The Six-Figure Travel Writer

Photo by Jonathan Pendleton on Unsplash

If you came to travel writing from first writing you own blog, you no doubt ran into a serious internal recalibration the first time you wrote for another website or magazine.

It’s less about the deadline than the readership. When you have you own site, there’s a certain level of confidence that you know what the readers are there for, what interests them.

With a new outlet, especially the first time writing for it, it’s all too easy to question everything you write as to whether it’s”good enough” or “what the editor wants.” Or to have your piece sent back for extensive revisions because what you had in mind for the piece is very different than what the editor understood from you pitch given her background with her own magazine.

In many conversations with readers and workshop attendees, I’ve found that when it comes to content marketing, it’s an entirely different ball game.

However, it’s one that you likely can’t afford to miss out on. At a travel writing event over the weekend, I heard that Veronica Stoddard, the former travel editor for USA TODAY, has branched out to create a travel content marketing service for brands because she estimates 85,000 editorial opportunities exist now because of content marketing that didn’t exist five years ago.

In this case, when we talk about content marketing, we’re looking in the trace sphere at the type of content that entities like tourism boards, tour companies, hotels, car rental companies, airlines, travel tech companies, and other organizations in the travel industry put out to support their sales.

You’re probably already familiar with many of them without realizing. Airline magazines and other custom magazines like the ones AAA puts out also fall into this category. Web content like destination guides for airlines or booking sites fall into this bucket. As do blog posts or web articles for sites like Marriott’s new content marketing effort or even the cool mini-features and interviews in Patagonia’s clothing magazine.

Even though most of you have probably come up against these content marketing efforts in the wild, the idea of pitching to lock then down for yourself–and especially sending an out-of-the-blue, unsolicited pitch to set up your own custom contract gig as we covered the process for in the series of webinars in January–feels like walking into a formal gathering in another country and delivering an eloquent speech in a language you don’t speak–frightening and simply impossible to pull off.

But breaking into travel content marketing is much easier. You probably speak much of the language even if you don’t realize it.

The key leap is to understand the audience these organizations are trying to reach, whether it is everyday, two-point-five kids families, drive-in daytrippers, or high-end honeymooners.

In today’s webinar, we’re going straight to the source to talk about how tourism boards specifically think about their content. Dan Gibson, director of communications for Visit Tucson.

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.

In this webinar, I’ll go through examples of the content travel companies and tourism boards are looking for before Dan comes in to talk about how own transition and how freelancers can working with tourism boards like his.

Register here and you’ll get the replay even if you can’t attend the event. The replay is available to registrants for one week, after which time it is available with transcript and audio files and in our on-demand webinar library.