No, I do not want to write your travel website’s content for free
It seems like at least once a week a new travel community website is popping up, expecting to revolutionize the online travel world with their fabulous/unique/outrageous idea. They then contact me as a travel blogger hoping I’ll help them out. Their emails attempt to flatter and charm with expressions like ‘premiere travel blog writer’ and ‘exclusive invitation’, followed by a request to come to their site and submit content, lots of content, full of my travel knowledge.
Dude, most travel bloggers are not looking for places to give away their writing for free. If you want your website to be full of fabulous content, you should either be prepared to provide it yourself or to pay someone to provide it for you. Businesses have start-up costs. It’s a fact of life.
Now there are exceptions to my no-free-content policy, of course. I happily submit reviews on TripAdvisor, for example, because I have received a lot of value from using the site. But there are 10s if not 100s of sites out there hoping to become the next TripAdvisor, and I have no interest in helping your site become the one that succeeds if you think you can buy my content for nothing but ‘exposure’ and ‘bragging rights’.
How do other travel bloggers out there feel about this?
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