All Posts in Category: Content Marketing
Summer Weekend Retreats Are Now Open for Early-Bird Bookings!
With our early bird registration, we offer a chance to get a huge discount (more than 25% off!) for being one of the first to snag a spot in one of our live retreats at our private retreat location in the Catskills.
We’re especially excited to open up this batch of retreats, because they’re one of the sweetest times to be in the Catskills—literally!
Summer retreats get to take the best advantage of our on-site farm, with salads festooned with edible flowers, more than a dozen different types of heirloom tomatoes, and special produce we grow from all around the world.
Daily Free Travel Writing Webinars for April
These webinars are only available at the times listed, live, but you can catch the replay in video, audio, and transcript form, along with the webinar slides, at any time in our on-demand webinar library.
Check out the full schedule of April’s webinars and register for your favorites below.
How Confident Do You Feel Writing Short?
For the large subset of travel writers who come from blogging, specifically writing on their own blogs without someone overseeing the writing or editorial direction, 1,000-word articles don’t inspire trepidation. They write 1,000-word blog posts all the time!
But as you spend more time reading magazine articles, you’ll very quickly find that a 100-word magazine article tends to have as much information as a 1,000-word blog post simply because in print, space is at a premium.
Every block of text could potentially be replaced by an advertisement (and this is often what happens when your story gets killed last minute!).
First Chance to Grab Our Newest Content Marketing Webinars…at a Very Special Discount
Today’s holiday trivia: In many European countries, the celebration of Christmas on December 25 pales in comparison with January 6’s Feast of the Epiphany–also know as the visit of the three wise men or magi. Presents for children arrive on the eve of the Epiphany rather than Christmas Eve, though they are not delivered by a jolly man. In Italy, gifts are ferried about by La Befana, a witch with a long nose and speedy broomstick who leaves garlic and onions, in addition to the usual coal, for bad children or parents who haven’t left her a glass of wine.
There are so, so many opportunities out there for travel content marketing.
How many hotels can you think of off the top or your head? How many destinations around the world? How many cities where visitors take tours during their stay?
In just the tour and activities market alone, in just the U.S., there are 68,000 companies valued at 20 billion. That’s not even the size of fish you’re probably going after. There are many, many more that are smaller and don’t have in-house staff devoted to their content marketing.
Please, Please Don’t Send Emails Like This to Companies You Want to Blog For
Yes, this is THE time to pitch companies in the travel industry to help with their marketing in advance of the summer high season.
And, yes, cold pitching absolutely does work, when done right.
But not like this:
Applications for Our New TravelContentCon At-Home Program Now Open
There are so, so many opportunities out there for travel content marketing.
How many hotels can you think of off the top or your head? How many destinations around the world? How many cities where visitors take tours during their stay?
In just the tour and activities market alone, in just the U.S., there are 68,000 companies valued at 20 billion. That’s not even the size of fish you’re probably going after. There are many, many more that are smaller and don’t have in-house staff devoted to their content marketing.
Every year when I attend the ITB Berlin travel trade show, more than 10,000 destinations, hotels, travel tech companies, and tour operators cram, often sharing several to a table, into a space the size of 30 football fields and pay anywhere from $4,575 to $38,200 to be there for just 2 days in front of around 160,000 German consumers and trade visitors (i.e. less than the monthly visitors of the vast majority of these organization’s websites every month).
Tourism boards in cities as small as Ontario, California (population 173,212), and Columbia, Missouri (population 120,612) are spending $1.9 million and $1.2 million, respectively, per year on tourism marketing and promotion. Destinations like Florida (population 20.61 million) and Philadelphia (population 1.6 million) spend more like $76 and $19.5 million respectively.
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 to Sell Your Blogging Services to Tourism Boards and Travel Companies (Even When They Don’t Say They Need Writers)
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.
Today Learn to Navigate the Landscape of Travel Content Marketing with our Special Webinar Guest
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.
Pricing, Negotiating and Contracts (for Travel Content Marketing and Magazine Writing)
I am so pleased to share that a lot of the folks that have been following the travel content marketing webinars are already getting responses to their pitches, setting up calls, and sending proposals:
“I just wanted to let you know that I have a phone call set up later this week with a tour company in Tokyo who have approached me about writing for their company blog. Thanks to your webinars over the last month, I feel like I have so much more knowledge going into the call. So I just wanted to say thank you for all your advice! Fingers crossed it all works out!”
“Listening to your webinars it has encouraged me to seek out social marketing jobs. I have landed 1, have a conference call with another and emails into 6 others.”