The Six-Figure Travel Writer

We heard you. A lot of you want access to our past webinar content.

And, even more importantly, you want to know exactly what I said, maybe even just read it rather than listen to the webinar.

Or, you’d like the audio version only so you can listen while you’re on a run or in the car. Or maybe just a downloadable version of the video webinar so you can watch it offline on a long flight.

We’ve got more than 30 past one- to one-and-a-half-hour-long webinars in our full library (currently only available to coaching students), and we are working full-steam on not only making the past webinars available (either through individual purchases or themed bundles around pitching, press trips, content marketing, and things like that), but on making that content available in every format you might want to consume it in.

We’re transcribing all past webinars, creating audio files you can listen to while you run, and making the slides from each call available to cut and paste text from. We’re setting up a new interface to manage all the content and make it easy for you to download (another big request!) or stream online any of our past content that interests you, and it’s coming July 31.

So you know what to look out for, here are all of our past webinars by category. You’ll be able to purchase them individually or in topical bundles. Click through to read more about what we cover in any webinar.

Work Smarter, Not Harder

• The Secrets of Six-Figure Travel Writers – As a travel writer earning six figures for several years, I used to get a lot of questions at industry conferences about just how exactly I did it, so I started coaching new, struggling and transitioning travel writers along the journey. Here we explore the misconceptions that keep people from achieving their income goals as a travel writer and you’ll leave with tools to increase your income right away. Learn more.
• Triple Your Travel Writing Income Writing for Magazines – For years naysayers have claimed that there is no money to be made in the magazine industry, the fact is that magazines still pay significantly better than websites–and there’s many more opportunities to write about travel for print magazines than you realize. Sleek, well-paying, new travel magazines are actually popping up every week. You just need to know where to find them. Learn more.
  
• How to Get Work Done When You’re On the Road – As a freelance travel writer, your days are composed of some balance of three things: marketing your travel articles, writing the articles, and traveling to commissioned research articles or those that you’ll pitch next. Here are approaches to partitioning your time on the road, maximizing efficiency in times that don’t at first look like work opportunities, and tricks for being productive anywhere. Learn more.
  
• How to Research on the Road and Find Saleable Ideas While Traveling – We have discussed how to get ideas for travel magazine articles from magazines and other types of research online, but some of the best ideas to report come from what you discover on your travels. Here is a look at how to use magazine pocket cheat sheets, getting lost on purpose, and hints of coolness from press releases and CVB sites to make sure you are gathering the most interesting and salable ideas on the road. Learn more.
• How to Break Your Trips into the Maximum Number of Article Ideas – Does one trip equate to just one story? Certainly not if you’re looking to make a living as a travel writer. In fact, it’s much more normal for full-time writers deriving their entire income from travel writing to place 10-12 articles from one trip–right when they first return. Here we discuss the basic tenets of free travel as a travel writer, from ethics to minimum barrier to entry to the different types of trips and their various pros and cons. Learn more.
• How to Become Part of an Editor’s Stable – To have a stable source of recurring revenue–the best way to build a sustainable, worry-free, forward-looking freelance travel writing career–writing for magazines, you need to stop writing for a magazine just once and focus on long-term relationships. We look at how to build those relationships with editors with copious quotes right from the sources that I’ve drawn from editor panels at recent events with major newsstand titles represented. Learn more.
• Secrets to Successful Interviews for Your Travel Articles – This week, we cut past the anxiety and unpacked exactly what you do and don’t need to know about doing interviews to flesh out your articles–and how learning to rock them can make your writing process much faster and more effective. Learn more.
• Securing Interview Sources to Make Your Stories Sing – I’m always shocked when I see people selling lists of contacts at tourism boards. They aren’t hard to find! And, you’d be shocked how many (important!) people are not only available, but very happy to speak with you for your articles. In this webinar, we looked at how to find the right people for each piece.I’m always shocked when I see people selling lists of contacts at tourism boards. They aren’t hard to find! And, you’d be shocked how many (important!) people are not only available, but very happy to speak with you for your articles. In this webinar, we looked at how to find the right people for each piece. Learn more.
• Transforming Interviews into an Article (Live Demo!) – By popular request, in this webinar, I walked through the process of organizing notes and quotations from interviews into a full reported feature article from start to finish. The entire webinar was a live demo using real interviews. Learn more.
• How to Handle Questions and Responses in Interviews (Live Demo!) – In this very special webinar, I interviewed real tourism boards and other representatives to show you exactly what to ask, how to expand, how to move on, and how to make sure you get what you need on the fly in your interviews. Learn more.

