Travel Blogging Fast Track – Heather Delaney Reese

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Travel Blogging Fast Track

Everything You Need To Know About Travel Blogging (and More)

You already know you love travel…

Now discover how to make a living from it

What if you could build a travel blog that made hotels pay YOU… for the trips you already wanted to take

Cabo San Lucas, Mexico

Lake Tahoe, California

Riviera Maya, Mexico

All these trips were fully comped by resorts & hotels

A travel blog that lets you and your family go the places YOU want… on other companies’ dime.

One that lets you travel the way it suits YOUR life… and gives your kids the priceless experience of new ways of living.

And one that lets you supplement (or even replace) your regular income… with cash, comped travel and freebies!

Yes — it’s possible, even if…

• You don’t have much experience travel blogging (or don’t even have a blog!) and you think nobody would respond to a ‘newbie’
• Just the thought of ‘pitching’ makes you nervous
• You don’t have a huge budget — or a lot of time — to do it

Below, I’m going to show you exactly how my husband and I did it… and how you can do it too! 

Hi! I’m Heather Delaney Reese, the founder of the popular travel blog It’s A Lovely Life

Together with my husband Pete, we teach over 50,000+ aspiring bloggers how to build the life of their dreams with a successful, profitable blog.

But — we’re not those “one-hit wonder”, 20-something type of blogging instructors who talk the talk after just a year or two in the biz:

Pete and I are both active travel bloggers who practice what we teach.

After all, I’ve been blogging for a living for over 12 years now…

And since 2014, we’ve made a very comfortable living — just from our travel blogging!

Let me show you what I mean…

Throughout 2017, travel blogging consistently generated us five figures per month.

Our total blog income growth over the past year

And along with our three daughters, we’ve managed to travel 150+ days per year for the last few years.

Well, today — for the first time — I’m going to show you the secrets behind how we actually do it.

And I’m going to get reeeeeally specific, too.

For example, I’ll show you one of our successful pitch emails that landed us comped travel (yes, a screenshot of the email is a bit further down this very page!)…

I’ll let you in on the secret of how we use coverage packages to get more invitations (with a specific example)…

And also in this article, I’ll share some of the little “ins and outs” of travel blogging that I wish I’d known when I started out.

Everything you’re about to learn is hard-earned knowledge from our full “travel blogging system” we’ve spent years putting together — the very system we use to make our own blog so profitable, and travel so much!

In fact, when you know the secrets in this system, you can use it to ‘turn the dial’… and scale up to as much comped travel and income as you want.

That’s what we’ve done, after all! In the last couple of years, we’ve traveled to Hawaii 3 times:

Jamaica:

Cancun (twice):

And a bunch of other destinations — Florida (a 19-day trip!), Dude Ranch in Arizona, Wisconsin Dells, Colorado Springs, Park City Utah, South Dakota, Cabo San Lucas, Puerto Vallarta, Aruba, Austin, A European River Cruise, and all over California (our home state)!

Since 2015, we’ve made it a rule to travel for 150+ days every year… and we plan to keep doing it this year, and for the foreseeable future.

And by the way, here’s something else you probably didn’t notice from those pictures:

We didn’t pay for a single hotel room on ANY of those trips!

Each one of those trips was fully comped!

Just take a second to imagine walking into a gorgeous, clean VIP suite … with a glorious view of the water, beds covered in gorgeous soft linen, and the warm breeze coming through the window … and knowing you didn’t have to pay a cent!!!

Not bad, am I right? (Below, I’ll show you how you can achieve this for YOUR trips, even if you don’t even have a blog yet.)

But wait — I haven’t told you the best part yet.

Because the whole time we were traveling, we weren’t just getting our expenses paid back to us…

All the while we were doing this, our blog was actually MAKING us a healthy, full-time income!

Remember what I said before: month after month, our travel blogging activities were paying us a steady (and growing) income stream…

And all this was happening whether we were traveling or not!

Now to be fair, we made other kinds of income too (and below I’ll tell you more about how you can add them to your blog). BUT you could take it all away, and our travel blogging alone would be more than enough to sustain our exciting lifestyle.

