How to Make $4,000 a Month as a Freelance Travel Writer

Many people dream about making a living as a travel writer. Getting paid to write articles while visiting exotic destinations and foreign countries seems like the perfect job. It's something that many want to do, but few know how to do it.

Marketing Is The Key

The problem is that beginning travel writers, and even some pros, don't know how to market properly. They are writers, not marketers, after all. But marketing is the key to making a living as a travel writer, and if it's done right one can live very well.

In today's fast-paced world the old method of writer's marketing; write a query letter, send it to an editor, wait for an assignment "yes" or "no," is too slow to pay the bills. What the writer needs is a system that will allow him or her to blast queries out to editors without getting objections, and to sell each article several times to global markets. This system is easy to do and I'll show you exactly how to do it.

Sell As Little Rights As Possible

First, check out the website writersmarket.com. This is an online version of the book "Writer's Market." Here you will have editor and contact listings for websites, magazines, newspapers and trade journals. Many of these publications take travel articles of some sort.

Next, write several query letters that grab editors' attention. Use a narrow focus with a broad readership in mind. Simultaneously send each query letter out to as many editors as you can (be sure to let the editors know what you're doing).

Offer different rights with each query. This allows you to sell your article over and over again without overlapping rights to the article that you have sold.

For example: you write a query letter about a little known city in Ecuador. You then send this query to several editors; to an editor in the U.S. you offer First North American Serial Rights, in Europe it's First U.K. Serial Rights, for Australia First Australasian Serial Rights, etc.

There are limitless possibilities for rights that you can sell. Language rights, second rights, non-exclusive rights, internet rights, and combinations of rights; like First English Language Rights in North America, which would leave you free to sell your article as First Spanish Language Rights in North America.

Resell Your Article Over And Over Again

The goal is to sell as little rights as possible to each of your travel articles so you can sell them as many times as possible for maximum profits. If you work your rights well you can sell one article to magazines, newspapers or websites 30 times, 50 times or more.

Travel writer Mike Sedge uses this method to make several thousand dollars a month from his articles. He once sold a single article with photos several times to earn over $10,000.

The way you sell your rights can make or break you financially as a freelance travel writer.

Let's say you only write one query a week. This is very easy to do, and with the normal way of marketing articles you won't make very much money. However, by offering different rights you send this same query to 10 different editors. The next week you do the same thing. At the end of the month you have only written four query letters, but they have reached at least 40 editors!

Assuming that one editor out of every ten gives you an assignment to write the article, you'll have four assignments in your first month. At $500 an article you'll make $2,000 that month. Of course, you still have to write those four articles.

But here's the really good part. Once those four articles are written, each one will continue to make you more money, and all you have to do is send off the same query letter (but offering different rights) to a new batch of editors. Over the months, if you sold each of those four articles to 10 different publications you'll have been published 40 times! Forty sales times $500 equals $20,000!

That's just from writing four queries and four articles in a few months' period. Imagine what you could earn if you doubled your work output. Try writing eight queries and eight articles, then sell each article as much as possible. It won't even seem like you're working much at all. You'll be making around $4,000 a month while getting paid to travel!


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