Most people have given the passing thought to how wonderful it would be to be paid to spend their life on vacation. Who wouldn’t want to be paid for sitting on white sandy beaches sipping exotic drinks? The Freelance writer can make this dream a reality!
What exactly IS travel writing? Most people think that you get a job at a travel magazine and they send you out to great locations and tell you to write about them. This rarely happens because it is cost prohibitive for most publications. The vast majority of travel writers are working freelance. This takes the financial burden off of the publisher and makes it possible for them to pay you more. It also drastically changes other factors such as where you go and what you do when you get there. This puts the freelance writer in complete charge of everything from booking the hotel and airline reservations to deciding what to do on an unexpectedly rainy afternoon.
The current trend is to write up your article and pitch it to the interested markets. Done correctly you can end up with several articles out of one trip. While a general article is fine for many travel magazines, newspapers and general travel websites, niche markets are where you will find the best pay and audience. Traveling with children, places to dine, anything remotely different or unusual about the area. There are publications that specialize in virtually everything because there are millions of people interested in that particular niche. I have a friend that attends daily church services in Catholic churches. She visits as many different churches and cathedrals as she can when traveling. While that might seem like a really peculiar niche, it has been invaluable to traveling Catholics and Catholic magazines pay her top dollar for her articles that discuss both the history of that particular church as well as the times of services.
The most popular niche markets are food, accommodations, shopping and scenery. The same people who couldn’t tell you where to find a hiking trail near their home will avidly read about the hiking in the Black Forrest. It’s important to pay attention to at least the basics: food, accommodation and weather no matter what else you write about. The most important aspect of your article will be the passion that you bring to it. You need to be lively, entertaining and fun. It’s important to both make the reader feel like they are there and to make them want to plan a trip to see what you saw, eat what you ate and explore what you wrote about.
Getting Started
It doesn’t get any easier to get started than this: Write an article. The cheapest and easiest way to get started as a travel writer is to write about where you live. I already know that you are thinking that no one wants to visit where you are currently living. How wrong you are. Let me tell you how I met one of my best friends.
I was living in a small town in extreme Southern Illinois. I couldn’t believe anyone would want to visit there but my friend saw it on the Internet, read one of the tourism articles I wrote about the place and moved to the town without ever having visited it.
There is an old saying that goes “familiarity breeds contempt” and it can be very true. What you need to remember is that to someone else, perhaps a stranger in a foreign country, where you live is exotic. Try looking at your local area the way a tourist might. What hotels are close? Where is a great place to get a nice dinner? What would a tourist do if they only had a few days and wanted to explore? My tourism articles highlighted some of the best hiking, camping and fishing in Illinois; I’d lived here so long that I had forgotten how really beautiful the area can be.
If you have no idea how to write a travel article, pull up a few on the Internet. You will find that they are generally written in the first person, contain personal anecdotes and anything interesting that happened. They will always contain a brief review of the accommodations, the food and local attractions. Read three or four of these articles and then write one about your own area.