So I think it’s fair to say that travel blogging promises a wonderful, exciting lifestyle — if you know how to do it properly.

But you’re probably looking at all this and thinking, “wow, that must be nice Heather… but I don’t have what you have! I don’t have thousands of readers a month, and nobody wants to listen to my pitches — I don’t have anything to offer them anyway!”

Hey, I hear you! I remember what it was like to start out.

But don’t lose hope. I have good news for you: everything I just showed you, you can learn how to do too.

Trust me — I’ve taught thousands of people how to set up their own money-making blogs…

And I truly believe there’s nothing that Pete and I have done that YOU can’t do also… as long as you follow a step-by-step “travel blogging system” like the one I’m going to show you today.

But before I do, there’s one very important thing I want you to keep in mind:

But you’re probably looking at all this and thinking, “wow, that must be nice Heather… but I don’t have what you have! I don’t have thousands of readers a month, and nobody wants to listen to my pitches — I don’t have anything to offer them anyway!”

Hey, I hear you! I remember what it was like to start out.

But don’t lose hope. I have good news for you: everything I just showed you, you can learn how to do too.

Trust me — I’ve taught thousands of people how to set up their own money-making blogs…

And I truly believe there’s nothing that Pete and I have done that YOU can’t do also… as long as you follow a step-by-step “travel blogging system” like the one I’m going to show you today.

But before I do, there’s one very important thing I want you to keep in mind:

Building A Travel Blog That Pays You To Travel Is Simple… But It’s Not Easy

Let us be the first people to tell you this — travel blogging is not a “get-rich-quick” scheme!

Yes, you CAN start getting comped travel almost right away (we’ll show you how).

And yes, you CAN start creating great content without spending a cent on more travel (we can show you how to do that too).

But we won’t lie: to succeed, it takes a lot of persistence!

So many bloggers online love to tell you that it’s “easy” to start your own successful travel blog. But they’re confusing easy with simple.

Because, sure — I guess in theory, starting a travel blog that pays you to travel is very simple.

Here, it’s so simple that I could tell you how you do it off the top of my head:

Heather & Pete’s ‘Simple’ Roadmap To Setting Up Your Own Profitable Travel Blog:

1. Set up a blog
2. Find a place you want to go
3. Send a great pitch that lands you a comped trip
4. Take the trip (the right way)
5. Create high-quality, professional content about your trip
6. Leverage your content to earn enough to make it all profitable
7. Rinse and repeatThat’s it in a nutshell, I guess.

But… could you use that list to go out and start landing paid travel next week?

Of course not! It’s way too generic!

What should you say in your pitch? How do you do a trip the ‘right way’? How do you create content if you’ve never done that before? And so on. This outline doesn’t tell you any of that.

Unfortunately that’s where most bloggers (and sadly, their courses) leave you… with a fluffy outline, and wishy-washy advice (like “use hashtags!”).

That’s why I said “simple” and “easy” are not the same thing. Because even with a simple plan like this, there’s many parts about travel blogging that are quite hard.

And you have to be so careful — because if you let them, they can derail your travel blogging dream before it even starts!

So let me ask you…

What’s Stopping YOU From Living The Travel Blogger Life?

From my 12 years’ experience as a travel blogger — and having taught hundreds of bloggers myself — I am VERY familiar with the things that can get in your way from building the life of your dreams with a travel blog.

Here, take a look at this list. Which of these can YOU resonate with?

When you’re starting out…

• “Getting paid to travel would be a dream for me, but I just have no idea how to even start.”
• “I’m an introvert, and I’m very shy, so I get nervous even at the thought of pitching to get free travel. And even if I worked up the courage to pitch, I don’t know how, or who I should pitch to.”
• “My husband and I both love travel, but the corporate grind makes it hard for us to have the freedom we want!”
• “I feel like it’s impossible for a newbie like me to break into the field.”
• “I’m still nervous about how much money I’ll have to invest along the way to set up a really nice blog with good graphics, streamlined/convenient maintenance, etc.”
• “How am I supposed to start when I don’t even have any trips I’ve taken?”
• “I do have a blog already, and I love travel, but I don’t know how to pivot it to a travel blog.”
• “How do I make posts that people actually want to read? I’m not even a good writer!”
• “I feel overwhelmed with how long it takes to create just one post with quality photos, video, SEO and pins.”
• “It just feels like travel blogging is saturated already.”
• “I’d love to travel for a living, but I need it to be profitable before I commit to it.”

