All Posts Tagged: pitching
This One Thing Can Dramatically Change How Much Money You Earn Writing About Each Trip
What is the first thing you do when you are done with a trip?
When you board the flight home or finish packing for your return journey or next destination?
Do you start working on your to-do list for the following week? Upcoming travel plans? Photo editing? Social media posts? Read More
The Only One Holding You Back Is You
How much pitching have you done lately?
No, I’m not about to harp on the importance of marketing. I hope I’ve done that enough for a while.
I’m asking for a different reason. To save you from yourself. Or from your own success.
How to Analyze a Magazine to Ensure Successful Pitches
One of the first things I teach aspiring print travel writers (especially the ones come over from blogging or copywriting) is how to break down a magazine.
You need to take it from a pile of glossy paper that you put on a pedestal or can’t imagine seeing your own humble words in to a framework of component parts that is built from the ground up every month.
Are You Missing Out on 80% of the Travel Magazines Out There?
It truly boggles my mind when travel writers (or aspiring travel writers) tell me that they aren’t pitching magazines because they don’t know who/where/what to pitch for three big reasons:
(1) The money they are missing out on could be a huge game changer for their freelance income.
(2) If you know how to analyze a magazine, the ideas come on their own. (And if you can’t get a hold of the magazine, we can help you with that too.)
(3) There are thousands of magazines out there looking for travel articles.
How to Get Yourself an Ongoing Travel Writing Gig This Week
Before we launch into how, exactly, to set yourself up with a steady stream of travel writing work, I want to look at some reasons why having a recurring travel writing job is so, so important. Especially for people who are either:
- just starting out as travel writers
- struggling to have a sustainable travel writing income even after many months or years at it (and with a healthy pile of clips to their names)
Do Travel Magazines and Newspaper Travel Sections Still Pay?
One of the biggest myths about travel writing that I’ve encountered is about the pay for travel content.
For years, people have been going around saying there is no pay for writers anymore. Yet somehow a lot of us still earn a living this way.
A Simple, Crazy Successful Way to Start Making $2k (Minimum) This Month as a Travel Writer
One aspect of the typical travel writer’s life is that not every bit of work is a web or magazine article (or something related to one).
I could give you dozens of examples of “every day” working travel writers’ additional income streams (the sample breakdowns of six-figure travel writing incomes are a good place to start), but let’s look at some huge folks who are basically the “giants” of travel writing:
- Don George
- Tim Leffel
- Jeff Greenwald
How to Write a Travel Article Pitch that Sells–In 15 Minutes
When it comes to pitching, I tend to read a lot more blogs, websites and books about other types of journalism—everything from business to health to international news.
I’m not saying that travel writers (those who have a lot of assignments) don’t know how to pitch, but it just seems that not a lot of folks talk about, specifically, how to write pitches in the way you need to to be a well-paid, busy writer:
- clearly
- quickly
- without a lot of emotional investment
Editors Have Needs. Please Fill Them.
Let’s turn your usual visions of an editor around. Rather than envisioning an editor:
- seeing an email come in from someone they don’t know and either ignoring or deleting it;
- finding something fundamentally wrong with your subject line and deleting your email without reading it;
- opening your email, checking if you have any clips from national magazines and deleting it when they find none;
- reading your email, liking the idea, and then sending it off to one of his or her writers to work on
Before or After: When Should You Pitch Your Travel Story?
Like “should I write the story before I approach an editor?”, this is one of the main questions I get from people who would like to write for travel magazines.
The truth of the matter is: it depends.
But I can tell you what it depends on.