All Posts in Category: Case Studies
How to Take Ownership of Your Freelance Travel Writing Success
When I was first asked to coach other travel writers on how to meet their business goals and finally get their dreams off the ground, I spent a long time thinking about it, observing writers I knew, and taking stock of the marketplace.
The 18 months of research that led to The Six-Figure Travel Writing Road Map actually centered very specifically on one question:
What is the difference between the writers who have normal careers as if they were in any other field, earning a great amount of money, buying houses, etc., and those that never seem to be able to crack making this into a viable, stable, long-term career?
A Small Moment of Inspiration from One of My Students
I just finished a coaching call that made me so verklempt over and over.
The person I was talking to was a single mom in a very sandwich generation time of her life who was literally in the process of giving up on her writing dream when we started working together.
I Want to Stop the Scope Creep Hate that’s Making You Secretly Despise Your Travel Writing Clients
On a coaching call yesterday afternoon, I had a conversation that I have much more often than I would like.
This freelancer had a client that had landed themselves with a cold email–the first of the kind for this writer–and landing the gig filled her with so much pride and positivity.
At first. (There must be a but coming, right?)
The bumps started small. Her client insisted on providing her all of the blog post ideas, but would only give them one at a time. And not always on-time.
This left the freelancer constantly having to rush to complete the blog posts assigned, often dropping other things to do so. We talked about how to move the client into giving her batches of post ideas at once, and that helped. For a while.
How Exactly to Move from Trip Memories and Notes to Completed Travel Article Pitches
To be honest, I’m a bit scared to do this series.
For our next round of live travel writing classes, we will offer a (probably shocking to many of you) window on how pitching takes place for an established writer in the most minimal time with the least possible fuss as we walk from initial trip notes all the way to polished pitches leaving my inbox right before your eyes.
To make sure you can see and ask questions about my decision-making at every phase, I will walk through each step of the process completely live with no prep work outside of our calls (or cheating, as I would call it!) to pretty things up or do more digging into an idea.
Tourism Boards Really Need Your Help Right Now
If you’re not interested in working with tourism boards or travel companies, now or in the future, today’s missive is not for you.
However, if you are, I’ve just returned from an event that was a big investment by us for you guys: the conference specifically for Directors of Marketing and Digital Marketing Managers at top CVBs.
I always advise going to conferences where your clients, rather than your peers, are to learn what are the problems your clients are actually facing (rather than what you see to be their problems or simply the things you want to pitch them whether that is a pain point for them or not).
But it’s even more fascinating to see how your potential clients are trying to solve their problems when it is so, so far off base from the best practices that are second nature to you.
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.
Last chance to get your roadmap for accomplishing your 2018 travel writing goals workshopped!
It sounds totally counter-intuitive, but we have spent a lot of the past four weeks in our five-week series on reviewing your past year and setting the course for the year ahead talking about why goals don’t work.
I wholeheartedly believe that goals can be a real impediment to moving your travel writing career forward.
Before I reached a point where I had clients I enjoyed working with, enough work (at at least $100/hour) that I didn’t need to do any marketing, and complete control over my schedule, I had a lot of goals for my freelance lifestyle and my writing.
And a lot of the folks that come to me for freelance business coaching have very strongly held goals as well.
In fact, I think it’s one of the things that separates the dreamers from the doers in many ways.
The Simple Core of Most of Your Travel Writing Problems
Travel writing is a tricky profession.
I mean that very literally.
It’s not that it’s difficult to succeed at (contrary to popular belief–it’s dead simple to make a good living at if you follow the right steps). The problem is that it’s very easy to be tricked about the profession part of the equation.
In addition to working through our annual review series with all of our readers, I’m currently working with a new batch of coaching program members, and the beginning of that process inevitably begins the same way: intensely dissecting how they spend their “work” time.
This: You Asked for Examples of Excellent Brand Content Marketing
A little while back, someone wrote me a question for the Monday Mailbag series that I wasn’t quite sure how to answer: what are some great examples of company content marketing writing (particularly blogs) and magazine articles?
Hard to answer, not because I haven’t seen them, but because there are so many!
How Do You Respond When Travel Companies Ask You to Blink First in Negotiations?
Photo by Helloquence on Unsplash
Welcome to a new feature here at Dream of Travel Writing–the Monday Mailbag! We often get questions from readers, folks in our accountability group, or coaching program members that we think would apply to a lot of you.
Now, with permission, agony-aunt-style, we’ll be sharing a new one with you each Monday. If you have a question you’d like to see included, please send it to us at questions [at] dreamoftravelwriting.com and make sure to include a line saying we have permission to reprint your question.
On to the tricky travel writing questions!