Then when you’re a little more advanced, it becomes…

• “How am I supposed to get more followers?”
• “Some of the other groups I’m a part of have bloggers who are getting hundreds of thousands of views, and I’m just not on that level — so I feel intimidated and like I have no chance at ever getting to that same spot.”
• “I already have trips planned, and I really feel like I need to learn how to get at least a little something comped… ugh, travel is so expensive!”
• “I’m doubtful that anyone will respond to any outreach work I do, as my blog is still so small and I don’t have a large following.”

Wow! Do I ever remember struggling with all that stuff.

I know that sometimes it feels like succeeding with travel blogging is impossible.

After all, when Pete and I first shifted to travel blogging a few years back, it was MUCH harder than it is today. (For example, people were far less willing to listen to your pitches for comped travel — they’d often ignore you, and you could tell they were thinking “who does she think she is?”)

And yet, there weren’t any resources I could turn to to answer all these questions for myself. So I had to figure them all out myself — the hard way!

And that’s how I’ve learned the answer to almost every single one of them:

You Need A System To Follow!

To succeed at travel blogging, I discovered you need to have a proven, step-by-step system you follow — that you can count on every time.

(Because remember, travel blogging is simple. There’s not actually that many things you need to do… you just need to know how to do them, and when!)

Having a proven system takes care of all these problems — because you know you have something that’s worked time and time again in the past. You just follow the system, and you’ll get the result you want.

That’s why, every time Pete and I have learned something over the years, we’ve written it down and filed it away in our own “travel blogging system”, ready for us to refer to in the future.

Here are just a few examples…

• We want to know the contact person for a certain visitors’ bureau? Hey look, we have that written down in a list!
• When we’re booking a new trip, how do we remember what order we’re meant to arrange accommodation, activities, and all those things? Easy — we just refer to our “cheat sheet” on how we normally do it!
• It’s been a while since we negotiated a contract for a sponsored trip, and we need to brush up before we sign a new one? Oh yep — we’ve got our notes on what was important to watch out for.
• We’d like to take a trip to a certain resort in Florida next month? No problem — we can dig into our archives for a proven “pitch script” that’s got the best chances of scoring us an all-expenses-paid trip.

Every successful travel blogger I know has built their own “system” like this — a repository of their own tips, techniques, hacks, strategies, scripts, pitch emails, and the various “ins and outs” they’ve learned over the years.

(Although, most bloggers are very protective of them, and for good reason — it’s their “keys” to the travel blogging kingdom!)

But rather than just sit here telling you about these, I want to show you some real examples of what I mean.

So right now, I’m going to share with you three small but juicy excerpts right out of the exact system we use to run our travel blog…

Three Hard-Won Secrets of a Successful Travel Blogger

Some of these insights have taken Pete and I years to perfect… but they have saved (or earned) us thousands of dollars!

Heather & Pete’s Travel Blogging Secret #1: There’s A Right Way To Pitch

Pitching is one of the fundamental pillars of ANY travel blogging system — because you NEED to do it to get the trips you’re after!

That’s why, as part of our own full “travel blogging system”, we have a little “pitching system” we use to help us land the trips we want.

Now I promised I’d show you one of the exact emails we’ve used to land comped travel.

Well, here’s one we used back in 2016.

We were going on a 19-day tour of Florida, and we wanted to line up comped accommodations for the whole trip.

There was a certain resort we really wanted to stay at along the way. So we pulled out our pitch template email, customized it a little, and sent off this email.

See if you can spot some of the techniques we used to maximize our chances of winning the pitch…

So, off went that email.

And guess what? Later that same day, this was the reply we received:

Success!

And that meant that, all thanks to that one pitch email, we ended up going on an amazing trip!

As you can see, we had a blast!

