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?
We see so, so many places on our trips, whether we’re walking around by ourselves or on an overstuffed press trip itinerary, but the hardest part of being a freelance travel writer is knowing how each of those can be matched to a magazine and developed into a story that an editor will jump out of her seat to buy.
When you’ve found something that seems just great, whether the tea cafe culture in Prague or a zero-environmental-impact hotel in Miami, and it isn’t *new* (like brand-new, just opened yesterday hotel that will still be considered new by the time your idea actually gets accepted and the article makes it into print), what do you do?
The answer is a business profiles–but not just because they allow you to write individual stories about each of the places you visit on your trips.
Zeroing in on business-profile writing as a travel writer also forces you to do two great things: hone your interview skills so you are getting five to 25 stories out of each place you visit (!!) as well as sharpen your ability to narrowly slice each experience to perfectly fit what each magazine needs.
Learn how business profiles do this for your skills and income, in this week’s live webinar, the fourth webinar in our new series walking through the construction of different types of articles, as we take an in-depth look at what should be the bread and butter of your freelance travel writing toolkit: the business profile.
We’ll dive into a part of the writing process–structuring your articles–that should come before your fingers hit the keyboard and before you even begin researching your piece to show you how to quit second-guessing yourself and save tremendous time on your articles.
Catch Article Nuts and Bolts: Putting Together a Business Profile this Thursday, February 22, at 3:30pm EST / 12:30pm PST.
Register here to get the call-in information to join us live along with the link to catch the replay for one-week following the live webinar.
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