All Posts in Category: Press Trips
12 Days of Holiday Specials Day 6: Six Steps to Never Having to Worry About How to Afford Your Trips Again
Today’s holiday trivia: Traditionally, the Japanese celebration of Ōmisoka had participants ensuring the completion of important activities before the end of the year in order to start the new year afresh. Activities ranged from house cleaning and repaying debts to purification rituals such as driving out evil spirits and bad luck, and bathing so the final hours of the year could be spent relaxing. More recently, families and friends gather together for one last time on December 31 to have a bowl of toshikoshi noodles—a tradition based on people’s association of eating the long noodles with “crossing over from one year to the next,” the meaning of toshi-koshi.
When we asked what people wanted to see in this year’s holiday specials, there was one thing people universally agreed on: they wanted to know how to land a spot on a press trip!
12 Days of Holiday Specials Day 4: Four Days of Our Favorite Travel Conference
Today’s holiday trivia: December 29 is the main official holiday in Mongolia, marking the day the country obtained independence from China in 1921. To commemorate the holiday, Mongolians hold the largest wrestling match of the year. In Mongolian culture, wrestling is one of their “three manly skills,” the English name for the trifecta of wrestling, archery, and horsemanship. Wrestling is regarded as the most important of the three, and it is said that Genghis Khan considered wrestling to be an important way to keep his army in good physical shape and combat ready.
Today’s holiday special is very different than anything we’ve offered in the past. You don’t actually even pay us for it!
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.
The Answer to the Perennial Travel Writer Question: How Can I Pitch This Hotel/Museum/Restaurant That’s Already Been Open for Years?
When you start planning a trip on your own or first get the bug of a press trip in your ear, the options of what to explore in a destination are tantalizing.
Nailing down the sense of place, honing in on the food culture in a new place, and the promise of highly quotable sources with exciting stories you would have never thought of all give you a high.
But we all know trips, attractions, interviews, hotels, and meals don’t always live up to our imaginings. Sadly!
Some parts of a trip will be brilliant and bring those great quotes and anecdotes and new story ideas you never would have had at home, but what do you do with the rest of it?
How do you get the best assignment-dollar-worth out of your on the ground research time?
Did We Become a Travel Blog? What is All of This About Points and Miles?
This week, we’ve got a special webinar double header week since I was out with the flu last week, and we’re also doing a very different mini-series.
We’ve looked in the past at a lot of facets of free travel that are specific to travel writers:
- Setting Up Sponsored Travel 101: How free travel really works for travel writers.
- How to Set Up an Individual Trip From Scratch: The ne plus ultra of press trips are the ones you design yourself.
- Getting a Spot on a Group Press Trip or Fam: Cracking the code for getting offers and acceptances for scheduled group press trips.
- Putting Together a Pitch Portfolio to Support a Big Trip: The simple secret to landing a spot on any press trip you’re interested in.
- What to Expect on Press Trips: What you can realistically expect from your press trips–the good and the bad.
- How to Prepare for Your Press Trip: What you get out of a press trip depends largely on what you put in.
- How to Get the Most (on the Ground) Out of Your Press Trips: Getting on a free trip is the easiest part. Leaving with saleable ideas is the real challenge.
But this week we’re talking about a totally different way to travel for free: trips you book yourself…but don’t pay for.
That’s the real dream, right?
How to Be Independently Awesome No Matter What is Going on on Your Press Trips
After our webinar last week on how to lay the groundwork before your press trips to make sure you’re prepared to get the most article research for the most stories done when you’re in the destination, I received an unusual email.
A writer that I know that has attended our weekend Pitchapalooza retreat in the past wrote me with the subject line “THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU.”
A Very Special Webinar with Guests from Two Tourism Boards!
Photo by Cole Hutson on Unsplash
In the first webinar in our series on conducting interviews that take your stories to the next level, I talked about the very first interview that I ever did for my first blog with the editor of mega food website Epicurious.
At the time, to prepare for the interview, I read articles on tons of general journalism websites about how to prepare interview questions, and I dutifully wrote, re-wrote, re-worded, scraped, re-wrote, and re-worded all of my questions until I was sure I had the perfect set.
But when I was doing the actual interview, it lacked energy, connection, and opportunities to get great quotes because I was so focused on my prepared questions.
How to Put Together a Pitch Portfolio to Support a Big Trip
Pitching is pitching is pitching.
If you know how to pitch, you can get magazine assignments, secure spots on press trips and land gigs writing blogs for company whether you’re battling the hordes flocking to respond to an online job ad or blazing a trail and cold emailing a tour company owner you’ve never met who isn’t technically in the market for a writer.
Right?
If you can nail one you can nail them all?
How to Set Up Individual Sponsored Trips from Scratch
One year when I had not been a full-time freelance travel writer for too many years, I was in Europe to attend a conference and had left some time open after the event hoping to get myself set up on a trip somewhere fabulous.