanism for you. So, you know, whether you are somebody who has had a blog in the past so you’re very familiar with content management systems, or whether you are somebody perhaps who has a journalism degree and a background, you know, 25 years ago and a completely different type of journalism, these are all things that are either present or past, so either from your circumstances now or your background, that give you some kind of edge.

So they could be knowledge that you have that other people don’t. It could be experienced that you have that other people don’t. It could also just be some sort of characteristic like you don’t sleep very much, you know. So, like, you can work more hours and other people. Or, you know, it could be something like you are very loquacious and you just chat people up easily, which gives you an advantage in terms of getting story ideas when you’re traveling. So, again, what you come up with your first strengths depends a lot on what you’re choosing to focus on. But these are just some starting points for very basic strengths that you could be bringing to whatever travel writing question you’re asking.

Another good thing to put in here is proven successes. So this is the kind of thing where especially if you’re somebody who tends to be a little bit down on yourself, if you don’t necessarily think that you can do this, think about how many articles you’ve written in the past, whether it’s in a different business setting, or, you know, if you’re mid-career writer and you’re just feeling like you’re not sure that starting to do a bunch of pitching is the right path for you, or if you should go to conferences and make face-to-face connections with editors. You might do two different SWOTs around those two different things and see what you bring to each of those equations.

And so if you do have success whether it is that even though you don’t send that many pitches, every single one of them has struck up an ongoing relationship with an editor even though you’ve only sent like 8 pitches in 20 years. That would be something to put in here as a strength, okay?

So a couple of the things they consider. Remember I talked before about how we don’t often think of our product, or of our process, or of our customer? These are other things to put in here. So attributes might be that you know your ideal customer very well because you already are that person, or because you have a very big network, or you might have a really good system in terms of coming up with ideas because you’re also a photographer who regularly accompanies these tours, these safari tours, okay? So these are different things that can go into your strengths category.

Weaknesses. Okay. This is the harder part to talk with. But I think some of you might, like I said, be in the position where you come up with more weaknesses or more strengths. It’s important to look at this. You know, you might be somebody who puts as a strength that you, you know, have gotten “blah blah blah” assignments. But if those “blah blah blah” assignments are all from places that don’t pay you and they don’t give you a tutorial insight, I’m not sure if it’s a strength.

So, for instance, there’s somebody, Roy Stephenson, who teaches, I don’t know if I wanna say travel writing, but he teaches kind of how to get yourself on press trips. And on his website, he says something, I never remember the number because it changes all the time, where just like he’s had 1,100 articles published in 800 magazines. And I was just looking at this and my husband the other day because he have never heard me mention this guy before. And it came up in our business that we’re looking at him and trying to make a decision. And he looked at the website. And I was like, “Just look at the website and figure out who he is.” And he read this number, and then he stopped for a minute. And he said, “Wait a second. That’s a lot of different mag…Is he only writing one article for each magazine? That’s not good, is it?”

And so that’s the kind of thing where many numbers can go one way or another unless you know exactly what the point of your SWOT is, what objective you are trying to put these items together for. Things can go one way or the other. So it’s really important that as you think about your weaknesses, if you’re having trouble coming up with them, if you’re not having trouble coming up with them…like I said, think about this about your strengths, whichever one you are having a harder time coming up with, think about them very strictly in terms of the objective that you’re trying to evaluate.

So let’s look at the external factors. Because I think these are going to be difficult for more of you to come up with especially if you aren’t super up on what’s going on in the industry. But Kerwin was kind enough to put the link in here earlier. And I will recopy it. So FOLIO is a great place where the folks talked about the magazine industry. There’s also…wow, okay, I can’t seem to kind of paste it very easily. There’s also the several websites about content marketing like I believe it’s the Content Marketing Institute. Personally, I really like Contently, which is a content shop, but they have a blog called the Content Marketer. That’s a really great place to read about these things if you’re more content marketing than magazines.

So if you’re stuck on these external factors or if the external factors are coming in but they’re very vague, like there’s a lot of other travel writers out there with more experience than me, then you want to really dig into that, okay? So like I said, the FOLIO: Magazine website is a good place to look for what’s going on the writing. Obviously if you don’t already have a subscription to the Travel Magazine Database, it’s gonna give you a much better picture about what type of articles, different magazines you’re looking for and how you can help serve those needs. The Content Marketer by Contently is a really great place to learn more about the big-picture stuff that’s going on in content marketing world.

So as you’re evaluating these different opportunities and threats, think big. Think about economic factors. Think about how the travel industry is going in this country or in the region that you write about or in the region where you work. Think about trends. Skift, which is so awkwardly spelled, is a really great place to see about trends in terms of what different CVBs or companies are doing, okay? So for opportunities, these are things that you can exploit, okay? Again, like, kind of edgy word there. But this is something that’s kind of lying around that you’re not yet using to advantage, right?

So this might be the kind of thing where you think, oh, well, I’ve gone on all of these trips that I haven’t written about yet. That could be an opportunity, right? Or I know all of these people at all of these CVBs because I used to work in PR, or I used to be a magazine editor but I didn’t really write when I was there. But that’s an opportunity because now I know a lot of other magazine editors that I met at conferences that I can go talk to and pitch.

So there’s a lot of different ways to look at opportunities. And like I said, it’s important that they’re related to your goals, but it’s also important to think quite specifically here, okay? So don’t think like, oh, well, I wanna do content marketing for tour companies. There’s so many tour companies out there. Think, well, that segment is increasing at a rate of 166% a year made of statistic, but there’s some real statistics out there that are very similar. Or, you know, if you are like our fictional travel writer, you can say, you know, Inc. Global, which is a publishing company, alone has added five new magazines in this area in the last two years.

So threats, likewise, are things that are potential liabilities, potential weaknesses to your endeavor, this objective that we’re analyzing that are out there in the world. They’re in the environment. So these might have to do with other writers, but it’s really important at this threat stage to think bigger, to think really about what is going on a macroeconomic level. And so what I mean by that is, you know, if you are looking at getting into content marketing in terms of pitching yourself as a content marketer, it’s really important to think about as a threat those big large agencies, those third-party connection systems that are working with Hertz and Hyatt and how that is affecting your ability to get business, okay?

So this is the type of things that you wanna look at in terms of threats and opportunities. So, for instance, when we did something like this last year for this business as we were getting this business started and setting up what we were going to do in the year ahead, and who we wanted to target and why, we actually ran the big competitive analyses that I commissioned on everyone else that has a similar offering at a similar level. So we looked at a lot of different businesses. So when I talk about being specific, I’m saying things like this.

So we looked at a bunch of other businesses offering this. We looked at every single thing they offer and how much they charge. We look at how regularly they offer it. And we looked at all the features involved with what they offer, if it was, like, a course or a, you know, workshop program or something like that. So you might, to figure out your threats and opportunities, you might take a couple writers who are at a similar level to you, or who have a similar geographic area that they focus on, or a similar area of interest that they focus on, you know, like a Renaissance history or something like that, and run a competitive analysis on these different people.

And what I mean, again, by competitive analysis is who do they write for. How regularly are they writing for those people? What type of topics are they covering? Are they only writing this specific article? Type of article, you know. Are they only writing roundups and not narrative features? And that will help you by seeing what your peers or the people you would like to have as your peers, by seeing what they are doing, then you will get the same kind of self-awareness thing of seeing your strengths and weaknesses in comparison to those other writers.

And that will show you if you have a strength that other people don’t seem to have because they’re not doing a certain thing. There is an opportunity. Or if you thought that you had a certain strength but everybody else is already doing that thing, that might be a threat, okay, to what you thought was gonna be a big moneymaker for you.

So that’s why we want to do the SWOT analysis before we get into doing our goals. Because this is where we really pull together, not just that data…last week we pulled data, right? Last week we pulled numbers. We thought about some of the reasons why things might be happening. But now we’re pulling together the factors that will affect the plans that we’re gonna make for the year head.

So we already went through this, the fictional travel writer example. If you guys have some questions about this or for yourself or some different focuses that you might be thinking of doing a SWOT and you’re not sure if they make sense, let me know because we’ve gone a little bit over. So I want to get to wrapping up the call. But please let me know if you have questions.

As we’re wrapping up, I mentioned that I wanted to touch on some weaknesses that this method has. And I alluded to it a little bit earlier when I said you’ll notice that this SWOT, this fictional SWOT that I did for this writer who is moving to Montenegro, that it didn’t tell us what she should do, right? It didn’t make a clear plan, the SWOT itself, because that’s not what it’s supposed to do. SWOT is awareness mechanism. But part of that awareness is knowing that just because we’re doing the subtle one, you know, I guess one-dimensional, what-have-you, two-dimensional sheet of paper on this plane, that doesn’t mean that everything is equal. It doesn’t mean that each strengths is necessarily equally strong or has an equal weight in terms of your decision-making.

So what I really like to do is to take two or three passes at your list. So those of you who are listening at home and those of you who are here this week, please pick something that you think you wanna do for the year ahead. And do this swap before the next call because it’s going to influence what we’re gonna talk about next week, okay? So pick an objective, pick something that you wanna do, change, think about, evaluate whether you should do in the next year. Make a great big SWOT about it. Make your four lists, okay? And then put it aside, okay?

And then some time before our next webinar, go through, look at each of the things and circle the ones that you really think are more important. Make sure you have at least one from all the different categories, okay? So strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Circle at least one that you think is most important from each category up to, say three, okay? And then what’s gonna happen is that next week as we’re talking about what your goals, what your rallying cries for the next year should be, after you do that, you’re gonna go back and look at the items that you picked. And that way you’re gonna have your goal that you work on. And then you’re gonna see the factors that you need to consider.

And then as we move into the last week’s webinar in this series, we’re making really specific, actionable, and sustainable, that’s the important thing, plans about how to move ahead. You’re gonna be aware of these factors that you need to consider that you can plan in advance about how to avoid them, mitigate them, or just change your plans so that liabilities that you foresaw aren’t actually gonna be liabilities at all, okay?

So I’ve mentioned this already, but in the next couple weeks, we’re gonna talk, next week specifically, is about goals, okay? This is about setting your goals for the year ahead. But goals are separate than implementation. And it’s really important and useful to think about those two things in separate mindsets in separate minutes, okay? And so we’re gonna have one webinar where we talk really about what your goal should be, about how to make sustainable goals that are like really Teflon to all the things that can come up in your business.

But then after that, when we talk about actually mapping out your goals on a month-to-month, or week-to-week, or quarter-to-quarter level, we’re gonna have a webinar where I work through them with various ones of you who wanna step up to the plate and get your plans for the year ahead workshop. 

So thank you guys all so much for joining me, and I’ll talk to you more later.

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A lot of times when we talk about travel, content marketing, and different things like that, you can kind of get around parts of what I talk about just from me reiterating it in the next webinar. But if you wanna follow this annual review cycle that we’re doing, which is five webinars, I really recommend catching each and every one.

So let me just pull up, because I was hoping most of you would have caught it, but I’m just gonna pull up for myself in the background my slides from the previous week, which I accidentally also overwrote when getting all the technical stuff sorted out for the webinar today. But I do have the PDFs in the coaching library. So just to really quickly, for those of you who weren’t here last time, have a look back at what we talked about because it’s really fundamental. Is we talked about the underlying reasons why it’s so important to do this annual review process, which kind of seems like, oh, you must know because you’re here this week listening in for this.

But I have spent so many years now, even beyond the ones that you guys know about, writing about freelancing. Because even though I…the six-figure travel writing roadmap came out now… Wow, I guess it was 2016, so it was last year in May it came out officially. And I spent 18 months before that, researching that book. I spent several years before that writing about freelance travel writing for a different market before I started writing about it in the travel context.

I wrote about freelance writing and how to be a freelance writer and how to run freelance businesses as a ghost writer for several years. And I have spent a lot of that time, part of it just writing and reading online. But I’ve spent a lot of the time going to conferences and talking to different people. And I can tell you for a 100% fact that the people that I have seen over the course of four or five years literally turn themselves into million or multimillion dollar businesses, do this kind of thing religiously.

And if you have been following the blog posts we’ve been putting up this week, those are kind of companions to this series, you’ll notice that I talked a lot about this idea of just kind of covering your eyes and waiting to see what happened. And the thing is that the people that I see who aren’t making the type of progress that I want, that’s what they’re doing. Whereas the people…or not just that I want them but that they want, but the people who are just killing it unimaginably, they could never have thought they would have the success that they have now, they are really, really religious about this process.

Not about being sticklers to a plan that they have to implement on a certain day every year that they set really far in advance, but about this process of taking the time out of their life at the end of the year to look back and to look forward.

We talked quite a bit about that last week and one name that I’m gonna write here again in this week’s box, if I can find the right tab, there we go, is Chris Guillebeau. Do any of you guys know, besides me having mentioned him last week, for those of you that were on the call last week, do you want any of you guys know who Chris Guillebeau is? He runs a blog called Art of Nonconformity, he has a lot of products around travel hacking, traveling and points and miles that you might be familiar with. He runs the Travel Hacking Cartel. He runs the World Domination Summit. He used to run an event for freelancers called Pioneer Nation or Small Business Owners. He does a lot of stuff in this space. And he has been doing this annual review process for several, several years and he’s now got, I think, five “New York Times” bestselling books. And he has been doing his annual review process publicly for all these years. And so, he’s a really great resource to look at somebody who is not the most gregarious and outgoing person by any stretch of the imagination doing this very publicly, and that ownership of where he is and how that has propelled him forward.

