My travels and writing are personal in nature. I write for myself to capture my experiences and challenge myself creatively. I dabbled in promoting my articles, however, the fact it took me over five years to write a “How To” book on travel should be an indicator that promoting my travels is not a top priority. I believe you don’t need to please a bunch of people you’ve never met to justify your writing and travels. Others do. It’s strange how validation works.
The direct way to share your travels is through, what I will collectively call “Blogging Programs”, like the The Huffington Post. If you want to write for The Huffington Post, create a profile and upload an entry. Poof! You are a writer for The Huffington Post. As someone who claims they don’t seek validation from others, I begrudgingly admit I enjoyed receiving an out-of-the-blue email about a “72 Hours in Dhaka” article I posted to The Huffington Post. Someone in Dhaka read the article and thought enough of it to interview me two years after the original posting. I’m world famous in Dhaka. I enjoyed conversing with someone in Dhaka and reminiscing about the city.
Lonely Planet has a travel blogger forum that makes it as easy as The Huffington Post to claim that you are a contributor—create an account at Lonely Planet and upload an entry. Poof! You are a writer for Lonely Planet. You’ve been “published.” The Lonely Planet travel blogger forum is nice because you can see what your contemporaries are writing—evaluate the “competition” and see how your writing compares.
Another option to share your work includes the travel sections at larger media companies. The bar for the travel sections, at otherwise reputable news sources, such as Business Insider and CNN, is low. News organizations realized there are thousands of travel writers scouring the globe and there’s not a need to employ someone full time when you can obtain travel writing from volunteers. If the international publications are a bit out of reach, local newspapers are also always looking for travel writing submissions. I had an article published in The Philadelphia Inquirer—I was proud and appreciative of having an article on Holi appear in my hometown newspaper.
Flipboard is a news aggregator application and pulls a range of travel writing publications into a single medium. Flipboard allowed me to see how my writing aligned and fit with various travel sites that contributed to the application. One glance at Matador Network, which caters to millennials, and I knew I had no desire to alter my writing to fit their brand. Tailoring your writing to a specific audience is one thing, completely altering your style is another.
The biggest secret to writing and submitting articles? You need to write and submit articles. Make writing a routine. The more you write, the more your writing improves. I cringe when I read my initial writing. It is difficult to appreciate your first writing attempts because it doesn’t amount to much and the quality is poor. Over time the volume and quality increases. Three to four paragraphs a day leads to 365 pages in a year (that’s a book). You’ll write about 100+ destinations. You can write how to guides, country summaries, and other travel angles. You will easily reach over 200 pages on your website. It takes weeks to see the results and recognize how far you progressed. It’s like climbing a mountain, it seems like you aren’t making progress until you look back down at the valley below.
You’re submitting articles. You have the website. What’s next?
Part and parcel with the article submission and website content are the social media extensions. Create Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter accounts for your travels. Creating new social media accounts related to your travels (versus using your existing accounts) will help to delineate between personal and travel activities. You will be able to create a travel brand that continues after you stop traveling. Social media helps to promote your writing and photos, whether content is posted to your own website or a third-party site. This may seem a bit ambitious when you start your travels and are not sure where it may eventually lead, but if you start early, you will build momentum. After a few months there will be heft to your writing and social media presence that shows others you are active, you post frequently, and you may be worth following.
How do people find your social media profile and consider following you? People won't simply find and add you. No one fully discloses how they obtained hundreds of thousands of followers. You can purchase followers. Do you need validation that badly? Some people do. Slightly less insidious is to advertise your business on Facebook or Instagram. It’s cheap. For $25 Facebook will blast one of your posts to 5,000+ accounts. Another technique that people pull on Instagram is the “I will follow you, if you follow me” trick. This is nonsense. People will unfollow you a week later and you are left receiving travel posts from completely random people. Then those people stop traveling, start families, and you have their baby photos coming through your Instagram feed. For what? Validation? I stopped the “I’ll follow you, if you follow me” scheme at around 200 followers. I’ve since cleaned up my Instagram account to limit what I follow to personal acquaintances and preferred brands.
Don't be discouraged if you’re not an instant success...or never have any success. In today’s crowded and convoluted online environment, you could be a modern-day Ansel Adams, taking photos of breathtaking landscapes, and no one would notice. The World Wide Web has prime real estate and trying to gain a piece of that real estate is more difficult in 2019 than it was in 1999. When you travel you see the McDonald’s and Starbucks in the best locations. The Google search engine works the same way. People have been blogging since the early 2000s and reside in the best digital locations. It’s difficult to rise on the algorithm rankings. People flock to the McDonald’s and Starbucks blog equivalents.
