Travel Writing 2.0 With Tim Leffel

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How can you balance freelance writing for immediate income and the creation of intellectual property assets for a long-term business? In today's show, Tim Leffel gives his tips for becoming a successful travel writer.

In the intro, some thoughts on the European Copyright Directive [The Verge, Ars Technica, Publishing Perspectives].

I talk about my lessons learned in my 7th year of being a full-time author-entrepreneur, and also I'm a finalist in the Digital Book World Awards for Publishing Commentator, and Best Use of Podcasting in Book Marketing. Plus, you can now pre-order Valley of Dry Bones.

This podcast is sponsored by Kobo Writing Life, which helps authors self-publish and reach readers in global markets through the Kobo eco-system. You can also subscribe to the Kobo Writing Life podcast for interviews with successful indie authors.

Tim Leffel is the author of travel books including Travel Writing 2.0: Earning Money From Your Travels in the New Media Landscape, and A Better Life for Half the Price. He's also an award-winning travel writer for sites like Lonely Planet and the editor at PerceptiveTravel.com and CheapestDestinationsBlog.com.

You can listen above or on iTunes or Stitcher or watch the video here, read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and full transcript below.

Show Notes

• What life is like now for a travel writer

• Different models for travel writing for a living

• Thoughts on affiliate and ad income from a blog

• On building relationships with magazine editors to further a travel writing career

• On what travel writing is really about

• Using photographs with travel writing

• Rights for travel articles

• Productivity tips for running multiple blogs and writing projects

• On being location independent and living in foreign countries

• Effective ways of marketing in the digital age

You can find Tim Leffel at TimLeffel.com and on Twitter @timleffel

Transcript of Interview with Tim Leffel

Joanna: Hi, everyone. I'm Joanna Penn from TheCreativePenn.com and today I'm here with Tim Leffel. Hi, Tim.

Tim: Hey, how are you?

Joanna: I'm good. Thanks for coming on the show. Just a little introduction.

Tim is the author of travel books including “A Better Life for Half the Price” and “Travel Writing 2.0: Earning Money From Your Travels in the New Media Landscape.” He's also an award-winning travel writer for sites like “Lonely Planet” and the editor at perceptivetravel.com and cheapestdestinationsblog.com. Tim does loads of things.

Tell us a bit more about you and how you got into travel writing.

Tim: I could give you a really long story about how all this started, but I'll keep it short.

I used to work in the music business first in Nashville and then in New York City as a marketing guy and so I was doing a lot of writing, corporate writing kind of, band bios and that kinda thing.

I met the girl of my dreams and we started dating and she said, “I want to go traveling around the world and I'm going to go whether you go or not, but I would like you to go with me.” So, it was the dilemma where I had a car and a condo and this career track and everything, but then we both got this sign from above or wherever the stars aligned where I hated my boss and I got fired and her company went out of business. It was kind of like, “Oh, I guess this is the time to go then.”

We saved a little more money and then we took off and I was just looking for something to do along the way that would bring in a little income and I thought, “Well, I've already done all this writing before.” I just started sending queries to editors and got a few things published back in the day when that was the only way to get published was to send queries to editors.

I got a few trade jobs like reviewing hotels and one thing led to another, but I stayed part-time for a really long time when we stopped traveling after three years and teaching English and other things.

I got an office job again, but I kept writing on the side and then when the blogging world came along, that's when I really started to take this seriously and realize I could make a full-time income at it without killing myself. So I became a full-time travel writer about 12, 13 years ago.

Joanna: Wow. When blogging really started to become more serious and people started to make some money with blogs, which is amazing. But you've seen this landscape really shift.

I talked to some people who want to be travel writers and they seem to be fixed in the way you used to be years ago, like getting “Conde Nast Traveler” or something.

How has the landscape changed for freelance travel writers? And how does it reflect the shift in publishing in general?

Tim: I only know three full-time travel writers personally who are making a good living at it, just doing freelance. It still can be done, but it's a real hustle; you've got to be out there sending pitches every day and a lot of times they're juggling three or four deadlines at once.

You've gotta put a lot more jobs together because there just aren't as many publications out there as there used to be and they're thinner than they used to be. They don't have as much content. And so it's tougher to get those $2 a word assignments and string a bunch of them together in a month like you could in the good old days.

I don't think those are really the good old days either, but it can be done. But I think it's a lot easier to have multiple streams of income and online you could do that in many more ways.

And of course, book publishing which you talk about all the time. There are a lot more ways now to take control of your destiny rather than getting permission from someone else to publish what you write.