Just one more bit of reiteration for those of you who weren’t here last week. Like I said last week, we did quite a few things and one of the things that we did was ask some tough questions of yourself. But we talked about seven different things that can get in the way of this process, and I wanna make sure that all of you guys are familiar with.

One is what we’re really gonna tackle really deeply this week, which is not looking really clearly at the economics of your costs and your income and the interplay between those things, but also just not looking at them period. And relatedly, and this is what we’re gonna get into in the upcoming weeks, is not having income goals set and working very specifically on making them happen.

Some of the things that can get in the way of that are shiny freelance projects syndrome, which is a new super long-term that I just coined, which is when you have too many goals that you’re trying to pursue and you can’t make headway on any of them.

But some other ones are when you just have too many ”real-life obligations” on your plate such as being in the sandwich generation or having very sick parents that take up your time and you can’t feel guilty about that. Or just being plain exhausted from various things in your life, which could be health issues that just keep you from thinking creatively, or working a lot on freelance writing, but not freelance regiments but you wanna do and not a rate that you should be paid that makes you resent your work. Or needing to take that step back from your work to have fun and do other things so that you can have a perspective on your life.

Those are seven things that we talked about that can kind of get in the way of that process. Oh, great, some of you know Christian. I’m curious where he came up this week. 

So Jay just mentioned that Chris Guillebeau’s new project is this thing Side Hustle School. Side Hustle School, by the way, is a really great bit of inspiration for those of you who are either just getting into this, just getting into travel writing, or just getting into it on a freelance basis or feel a little bit stuck about where you are. Because what Chris does with Side Hustle School as he has a daily podcast, I can’t remember if it’s every weekday or every day-day, I’m pretty sure it’s every single day. He has a daily podcast where he profiles something doing…someone doing just a really cool side hustle, which is a freelance-type thing, which might be a small business or might be a hobby that they earn money from. So it’s a really great way to open your eyes to other things that you can be doing if you feel stuck in a rut, but we’re gonna talk more about ruts next week.

This week we are going to talk about how to catalog the work and opportunities you have now to see where you wanna go. It’s a really euphemistic title for looking at your income and expenses, but if I put, ”Hey guys, we’re going to look at your income and expenses this week,” everybody would freak out and not show up for the Webinar because nobody wants to talk about money, right?

This is a huge thing. I spent way more time than I usually do this week just googling for some really, really basic touch points for this call. And I was shocked by how many freelancers, small business owners, people who coach freelancers and small business owners, websites both for the activity for freelancers and small business owners did not talk about looking at your business numbers for the past year. I was just shocked.

I had to really dig around and go into some things that were for larger businesses and look at how they work and think of ways that those are applicable to you guys. But it really came back to a lot of stuff that I have been writing about for several years, and that is being tuned into your numbers and being honest about them. So in that vein, what we’re gonna talk about today is threefold. So as this webinar is about getting on top of your numbers and getting honest with them, there’s three aspects to that.

One of them is assembling your income. I’ve been talking with some people who are new to the coaching program and some people who have come to various events recently, and I’ve been doing a lot of “I say that this is okay or this happens normally, so please forgive yourself” lately. And I think some of that is because now at the end of the year, especially Thanksgiving was at a weird time this year, if you live in America. We have that push. There’s this year-end to push that happens where you just see as a freelancer you just see this ticking clock of the number of work days left in the year. And rather than feel excited like most people who have desk jobs that they get to put their work aside at the end of the year, we just feel like the number of days that we have remaining to get income for this year, to set up income for next year, to hit goals, to get pitches in front of editors, the number of days remaining for all of these things is just waning and we don’t know what to do about it. We just feel like we aren’t ready, and it can be a very stressful time as a result.

As we look at your numbers for the year, I said this last webinar. So for those of you that are new this time, I wanna say it again. Please don’t feel, any of you, because it helps people not feel like they’re not comfortable. Please don’t feel like you need to share any of your numbers in the webinar chat box, okay? Because I want us all to be able to do this work on our own and not feel any feelings, basically, good or bad about those numbers. We are looking at them as data. So we’re gonna look at some ways to look at them that are beneficial rather than making us feel prejudiced against ourselves and sabotaging our future efforts accordingly.

And then we’re gonna talk about how to look at your marketing efforts. And I know this is a thing, that some of you haven’t been marketing, some of you perhaps have been marketing but not with success. But it’s so important that in either case we get honest about what that is.

Because, as I said in the blog post and the newsletter proceeding today’s call, if you don’t look at that hard and seriously with your eyes open, then you can’t realistically assess the validity and the feasibility of steps that you can take to change your state, your status, your work portfolio, your clients, your workload, and your income unless you can be really honest about what got you to where you are right now.

And then we’re gonna look at another part that I think people forget, and I’m actually going to look at this in a totally different way. So I think I’m gonna look at it differently in terms of what types of expenses that we’re gonna look at, but I’m also gonna look at them in terms of reminding you that you need to spend money on your business, and I don’t mean on me, but I mean on things like travel and whatnot. So let’s dive right in.

Like I said, we’re gonna look at income marketing expenses, so we’re gonna look at pulling these numbers and you can work on pulling them now in the background while we’re talking, you can do it later. But next week, so like I said, this…all these webinars are super sequential. Next week we’re going to be looking at those numbers together and drawing conclusions for that from them. So make sure if you’re not doing it now that you try to hustle those numbers together before we all get together next week.

An interesting thing came up when we sent out this survey that’s ended now about your travel writing and how you came to travel writing and different things like that, is that I didn’t ask any income-related questions, but I found a lot of things in your answers that were related to income and this thing called a scarcity versus abundance mindset.

So as we are walking through right now, talking about where your income is and where your expenses are and where they could be, I really want you guys to start thinking about how being clear on these numbers for yourself helps you know how to spend your time and also see that making a budget for yourself around investing in learning can have a dramatic effect on your work.

Even if that budget is time, I think that we…I was just talking about this on the coaching call and the person was saying it seems like I’m more productive than most people, and I responded that I think I’m an absolute layabout. I think I’m one of the most lazy people ever. And we all have these certain ideas in our head about how our time should be budgeted in. And some of use extra time on researching some nitty-gritty piece of information that doesn’t really matter to the article that we’re working on, or on doing interactions with a certain number of people on social media even though our blog isn’t something that’s really related to our income goals but just something that we’re maintaining. And I think it’s really important, and we’re not gonna specifically talk about it today, so that’s why I wanna invite you to do it on your own, to think as well about how you are budgeting your time and if that is related to your goals in the same way that we’re gonna talk about income.

We’re gonna look a little bit about time trackers, but I feel like I harp on it all the time so I don’t wanna spend too, too much time on it today. So now, I’m gonna ask some questions that you can answer, so please do chime in on these. So before we get this train moving, I said that we’re gonna talk today about your income numbers, your numbers, and your expenses. How many of you, tell me in the chat box, like just yes or no, check in with yourself regularly? That can be like as little as once a quarter or once a month, about where these numbers are. This is really important and useful for me to know because I wanna talk about some different techniques for approaching that process if you guys aren’t already using them, and I wanna also know for those of you who are using them, what kind of stuff you’re currently using, okay? So let me know that in the chat box.

Anybody who’s coaching me and says, “Nope,” just…or that I coached, know that that’s something that we’re going to start doing now that I’ve seen you say no. All right, people keep dropping those numbers in the chat box with a spreadsheet. Yep. I use denial. Is that Suzanne Suzanne? Is that Suzanne Ball? I look every week. Yeah, that’s really good. I feel like looking every week is probably the best possible situation, but as Suzanne said, it’s, you know, not something that necessarily everybody is comfortable doing yet. And like I said, that’s something that we’re gonna be talking about this week, is really getting comfortable with looking at those numbers.

Yeah. So Stephanie has a good point here about having a Google sheet that she accesses when she needs it. So this is definitely something that I have noticed as well for myself in the past year so that, so now everything is all done electronically because I’m not really doing freelance writing right now and everything comes in through different payment methods where it’s very easy for me to log in to different tools, which I do pay for actually, and I don’t know if they’ll help you guys so it’s not really worth mentioning. But I can log into different tools that give me the answers to a lot of these questions that we’re gonna look at. But before, when I was freelancing and I kept it in a spreadsheet, I found that I would mostly go to that spreadsheet at the moment when I wanted to see if somebody was behind on paying me or I wanted to put in a new assignment that I got, but I wasn’t necessarily checking in with that spreadsheet.

I love this that Terry said, “I too use denial. It’s very effective. I feel like Denial should be the name of, like, a new income tracking apps that we should create. That should be Denial.” Okay, so Denial, registered trademark, you guys all heard it here first. I’m jotting it down on the side. But here’s the thing, is that the times, the months, the years that I and other people that I know have looked at that spreadsheet on…I’m trying to remember who it was, what Rebecca said, on a weekly basis or even more regularly are the times that very serious advancement took place. And what I mean by that in terms of looking on a weekly, daily, or monthly basis is that you are checking in with where you are, how that number makes you feel, and where you are in relation to your goal.

I’m actually gonna show you pure, actual, real, raw data from my own income spreadsheets from some years ago that I did not black out the clients, I didn’t black out the numbers, I didn’t do anything. I just pulled the actual real spreadsheets for you guys. And I pulled my time tracker data from that time as well. And the thing is that, like I said, we wanna get comfortable talking about these numbers, but not just together, with yourself.

I find that if any of you guys have followed David Allen who does this, I might have totally screwed up his name, but the getting things done methodology, he advocates a weekly check-in, a lot of people advocate a weekly check-in. And quite honestly, if you work for yourself, as in, forget clients but you are self employed, you should be having a one-on-one check-in where you become a bit bipolar and you separate your employee you from your boss you and you have a little meeting. And I know it sounds a little bit crazy, but it’s something that we all need to do, whether it’s to look at these numbers or not, on a regular basis in order to make sure that we are in line with our goals.

As we start to look at how things have gone from you in the past year, as we start to look at where we want them to go in the next year, and definitely before we get to the point of where we make specific plans that we wanna hold ourselves to on a quarterly or monthly basis in that last webinar, it is ultra important that you know that you have the mechanism, whatever works for you, to check back on yourself for accountability. And a lot of people talk about accountability partners, I’ve used accountability partners through different writing groups in the past or just people that I know, and some people who’ve come to retreats of ours have then become accountability partners.

But here’s the thing that I have found about accountability partners. Like they can be so lovely, but life happens. And I’ve never seen this more acutely than now coaching you guys. And I think, you know, teachers say it all the time, but it’s so much more true for grownups. I’m not kidding. People get cancer, people get in car accidents, people have hurricanes.

Really bad things happen on an astonishing basis. And so, as lovely as your accountability partner may be, there is no one who is more involved in your accountability than yourself. So you really do need to take the responsibility for being accountable to these numbers. Both that we’re gonna look at it now and, you know, owning up to them for yourself, but also to the ones that you’re gonna make going forward to checking in with your goals.

Okay. So I know that we…that I kind of asked, like, do you track some of these things? But I wanna know specifically, do you use some kind of tracker of any kind, whether…I know some of you mentioned Excel. But for your expenses, like, I know some people have invoiced me through PayPal directly. And a lot of people that I know who use something, use FreshBooks and things like that. So do you have something like that either for invoicing your clients, or on the flip side, I have used in the past, though I don’t really love it and I’ll explain why in another slide. QuickBooks, I think it is QuickBooks Self Employed, which is supposed to just automatically, like, mint, pull all of your credit card statements in for you and then you can operate them out by categories. So either on the income side or on the expense side, a lot of people are talking about using QuickBooks and FreshBooks. But let me know if you use something on the expense side as well, because there’s a lot of more household tools that can be used for expenses, but you need that hack them. You’re gonna use them for freelancing. And we’re gonna talk about that as well.

Okay, great. So we’ve got someone tracking them manually. Self Employed. I think that’s QuickBook Self Employed, but let me know. Oh yeah, QuickBooks Self Employed. Okay, great. Running along of invoices, not marketing expenses. So it seems like a lot of you are doing stuff on the income side but not so much on the expense side. Like, Rebecca said it really well, I just pay what comes in. Yeah. It’s kind of like I use Denial again, right?

A couple of you are using QuickBooks Self Employed, so I just wanna take a moment now, and we’ll get to the expenses more in a minute. But I found that QuickBooks Self Employed doesn’t really work for us as travel writers, and I’m gonna talk about how our expense setups are different than other types of freelancers later. I just wanna caution you to be a little careful because they tend to miscategorize and make it hard to categorize a lot of things that we need to use as travel writers specifically.

I actually had to kind of hack it and then we eventually gave up on it because I just found QuickBooks Self Employed was a bit too annoying for our purposes. But if you are in the position, and we’ll talk about in a little bit why you hopefully shouldn’t be in this position, but if you are in the position of delight where you earn so much that you actually do owe the government money at the end of the year, QuickBooks Self Employed, it can be nice because it helps automatically calculate that for you, but we’re gonna get back to that, like I said, a little bit later on in the slides.

Okay. So Jade does track all her business expenses. Great. Okay. We have somebody. So here’s the thing, is I feel like a lot of you, like I said, are pretty good about tracking your income. So let’s look, since you do have pretty good access to that data and if you don’t, you’re gonna go get it before the next webinar, at some ways for the process of this annual review that we wanna be… Chelsea says she always knows the government money and you shouldn’t.