Imagine that! Sending one email… and within hours, receiving a VIP invitation to a fully-comped trip like this one!!!

Now yes, you may not have the figures or stats we used in our pitch. That’s OK — you don’t need them!

The beauty of our pitching system is how flexible it is. We’ve taught it to others… and we’ve seen it work for all kinds of bloggers of different sizes, from big (like us) to tiny (no previous trips)!

Over hundreds of trips, we’ve learned strategies for adjusting your pitch… how to title your email… and even a “perfect pitch” template we use (we’ve been refining this for YEARS and we think it’s as close to perfect as you can get!).

Just a little further down this page I’ll show you where you can find those things.

But you may be surprised to know… that even a great pitch sometimes isn’t enough to land you comped travel!

To learn about the next missing piece, read on…

Heather & Pete’s Travel Blogging Secret #2: Building An Irresistible Coverage Package

Most travel bloggers think that the pitch email is everything. And yes, it’s hugely important — but there’s so much more to it!

One of the big things you’ll always be offering as a travel blogger is your coverage package — that is, what content you are going to create for the travel partner, in return for them compensating your visit.

Like most travel bloggers, we used to be kind of laid-back about this — when we traveled, we’d just document whatever we noticed, and use that in our coverage.

Then one day, we made a small tweak which massively increased our value to our travel partners:

Before we even start working with a new travel partner, we now do our homework on what is important to THEM from our coverage.

And then… we will make sure our coverage package features those things heavily!

That sounds simple… but it’s really what sets us apart from other bloggers.

For example, we will read our travel partner’s press releases to see what is new and what they are most excited to share with potential visitors.

Then we plan ahead of time exactly what pictures/videos we will need, and we make a plan to get them on our trip!

Here’s a real example:

Let’s say we were told that a resort we are covering just had a complete remodel.

Well, most bloggers would skip over this. But we would ask for specifics, so we can share with our readers what changes were made so we can share that in our coverage.

We always make a point of asking our travel partner contact what is important for us to cover — and we pay special attention to that for our content.

That way, when we share the content, the travel partner is delighted, because they got exactly what they wanted!

(Compare that to a blogger who didn’t prepare, and maybe focused on the meals, when the resort wanted to show off its new fancy rooms. When the travel partner reads their coverage, do you think they’re going to be excited about offering them any more comped trips in future?)

Now, given that resort owners will often own more than one destination… that instantly opens doors for us at their other locations around the country (or the world)!

This one tiny tweak has been responsible for thousands of dollars in free lodgings, food, and entertainment — so keep it in mind on your next trip!

Of course, our full travel blogging system includes way more material on defining coverage packages. (We’ve even got template coverage packages we refer back to, along with guides for what kind of comped travel/activities we can usually score for different packages.)

Again, there’s more information on where you can find that shortly.

But before that, there’s one last HUGE tip I want to give you…

Heather & Pete’s Travel Blogging Secret #3: Start Building An Email List NOW!

Making a living from travel blogging isn’t just about the travel — you need to make money too!

And I’m going to reveal the #1 biggest secret I wish I had known when I was starting out:

Focus on building your email list TODAY.

This is honestly the thing I regret most for not doing from the very start!

You’re probably thinking, “but why would I need to do that when I have social media?”

Sure — social media is where your readers are, and where you’ll find new readers.

However, there’s also a potentially huge problem with all these social networks that doesn’t get discussed as much as it should:

You don’t own the platform!

In fact, you could be shut down at any point, on any of these networks, if the social network chooses to do so (or if jealous competitors report you as spam!).

What’s more, on most social media networks, only a very small percentage of your followers will ever see your posts — unless you are willing to pay money to boost or promote them.

The solution to this is to build an email list which YOU own.

Trust us: This is absolutely critical for long-term success as a blogger.

With one email you can reach every single one of your subscribers with your message. You can choose to drive traffic to your website, or even send them directly to an affiliate link (which makes you profit).

Unlike social media, YOU control your message and YOU control your subscriber list.

If you have a blog, this is something you should start focusing on from TODAY. And if you haven’t started a blog yet, you have an…