What matters is that you enjoy writing and continue to improve. For the latter, perform a realistic assessment of your work. If it doesn’t meet your standards, rewrite. Eventually you’ll reach the other end of the writing spectrum and need to know when to put the pencil down.
Lonely Planet has a travel blogger forum that makes it as easy as The Huffington Post to claim that you are a contributor—create an account at Lonely Planet and upload an entry. Poof! You are a writer for Lonely Planet. You’ve been “published.” The Lonely Planet travel blogger forum is nice because you can see what your contemporaries are writing—evaluate the “competition” and see how your writing compares.
Another option to share your work includes the travel sections at larger media companies. The bar for the travel sections, at otherwise reputable news sources, such as Business Insider and CNN, is low. News organizations realized there are thousands of travel writers scouring the globe and there’s not a need to employ someone full time when you can obtain travel writing from volunteers. If the international publications are a bit out of reach, local newspapers are also always looking for travel writing submissions. I had an article published in The Philadelphia Inquirer—I was proud and appreciative of having an article on Holi appear in my hometown newspaper.
Flipboard is a news aggregator application and pulls a range of travel writing publications into a single medium. Flipboard allowed me to see how my writing aligned and fit with various travel sites that contributed to the application. One glance at Matador Network, which caters to millennials, and I knew I had no desire to alter my writing to fit their brand. Tailoring your writing to a specific audience is one thing, completely altering your style is another.
The biggest secret to writing and submitting articles? You need to write and submit articles. Make writing a routine. The more you write, the more your writing improves. I cringe when I read my initial writing. It is difficult to appreciate your first writing attempts because it doesn’t amount to much and the quality is poor. Over time the volume and quality increases. Three to four paragraphs a day leads to 365 pages in a year (that’s a book). You’ll write about 100+ destinations. You can write how to guides, country summaries, and other travel angles. You will easily reach over 200 pages on your website. It takes weeks to see the results and recognize how far you progressed. It’s like climbing a mountain, it seems like you aren’t making progress until you look back down at the valley below.
You’re submitting articles. You have the website. What’s next?
Part and parcel with the article submission and website content are the social media extensions. Create Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter accounts for your travels. Creating new social media accounts related to your travels (versus using your existing accounts) will help to delineate between personal and travel activities. You will be able to create a travel brand that continues after you stop traveling. Social media helps to promote your writing and photos, whether content is posted to your own website or a third-party site. This may seem a bit ambitious when you start your travels and are not sure where it may eventually lead, but if you start early, you will build momentum. After a few months there will be heft to your writing and social media presence that shows others you are active, you post frequently, and you may be worth following.
How do people find your social media profile and consider following you? People won't simply find and add you. No one fully discloses how they obtained hundreds of thousands of followers. You can purchase followers. Do you need validation that badly? Some people do. Slightly less insidious is to advertise your business on Facebook or Instagram. It’s cheap. For $25 Facebook will blast one of your posts to 5,000+ accounts. Another technique that people pull on Instagram is the “I will follow you, if you follow me” trick. This is nonsense. People will unfollow you a week later and you are left receiving travel posts from completely random people. Then those people stop traveling, start families, and you have their baby photos coming through your Instagram feed. For what? Validation? I stopped the “I’ll follow you, if you follow me” scheme at around 200 followers. I’ve since cleaned up my Instagram account to limit what I follow to personal acquaintances and preferred brands.
Don't be discouraged if you’re not an instant success...or never have any success. In today’s crowded and convoluted online environment, you could be a modern-day Ansel Adams, taking photos of breathtaking landscapes, and no one would notice. The World Wide Web has prime real estate and trying to gain a piece of that real estate is more difficult in 2019 than it was in 1999. When you travel you see the McDonald’s and Starbucks in the best locations. The Google search engine works the same way. People have been blogging since the early 2000s and reside in the best digital locations. It’s difficult to rise on the algorithm rankings. People flock to the McDonald’s and Starbucks blog equivalents.
What matters is that you enjoy writing and continue to improve. For the latter, perform a realistic assessment of your work. If it doesn’t meet your standards, rewrite. Eventually you’ll reach the other end of the writing spectrum and need to know when to put the pencil down.