Power Up Your Pitches

• How to Increase Your Pitch Success Rate by Analyzing Magazines – The process of pitching regularly will drastically improve your income and portfolio, and editors respond best to pitches that demonstrate a knowledge of their publication. The best way to demonstrate that knowledge is by only pitching specific sections of the magazine. Learn more.
• How to Generate Sure-Fire Saleable Ideas – Instead of generating article ideas and then trying to find a magazine that will take your idea, I find starting your brainstorming with the sections magazines include yields a much higher success rate. Here we cover techniques that you can also use with any magazine that you have a copy of and ensures that your pitches hit the mark and you get responses from editors. Learn more.
• How to Hone Your Travel Article Ideas to Perfectly Fit Each Magazine – In this webinar we workshoped article concepts into ready-to-pitch, focused ideas with multiple angles matched to specific magazines. I pre-matched them with specific sections from multiple magazines and walked through the process of honing an article “idea” from your concept into something adapted to a magazine and ready to pitch. Learn more.
• How to Craft the Perfect Travel Article Pitch – You can take workshop after workshop on how to write the perfect travel article, but if your pitches aren’t landing assignments, it’s all for naught. In this webinar, we walk step-by-step through what you need to know to write the perfect pitch–and everything that you should leave out. Learn more.
• Don’t Create “Ideas” Out of Nowhere: How to Always Find Them When You Need Them – I’ve found the the process of coming up with the right ideas is much more of an issue than actually writing the pitch. Once you’ve got the idea right, the rest comes much more easily. Here we worked in detail through three different ways to generate ideas from magazines and three ways to come up with ideas “from thin air”. Never be worried about *what* to pitch again. Learn more.
• Answers to Your Most Common Pitching Questions – I’ve got a huge store of these pitching questions that I think are really enlightening for both the newer writers and people who have been doing this for a while that I have shared with you in this webinar as we focus on the truth behind sticking pitching situations. Learn more.

Land Travel Content Marketing Gigs

• How to Earn Big with Travel Content Marketing Writing – Have you had a blog at any time in the past? Even if you never got the numbers to where you felt like you could become a professional blogger, you have a valuable skill set that travel companies and tourism boards need. 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. Learn more.
• How to Locate the People Who Need Your Travel Content Marketing Writing – 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. Learn more.
• 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. Learn more.
• How to Close the Deal: Proposals and Phone Calls that Get Results – In the last few webinars we covered what types of opportunities are out there, how to identify the right companies to approach, and how to write your travel content marketing pitch so that people will be compelled to reply. Here I walk through how I qualify what a prospect needs on the phone and then put it into a tantalizing collaboration proposal. Learn more.
• Pricing, Negotiating, and Contracts (for Travel Content Marketing and Magazine Writing) – 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. Learn more.
• How to Build Serious Business Partnerships at Travel Conferences – If you’re on your way to TBEX, or recently home from WITS, Travel and Words, or Traverse, you need to know how to actually do something with all of those business cards. In this webinar, I provided a primer on travel conferences – how to prepare, how to rock them, and how to follow up. Learn more.

Get Your Trips Sponsored

• Setting Up Sponsored Trips 101 – Getting on a sponsored trip is the holy grail of travel writing, right? Living a life in which you effortlessly hop from one free trip to another, spending your days enjoying haute cuisine and your nights in the fluffy king bed of your complimentary suite? Here we discuss the basic tenets of free travel as a travel writer, from ethics to minimum barrier of entry to the different types of trips, and their various pros and cons. Learn more.
• How to Set Up an Individual Trip from Scratch – In this section we’re going to dive head first into how exactly to plan your own individual sponsored trips that fits your interests, travel preferences, and schedule. Here we look at where to find these trips and best practices for applying. I pull real press trips, read between the lines, and break down exactly what you would do in each situation of your application. Learn more.
• Getting a Spot on a Group Fam or Press Trip – In the past few sections we’ve looked at the basic tenets of sponsored travel and how to piece together an individual sponsored trip. In this webinar, we focused on group familiarization and press trips, which primarily come out of tourism boards and PR agencies, but can also appear in other surprising places. We look at where to find these trips and best practices for applying for them. Learn more.
• Putting Together a Pitch Portfolio to Support a Big Trip – 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. Learn more.

Work With More Magazines

• The Magazine Landscape: Where All the Assignments Are Hiding – As we come up on a milestone of 300 magazines in the Travel Magazine Database, even I’m struck by how many fully-travel and travel adjacent magazines are out there looking for content. Here are five types of magazines looking for travel content that you may be missing out on, and three ways to find more magazines that you’ve never heard of to pitch. Learn more.
• Writing for Travel Trade Magazines 101 – These magazines work quite different than custom and consumer titles in many ways, notably editors pitch you ideas rather than the other way around, making your hourly rate go way up. Some trade editors will even provide you with interview sources! Trade magazines are the single best way to establish a clear pipeline of assignments and also maximize your hourly rate when writing for magazines, and we look at how, why, and how to get started writing for them in this week’s webinar. Learn more.
• How to Write a Letter of Introduction–The Pitch Equivalent for Trade Magazines – Unlike consumer and custom magazines, trade magazine editors are approached by something called an LOI or letter or introduction, which has more in common with a cover letter on a job application than a magazine pitch. We look at when to use a letter of introduction, how to craft your own boilerplate one for each vertical within the travel trade world that you’re looking to pitch, and how to avoid information overload. Learn more.