Why Is It So Hard to Make the Changes We Need to Make to Achieve Our Dreams? (And What We Want to Do About It)
I always planned to be a professor.
Throughout college and for many years after. I laid the groundwork to go back to school for a PhD in Italian literature.
Travel writing was meant to be a way to pay the bills legally while I was in Italian working on research for a dissertation.
There’s all sorts of odd things you have to also learn about to get a PhD, at least in Italian literature.
It wasn’t enough to speak fluent, academic-level Italian. I actually was going to need to pass proficiency tests in up to three other languages, from other romance languages to unrelated ones like German. Theoretically this was so we could read literary criticism on a global scale.
I also would have needed to read and be able to speak at length in an oral exam on every single significant work of Italian literature over a roughly 1,000 year period.
Are You Still Waiting for that “Aha” Moment with Travel Content Marketing?
This past weekend, I had the privilege of spending three days with highly motivated, hardworking, and inspiring travel writers for our TravelContentCon retreat event.
We took our first three sessions up on the top of the Catskill’s famous Sam’s Point lookout as we explored what content marketing means today, and that’s when the magic began.
The One Place it Absolutely Makes Sense to Write for Free (Or Very Little)
Whenever the topic of writing for no or very little money comes up in conversation with a travel writer, the first thing I always do is ask why they want to do that.
You might be surprised.
I hear a startling number of people, even those who have already been writing for no compensation on their own websites for years, tell me that they don’t think that they are in a position to get paid more.
They aren’t saying that those rates aren’t out there–but rather that they don’t personally deserve them.
Need a Getaway to Get Things Done? Summer and Fall Catskills Writing Residency Dates Available!
If you have never tried it, the short-term (s*ht gets done) and long-term (you can 30,000-foot perspective on how you spend your time and what you’re really doing with your travel writing) benefits of taking an individual writer’s retreat are addicting.
At a conference recently, I heard author, restaurateur and actor Madhur Jaffrey explaining that she doesn’t know how her recent book would have gotten done if she hadn’t spent a week more or less in bed surrounded by papers working and sleeping in equal fits, problems immersed in the text of her project.
But even if you’re not working on something on the scale of a book currently, a residency can also guide you to what it is you should be investing your time in more deeply, as this peek at the famed MacDowell residency explores:
How Are You Getting Where You Want to Go With Your Travel Writing?
Behind the scenes, I’ve been working on something very unusual for you guys.
In a way, you could call it the map to the Holy Grail, a la Indiana Jones–that is, if becoming a full-time, well-paid freelance travel writer sounds like a worthy mission to you!
Of course, there may or may not be poisonous snakes and collapsing tunnel floors in ancient ruins in this scenario. Unless that’s your preferred travel writing topic!
Exciting Changes Coming to Our Weekly Travel Writing Webinars!
You may have seen that we have a very cool offer going right now for those of you interested in getting an all-access pass to the more than 500 magazine how-to-pitch breakdowns in our Travel Magazine Database, 300+-strong question-and-answer library, and 85+ hours of past webinars:
- When you join the Dream Buffet by July 31st, you can take 50% off your first month.
- When you join by July 20th, you have the opportunity to win a free conference pass and FLIGHT to the 2019 Women in Travel Summit.
But we have some other exciting additions to the offerings in the Dream Buffet that we wanted to let you in on.
Want a Sneak Peek of What We Publish in the Travel Magazine Database?–Check Out These 70 Magazine Sections Waiting for YOUR Pitches
One of the main questions we get from people about how to use our Travel Magazine Database is whether there’s any point signing up if you aren’t already sending a lot of magazine pitches.
Or if you don’t already know how to write pitches at all!
The thing is, we actually created the Travel Magazine Database to teach people how to write better pitches.
PayPal Now Available for the Travel Magazine Database
We’re delighted to announce that you can now also use PayPal to subscribe to our 500+-strong database of how-to-pitch information for magazines looking for travel articles.
We’re working on adding this payment option for other resources, like our Dream Buffet, but PayPal is not the best at playing with others, so we’re still working out the integrations with all of our different providers and will let you know as soon as that option is available!
Outside of PayPal, we use the top-of-the-line payment solution Stripe to handle all credit card payments on all of our sites.
Our On-Demand Coaching Concierge Now Has Answers to More than 300 of Your Top Travel Writing Questions!
Before there was Dream of Travel Writing or even The Six-Figure Travel Writing Road Map, there were questions.
I’ll never forget the time I was sitting in a room at the World Travel Market in London after one of the panels had finished up catching up on email, and a British gentleman came up and started chatting with my about what I did.
It was quite a few years ago, long before I ever even considered writing about freelancing, let alone coaching freelance business owners.
We were talking about what I did, and the conversation took a turn that it frequently did back then: a bit of puzzlement when I said that, yes, I was a blogger, but, no, I could not tell him what my blog was. I was a freelance blogger.
So I told him my mantra back then: “If I’m not getting paid, why would I write something?”
We Want to Pay for Your Flight and Registration for One of Our Favorite Conferences
Every year, on the mainstage and in the individual sessions at this conference, we are blown away by the amount of tell-it-like-it-is and no-matter-what-anyone-tells-you-you-can-absolutely-do-this wisdom shared.
It’s an environment in which attendees are so surrounded by people who are out there both doing work they love and running a solid business around that every year we watch those who haven’t yet made the leap into full-time freelance travel writing see that it’s possible to take the plunge successfully and put a deadline on when they will do it too.
Often just a few months after the conference takes place! (Because they’re so jazzed with possibility, they can’t stand to stay in their job any longer.)
We want this kind of experience for all of you.