Joanna: Let's go into some of these multiple streams of income because I do know some travel writers and they are doing what you say in the gig economy. It does seem as if there are so many people and they say, “Some people will do this for free.”

People will write articles for free because they get to go to places and, or maybe they'll even pay their own costs. So let's look at it from the other perspective.

What are some of the multiple streams of income that you have or the other travel writers have?

Tim: The ones I know that are really successful that are making six figures at this have 8, 10, 12 different income streams is pretty common, so I don't think that's an unusual thing anymore.

If you have a blog or you have some kind of website that you publish, there's many ways to monetize that, from AdSense to network ads to direct deals to sponsorships and sponsored posts and those kinds of things.

You can make money from affiliate ads, where you link to a product and if somebody buys it you get a commission and that can work for hotels or HomeAway or whatever.

And then a lot of people sell their own products, whether those are books or eBooks or tour services or itinerary planning. If you're an expert in a certain area, you can sort of parlay that expertise into other things and people get paid for speaking.

Once you become an expert at something, you know this from your own experience, it's easy to branch off into other areas using that expertise and then publishing too.

For me, books are probably 10% or 15% of my income, so it's a decent amount.

Joanna: We're going to come back to your books. In fact, the “Travel Writing 2.0” is what we're really talking about the moment, the different things you talk about in that book.

But then I wanted to ask you about that. Like you said, books are sort of 10%, 15%, I've seen, looking at your blogs, you do have ads on the blogs.

I really feel that affiliate income can be stronger than ads or AdSense, or pay-per-click ads on a blog if you're getting in a niche. I've never had ads on my blog in that way.

Have you found that affiliates stuff can work better when you're doing targeted articles, for example, over advertising?

Tim: It can work well if you're doing a very targeted post or your blog, in general, is very targeted.

When I started out, which was very long time ago, 2003 is when I launched my first blog, there wasn't even any AdSense then. I think we mostly just had affiliate ads for Amazon, I remember and then other companies started jumping on.

The problem with travel though is people are set in their ways as far as where they book their trips. They're used to using Expedia or KAYAK or Trivago or whatever they use and they've got it on their phone a lot of times. So you're not necessarily gonna get that last click too for them to book, but it can work for sure.

And some people do better at it than others. Again, the more general your topic is, the harder it is to earn money from affiliate links, I think.

Joanna: I agree.

You had a very interesting post which I thought was great around the myths of travel writing, which I think are huge.

Can you talk about some of the most common myths that people have about travel writing?

Tim: Some of those are perpetuated by these people who sell courses. They're selling the dream and showing people on a beach with their laptop, drinking a cocktail, and it all looks so glamorous and easy.

Of course, we do have trips like that sometimes, but most of the time we're holed up in an office just like any other writer trying to bang it out. It's not all that glamorous when it comes to the actual work.

But it looks fun because it is, it's travel so of course that's more fun than writing about colonoscopies or something so it does attract people, but it takes a while to get there. That's the whole thing that I think is not ever discussed.

If you start a blog today, it's going to take you two or three years before you're making real money from it and that's if you do everything right.

I've seen people move that up a little bit, make it a bit faster or even a year, but it's really tough to make it happen faster than that.

And the same with freelancing; you're not going to start out writing for “Conde Nast Traveler,” $2 a word. You're going to start getting, you know, $50 from somebody or you're going to get $15 a blog posts to write things.

It's not a quick and easy way to make money. It's a fun way to make money, but it's not a quick and easy way to make money. Anyone who dives into this shouldn't expect to take off on around the world trip and be earning the big bucks before their trip is over.

Joanna: That's properly true of most writing careers, it takes years to kind of get it going.

What if people are starting out now, because all of this is possible if you do take the time and you focus on things.

If people are starting out now, would you suggest that they do start writing for other blogs or build their own platform or both? What would be the starting out place?

Tim: I would do both because what Google really cares about is links coming into your site, that's still their sign of popularity. If you're writing for someone else online, then that enables you to link back to your own site, which is going to help and it also gets you practice in another arena.

I think if you're starting out, the more practice you get, the better and the more you write for other people in different styles, the better. That's going to make you doing freelance work in the future because the way we write for our own blogs is not the way we're going to write for a magazine and that's not the way we're going to write for a different website that's going after a different audience.

You kinda have to be a chameleon when you're freelancing and when it's your own blog, you want to do the opposite, really. You want to have a unique voice and be known for that.