We’ll talk about that in another slide, but again, I’m gonna do this disclaimer periodically. This is not professional, legal, and accounting advice. Please consult your lawyer and/or accountant for further guidance on these issues, but make sure you have an accountant that actually knows how to work with these things. No, no, you shouldn’t owe a lot this year. Okay, we’ll talk about it.

All right, guys. Okay, so let’s get back to the review. So there’s four main ways that we need to, for the purposes of annual review, pull up our income. So I think we all hopefully have some sense at least of what income we have coming in every month. You can kind of yea or nay on that. But I think we tend to be pretty good in a given month about knowing how much we have coming in because, we have to essentially balance our monthly budget of paying our own personal expenses and things like that.

If you don’t already have that number to start with, then I recommend just for the next couple bits that we’re gonna talk about to at least kind of drum up what you think that that number is. So as you are adding up these numbers, and I’m gonna, again, I’m gonna show you exactly how I do it in Excel. As you start adding up these numbers, we wanna go past that. We wanna go past by month, but it’s important to look at the actual data by month because we’re gonna look at trends in terms of season, okay?

But my first stop in the annual review process of looking at these numbers is not by months, actually. It’s actually by client. And if you think you know why I do this, drop this in the chat box, but I’m gonna riff a little bit while the recording catches up. So the first stop that I do is by client and I’m just gonna jump ahead a slides to show you how I do that. But what I do, because I do or used to do everything in Excel was I just very simply, every line that I have attributed to a certain client, I just built a little formula over here and I add up every box that goes to that client and I think I usually kind of end up color coding it and then I double check it to make sure that all the boxes are accounted for.

The first thing, like I said, that I do is by client. So I’m trying to see…to evaluate time span. Great. Thank you, Jade. So this is an interesting one, right? Because I said I’m not gonna harp on you guys too much about time tracking in this webinar because I do it a lot. We’ll do it later. But it’s not so much about the time spent, it’s for an expectation check, because I can look at my time tracker, because I do really religiously, at any given moment and see what my hourly rate on a given client is. But I think we all have this inherent gut check of what we feel like takes a long time and what we feel like doesn’t take a long time that’s out of sync with reality, but that it’s really important for this annual review process.

The reason I like to start this whole numeric evaluation by looking at things by client is to get that gut check, because you might think that so-and-so, you’re spending all of your time on them even if in reality it’s only like 25% of your month or something. But you might feel like Blah Blah Blah magazine group is getting all of your time. And then when you look it’s only like $8,000 for the course of the year, or maybe 12, or whatever it is, or less, or 4. And when you look at that number, you go, ”Oh really?” And that is very important to capture.

That is literally step one of this process, is to just figure out as you look at your clients and how much they have brought in over the course of the entire year, how does that make you feel? Your feeling is important here. I know I said that today we’re talking about numbers and getting comfortable with those numbers. But part of comfort is acknowledging how you feel about those things. And I know that I sound a little bit more shrinky than usual during all this annual review stuff, but it’s because it’s really important when we’re mapping out these things that they are in touch with the reality of both us and the external reality.

So you do this gut check on those initial client numbers. Okay, that’s the first one. And what do we do with that gut check? We’re gonna talk much more next week about how we transform these data points into actionable things for the year ahead. But the very first thing is to say to yourself, “Does that number make me so annoyed, disgusted, etc., that I need to immediately go ask this person for more money/tell them that I need to take on more blog posts per month if this is gonna make sense, or do less work for the money that I’m currently getting?” So you need to write down the recommendations for yourself, first and foremost based on that gut check on a client by client level.

Now, the next level that we look at is the month-by-month level. So I have this. Admittedly I know it’s super tiny and hard to read, but it was hard to get too many months at a span here. So I’ve pulled up a whole third of the year here for you guys. And like I said, I know it’s small, especially because you don’t have the full slide, but you can see that the line… Okay, I’m gonna do it over here so you can see. The thick line in between here is adding up the end of each month. And the way, just to give some preface on here, I have a zoomed in version so you can see, the way that I’ve organized each of these is that my things that are recurring, that I know that I’m going to be getting every month, are up here on the top because then it’s really easy because you just cut and paste them onto the next one.

Okay, and then the things that are articles or things like that that are one-off, so to say even if that client recurs go down here. So I’ve essentially separated out for myself so I can see really easily the recurring versus the one-off stuff. Then I have a total that’s the total for the month itself, and I have a year to date total. And in some later months I have a thing where I project the year to date total with some division over, if that rate continues, what my income will be for the month. So this is something that, in terms of setting up your own thing in the future, can be really nice because it does that automatic check for you every time if you’re on track.

So like I said, so the way that I set this up, let’s go to the big multi-month one here, is that each time on this year to date section, it’s very simply additive, okay? So I have just simply added here on March, okay? I’ve added up the three previous months. So at this point, I can’t remember exactly what year this was, but at this point I’m averaging kind of around 4,000 a month. But interestingly I had more than 4,000 at the beginning and then I had something in the 3,000, like above 3,500 range for the next two months and then it went back up to 4,000. So and this is what I’m talking about, about looking on a month by month level.

And you’ll notice what I did here is that on the year to date this March, so there’s three months here, so then what I’ve done on the year to date here is I’ve multiplied this number by four. So if this pace continues over the course of four quarters, this is gonna be my annual income here. Then on this one, I multiplied it by three, so if this pace continues, then this is when my annual income is gonna be.

So that’s how that spreadsheet broke out. That’s how I concocted it. So it’s pretty simple, but it’s quite effective for what we wanna do. But it’s particularly effective, and this is why I’m saying it’s useful for you to put this together in a format that somewhat like this just for the annual review purpose, is to have, like I said, look at what’s recurring versus what’s not, because that’s something else that you wanna check on, and that total per month.

Because then what we wanna do is we look at the waves, okay, we look at the cycles. So are there certain months or periods where your income always dips? Now, I just realized a really important question that I’m very surprised no one asked, which is how am I deciding what to put in a given month? And what I mean by that, am I putting the amount I have been paid by that month or the amount that I have been billed that month?

So I mentioned this in the last webinar, so I just wanna reiterate for those of you who weren’t there, but in this tracking sheet that I’m doing, this is the work that I’ve billed that month. So that means this is the work that I completed and delivered and sent, shipped to my clients, okay?

But the caveat here is that during this time, and as you’ve noticed when I talked about it before, all of this stuff is work that’s on contract or that’s in some other way recurring, which means pretty much every single thing on here, I get paid either the first or the 15th of this month, so all this stuff at the top I’m getting paid basically automatically. And then the clients that I choose to work with, or chose to work with back when I was doing more magazine work, only pay on acceptance, so that means you get to put in your invoice as soon as they accept the article rather than when it’s published, and they pay within 15 days of acceptance.

So for me, this isn’t too crazy to kind of have it all here when I bill it because I’m actually getting that money in a quite timely fashion. But one thing that you’ll notice, and I’m actually gonna zoom this in a little bit more so that you can see, is that I started having some really obnoxious payment issues I think with one of these clients around this time.

You’ll notice that here we’re in February and one of these things was paid in March in a timely fashion and these other ones were paid in May or even late May. So part of the reason that this spreadsheet has a lot of notations about when things are paid is that this particular client had an issue, like their payroll person left and they got a new person who had no payroll experience that was not processing invoices accordingly.

So this also, this bit about when things are paid can be really important for you to take in as well when you do your annual review, because you can also look at, is this client on the regular paying you, you know, whether it’s sporadically or that the article dates get moved or something like that. And that, again, can factor into that gut check that you’re doing or into this monthly cycle that we look at. So as I was mentioning, in the monthly cycle we wanna look at are there certain months where things dip?

Now, I know for myself that I used to very regularly take this February, March time, or sometimes it was May, as the time that I would be in Europe doing research. So that would… Or I would be doing volunteer work. So that tended to be times that I was working less hours, so it’s very easy to just look at this month to month fluctuation and say, ”Oh, well I had more work in January than I did in February.” There’s, like, a pretty sizable, for the amount of income here, gap between those two months. But the reality of the matter is I only work half of February, so the amount of total income for that month is actually significantly higher than January. And that’s pretty common. If you don’t already have recurring work in place or relationships where you regularly write for the same editor, January can be a slow month.

And so, one of the reasons that we want to…let’s go back to Alyssa, what we’re checking on now, one of the reasons that we want to look on this month by month way as the very important second point is that that helps us plan out when we have needs, when are there times that our income dips in a way that we can do something about or that we want to do something about? So remember when I said that February and March tended to be a time that I traveled. I know for myself, I get really bad SAD, seasonal affective disorder, so I don’t like to be in the northeastern US where it gets dark at like 3:30 this time of year.

Even this time of year right now, it’s sunset right now, it’s horrifying. So I would proactively send myself to other places that are cities that are interesting or to volunteer programs where I would be engaged and I would have to be active during that time rather than sitting at home and sleeping all the time or, you know, generally being ineffective. So that was a choice that I made. However, you might find that there’s other months such as, for instance, June or something, or July, let’s say, when all the editors are out of their offices, that your income is dipping, and not because you’re traveling, but because of market forces.

When you look at this in a month by month way you can decide either “I need to market more proactively, several months in advance, to cover that gap,” or “I should change my schedule so that rather than traveling in these other times when instead I could be doing client work, I’m gonna travel in that time when the client work is naturally a bit sparse.” So these are some things that you can look at for yourself. Not that I’m saying let’s all travel in July, because it’s Godawfully expensive, though there are some places that you can do it not so expensively.

So then the thing to look at is type of client. So we can look at this in a couple different metrics. So remember on this next sheet I talked about…actually I’ll go to this one because it’s better. I talked about how I separate out my recurring or contract work from my article work. Now, I do that for several reasons. So on the one hand, like I said, that’s money that I know is coming in every month automatically.

Just looking at this, even when I’m doing it in a day to day or week to week or month to month basis, it’s really easy for me to know this is how much money is actually for sure gonna be in my bank account versus who knows, so that’s on the one hand. But then as we go through at this time of year and think about these things, we’re able to make decisions based on our income portfolio needs. So what that means is that we all have a different tolerance for the relationship between recurring “know it’s gonna be in our pocket” income versus “who knows when it’s gonna happen” income. We all have a different tolerance for that, okay?

And so, what I mean by that is that having either your income split up like this, that you can look at all the time, or for sure doing it when you put these numbers together for your review makes you do that same sort of gut check of, ”Oh my God, do I really have no recurring income ever?” Which you might already know. Or ”Huh, I actually had more recurring income than I think.” Or ”Wow, this month I got a bunch of recurring income and then I actually got more other income.” So maybe having more recurring income makes me feel better about pitching. It allows you to look at the counterpoints between these different types of clients in a one-off or bill-upon-receipt versus retainer capacity.

But another way to split up and look by type of client is also editorial versus content marketing. And so, what I mean by that is what people might call editor work versus client work, but generally, you know what I mean, it’s things that tend to require multiple rounds of edits versus things that you get on board with the client. And then for them it’s kind of set it and forget it and you just keep producing it every month. So this is another type of thing that you should look at the relationship between. Or another way to look at it rather than the set it and forget it versus editorial is the type of output.

So for instance, I don’t have it split up on here because I try to keep that to a minimum, but I do write in here that for this client, I have a couple different types of work that I do. And so, the reason for myself that I put this in here separately is that the Twitter for this client was on retainer whereas the blog posts were depending on how many I had billed that month, but she would pay me by a bank deposit. So it was basically the same as being on retainer for that work. So that’s why I have these two things split up. But I kind of say for myself what each thing is so that I can remember later. But this also helps me to look back. So like, is most of my income coming from blog posts? Is most of it coming from magazine articles? Is it coming from one-off magazine articles versus packages and magazine articles? Is your income coming more from Instagram than you realize? It helps you look also not just at the characterization of the client or of the income or the type of relationship, but also the type of work that you’re doing, and you do that same gut check. Do I feel good about this? Is this the amount of time on this type of work that I’m interested in spending or does it make me a little annoyed/nauseated?

So, like, I know some people on this call and maybe who could be joining later have been actively pursuing content marketing work. Whereas other people have picked up a certain amount of article writing work which made them happy at first because it satisfied some very urgent income needs, but in the long run, when they look at it and they think about their goals and what they wanna be doing with their time and do that gut check, it might not make them quite so happy.

So let’s go back and look at it this fourth type of way of looking at income, by marketing stream. So I have a whole slide on this, but before I get to that slide, let me know in the chat box, do you track your marketing in any way?

I love how someone had a “Yes…” Okay, I turned the sound off for a second so I could get a sip of water, but you should’ve heard a pause and then I’m back now. So let me know if you’re hearing me again. Okay, it’s kind of split here. So here’s the thing about tracking marketing, is that you can always do it retroactively. I mean it’s not the best, it takes a little time, and you have to set that time aside, which is why we’re doing these annual reviews. But you can go back and do it. So interesting. Okay, great. Yeah. Great.

