BITW 143: What Tourism Boards are Looking for from Travel Writers with Mary Charlebois

My guest today is a freelance journalist, photographer, videographer, and editor. Today Mary Charlebois and I discuss What Tourism Boards are Looking for When Working with a Travel Writer.

Mary is a lifelong traveler, in part due to her Nomadic mother, who often handed her the map and asked her to choose the destination and route.

Today, her home base is Fort Bragg California on the wild and remote Mendocino Coast. She is a features contributor for two regional newspapers, Independent Coast Observer and Fort Bragg-Mendocino Coast Packet. She is a recurring contributor to GoNOMAD, Trivago Magazine, Short Weeks-Long Weekends, Links & Libations, The Travel 100, and a bi-monthly contributor to ByWAYS Magazine. In the last four years, her work has been published in 27-publications, both print, and web.

In the past three years, she has worked with more than 35 PR companies and tourism boards and has almost completely booked her travel calendar for 2019, which is all hosted by tourism or PR companies.

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Show Intro:

1. Facebook Group Social Share Threads
   Facebook groups with sharing threads have been a ghost town for at least the last 6 months. I belong to a few as well as run the Aspiring travel writer evergreens threads group. I’m wondering: a) has the ‘newness’ of FB groups has just worn off in general b) if you are finding the time invested in the sharing threads is not worth the payoff c)  social shares of your articles, comments on articles & visits to your website from the threads are not your focus at the moment. A bigger question might be — is social media losing some steam? Do you find yourself on social media as much as you used to be? Does it still hold the same importance in your overall blogging or freelance writing  Please let me know in the comments below!
2. Why Writing Longer Content Improves Website TrafficMy challenge for you is to write an epic, all-encompassing article that dives deep into a story or location. And the catch it is must be at least 2,000 words. Listen to the intro to today’s podcast episode to find out how this will help increase traffic to your website!A few examples of articles with a large word count that are driving lots of traffic to my travel site, 52 Perfect Days:

What Tourism Boards are Looking for from Travel Writers with Mary Charlebois

Listen to today’s episode to hear Mary’s Step by step process to reach out to a tourism board and why she turns down group press trips. We also chat about why you don’t have to accept what you are offered regarding payment for freelance work and should negotiate your rate as well as how to properly research a destination before pitching a tourism board. This is “What Tourism Boards are Looking for from Travel Writers with Mary Charlebois“.

Full episode >> listen to today’s episode

Tweetable:

• Loved this episode about Pitching Brands, Destinations & PR with Mary Charlebois of WhereMaryGos  on the @writetotravel podcast! http://bit.ly/2SSjlmv [CLICK TO TWEET]

Hope you enjoyed this episode and are inspired to think about how you can set goals for your blog in 2019! Interested in hearing the full podcast? Click here to listen now!

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