All Posts Tagged: free stuff
Should Trends Be Your New Best Friends?
Ever heard of a time peg?
I try not to use the word too often, because it masks much more important issues at stake in people’s pitches, but, at its core, it means pegging or affixing the topic if your article to something timely.
There’s lots of options for this “something timely” that get thrown around when discussing pitches, from openings of new things to renovations of old things to major anniversaries of even older things.
I cannot tell you how many pitches I saw either related to country of Canada’s 150th anniversary of statehood or the American National Park system’s 100th anniversary of its founding.
Is February–or March!–the New January? (And What We’re Doing to Make Sure You Rock It)
Is it just now your new year?
On a recent coaching call, someone explained to me that as they were slammed with deadlines both before and after the holiday, had many family commitments during the school break, and subsequently had to take a trip involving many time zones-worth of jet lag for a family health emergency, she only finally felt, at the end of January, that she was finally in a place to really start the new year.
The Way to Actually Use Everything You Hear on Your Trips
Working on front-of-book pieces has several key benefits we’ve discussed, especially honing your ability to write short and journalistically.
But one of my favorites is that it offers you a venue to use all sorts of excess pieces of research that you collect on your trips with the most minimal investment of additional research.
This week, during our winter Freelance Travel Writing Bootcamp, a very interesting question has come up several times.
It’s a very common situation that travel writers find themselves in.
During the bootcamp, we try as hard as possible to stimulate real-world circumstances in our afternoon tours. The bootcamp focuses through morning lessons and afternoon outings on honing your ability to find stories out in the world wherever you are. And one of the realities of traveling as a travel writer is that not everything you see is interesting to you personally.
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?
If You’ve Been Waiting to Make the Leap into Travel Writing, The Job Market is Clear: Now is the Time
When I started to put down the list of travel writing jobs this week, I was absolutely shocked.
While everyone has been getting back into the swing of things during rentrée (the charming French term for reintegrating after a vacation), companies all of the world and in all portions of the travel industry have been starting in on their plans for 2018, and they require hiring a lot of travel writers.
Don’t believe me?
This week, we found 46 new travel writing jobs between Monday, January 1, and Monday, January 8, 2018. (Most weeks we have between five and 15.)
We typically only share our list of travel writing jobs, while we pull together from all corners of the internet, out network, and various whispers, with out newsletter. But we were so impressed by the overwhelming leap in the listings this week that we wanted to share it more widely.
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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.
What Does Your Personal Mountain in the Path of Your Travel Writing Dreams Look Like?
If you’ve attended any of our events or webinars, you know that I don’t sugar coat things.
When people first start asking me to coaching them so they could achieve the same level of success with their travel writing income and choice of clients as I had, I embarked on a journey of inquiry that lasted for years and led to the 400 pages of The Six-Figure Travel Writing Map.
Aside from learning tips and tricks for excelling both as a freelancer and as a trace writer from the best of each world, one of the main things I did was have a lot of conversations with folks just like you.
Is There a Way for You to Get Paid to Write the Exact Same Things You Write on Your Blog?
When you hear the term essay, similar to the even more antiquated concept of a “composition,” you likely think back to your school days more quickly than your bank account.
Especially if the phrase used is “personal essay,” which fills an alarming number of people with dread.
The thing is, many of you are incredibly acquainted, both as readers and as writers, with the personal essays, just under a different name: blog posts.
Is Your Style Holding Your Travel Article Pitches Back? Part 2!
I don’t like to think of myself as a grammar geek.
Before I left the 9-to-5 world to freelance, I had several jobs that required editing publications, from letter-length to book-length with lots of magazines and printed newsletters in between, but that type of work stopped sparking for me after a few years.
A lot of editors (the ones you really want to work in particular) get a really high from perfecting a piece of writing–taking what the write meant to say and making it indelibly clear for the reader.
When discussions of grammar and style arise among writers, it is very rarely with that same verve, that sparkle with which editors discuss it. And, more often than not, it’s because writers misunderstand its purpose.
A+ grammar and crystal clear style is not intended to drown out your voice or make your writing sound just like everything else out there.
Quite the opposite.