I’m gonna show you a couple different ways that we can pull together that marketing if you didn’t do it already. And this is the thing, is that there are some people who do very public displays, let’s say, of their efforts in terms of pitches and articles written. One that personally hurts me, because I don’t want her to be promoting this other people, is this woman Nicole Dekker. I’m gonna write it in here and I can’t remember the website that she does this on, so you’ll have to look it up yourself, but let me see if I can find it in the background. So I’m pretty sure her name is Nicole Dekker. And then she does these income reports for one of the main, very general, not specifically freelance writing website. And it must have something Nicole Dekker because I’m also not finding it. Nicole Dekker. Dekker is the name of somebody on a television show. Okay. I’m gonna keep looking at stuff in the background to make sure that I’m giving you the right name. So it is. It’s Dieker. Okay. It’s very close. So it’s on The Write Life. I’m gonna send you one so you can kind of see, and then I’m going to explain to you what I don’t like about it. So yeah, she writes for Contently, but she puts it on The Write Life. But good call, Jade, that’s how I found her name.

So the that way she started doing this was that she was one of those folks that started, like many of us do these days, writing lots and lots of articles online. And so she would put these income reports where she would say, ”You know, I wrote 103 articles this month and my income was, you know, some thousands of dollars.” And I was unhappy about it because I didn’t like that she was kind of promoting that this is the way to increase your income, but it’s really worth looking at in terms of how she tracks over time, because now it’s several years back that she started doing this. I remember living in a different apartment even when I started seeing them.

There’s several years of these that you can look at and she does not go into super, super deep detail about her marketing efforts. But she does talk about how it changes and how her work has changed over time. So this is a good place to look at, again, like how I mentioned Chris Guillebeau, whose name is in the beginning of the chat file, how he has also been publicly doing his annual reviews over time. Nicole has these monthly income reports and she mentioned how her marketing affects it. And what I find is really interesting when people publish these kind of marketing looks, let’s call them, they’re marketing reviews, is that there’s two sides. There’s the people who fanatically track every pitch they send, and I think Mariedo[SP], who has a really oddly spelled name, so I’m gonna write that down for you guys and hopefully not spell it wrong. So Mariedo Keller Ralph [SP]. I’m probably spelling this wrong.

So someone had done just a couple, I think, with her pitches where she would send like, you know, show that she sent 87 pitches in a year and here’s exactly how many, this, that, and the other thing. And also Lindy Alexander, who is a really lovely Australian writer, has been tracking her turn to freelancing from some other things in this very detailed way. There’s two schools of thought, either they track every single pitch and you see what new work comes to them, and new income levels from pitching, or I see this kind of “do it once, pat yourself on the back that it’s what you thought it was and not do it again” look at marketing. And those tend to be the people who look and a lot of their stuff’s coming from word of mouth and so they tell themselves, ”Okay, that’s working. I’m gonna keep doing what I’m doing.” But here’s the thing, is that even if…you know, Carrie was saying earlier that she’s just getting started, even if you are just getting started, you have probably done some of these things. There’s some things that you’ve done that you can look at.

You can look at the number of webinars that you’ve attended, you can look at the number of magazines that you’ve read cover to cover, you can give yourself some sort of metric that tracks what you have done in the arena of marketing, even if it’s not sending pitches, even if it’s improving efficiency or gaining materials. We’re gonna talk more about that when we get to expenses. But even if it’s some of these things. And the reason is because you need with marketing, the most effective thing that you…or most important thing you’re looking at with this tracking is to see the effect of these different efforts on your output, on your clients, okay?

So as you are pulling together the numbers of these things, you can go through for instance. You can go on your Gmail, you can go to your sent folder, you can just write “pitch.” And then hopefully if you’re putting “pitch” in your subject line, as I hope that you all are, that should show you every pitch that you’ve sent this year, even if you haven’t tracked it previously. And then you can go through and you can recreate a little spreadsheet that either just says the number of pitches, how many were accepted, how many were nos, or you can make a little spreadsheet for each pitch.

But for the purposes of doing this annual review, you need to measure the effect of your efforts, whatever they were. So that means that if you’re one of these word of mouth people, don’t just tell yourself “word of mouth.” What mouth was that word coming from? Was it somebody that you had a speed dating appointment with at a conference versus somebody that you just chatted with at a conference versus somebody that you met at a Travel Massive get-together?

If you…for instance, I stopped going to these years ago because I found…not Travel Massive specifically, but I have found that going to these networking events in New York tend to be composed of people who not necessarily are new per se, but of the same people and people who I didn’t enjoy being influenced by, because a majority of them weren’t really achieving in a big way. And the ones that I knew were doing it because they had a certain element of having gotten there first and were way ahead of everybody else. And so, I realized that there weren’t valuable connections to be made in that environment for me. And so, like I said, even if you are not sending pitches, are you going to some events? Better yet, are you hanging out in some Facebook groups and calling that marketing or networking? Okay.

Measure your networking if you don’t think that you’re explicitly doing marketing, because that’s what it is. Networking outreach, it’s all under that same umbrella. So if you’re hanging out in Facebook groups, make a list of all of the Facebook groups that you belong to and catalog how many leads that you have gotten. And those leads could be, depending on where you are and what you’re up to, it could be guest posts that you’ve been asked to write, they could be partnerships, all sorts of things like that, okay? So make sure that you’re getting some legitimate, as in actual numerical, data of some kind on whatever marketing efforts you personally have been doing. So like I said, this is a super diminutive list of just like the smallest, most surface-skimming ones here. Okay?

But whatever you are doing, whether that’s spending time getting more followers on your Instagram, whatever you’re doing, you’re putting in time around that networking, you know, getting more followers by doing this strategy versus that strategy. Write that down, because here’s the thing is that you need to know if the marketing that you’re doing is contributing to the goals that you actually want to achieve. And if they aren’t, is the way that you’re spending your time indicative that you should have a different goal? Okay?

So I said that I wasn’t gonna harp about time trackers, but I did print out…or not print out, but screen grab from that same period, my time tracker for the year, for the different clients that I have going on in this sheet here. So for those of you who have not yet heard me go on and on about time trackers, they take a little bit to get used to, but the data that they give you over time is utterly invaluable, absolutely invaluable. Okay, guys? So I really, really, really recommend it. Because for instance, I’m personally shocked that I only spent 40 hours in that entire year planning travel. That must have been after me harping on myself to spend less. But I can go through here and I can see that, like, this is one of my biggest clients. So that makes absolute sense. Admin? Holy crap, I hope that color does not actually mean admin, because that’s way too much time for me to be spending on my emails.

So the same way that we looked at your income and we’re looking at expenses, I encourage you, it doesn’t work unless you did it in the past. So it’s something to do going forward. But I encourage you to set up a time tracker so that at the end of the year and at every month interval, you can look at this and see again that gut check. How does this feel?

So let’s look again at, I just wanna reiterate these questions, at what we should be pulling from these numbers. Do they feel low, right? Like, that’s a very common thing to feel, to just look at it and feel a little bummed. And remember how I was saying that we can feel this, you know, on a month to month level or client to client level.

But it’s important to do that division before we start to have feelings because if you just look at what you earned for the whole year, this is that whole part about not being prejudicial, right? If you just look at the number for the whole year and feel like that’s less than what you wanted it to be, that’s gonna interfere with drawing useful data from here, okay? So it’s important to allow those feelings to take place in a constructive setting. So that means looking at those numbers by client and then jotting down some action steps. You wanna ask this client for more work, you wanna ask this client to raise the rate, you wanna tell this client that you’re not gonna find photos to go with her blog posts anymore unless she raises the rate or something like this, okay? And you’re gonna look at the dips.

And so, I used to find, for instance, that my magazine stuff had several very specific dips. So then what I would do was, knowing that, I would push my editors to get more assignments from them during those other periods where I knew that they were assigning a lot or were there were things that were in my geographic area of expertise that I could gobble up. Because even though I live in New York, they never had me write the New York stuff, they always had me write the southeastern US stuff even though I’ve never lived there. So as you’re looking at those dips, think about, are they things that you can control within the dip or are they things that you need to work around the dip? Are they dips that you are causing or are they dips that the editor is causing?

And then the really important thing, also, is what is not worth your time. Do you add up and find that you have…I’m gonna to go back up to this one with the addition. Do you find that over here when you add up the clients? Yeah. I only have three clients on here. I have a couple other ones but I didn’t add them up here because I was just checking my 1099 quickly when I did this. But do you find that you have a very, very, very long list of different people that you’ve worked for and that you have, you know, $50 from that blog and $100 here, $400 from that magazine. Is that really worth your time, and how do you want to change how you do that going forward? This is gonna inform our marketing strategies, okay? And particularly, are there things on there that simply need to go, that there’s just no way around it, that that number, especially in aggregate, of what you’re getting from them just doesn’t make sense, okay?

So again, with the preface, I am neither a tax nor legal professional. Please consult your own personal tax or legal professional for final advice on all of these matters. Let’s talk about expenses, because I notice a lot of chatter going on in the chat box about this and this is a huge, huge issue that I see for freelance travel writers. Like, I think that I know maybe two or three people that are as, like, sassy about this as I am, okay? So I was very fortunate before I started freelancing full-time that I took a course that was, I guess through Mediabistro, that was with an editor of a magazine in Boston who also freelanced on the side, that was kind of about setting up your business and money and all that stuff. And she clued us in to this very important truth about travel writing, which is that you probably…and at this point, I’m probably doing it unbeknownst yourself, or spending a lot of money on things that the typical tax code or the typical tax preparation specialist will tell you needs to be written off in a certain way or not at all, but that you in your line of work should be writing off. What does this mean?

Meals are a big one. This is the one that most tax professionals get wrong, and it’s really hard to find a tax repairer that can really, like, do this correctly, unfortunately. I think I know one person in Boston that a friend uses I can recommend to any Boston people. But here’s the deal, if you are writing about restaurants period, so not in the place that you’re in or something like that. But if you cover restaurants, if you cover food, if this is something that you cover, when you are eating out, particularly on the road, but also anything of note in your local area, that is research. It’s not the typical tax meal and expenses category, which only allows you to write off 50% of that expense. So here’s the thing. I talk a lot in our workshops of all kinds and the webinars about needing to be familiar with certain things and have a basis so you know what the trends are, so you know what is going on in that field.

I sometimes reference this really funny conversation that I had a few years back with somebody who was transitioning out of doing full-time blogging and social media for a tour company and then started doing freelance writing, and he told me, “I have this in with somebody at BBC Travel. I’m going to pit her about food halls in New York.” And I’m all about following trends, not just to write off on my food expenses, but because it’s so crucial for pegging your pitches. And I said, ”What about food halls in New York? Are you gonna do the most interesting ethnic food halls in New York? Food halls in New York by neighborhood? Like, what about food halls in New York?” And he didn’t have something past that, because he didn’t know enough about the subject matter to pull that together. He just wasn’t up on the trends.

So in other industries, you know, we have a lot of friends, like, family friends who are bankers and stuff. They are constantly following what is going on in their industry, and that is part of what they do for work. You should also be reading trade magazines. Read “Skift.” “Skift” is the easiest read of all the trade stuff and it’s online and you can get the newsletter. You should be reading that. You should be reading “Eater.” I skim at least…and I’m not somebody who spends a lot of time on this, but I skim like 10 or 12 different newsletter headlines. So the main ones…so Jade says, “What’s the best way?”

So I always skim Conde Nast Travelers newsletter, which is like the CN traveler daily, because they are really on the nose about putting the trends in the newsletter. They have this really crappy thing that they’ve started doing, though, where they just send around the office a super random question, like “Would you take a bath in the hotel bathtub?” And then just aggregate the answers from their editors, which is like the laziest blogging ever. But you could probably sell it to your content marketing clients, but it’s like the laziest thing ever for Conde Nast Traveler to do. So don’t read those sections. But otherwise it’s a really, really good way to keep up on trends.

I also subscribe to and glance at, though less frequently now, some newsletters or blog RSS feeds from people who write about flight travel deals, because those are super important to know. And the points guy, well, God help him, the points guy. But this guy Gary Leff, Gary Leff is really good about telling you everything that’s going on and he has a weekly thing that he does where he aggregates all the most interesting headlines in air travel. So “Skift,” which I know is a weird spelling, “Skift” for industry stuff, Gary Leff for airline stuff, and Conde Nast Traveler for consumer stuff. And then within your own geographic area or specialty areas, I’m sure you’ll have some as well. But I find those three to be really the best way for me to just kind of be in touch with trends without getting lost in email newsletters personally, okay?

But that was a side thing, guys. Part of the way to be up on trends is to be traveling and experiencing. So I used to write a lot about air travel, both for “USA Today” online and also for some points and miles websites. And I would literally, if I hadn’t been on a plane for more than two weeks, I would feel out of touch. I would feel like I hadn’t been talking to flight attendants and I didn’t know what’s going on.

So when I travel, I talked to cabbies, I ask them about things that they’ve noticed. I’ve talked to baristas in major cities where they have people coming through. I talk to the people at the front desk, at the hotel. I talk to the meeting planners at conferences that I’m going to. I talk to all these people all the time. That is part of our job of keeping up on the trends, is to be traveling even if it is in our own city or in our own area and having these industry intermittent conversations with people. So what that means is that for you, every time you are traveling is exposing you to these industry things that you need to be knowing about. So your travel, unless you are doing absolutely nothing that you could remotely use for work, your travel needs to be written off at 100%, not 50%, especially your meals, guys.

