77 minutes of video
77 minutes of audio
26 slides
25 pages of transcript
12 pages of handouts
Here we walk through several press trip itineraries to show who and what to pitch to set up a varied portfolio of coverage for each trip. We discuss five techniques you can use to ensure an impressive pitch portfolio to accompany any press trip request, and how to handle this process whether you’ve never been published and have no connections or have editors that you work with already but perhaps want to branch out to a new subject or geographic area.
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Pitching is pitching is pitching.
If you know how to pitch, you can get magazine assignments, secure spots on press trips and land gigs writing blogs for company whether you’re battling the hordes flocking to respond to an online job ad or blazing a trail and cold emailing a tour company owner you’ve never met who isn’t technically in the market for a writer.
Right?
If you can nail one you can nail them all?
I think so, based on what I’ve seen not only in my own days as a travel writer, but also based on conversations with other busy, high-earning travel writers.
But many people don’t feel that way. I get regular emails, pitch review requests, and questions in coaching calls about how to do just one of these types of pitching exactly and then how to do another type exactly.
All successful pitching, however, centers on the same thing: zeroing in on what the recipient wants and making them confident you can provide it.
In the case of pitching magazines, that means shaping your idea to fit an exact section of the magazines, giving a time peg for why the idea needs to run now, and showing the editor through the information you provide (and don’t–over writing is a big red flag to editors) that you understand how to put together a story.
In the case of pitching companies you want to do travel content marketing work for, your pitch shows them a clear industry figure on ROI so they’re not afraid to pay your rates and wows them with your insights on what their site is lacking and how you plan to fix it.
But with press trips, I see a lot of folks fall flat because it seems like the formula is different for every trip.
Some trips have more attractions or more hotels. Some are sponsored by a hotel but include a lot of other local activities.
And the result is that many people think the only solution is to put articles on the entire trip, which is a lot of ground to cover–the kind of thing, like a said above, that makes new-to-you editors worry.
It’s not effective and it several limits your options in terms of the number of places you can place a story.
It’s why many people end up just covering press trips on their own blogs or other blogs that pay little or nothing.
But today, we’re going to discuss the best way to give a press trio organizer what they’re looking for (the most coverage possible) while getting you what you want (a spot on the trip) and something that you didn’t even realize you could be getting from press trips (quite a bit of money by placing a high number of articles).
In this webinar, part of our series on setting up free travel as a travel writer, we’ll walk step by step through several press trip itineraries to show who and what to pitch to set up a varied portfolio of coverage for each trip.
We’ll discuss five techniques you can use to ensure an impressive pitch portfolio to accompany any press trip request, and how to handle this process whether you’ve never been published and have no connections or have editors that you work with already but perhaps want to branch out to a new subject or geographic area.
We will cover:
– Five approaches to breaking your trip into article ideas
– Live workshopping how to generate ideas using actual trip itineraries
– Frequent questions on multi-pitching, pitching press trips, and pitching when you’ve never been published