The Six-Figure Travel Writer

Almost universally, when people start travel writing, or even considering whether it’s a viable possibility as an actual income-generating career, they google some form of “paying travel websites,” “travel writing jobs,” or “travel magazine pay.”

On a recent coaching call, a writer I had asked to assemble lists of online markets (places to writer for) that interested her around certain themes like running, New York City and the Hudson Valley, and expat life, ran into this issue. Rather than focusing on legitimate markets around her specific areas of expertise, she embarked on some general googling. It wasn’t an inspiring journey, to say the least.

She came back with sites like Bootsnall, Go World Travel, or GONOMAD (that pay in the range of $20 – $50 per post and typically required to submit the entire piece with no promise of assignment) and the general feeling that that’s the going rate and circumstances.

As someone who has been paid in advance before even submitting (!?)–with little negotiating and a quick start-up period, by the way–$100 to $500 for similar posts

But here’s the issue with publishing pay rates online for writers: No one wants to do it.

On the one hand, as soon as you put a visible dollar amount, you get hordes writing you that have no qualification for the work at hand aside from needing money.

But more importantly–and you’ve no doubt heard this about general job searching at some point in your career–the best jobs are never advertised.

I’m going to say this again because it is so vitally important:

The best jobs are never advertised.

There’s several reasons for this:

• people who need help often don’t have the time to go looking for it because they’re too busy being swamped!
• because they’re too busy, people often give open contracting spots to referrals or people they find quickly by word of mouth to get the need filled quickly and avoid a lengthy hiring process that they don’t have time for
• plum positions are often created around people who are available, trusted, and display a needed skill

This trifecta particularly applies to two subsets of individuals:

• small business owners–especially if it’s a service business, like running tours or doing concierge travel bookings where the own is doing a lot of client interaction in addition to running his or her own business
• marketing managers who are constantly pulling in dozens of directions following the latest and greatest apps, social media platforms, case studies, conferences, and marketing gurus, all while trying to create content, monitor it, analayze it, and show its ROI to the people they are accountable to

In this today’s webinar at 3:30 pm EST / 12:30pm PST on How to Sell Blogging to Travel Companies and Tourism Boards we’re going to unite these two worlds–how to get the plum writing gigs that aren’t advertised and how to find and approach those small business owners and over-worked marketing managers who most need your help.

Last week, we spoke with the Visit Tucson director of communications specifically about what he is looking for and the opportunities available with tourism boards generally. This week, we’re going to follow up on last week’s call 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.

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.