Okay, this is a really big one, but then there’s a lot of stuff past that. Every single book or magazine that any of you buy, you need to write off on your taxes, every single one. I swear, like, there’s probably very few books that would not count for this. Even if you’re reading fiction, I hope that you’re taking in the story structure, go back and re-watch that story structure webinar that I did every day every time you’re reading fiction. Every time I watch a TV show, I’m pulling things, but the story structure, not that I…I don’t write off Hulu on my taxes, but they do it off every book that I read, okay?

So the one sticky thing, the only way that we get caught up here, is on clothing and kind of gear, but mostly clothing. This is really the only place that you can go wrong, and here’s how. I in normal personal life don’t hike. I just don’t. For work, I hike tons, but I’m not… I just don’t do that. So I remember one trip I was going that was an eco travel trip and I had to buy a bunch of new gear because we were going to be someone very cold and I don’t usually hike in environments like that. So I could write that off on my taxes because it is only going to be used for a work purpose.

There’s this uniform thing, so if you are buying an outfit as, let’s say, an actor or as a waitress, if you are buying something as a waitress, as part of your work outfit, which is like a plain white shirt that an IRS auditor could say, “well, you could wear that in your normal day to day outfit,” that wouldn’t fly, okay? So this is the thing with gear. If it’s a windbreaker, but you could also just wear it around town normally, that doesn’t fly. But if it just isn’t something that in your daily life would ever get used in the clothing category, that can be written off for work.

But meals. So the thing with me that I do with meals is they’re certain cities that I travel to very, very, very regularly and I always eat in the same café, because I know that I can get work done there. So I might write that cafe expense off the first couple of times because there’s some amount of familiarizing myself with their offerings in the neighborhood. But then I will downgrade it to the 50% category because it’s just me getting coffee and a pastry for breakfast when I’m in Berlin, and I’m not doing research in that thing so much, okay? So that is the one time with food that you shift into that 50% category.

So as I’ve noted here, the IRS’s categories for us are super weird. And as I was talking about, this is where the QuickBooks Self Employed starts to really fail and get really annoying and very difficult to use. So if you are using that, you need to essentially create your own, like, fake category code that is 100% that you stick your meals in. That’s what we did for many years before we just gave up and stopped using it and went back to Excel.

So another thing that I wanna say about expenses, okay, is, so I talked right now about kind of harping on you to make sure that you’re writing off every single thing that you can humanly possibly be writing off. For instance, like I, in normal life, I don’t take the subway pretty much anywhere because I walk. That’s my exercise, is I walk. I’ll even walk…I live in the upper east side. I will walk all the way to the lower west side. So if I have to be somewhere for a meeting at a certain time and the only way that I can get there is to take a cab, that gets written off on my taxes. Okay?

So let’s look at… Oh, there’s a parenthesis missing there. I’m sorry. So let’s look at a much friendlier way for you to look back at your expenses that ignores, for now, after this long diatribe, the IRS, okay? You should be looking at your expenses in these four categories. So you’ll notice this last one here, we talked about meetings and professional development travel? This is that area where you might be looking at things that are in 50%, but that is only if you are traveling to a conference and you’re staying somewhere that is absolutely useless to you from a research purpose and you are being fed the entire time at the conference apart from coffee that you’re getting at Starbucks, okay? And you don’t write at all about air travel, you learn nothing on your flight there or your drive there. That is really the only time that you have things that fall into this 50% category. But the money that you spent on that conference, so like that $500 or whatever that you pay to go to World Domination Summit or the… whatever they cost for two bucks right now, like 127 or 157, that all gets written off 100% as development. Okay?

So I want you to think of these mainly three categories as you look back at your expenses and see how these things fall, because more or less, these are the expense categories that actually matter to us in terms of how we run our business. So what are you spending on materials? And I put in research here kind of as a last minute addition, because materials is what they kind of call it for taxes, but this is for that food that you’re eating when you’re traveling that you’re paying for yourself. This obviously is for things like post-it notes and things like that, but for you the research materials are also things like magazines, okay? Or the travel magazine database for that reason, but that kind of falls into tools. So for us, materials and research, a lot of that is simply the travel expenses themselves, okay?

Now, Development, this is that part where we get into learning kind of professional development, okay? And this is something that, especially for those of you who are super, super new, you’re gonna have a higher development ratio. Yeah, of course this would be under development. So especially for those of you that are new, you’re gonna have a higher development ratio, but this is really important. I saw an incredibly cool conference talk on this at this writing conference that I went to over the summer called the Tribe Conference, which I’m gonna write in here before anybody asks me. The Tribe Conference, and Terry got a free ticket from me, she was there. There was a great talk there on reinvesting your money into development even at a higher level, and how important that is and how it skyrockets your business.

So I cannot harp on this enough. I remember sitting in the car with my husband trying to decide if I was gonna spend whatever it was, $400, if I could justify spending $400 just on a ticket to go to this conference that was about freelancing. And I remember agonizing over it and agonizing over it and finally doing it, and it completely changed my life, like, in ways that will be different for you, so I could tell you, but they’re gonna be different for you, but it’s all about possibility. It’s all about having these conversations with people and seeing what other business owners are doing, and making those face to face connections with potential clients. We’re seeing how you feel about potential clients and taking yourself and your business seriously as you are spending on that development.

So courses you can totally spend on, but I really, really recommend as much as possible attributing your development budget to face to face experiences. And if you want, like, a really big bang for your buck in terms of networking, shell out to go to some trade shows. There’s one in London and London’s got awfully expensive, but in March there’s one in Berlin called ITB Berlin and Berlin is a very inexpensive city. And so, it’s freaking frigid there and there’s not a lot of tourists and the prices are low and you can get a room in an Airbnb for nothing, and it’s absolutely worth it to get out there and start going to these things.

So the next category I have in here that I bet most of you are not spending on is tools and efficiency boosters, and this is also something you need to really look at, okay? Because most of you are not in the position where you’re looking at the difference between paying for a web app, hiring…like, using a tool versus hiring a person, but I am and I can tell you that the money that you spend on these apps that organize things for you and automate them and do them automatically, or, like, our database which analyzes all the magazines for you, are huge, huge money and time savers. 

Like, remember that I said that I don’t make those spreadsheets for my income anymore because I have paid tools that do it all for me? I have things that go through all of the different revenue streams that we have and they automatically show me which customers in the database are new and who’s re-subscribed, and they show me charts over time and all this kind of stuff and I can slice them and dice them and I can look at the past 30 days versus just this month. And it not only saves me so much time, but I don’t know if I would every day be able to check and look at those numbers and make decisions accordingly if I didn’t have those tools, okay?

So this is the new way that I want you to look at your expenses as you pull them together for the last year. How much are you spending on materials versus development versus tools and versus meetings and professional development? And if you drop professional development travel, that really means meals, and if any of these are empty, that’s not good, okay? 

It’s not good, because it means that your business is probably not really a business, it’s probably a hobby, because if you’re not spending on some of these things then to the IRS, honestly, they can look and say, ”Well, you might be spending that time but you’re not taking it seriously.” So the IRS can, you know, if you do get audited…oh my God, all of us, let’s touch wood right now. I don’t have any wood in my apartment, I’m gonna touch cardboard. If you get audited, the IRS will look at things like how much marketing have you done? How many appointments on your calendar are work related? How much are you investing in this business? That’s how the IRS makes a determination between business and hobby, guys, okay?

So Donna asked, would I share some of the apps that I use? Most of the ones that I use now just wouldn’t really be applicable to you guys because they’re around subscription businesses and processing payments. So if you do process payments, I use something called Stripe which isn’t in and off itself a payment processor, but it also gives me a lot of analytics tools. And then related to that is Baremetrics, which tracks more like your subscription websites and things like that that you guys don’t have.

Okay, so I hope that…this was a super long webinar on the end. I hope that you guys have pulled a lot to think about from here and that you’re gonna pull together a bunch of numbers. So the next week when we do our next level analysis, you guys have food for thought and questions to ask me based on your numbers and you’re ready to talk about them with yourselves and raring to go for next year. So for time tracking, I use OfficeTime, and I’ve always also recommended Toggl, but Annelise told me today that she…that it doesn’t have some of the capabilities, so I’m just gonna say I use OfficeTime and Toggl is another.

And then upcoming weeks guys. So like I said, there was a five-part seminar or workshop, what have you, five-part webinar series. We started out by talking about what’s really holding people back. This week, we talked about how to gather together all the numbers to make really good decisions going forward. Next week we’re gonna do some really serious analysis using those numbers, so make sure that you have gone through all the numbers and have your gut checks by next week. And then we’re gonna launch into the even cooler part where we start to make these beautiful, brilliant, untainted, idealistic plans for the year ahead. And then we’re gonna do the really cool year-end call-in webinar where you can send me your stuff in advance and I will talk through and coach you live on the call.

So thank you guys so much for bearing with this bundle of technical issues today, And I hope you have a great rest of your weekend. The sun is officially set here in New York City. I hope you have great night and a great rest of…or a great weekend coming forward. Okay, bye, guys.

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This is week one of what’s going to be a five-week series on running an annual review. That kind of, especially for those of us who might have a corporate or other sort of organizational background, that sounds like a scary, horrible thing where people judge you and tell you what you’re not doing right and your income is based on what comes out of that process and it’s basically horrible.

This is not what that is. The annual review that I’m going to kind of walk us through piece by piece in a non-scary way more or less over the next few weeks is really around taking stock of your business, of yourself, of your habits for your business, of the state of your clients. If they’re really worth your time anymore, if they’re worth you reaching out to get more work from them, and what goals you have for your own business and if you have been working on them in the past year or if you’ve gotten sidetracked. If you’ve gotten sidetracked, is it with something better or do you need to get back to where you wanted to be?

In the next couple webinars after this, we’re going to have two more that are around looking backward. Today is kind of looking at yourself presently. Then we’re going to have two calls around looking forward and making those plans for the year ahead.

I have a couple extra exercises on the Six-Figure Travel Writing Roadmap. For those of you who already have it, you may have already done them. The way that we’re going to look at the planning and also the reviewing process for the past year is really around the idea of you checking in with yourself.

Does this feel good for my business right now? Does it feel good for my income? My pocketbook? My bank account right now? What about my family? Is this client so stressful that even though I get a great income from them it would be better for me to drop them because every time I get an email from them I yell at my spouse because I’m so stressed out about the email because this person is crazy.

Those are some of the kind of things that we’re going to be looking at because what I’ve found for my own business, for other freelancers that I know, for other people who run small businesses that have gotten quite large over the years that do this process, first of all: it’s important to go through the process. What do I mean by that?

With our coaching students we do a little, let’s call it a diagnostic, but it’s quite short. We do a form every week before our call where they tell me where they are right now and what’s changed. It’s really interesting because how much goes into that form in terms of how much they say, tells me a lot about where they are completely regardless of what goes on the page. There’s the sort of non-verbal communications, right? But that process of them working on that intake form, questionnaire, whatever you want to call it, regardless of what they put there, forces them to think.

Sometimes people might not put too much in their form because they haven’t gotten that much done in the last week or the last month. They don’t feel good about it. So that comes out in a certain terseness on their form. The whole idea of asking yourself these questions and starting to do this review is not just to make the plans. It’s not just to look at what clients you may need to drop or what types of clients you need to add in the year ahead, but also just to get yourself comfortable and in the habit of having these discussions with yourself about where you are.

That’s a lot of what we’re going to talk about this week. Kind of becoming aware, which is super coach-y language that I don’t use often, but really getting an awareness of what is in front of you. With the blog post that I did that accompanied today’s webinar I kind of made a big, really photogenic, but I made a big mountain image with it because these issues that I see get in people’s way are their mountains. They are their Mount Everest.

The thing about Mount Everest is that not everybody survives the trek. Not everybody makes it to the top. A lot of that is preparation, some of it is luck, some of it is who you’re with, but you’re very unlikely to make it if you don’t even know what mountain you’re climbing; if you don’t even have an iota of a plan or training or the right gear. So that’s what we’re going to really talk about today.

On that note, what are we talking about today? We are going to talk about why you got into this in the first place. Remember one of the things that I said, especially for those of you who have popped in a bit late, is that a lot of the reasons that you might run into issues is that, to extend the Everest analogy, you might have prepared to climb one mountain and now the circumstances have changed and you’re in front of another one. Even if you are prepared for it or not, you might just not be motivated enough to make that trek.

We’re going to look at why you’re doing this and if that reason has become misaligned with your day-to-day actions. That in and of itself is something to take a look at. Also whether or not what you’re working on now really is the right thing in the long term. It might be. I have a lot of people who come to me saying vehemently that they want to do one things, whether that’s they want to work with magazines or they want to do content marketing or they want to just want for websites or they want to just write for blogs that they run, that they make money off of for themselves, completely controlling the income.

Then after looking at what the work is really like or the pros and cons of that type of work, they find that it’s really not for them and they try a couple other different things. Then they find something that fits them really well. Sometimes it happens in that way.

Other times people are trying too many different things and then they get stuck in the one where they’re having success, but it’s not necessarily what they actually want to be doing. They go down that path for a couple years, then they find that they feel just like they felt just like the felt before they left their jobs to freelance in the first place. We’re going to look at a couple different situations like that that may apply to some of you.

In doing that, I have a list of some questions for you to ask yourself and I’ll kind of say them and I’ll explain them a little bit, but don’t feel compelled to share your answers, because they are, like I said, hard questions that you need to ask yourself. Even though everybody here is supportive and respectful of where other people are on their path, as should be case for all of our live events, you don’t have any obligation to shout out your answers here.

