Why Face-to-face Communication Brings More Success to Writers

If you’re stuck in your career and you constantly get stressed by other writers seemingly earning money far more easily than you do, you might just need to get out and try more face-to-face communication.

It’s easy for us freelancers and travel bloggers to just hole up in our home offices or in a corner of a coffee shop, feeling like we’re still connected and productive because we’ve got tabs open with LinkedIn, Quora, Instagram, and whatever online communication flavors of the month are the hot ones this year. “Look at me, I’m networking my ass off!”

Mostly though, that’s all just noise. Sure, 15 minutes a day of that may accomplish something, but the rest of the time it’s just keeping you from doing work that will actually make you money. The hard stuff. The meaningful stuff. The work that will still be read a year or two from now.

What is really useful networking though?

Spending real money and time going to the right conferences and getting in front of people who can help you grow. Dropping everything for a few days so you can absorb, see patterns, and make meaningful connections.

At conferences and other industry events, you’ll meet actual humans face-to-face. You’ll accomplish more in a couple of days sometimes than you did in months of virtual water cooler chatter. The more I do that, it seems, the more my business grows. Almost everything great that has “luckily” landed in my lap has been the result of these kinds of connections.

Face-to-Face Communication Leads to Paid Work

Whether you’re a pure freelance writer, a pure blogger, or someone who combines multiple streams of income, making real connections can lead to real money in the bank. Here are just a few concrete examples that have come out of various conferences I attended:

– The head of an adventure travel conference I’ve attended for years recommended me to an editor at Outside and I ended up getting five assignments from them before that editor left.

– I’ve lost count of how many deals I’ve landed from TBEX follow-ups, but I once hashed out a deal at the conference itself that was for five figures, back when we started our travel content marketing agency. Probably 90% of the bloggers we’ve hired for the dozens of deals since are people we’ve met at conferences.

– It has been a similar story with IMM and the now-defunct VEMEX conferences, where I and my agency partner have pulled in multiple clients on two continents…and hired more bloggers to deliver the goods.

– I attended the SATW conference for the first time last year. I went on a bike excursion with one magazine editor who has since commissioned four well-paying articles from me and I had a formal meeting set up with the travel editor of CNN. I’ve since done articles for CNN on travel savings and Mexican ruins, but I also ended up doing a whole newsletter series for them and am working on another feature now.

– When it comes to press trips, there have literally been dozens of juicy ones that have come out of these meetings. Just in South America, I’m talking about a small-ship luxury cruise, a sail around the Galapagos, and two lodge-to lodge treks in Peru–for a start. I’ve been on two week-long bike tours in Europe, a long hiking trip in Bulgaria, and tours in Romania, the Czech Republic, Iceland, and Sweden. From conference meetings, I’ve set up trips in Guatemala, Belize, Kyrgyzstan, Turkey, and all over Mexico and the USA. Some of the articles that came out of them have won best travel writing awards.

Plus there are the longer-term benefits of making solid connections with fellow writers and bloggers. Sometimes these people have become my best friends, sometimes they’ve pointed me to an opportunity, and sometimes one of us has hired the other for a project. Or all of the above.

Letting Serendipity Happen by Hanging Out in Person

 

That shot above is my view from the stage when I went to Colorado for my first TBEX conference back in 2012, where I was speaking on a panel. Here’s what else happened:

• I met an editor from Lonely Planet and pitched an article on the spot that I’d had kicking around in my head. He ended up buying it.
• I met a bunch of bloggers in person for the first time that I have now interviewed on this site, including Matt Karsten, Dave and Deb from The Planet D, and Nomadic Matt.
• After appearing on a panel together, three of us started a content marketing agency (one person has since exited) and started negotiations with our first client, Trivago. They went on to do a large deal with us that lasted nearly a year.
• I met a few writers who already worked for me, plus some that did later.

That’s all in addition to what I actually learned in the seminars, things I could apply to my business and career. How long would it have taken to accomplish all that by phone and e-mail? Two months? A year? Infinity?

The next year I went to TravelMart Latin America as a reporter, covering it for the Luxury Latin America travel site. Besides learning what was new and interesting so I could share that with readers, here’s what’s directly come out of it:

• Three press trip invites.
• Three ad inquiries, two of which led to bookings.
• Connections with tourism officials I’d had no luck reaching by e-mail or phone.
• Correct contact names for companies that would make good ad/promotion partners down the line.
• A jump in traffic and new newsletter subscribers from the industry.

After that I attended a NATJA conference where again I pitched an editor on the spot, he liked my experience, and after a few beers together, I ended up in a big airline magazine. He’s now a professor and may be assigning my travel writing book to students in his course next year.

Your mileage may vary of course, but I’ve had outcomes like this from all kinds of acronym-laden conferences I’ve been to. Some have been better than others, but none has been a complete waste, even when I’ve had to pony up airfare and hotel expenses on top.

At the worst, I get some new article material from the pre- or post-trips and get some contacts I can hit up later for hosting if I’m in their region. At best, I get leads that become deals, become trips, and become opportunities that I never saw coming. Plus every single person I’ve ever been in a mastermind group with has been someone I had already met in person. We already had a connection.

Plus there’s the personal benefit: when we’re holed up in a home office all the time, it’s nice to form real friendships with people you actually have a chance of seeing again. This is especially true when you’re nomadic and you don’t even have a hometown.

Get out there and mingle with warm bodies and create some face-to-face communication. You’ll be surprised how much you can get accomplished, even if you don’t log onto social media once for days on end.