The Six-Figure Travel Writer

Today’s holiday trivia: In many European countries, the celebration of Christmas on December 25 pales in comparison with January 6’s Feast of the Epiphany–also know as the visit of the three wise men or magi. Presents for children arrive on the eve of the Epiphany rather than Christmas Eve, though they are not delivered by a jolly man. In Italy, gifts are ferried about by La Befana, a witch with a long nose and speedy broomstick who leaves garlic and onions, in addition to the usual coal, for bad children or parents who haven’t left her a glass of wine.

There are so, so many opportunities out there for travel content marketing.

How many hotels can you think of off the top or your head? How many destinations around the world? How many cities where visitors take tours during their stay?

In just the tour and activities market alone, in just the U.S., there are 68,000 companies valued at 20 billion. That’s not even the size of fish you’re probably going after. There are many, many more that are smaller and don’t have in-house staff devoted to their content marketing.

Every year when I attend the ITB Berlin travel trade show, more than 10,000 destinations, hotels, travel tech companies, and tour operators cram, often sharing several to a table, into a space the size of 30 football fields and pay anywhere from $4,575 to $38,200 to be there for just 2 days in front of around 160,000 German consumers and trade visitors (i.e. less than the monthly visitors of the vast majority of these organization’s websites every month).

Tourism boards in cities as small as Ontario, California (population 173,212), and Columbia, Missouri (population 120,612) are spending $1.9 million and $1.2 million, respectively, per year on tourism marketing and promotion. Destinations like Florida (population 20.61 million) and Philadelphia (population 1.6 million) spend more like $76 and $19.5 million respectively.

If you have ever had a blog, set up an Instagram account, interview sources for journalism stories or corporate writing, or told stories at parties that kept every glued to your every word, you have skills that these companies need.

We’re gearing up to run our live TravelContentCon retreat next weekend, because this is the last window until after the summer travel rush dies down to get your travel content marketing ducks in a row.

Once we start rolling into March, companies and tourism boards are far too busy interacting with visitors for this season to loop in new contractors and strategies.

That’s why, for today’s holiday special offer, we’re giving you a chance to grab all of our eight of the webinars from our two content marketing series for a special price–$44.

At the regular price ($19 each), this much content would typically set you back more than $150, because all of the webinars from our library come with:

• streamable high-def video
• smaller downloadable video
• streamable and downloadable audio file
• full transcript available to read on screen or as PDF download
• all webinar slides in PDF form
• any applicable worksheets

So today, for just $44, we’re offering the full webinar packages of:

1. How To Earn Big With Travel Content Marketing: Here we talk about the different opportunities for travel content marketing writing–from blog posts to content strategy to choosing and editing photos for Instagram–what kind of pay you can expect, and where to start looking for these opportunities.
2. How To Locate The People Who Need Your Travel Content Marketing: We continue looking at where the big money in travel writing is hiding this week in part two of our series on travel content marketing writing: how to identify the people you can approach for this type of work, whether companies or tourism boards.
3. How To Craft A Travel Content Marketing Pitch That Gets Attention: In the third portion of our coverage on travel content marketing writing, I break down the steps of putting together your own pitch to send cold to companies and tourism boards you think would benefit from your services, including powerful statistics on content marketing ROI to include and just how much information to give away to keep your prospect interested without setting them up to go execute your plan without you.
4. How To Close The Deal:  Proposals And Phone Calls That Get Results: In this webinar, we’ll cover, in detail: the exact questions to ask and path to follow in your call to ensure the best results for you and your prospect (it has to be a win-win to close a good deal!), what to listen for in your prospect’s responses to make sure your proposal speaks his or her language, the formula I use to put together proposals that wow prospects and close deals.
5. Pricing, Negotiating, And Contracts (For Travel Content Marketing): In this webinar, in addition to covering the sections to make sure you include in your travel writing contracts, I cover general pricing and negotiation. Here you can find out what you “should” be charging in different situations…along with what you could be asking for when an editor names a price to you.
6. *NEWLY ADDED* How to Sell Blogging to Travel Companies and Tourism Boards: In this webinar, we discuss exactly what statistics, industry terms, and buttons to push you need to know to get yourself in the door with, fielding assignments from, and signing recurring contracts with tourism boards and travel companies.
7. *NEWLY ADDED* Best Practices When Writing on the Web for Travel Companies: Even if you’re had your own blog for years, tune in to learn the best practices in blogging technique and style when writing for companies and tourism boards, which are trying to provide information quick to readers who may have never visited their site before and may never come back again once they’ve gotten what they needed.
   
8. *NEWLY ADDED* Ghost(writ)ing on the Web as a Travel Writer: So many small travel businesses, whether tour companies or concierge travel bookers, are built around the judgment and expertise of the owner. A blog showcasing those unique advantages is a no-brainer for these companies to build trust with prospective customers, but the owner rarely has the time–or the writing chops. We unpack the process of creating ghostwritten content for your travel blogging clients.

To take advantage of this offer, head to the webinar library, and load up your cart with the webinars listed above and enter the code TCM8.

You’ll also receive something exclusive that we aren’t offering in the webinar library: the recording of our special interview with Dan Gibson from Visit Tucson.

In this call, we went straight to the source to talk about how tourism boards specifically think about their content.

Dan himself was formerly a journalist before making the jump into the tourism board side, so he has a unique perspective on what you need to know to transition into this type of writing. And he generously spilled all the beans about how tourism boards are working with freelancers today.

The thing is, we had problems with the recording for this call (one of the reasons we switched providers!), so we don’t have the beginning of the recording when I introduced the topic–just the interview with Dan–and aren’t able to include it in our webinar library.

The interview is incredibly eye-opening about how tourism boards are working with writers today–and just how easy it is to get into this type of work.

That’s why we’re including this recording (just the audio) as part of this special offer. This is the only way to get your hands on it!

Delivery: In the webinar library, add all of the webinars listed above to your cart and enter the code TCM8.

The webinars will be available immediately in your user profile on webinars.dreamoftravelwriting.com, and you will also receive an email for each webinar with the links to the downloadable audio, video, and transcript files.

Once the offer ends, we will send the downloadable file of the interview with Dan Gibson to all who have taken advantage of this special.

Three important notes:

• You need to have all eigh webinars in your cart for the coupon code to take effect. If you have previously purchased one of the webinars in the set, that will preclude you from adding that specific webinar to your cart. We set up new test accounts attached to different email addresses to get around this issue, and recommend you do the same if you are running into this issue as it is the only work around.
• We’ve completely removed the expiration time from this coupon so there is no potential of weird time zone interaction affecting the expiration time as with the 11 webinar offer earlier this week, and we’ll shut it off manually when the deal has ended. If you have any issues with the coupon saying it has expired within the window specified, email us. The shopping cart will automatically alert you if it cannot apply the coupon, because the wrong webinars are in the cart.
• Due to an issue with an unscheduled security update creating problems with the display of webinars and transcripts in our webinar library, this offer is available through the end of the day on January 6.

This offer has ended. Thank you!

Please check the 12 Days of Christmas page for the new daily offer, or add your email address below to get the day’s offer in your inbox each day when it opens.