Then we’re going to look at seven different quite specific things that may be happening one or more to each of you at this moment. There are things that you will encounter at different moments. One of the things about this whole process of putting together an annual review that I really want, and annual review and also a plan for the year ahead, that I really want to hone in on is that you never know what is coming.

For good or for bad, you don’t know if there’s going to be some sort of catastrophic illness or injury in your future, but you also don’t know if your dream client is going to come along out of nowhere and make you dump all of the plans that you have to pitch different markets going forward. If there’s one thing that I’ve learned doing this full-time ore eight years now and part-time for many years before that, is that that is a virtue, not knowing. The real virtue is being prepared for not knowing and that you will figure it out when it comes.

I know that sounds a bit woo-woo, but I’ve been talking to somebody that has a lot on her plate right now that I couch, and this is kind of the freeing thing, to just know that no matter how much you plan, you don’t know what’s going to happen.

Then why do we bother planning, right? The thing about the annual reviews and the goals that you set for the next year is that—there’s this analogy that I love to use because it’s travel related—a ship that sets sail for no destination is just going to end up at sea.

In reality that doesn’t make sense because the boat can actually end up somewhere, but I like the metaphoric nature of it. The thing about that is that if you really, really aren’t pursuing what you want to work on, it’s quite unlikely you will get there. It’s quite likely you’ll get somewhere else. In fact, the chances are much higher that you’ll get somewhere else than where you wanted because there’s only one of that place and many other options. So it’s much better to at least set out towards what you want, which requires knowing what you want, in that direction and then understand that other things might happen that are more attractive.

At least if you know where you want to go you can examine these other opportunities through that lens and make sure that you don’t just say yes to things that come across your plate and then find yourself three, four, two, years, even six months down the line somewhere where you may be freelancing, you may be full-time or you may be part-time at a full-time job doing something else and your future doesn’t look like you thought it was going to look like. That’s something we really want to avoid.

In terms of this annual review process that we’re talking about today, this is something that I have done on and off for the various years that I’ve been freelancing. I can definitely tell you that the years that I have done it have been the years where I feel like I’ve kind of made something of myself that year or I get to the end of the year and I look back and I’m like, “Wow! Where I am now is so different than where I was last year.” I love that. It’s so different in a great way.

I’ve talked a couple times on the blog or in webinars or in courses about how one year I had a really bad cycling accident and a concussion and I had really deep, like a centimeter deep hole in one of my hands so I couldn’t work for a few months and basically lost all my clients. That was one of these years where I sat down and I was ruthless about having a plan, both for getting back on my feet after that, but also for the year ahead. That was definitely the single time when my business grew the most as a result of that planning process.

We’re going to look at that, not in the next two weeks, but in the weeks following that. Part of that process and part of what makes it resilient is that we don’t necessarily sit down and block things out on paper that this day I’m going to do this or by this month I need to do this many things. It’s more about having some guiding principals and some practices that you’re going to put in place to make those things happen.

Something I’ve put on here that I don’t often mention is that before I started freelancing I actually quit my job to freelance twice. One time it didn’t stick and then one time it did. Go ahead and drop in the chat box if this is something that’s happened to you, but I know I’m not the only one out there who has quit their job on more than one occasion to freelance.

I know other writers who have been freelancing with a very obvious level of success for some time and then gone back in house with a magazine and then left to freelance again. It can happen for various reasons. In my case, I did what I think is kind of these days more common to do straight out of college: I quit a job that I had with some saving banked up—this is kind of something that people used to do just a couple years out of college but now tends to happen a little later or you just go from college and make it happen.

I had quit a job with some savings banked up and I was going to Bali. This was around when Eat, Pray, Love came out, so it was not so much of a thing at the time, but I was going to Bali because it’s Bali, but also because there was a writing festival going on there and I was going to take a prestigious workshop on travel writing and a prestigious workshop on narrative arc, which is actually what we looked at a couple weeks back, then I was going to start my career as a freelancer.

I had been studying all the freelance blogs that existed at the time, which were not very many, quite honestly. I knew them all back to front, I had them all printed out, I would read them all on the subway on the way home – this was before smartphones. I was totally ready. Then I got offered a job that was really attractive that was with a prestigious, big-name university. They had created just for me to do what I wanted and I wasn’t quite sick enough of having a boss at the time that that didn’t seem attractive.

I just got an email from somebody else the other day about this. Sometimes when you look at all of the work that freelancing entails, that running your own business entails and the strain that that can put on your relationships and your health and different things like that, it doesn’t make sense for you at this moment to take that lea into freelancing. That’s one of the things we’re going to talk about when we talk about 7 things that can be holding you back right now.

Let’s get into it. For those of you who joined us a bit late—I’ve seen the number of people on the call kind of fluctuate—I just wanted to reiterate: part of the reason we’re dong this annual review process and why we’re doing it over so many weeks is that it really is a process. It’s not something that you should just sit down in one hour and bang this all out.

The person whose annual review process I kind of model on and look to for a lot of business—advice isn’t quite the thing—but I look at how he’s built his business over the years is Chris Guillebeau. He’s a great example if you really want to dive into this annual review process. He’s made his own personal annual reviews, which are quite lengthy, available online for at least as long as I’ve known him, so probably seven years or so. As long as he’s had his blog, I think. That’s a really great source. His name is very oddly spelled, so before you ask me, I’m going to write it here in the chat box. Chris Guillebeau and The Art of Nonconformity, which is hard to type.

He’s got his annual reviews going back many years. He’s a good resource for looking at how things can change over the years, not just in terms of your business, in terms of your business growing, but he’s had a lot of up and downs as well. This is a public bit of information, but his brother committed suicide a few years ago and that caused him to really take a look at a lot of things. He’s had book tours that have been really successful, but there are also a lot of things that have taken a toll on his health.

He’s a great – besides doing this process and doing it publicly – he’s kind of this backlog on information and how somebody who can have a very successful business can go through those things. If you’ve had things like that going on with you, and we’ll get to some of these things that can hold you back, he’s a great place to look at how at least one person has dealt with that and dealt with it publicly and continued to grow his business apace while that is happening.

Adrienne has put in the chat box to the answer to the question here on the slide, which I’ve been talking over for a minute. One of the things in terms of this annual review process is making sure ruthlessly that everything that you do is tied to your goals. This is one of the things, this is why I started talking about Chris, that Chris has really excelled at over the years. Particularly with this course correcting.

One of the reasons I want to have us start with talking about this annual review process with what brought you to travel writing in the first place is that one of the first clicks for people that makes them start scribbling in their notebook when I do these kind of workshops about setting up your business and then run home with plans, great big plans that change their freelance business for the better, is sometimes just a simple question: Why are you here? What made you do this in the first place?

I’m going to give you another couple seconds or minutes here to drop in the chat box for those of you that haven’t already. I’ll share or those of you just listening in to the audio that people have shared already.

We’ve got “Passion for meeting people in different cultures and hearing their stories.” This is a big one and I would almost go so far as to say this is something that unites all travel writers.

I do find there are people who specialize in kind of extreme luxury who are more around, not necessarily meeting people in different cultures in the same way that I really value—and we talk about this on the Dream of Travel Writing webpage—seeing the way people live in other places changes you. I think other people kind of in this extreme luxury world—I was just reading Conde Nast Traveler the other day—are kind of on that acquisition mindset. But I think apart from that subset, I think what Adrienne said is true of most travel writers: passion for meeting people in different cultures and hearing their stories.

Lisa has said something similar: “A huge passion and love for travel, culture and cuisine.” Carrie said, “Getting over heart issues and getting grounded.” Stephanie said, “Getting variety and inspiration to her current writing work.” Nancy has said, “Love of travel, other languages and cultures and writing, LOL.” Lynn has said, “I’ve had a passion for both travel and writing since I was very young and I love the idea of getting paid for it.”

I love that you said that, Lynn. Marilyn loves to travel and experience different cultures. Laurie said, “Freedom to work anywhere and a flexible schedule.” Janet said, “Encouraging aging Baby Boomers to keep moving and learn about the world.”

What I love that all of you guys shared here is what brought you to travel and to sharing your love of travel, but not necessarily to travel writing as a business. Lynn had said earlier, “I love the idea of getting paid for it.” This is an interesting one. Kia said, “I’ve seen other friend’s adventures on Facebook and would love to have my own.”

That’s a great example of why travel, but why travel writing? Some of you have probably heard me talk about this before. If you have my book you’ve definitely seen it. One of the things that came of the about 18-months of research and interviews and then the following six months of working on the book and getting it out was a lot of conversations with a lot of people about why they were doing travel writing. Not just why they were traveling, and not just why they were writing about their travels, but why they were really pursuing travel writing as an income-deriving activity. With freelance or that they started a blog with the idea that someday some gain of some kind that was financial or in kind would be coming from it.

In that vein I notice a lot of what you guys are talking about, a lot of these same similarities: that people love to experience different cultures and meet people in different cultures and be changed by those things or to share those things with other so they can also be changed by those things. This is the things: that motivation is often what gets us to write, perhaps to write on a personal blog or even just write emails home from wherever you are.

I have a friend who’s working on a proposal on major publishers on a narrative book, which is all just fake letters home that he’s writing for his book, but letters home from his various trips.

As I was working on the Six-Figure Travel Writing Roadmap and I had a lot of conversations with people, I noticed that most travel writers are united by this love of other cultures, of experiencing them, of being changed by them, but of course also sharing that with people. But what that leads to is really more this concept of the sharing aspect. Of putting it in writing, whether that is in a blog or just letters or emails home. Not so much this pursuit of paid travel writing.

What Lynn said earlier, “I love these things and I especially like the idea of getting paid for them” is great. That’s starting to get into why are we really here? Why are you really listening to me or reading my blog or talking my workshops? Why are you really trying to make money from your travel writing instead of altruistically doing it for the fun of it and to help other people?

When we get into that, I found that there are really three main reasons that people are doing this. The first one I call Freedom. What I mean by freedom in this case is that you want to travel. You want to travel the world and you want to be able to spend some money on something and maybe not volunteer the entire time and have some money when you come home, whenever that is, and you’ve decided the way you’re going to fund those travels is through travel writing.

I think Laurie said this earlier, and Laurie has been freelancing for a while and just had a book come out in our newsletter the other day – everybody clap at home for Laurie – but she said freedom to work anywhere and a flexible schedule.

This is interesting because I know that Laurie loves food and traveling and talking to people and finding their stories, but this is what has really driven her to do freelance travel writing and food writing and photography as her métier, so to say, as her calling, as her profession, is wanting to have that control over her schedule and what type of work that she is doing.

She really falls into that freedom category whereas some people, and Lynn, you might fall under this category or you may not, some people fall under the bylines category.

What do I mean by that? If your main motivation for pursuing travel writing as a profession is bylines, you may have grown up reading or thumbing through National Geographic and looking at the photos of all of these far away places that you can’t even imagine that that’s real life and not a movie, and wanting to be the person who gets to go there and spend six months staking out the white Siberian tiger. That’s totally stolen from Walter Mitty, but you get the drift.

The people who pursue bylines (Oh there’s the other Laurie! Both Lauries are here!) People who pursue bylines, they are in it for, not necessarily the love of the written word in the way novelists might be, but they are in it for the thrill of seeing their name up here in Conde Nast Traveler or Travel and Leisure or National Geographic or in an anthology alongside Jan Morris or Alice Waters or other big names.

It’s very easy both with this bylines one and the next one I’m going to talk about, which is free trips, to feel like that’s a lesser thing, but it’s really important to remember that what motivates you, there’s nothing inherently good or bad about it and that any designations of that type that you put on your own motivations only has the by-product of potentially souring you from honestly pursuing what you need to pursue and taking the jobs that are right for you, that you will flourish in because you’re appropriately motivated.

The next one is Free Trips. People who are in the travel writing business, again we’re talking about business, not just the writing, who are in travel writing as a business for the free trips, they tend to be people who are retired. I know people who are 32 and former bank managers who are retired and just travel to tango dance, so it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re a Baby Boomer or older, that you are doing this as a post-retirement profession, but they tend to be people who want to essentially travel full time, more or less, and have decided, similarly to the freedom people, that they way they are going to fund that is by travel writing.

The different between the people who are in it for the freedom is that they don’t really care about having complete freedom over their schedule or over the types of work that they’re doing or over the places that they’re going. What they’re more concerned is if they can have a luxurious or exclusive or whatever experience without having to pay for it, without having to think about the monetary aspect of it.

What that might mean, and what I see really commonly—and there’s a guy who specializes just in teaching this, but I’m not going to tell you what his name is, not because I don’t want you to go to him, but because I have opinions of him that other people share and he’s not the best teacher—the whole thing about free trips, though, is that you tent to not care so much about the money. You tend to care more about just having the travel paid for, being able to travel. So you’ll often write for places just because they’ll take the story rather than because they’re going to take the story and they’re going to pay you for it because you’re essentially being paid in kind on the press trip.

That doesn’t mean thought that f your motivation is free trips, if you just want to have somebody else pay for your travel and just explore the world based on what comes to you in that way that you can’t make money.

These slides are pulled from the book, so I’m going to come back in one second. I used them in some other webinars as well, so you may have seen them I’m going to go through in a minute a couple quick ways that you can make six figures doing each of these things. In the meantime, I want to say this.

I mentioned earlier that it’s really important to not shy away from whatever is your main motivation. That is because one of the biggest things, not just that I saw when I was doing the research that I was doing for this book or I see on coaching calls or I see trying to employ people doing work for us, but I see all the time when I compare travel writers to the other freelancers that I know—I know a lot of other freelancers.

I used to do graphic design. A lot of the conferences I go to are specifically, not specifically, but are largely geared toward people who do different types of web development or app development or things like that. I hang out with a lot of these types of freelancers. The biggest difference that I see with travel writers is that they feel much less compelled to do things.

There’s a reason for that. Again, it’s not something to shy away from. We have all decided to pursue this thing that everybody has probably told you doesn’t exist or that you can’t earn money at or just seems like a pipe dream or there’s so many people doing it, how could you possibly succeed? We have all decided to box the odds and pursue this elusive thing despite what everybody says, despite all of the things that look hard. That takes a lot of chutzpah and a lot confidence in what you want as well as your ability to figure it out.

But the flip side of that, the downside of that is that we do what we want. So if we don’t want to do something it’s very hard to get ourselves to do it. I spend, not a ton of time because I try to get this out of the way in the first couple coaching calls, but a fair bit of time talking to people about how to get things done. I don’t really position myself as a productivity expert, but if you’ve ever taken a workshop, particularly a live workshop with me, you’ll see that this is a big thing that I talk about. In fact, my time tracker is working right now behind the webinar window as I talk to you guys.

I have been studying productivity for years and years, long before I switched to doing this full-time, and it’s indispensable. We’re going to talk a little in the slide today but especially in future webinars, why that is. But here’s the thing: I have found indisputable by my consistent use over seven-odd years of my time tracker, that doing something that you don’t want to do, even if it’s an article you want to write but don’t feel like writing it right now, my data leads to four to ten times longer.

That’s like if it would take me—I’m trying to think of how long it would take me to write a certain type of article—lets say two hours to write a 1,500-word feature that is 100 percent reported and based on a bunch of interviews I have to tie in and fact-checking that I need to do. Say the pure aspect of writing that without the interviews and everything of just getting it down on paper would take me two hours if I was really jamming away at it.

If it was pulling teeth and I was on deadline and I was so unmotivated and I was just staring at my screen and I couldn’t get it done, that might take me 20 hours or 8 hours. That’s what I mean by 4 to 10 times longer. I hope that all of you at home, as soon as the time delay catches up, are shaking your heads when you hear this because I’m sure you’ve experienced this without having that tangible number to point to. That yes, this takes me longer.

I have found that can be, for a lot of people, the number one thing that is holding them back: That they are simply spending way too much time on all of their work because they don’t really want to do it and they need other work that they want to do more. This can literally be the number one thing.

In fact, I was interviewed on a really lovely podcast the other day that I linked to from the newsletter; hopefully some of you guys caught it. It was an Australian writer who’s been running a podcast for quite a long time. I was saying something about this and she totally didn’t want to go down the productivity path. She said, “Oh, you know, as writers it takes us a while.”

But what I’ve found from years of setting this and working on it and tracking myself, is that all of that thinking that you’re probably doing when you’re sitting there looking at the blinking curser like a metronome that’s just taunting you and it beats. And sometimes the beats look slower and long and you know that time is passing and work is not getting done.

That thinking, that stressing, that should not happen in front of your computer in front of a blank screen. You should do it in a park while taking a walk. You should read something else or listen to music until what you need to get that piece of writing done comes to you. If you don’t have enough time, wither you’ve procrastinated, which is a whole different set of problems, or you’ve let an editor talk you into an unreasonable deadline, which I’m seeing increasingly. That’s another one of the things we’re talking about on another slide.

Lynn has chimed in on that. It takes way more time when she’s not motivated or not enjoying it for some reason.

This information is available in a lot of different places. I think it’s on our blog as well, so I’m not going to dilly-dally over this for too much time, but I want to show you how, depending on what your motivation is, there are different types of work that fit that.

If freedom is more important for you, these unreasonable deadlines that I was talking about? Totally not for you. Working for big, glossy, mainstream newsstand magazines that won’t put your article out for a year and will come back to you nine months after you wrote it with a bunch of edits when you don’t remember anything about the source? Not for you.

The stuff that is for you are projects that you can get done without a lot of research or time on the internet or something that keeps you from experiencing the destinations that you are in or that keeps you on the phone at weird hours and that you can finish and work on in your own time with minimal interaction with your client. That’s really the best thing for you.

That can mean writing a blog post or articles based on things that you know very well for editors that are easy to work with whether those are publications or websites.

What about bylines? It seems pretty obvious who you should be working for if you’re in it for bylines. In the end, actually, it’s not. I see a lot of people past the people that I don’t even work with who are just slinging their pitches about to publications that pay zero or to pay $2000 because they found them on a list of “50 travel publications that pay.” Like one I saw the other day that was so outdated that three of the publications on there don’t even exist anymore even though she had purported it as a brand new post.

This is totally outside, “I’m going to pitch Conde Nast because I want to write for Conde Nast.” If you are in this because you value bylines, there is still a way to go about allocating how you spend your time and who you work with as a client to make sure that you are happiest with the investment that you are putting into the work that you’re working on.

Nobody likes having written an article and then nine months later get edits because your editor has finally looked at it and has a totally different idea. You need to, if that’s what you are interested in, for your own sanity as well as a steady stream of money coming into your bank account, balance different types of things that you work on in order to have a sustainable travel-writing career.

That means mixing it up. Writing sometimes for the airline magazines. Having some editors that you write for regularly, whether that is an official column or just something similar. Writing some for newspaper where you get a bigger word count and still a respectable paycheck at the end of the day and it comes much faster than writing for a newsstand glossy magazine.

The last one—remember I said it seems like free trips you don’t really care about money and you just write for outlets that pay for free—you can still make money at that. That’s one of the things that if you think that you are kind of a freedom person but you’re really attracted to the idea of free trips because you’re just not that interested in the physical act of planning your trips, you can still make money doing this.

Even if it’s slightly differently, you look for editors who are easier to pitch and more likely to give you assignments because you need those to get on your press trips. You also work, particularly for tour companies, because you can essentially get them to set you up to go on a series of their tours for free and then have you write about them.

That’s just a couple drops in the bucket of eye opening before it gets you into the hard questions that are going to make us all take a deep breath for a moment.

I have the big whammy on the next slide, but these are the questions I said earlier on in the call that—please don’t feel like you need to put these in the chat box, in fact it’s probably be better if you don’t so other people don’t feel like their not putting them in and holding back by omission. We can just keep all of these to ourselves as I go through and discuss them.

You can write your answers to yourself on your own screen or you can write them down for later o think about, but this is really the first phase in moving through our travel writing process. Several of the questions that I have on here you will have answered. You will have positive answers. You will have done those plans or you will know the answers to these by the end of the webinars of this series.

If you haven’t already done some of these things then you’re going to start or you’re going to do them in the process of working on the webinars.

Question 1: Can you tell me exactly how much money you have coming in this month?

What I mean by that is right now is the 22nd. Do you reliably, accurately, for sure know both how much work you have on the books that you will actually turn in or file—I like to note the different between filing and receiving—do you know how much work you will actually have billed this month?

What about next month?

I know for a lot of folks that there are no regular clients in your lives or—this is something I’m seeing more and more frequently—you might have regular clients, but you don’t have people who are on contract. What I mean by that is that I’m seeing some people working through our content marketing pieces and one of the things happening is that they kind of skip the bit about proposals and contracts. What happens then is that they start working with people for a blog post here or a blog post there and the problem with that is two-fold.

First, having a specific process that you set out with your clients shows them that you are a professional, but also shaving a contract in place helps you get through bumps in the road, figuring out your path together with new clients. If you don’t have that contract in place, that security that we are going to continue working together, it can cause some falling out.

One of the things I see sometimes is that you guys have people that you might work with but you’re not sure you’re going to work with them next month. You kind of never know. There’s this idea that one day to the next they might just stop giving you work. You really never know if that next assignment is coming. That’s something we’re going to talk about how to avoid.

I talked about what stuff you have billed. On my spreadsheet—and we’re going to talk all about spreadsheets later is you like spreadsheets. I’m not a big spreadsheet person personally, but I for many years had a spreadsheet where I would simply track what I had that was billed and that I was going to turn in, and then also when those things were being paid for. Because that’s the important thing for us in a lot of ways.

There’s a great feeling when you file something, but there’s also a great feeling when you can pay your bills, especially when you can pay your bills entirely from travel writing. So there’s a difference between what you’re filing every month and what you have coming in, what you are receiving, which is what is know in accounting terms as accounts receivable.

This next question is always a doozie. I’ve stolen it form somebody who loves to stump freelancers with this exact question. Stolen isn’t quite the right word. I’m going to put Carol Tice from “Make a Living Writing” in the chat box. When she first started working on this, people would come to her with the various problems in their freelance writing lives and she would say, “How much marketing are you doing?” or “When was the last time you sent a pitch?” “How many new clients have you gotten in the last couple months?”

The answer was always more or less “I’m not doing that” or something to that effect. It was a question that always really stumped people, even and especially freelancers who had been at it for many years. I find that this concept of having a regular marketing plan is something that can be more common if you’re breaking in, but when you’ve been at it for a while, it falls off.

If you have been in your freelance business for some time, whether part-time or full-time or as a hobby or as a full-time profession, you need to really ask yourself, “Am I doing on the regular, even if the regular just means one day a month or every two months, am I doing something to drum up new business?”

Something that we’re going to talk about is that you want to always have the ability to cut what isn’t working and hone your efforts more toward what is. For instance in the case of content marketing clients, say some of the people who’ve been following our content marketing either our live workshop or in coaching with me or on the online version, say that they have signed a bunch of new people.

I’m seeing this happening and I just had a call yesterday with somebody who sent out five emails and she got three responses and she’s already working with two of them and just holding off the third one because she’s not sure she has enough time.

Say you’re one of these people. What can happen is that if you just stop marketing and you just keeping working with the people that you already have, if there’s a hiccup with one of those people. If, for instance, the relationship goes bad, you don’t like the work, they start initiating scope creep when they start expecting more things than you initially agreed they were paying for, you don’t feel like you have other options.

Maybe it’s been a while or it was just one time that you were able to sign new clients and you don’t know if you have that skill anymore. Having a regular marketing plan not only protects you from the relatively likely event that you want to dump one of your clients for one reason or another. It also helps keep that muscle from atrophying. Because you are always confident. Not because you are full of yourself; because you have reliable data to this effect that you can find somebody new to replace them.

Lynn with the golden question: Do you have suggestions on what freelance writers can do to market themselves and drum up new clients.

This is going to be the fodder, particularly of the last webinar in this series, which is going to be all around developing your marketing plan. I’m going to tell you in a bit at the end of this call, but in the ones at the end of this series it’s going to be setting up your annual plan and the last one is going to be setting up your marketing plan specifically, and in a way that is followable no matter what.

Continuing the questions: Do you review your rejections or non-responses for patterns?

This can be anything. Especially people who don’t feel like they’re pitching, per se. You’re probably in a position where you might see something on Finders or on LinkdIn. I used to get tons of work from LinkdIn, but that has changed quite a bit. That you just sent something out to somebody like, “Hey, I saw this and would you be interested in working with me?”

The rejections or non-responses you’re getting might be pitching yourself for a press trip rather than pitching yourself for an article. Or you might be pitching yourself for other bloggers for collaborations, but you need to take whatever mode in the last year you’ve had of putting yourself out there and see where it’s going wrong.

What in your language, your tone, your presentation is keeping people from meeting you where you want to be met? That’s the analysis, that’s being self-aware and looking at where you are and what’s going on and taking stock and making iterative steps to move forward. Of course you are, because you’re here, but are you learning around the things you’re not currently succeeding at.

I had a call recently that was telling me up and down that she wants to be writing for magazines and that’s really what she wants to do, but as she was telling me what she’s been working on recently, she’s recently done a huge redesign of her blog that she’s invested in quite heavily with a designer, and she spent a bunch of her professional development budget on a workshop around social media and various other things about the investment of her time.

So as we’re talking about what she’s been doing lately, there’s this very clear path to her blog, but she’s saying up and down that all she wants to do is write for magazines. But she’s not pitching, she’s not reading the travel magazine database, so she’s not actually doing anything to move toward that goal.

This goes back to, I’m going to jump back a couple slides, to what I was talking about over here. Is that if you think you want something, but you really want is something else, whether that’s a goal or motivation, it’s not going to click. It’s not going to work. So one of the big things that I see, especially with people who are sort of early-stage in terms of they’ve put a bunch of time or money into moving down this path, but they aren’t getting the traction that they’d like, that is one of the big stumbling blocks. What they say they want to do and all of their efforts are pointing toward are diametrically opposed.

This all points to one big thing: Do you feel like you’re running a business? You don’t have to say yes or no. This is like the other questions in the tough question category, you don’t have to blurt it out. But if your goal is to do this full-time or you are currently doing it part-time and putting said part-time work on your taxes or excusing it as part-time work to your spouse or kids, it should feel like you are running a business. You should be out in the world at the ice cream store, the pizza shop, the boutique in town, and see these fellow small business owners and feel like you all have common struggles.

You should feel like accounting is an everyday thought for you, not, “Oh, wow, I need to send some invoices, I didn’t do that yet.” And they’re invoices for something you filed two weeks or months ago and you just haven’t heard back. You need to have processes, a business presentation.

That’s why one of the other things that we talked about in the exercises in the Freelance Travel Writing Roadmap, one of the very first things is just setting up a very basic website, but that proclaims yourself a freelance writer. For all of you on the call—which hopefully most of you have heard me harp about this by now—If you do not already, get yourself a website, which is yourname.com. If that is taken, use yournamewrites.com or yournametravelwriter.com.

Get it done. In the book or on the website there is a plan for how to set it up in exactly one hour. I go minute by minute just like when I used to do a cooking website and I’d show how to do 30-minute dinners. I go through minute-by-minute and I say, “Write this, write only this. Do not write more than this. Fill in this exact template and just put this.”

That is step on to feeling like you’re running a business. If you don’t have that yet, please, please get it done before the next call or during the course of this series it can be something you check off your list. Even if you are already freelance writing you need that. When you are pitching people they need to Google you and see that you exist. That doesn’t mean that you have yourname.contently.com or whatever. That’s not legit, I’m sorry. I know it’s a thing and a lot of people use it as their portfolio, but you also need to have your own website that is just for you that is not your blog.

This is another one. People say, “Well I have my blog.” But that’s not the same for you as a writer. It shouldn’t be your blog and it shouldn’t be a page on your blog. You need a very basic website that’s SEO friendly, as in your name is in the URL, that’s the SEO kick right there, that is just about you a s a freelance writer and nothing else. It can link to your blog or mention you have a blog, but in the majority of cases that’s not really necessary.

If you don’t have that, do it.

Second thing. If you are using a Gmail address, stop it. Use an email address that is connected to a URL that you own. You can still root it through Gmail. I used to do this through various small publications I worked for. You’d be surprised at how many people on a company level are rooting their email addresses through Gmail itself.

You need to have an email that is you as a company. That’s part of looking like a company to people. That’s the big one.

Do you feel like you are running a business? Part of the flip side of that, and I have some slides about this at the end, is that there’s a difference between being a service provider and a business. Some of it is actually in terms of taxes and stuff like that, but I really advocate that you try to think of yourself not a a service provider. In part that’s because there are a lot of ways that that mindset allows, not allows clients to take advantage of you, but makes you start to lose your footing when clients are bullying you, whether they realize it or not.

I was just chatting with somebody about this that has some new content marketing clients. It’s not uncommon for clients, people who are assigning you writing assignments, to say that you need to do this, this and this after you’ve set the rate. They don’t understand that that needed to be clarified before you set the rate. Or they don’t understand that there could even potentially be a different rate for having photos with the blog post instead of just the text or for having you set the blog post up in their content management system versus you just email it to them. They don’t understand that that takes you more time. They don’t even think about it.

Sometimes it’s nefarious and sometimes it’s not. Having that mindset of a business, rather than a service provider help tune you into the top thing on this slide, which is the economics of your costs and income.

When I was talking before about time tracking on your articles, I say this every single live workshop that I do and I’ll say it today: If you don’t have a time tracker you should try it for a little while because you need to get a handle on your costs.

You costs, especially for us because we are, in a way, service providers, our time is one of our biggest costs, but also investments. What might you be investing in to produce a writing assignment? Perhaps you have some different tools that you have that help you search better like Lexus-Nexus or something like that? That’s a little less common, but what about travel?

We, even I, tend to kind of think: I travel, but it comes from a certain part of my budget, but I don’t bill it to every article. Ok, well I’ll barely make back what I spent traveling for this article with the pay, but they’re not factoring both the travel costs and the time costs. You need to make sure that you take both of them into account on any assignment.

Also on meetings, which are free, this is really important, guys. Somebody was just telling me the other day that they went downtown to have coffee with a client. They didn’t tell me how long it took because then I probably would have harped ion that too, but she was like, “Yeah, I know it was way out of my way to travel because I live super uptown in the Bronx, but we had this great conversation.”

I used to have a client who wanted to meet quite frequently. Like every time I was in town, but every two or three months in reality. She would take me to lunch and all of these things. The reason I let it happen, I made sure that every time we had a meeting I made sure I got new work from her. Like not just a new blog post, but a whole new area of responsibility from her.

So you need to look at the economics and your costs and your time. Not just on assignments you’re doing, but also on your marketing.

Related but different in terms of common things that get in the way, rather than just not looking at your costs and your income, if you don’t have income goals—we talked about goals generally and how your goals need to be tailored to what you want to do—but if you don’t have income goals specifically, then you don’t have sales target.

Sales targets: Who that teaches freelance writing ever talks about sales targets? I want all of you to start. Sales targets should become your new favorite words. I’m not even kidding. You need to get comfortable with the word sales. You are in sales. All of you who are freelancers are the head of sales for your personal company, for your personal business, for your freelance empire.

Salespeople have targets and they need to meet them or they get fired. So you need to set up some sales target for yourself. They can totally be low and meetable to start, but you need to get in the habit of thinking of yourself the chief salesperson for you that has sales targets.

I’ve talked before and we’ll talk in future webinars in the series about how you can break those out. I used to have a little thermometer like fundraisers do in my notebook. Every single day I would draw my little thermometer and as I filed my little pieces of writing I would fill in my thermometer to meet my daily goal. Over the course of that year, the size of my thermometer grew in terms of how many dollars were on my daily goal. And it happened because I would look at it at 3:00 or 5:00 or 7:00, god forbid, and say, “Oh my god, I really haven’t gotten that far on this thermometer today. I need to do something that pushes it up because otherwise I’m going to have to do much more tomorrow and the day after that.”

Income targets or sales targets, sales goals, need to be a part of your repertoire, both in terms of the practice and the speaking and being comfortable with them.

A couple other common things that get in the way: This is a big one, so I put a whole slide just on this one: Shiny freelance project syndrome. I don’t have a good acronym for this, but this is really what I always call it: Shiny freelance project syndrome. This tends to manifest itself in exactly what I’ve put right ere on the slide. That you are interested in writing book length works, videography, growing your blog, freelancing for other people, writing for publications and working on your content marketing business.

You’ve gone so far as to buy videography equipment, you have three different books of poetry that you’ve outlined. You have a blog and you do Facebook live posts on the regular, you’re trying to write pitches to magazines and get to know those magazines. You are picking up freelance clients at conferences whenever you can and you’ve set up an LLC just for your content marketing business.

I’m describing sort of a real person, but also many people with that description. It doesn’t work. Categorically it doesn’t work. I can tell you point-blank that one of the biggest unifying factors of the people that I have surveyed formally or informally and that I have known, some of them for 10 years who are just not making it income wise or who can’t let go of that part-time job or have had to go back to that part-time job or more than a part-time job, it’s because of this.

This is one of the biggest things. You can do all of these different things, but not at the same time. Part of that is that it’s not how your brain works best. Say you are working on videography and you’re really immersing yourself in it. That gives your brain the opportunity to make connections between disparate pieces of information that you’re getting in different places, to really present yourself well when you talk to potential clients. For people to know that’s the type of work you’re looking for and to send it your way.

Every business that gets big, whatever big means for that business, does it by first becoming good at one thing. I’ve put Google on here not just because my husband works here. I grew up in Silicon Valley and when I was young both my parents worked on computers. I remember one summer I had a summer job or part-time thing testing a search engine. It wasn’t Google it was Fat sure or the Butler one or something and Google didn’t even exist at the time. Now Google is everything, right?

Google is computers and phones and I just saw a ridiculous in real like thing that they’re doing. They have Google Home, we all use Google Docs, but they didn’t start that why.

I just threw Shonda Rhimes at the end because I think we all knew her first for Grey’s Anatomy. Grey’s Anatomy went for a really long time before Scandal, before it became a thing but before it even started. She really established herself with Grey’s Anatomy and became known for a particular type of storytelling.

So shiny freelance project syndrome is the number one reason that people in the category of having been at it and have been banging their head against the wall in terms of moving forward in a substantive way, it’s the biggest thing that holds these types of people back.

Here are a few other ones that I want to look at. These are sneaky ones. Not necessarily nefarious, but these are ones that can be hard to realize are negatively impacting your freelance travel writing career prospects.

The first one is because it sucks. You don’t want to tell yourself that you can’t do this thing that you want to do because of these real life obligations. I’ve put “real” in quotes here because I wanted to make the distinction between things that physically exist in your day-to-day life.

For instance, this is a funny example, but a good one. I had somebody cancel a coaching call in advance, respectfully, yesterday. She runs a goat farm, I’m not kidding, in Kentucky. Fantastic super cool woman. When she was here for the Freelance Travel Writing Bootcamp she was in the middle of purchasing goat semen in an auction in order to impregnate her goats so she could have new goat. So now she has the goat babies that she needs to feed and take care of and they’re up all night.

So she sent me this email where she sounds like any new mother where she’s not getting any sleep because her goats are up all night and they’re causing trouble and she has to take care of them so she wanted to reschedule the coaching cal because she hadn’t gotten much done.

That is a real, actual thing even though it sounds a bit silly. I know a lot of you have more dire situations. There are people who are in the sandwich generation who have aging parents to deal with as well as their own children or people who have spouses with very serious medical issues or they themselves have very serious medical issues. Or you live in a place that has recently been devastated by a hurricane.

There are all sorts of things that come into you life that might cause you to need to take a step back or to shift your goals for your freelance travel writing in a very real way. Rather than feel disappointed in yourself, you need to take those things into account and adjust and be realistic.

A related one is being just plain exhausted, which doesn’t allow you to do your best work, get your best clients or move your career forward in the way you need to make it a full-time profession. I’ve seen this happen with somebody else recently. She just had so much on her plate. She’s a mother, she’s pursuing certificates in all sorts of different things, she has a very demanding career for the government as well, so it’s not super forgiving in terms of hours or rewarding in terms of pay. And she has so much on her plate, but she signed up for a lot of but she’s jus exhausted right now and she isn’t going to be able to make the right decisions for what’s right for her until she gets thorough that to a point where she’s rested and back to being herself.

Conversely, you might have a lot of work of the freelance variety, but it all pays so low or it’s so far away from what you thought you’d be doing that you hate it and you resent everybody and you’re total curmudgeon, whether that’s to you clients or laptop or spouse.

It’s kind of like being exhausted, but it’s being exhausted with what you’re doing right now. You need to recognize if you are in that place because it’s definitely spilling over into other things in your life and it’s definitely clouding your ability to think creatively and freshly about where else you can go.

Another one that’s related to that is that even if you do have a full-time job that’s different and you’re doing this kind of on the side; this is not a hobby for us. We’re here to make money. This is work and if you have another job and this that’s work—I had two full-time jobs for several years before I did this—you need to have time not just to rest, not just to relax and sleep and do brain-numbing television watching or whatever, but to have fun. This is incredibly important.

That could be another thing that’s keeping you from moving forward. All of the things on this slide are things that keep you from seeing opportunities, from grabbing on to them, from thinking creatively of making plans.

Making plans is something we’re going to do in the last two webinars in this series. We’ve gone super over even though I managed to get the slides in today. Hooray! And we didn’t start too late, so I thank you all for joining us today. I’ve just got a couple more slides that are just in wrap-up and then I’m going to tell you about the other webinars that are coming down the line.

Here’s the hard truth: If you say you are doing this full-time or part-time for tax purposes or to your spouse or whatever, you need to get particularly serious about two things: recurring income and having goals.

Recurring income because that is the basis. That is the bedrock upon which an actually business is built. Because I’m not going to go back because it would take too long with too many slides, but remember when I asked how much money do you have coming in this month and next month? If you can’t answer that question, if that question causes you anxiety, that’s a problem that’s going to seep into lots of things you do. It’s going to seep into when you sit down to try to write because you’ll have this gnawing feeling that there’s other stuff you need to do or you need to do this fast but you’ve paralyzed yourself. You need security. That is the bedrock of a freelance business.

We’re going to talk about this in the webinar on goals, but also next week when we look at where your money is coming from. Part of security is having things on contract when people have agreed in advance and can’t change their mind with a specific amount of notice that you’ll be doing a certain amount of work and they will pay you in a specified, agreed upon, mutually beneficial time frame.

The parting words are, this is leading up to what we’re going to do in the upcoming weeks—the business plan isn’t dead, it’s just for people who actually have businesses, as opposed to people who don’t look, cover their eyes, and hope that all of it works out. Which is not what any of you are going to do after this.

Next week we’re going to look up how to clearly catalogue the work and opportunities you have now to see where you need to go. What I highly recommend if you want to really get the most out of this is to start to do some prep on this front in terms of having at least in a single unified place if it’s currently scattered all over the place, who you have been working for and how much money you have from each of them. We’re gathering it as one thing but we really want to analyze it.

Then we’re going to look at those patterns that I was talking about in your work for the past year and how we can springboard that going forward, both in what tweaks we need to make in improvements as well as what is going well that we want to continue and make more of.

Thank you so much for bearing with me on this long webinar. I know we’ve got some really serious stuff to go over in the next couple weeks, so I might go over more in the other ones as well. But I’ve tried to break it down in several segments so we can do it in manageable sized chunks. Thank you guys so much.

Thanks for joining in on this slightly long and earlier in the week webinar and I look forward to chatting about where your business is now and where we’re going to take it next week. Bye guys!