It's good to get as much experience as you can. I always tell people when they're starting out, take every job you can get. Don't worry about what it pays because you need the clicks, you need the experience, you need the links back. All of those things are sort of currency, actually.

Joanna: And then the other thing I noticed with other travel writers is relationships with editors and people that they've built up relationships over time at these various blogs or magazines so that they can pitch ideas.

Is that kind of relationship building critical, especially if you want some of those bigger magazines?

Tim: Yes, it is. The problem is editors move on a lot. It's a revolving door, so that's very frustrating.

The one print magazine I still write for regularly is called “Global Traveler” and it's mostly because they've had the same editor for years and years and so I do have a relationship there. I don't have to work so hard on convincing someone new that I can write a good piece for them.

That's the most frustrating part about being a freelancer is the constant querying and it's not even rejection, it's more a matter of not getting an answer. Half the time, you don't even get a response. Actually, if you're getting a response half the time, that's pretty good.

If you can have a relationship where you can pitch an idea and mull it over with them and come to an agreement on what's going to work, then that's a lot more fulfilling than just sending out blind pitches all the time.

Meet editors whenever you can in person, go to conferences. If you get a job with an editor, do a fantastic job, turn everything in early, turn it in exactly as they expected, exact word count that they wanted, just do a fantastic job. If you make their life easier, you'll probably get hired again.

Joanna: That actually makes me think about a question around the actual writing itself because travel writing, I guess people think is about places like, “Oh, you get to go diving in the Philippines and write something about that.”

Is travel writing about a place, or is it about people? What are some tips for writing travel pieces that actually resonates?

Tim: There are a few different kinds and most travel writers are bouncing around between the different types of writing.

There's a lot of service writing. That's what really is in demand. It's not about your trip, it's about helping other people plan their trip. So that's why you see so many of these top five beaches in the Philippines to get back to there or the eight best Thai restaurants in New York City or whatever.

Those listicle things have always been in demand even in the magazine days and they'll probably be in demand 100 years from now. There's just something in our brain that reacts to that organization being the organization of a list. So there's a lot of that.

But then there's also narrative travel stories, which I think is what people think of a lot of times when they think of travel writing, there's more long-form story kind of pieces which are in a lot of ways more gratifying to write but they're not as much in demand.

I have a site called Perceptive Travel that's been around since 2006 and in an ideal world, it would be the most popular site on the internet but it's all narrative travel stories and it's never gonna be as popular as the ones running a bunch of listicles.

Joanna: You mentioned three types and gave us two. Was there another type?

Tim: There is the whole memoir and that's the same as a narrative but not exactly, where it's more about discovery through travel. But of course, there are just regular destination pieces too that are not necessarily narrative but they're all about the place and not about the person.

We have some that focus all on the narrator and some that don't focus at all on the narrator and a lot of times it just depends on the publication as to what they want.

A lot of blogs are naturally just first person, focused on the person writing because there's a personality behind it and the readers get to know that person. Whereas on TV and in like AAA kinda magazines, it's usually about the place more than anything.

Joanna: I wanted to ask you about photos because it seems like there would be two types of photos. One would be the photos that you take for your research. I take photos when I travel that I then use when I write my pieces.

For professional photos for a magazine or something that you're being paid for:

How does taking photos work with the travel writing and do you license them in a different way?

Tim: Photos have really gotten devalued over the years. I feel bad for the professional photographers because they keep having to buy all this expensive equipment but they're not getting paid as much for their work and so it's kind of a drag.

And it's just because the photos have become so ubiquitous. Everybody's got a camera in their pocket that takes pretty decent photos and so it's that last 10% that you get with a really good camera and the really good lenses and the really good eye, so they're being paid for that last 10%.

I rarely get paid for my photos. I do now and then but a lot of magazines I write for and online sites especially, it's just part of the contract, you have to supply photos and it's not even really up for negotiation. They're just not going to pay for it.

Whereas the higher up you get, the more professional the magazine, the bigger the circulation, the more likely they are to pay extra for it. And then, of course, a lot of photographers, pro or amateur, will sell their photos to stock services and you don't make a lot of money. You might make 50 cents a photo or something, but if you sell enough of them then that can add up to something.

And then if you're a blogger, you pretty much have to have photos on your blog these days and so it's just a requirement of being a travel writer really. The cover of my book is actually related to that.

“Travel Writing 2.0,” it's got this like Indian sort of a goddess with six arms because I think that's what it's really like these days. You have to be doing anything and everything. You're not just putting words on the screen, it's not about just that anymore.

Joanna: I think that's probably true for most of us. I feel like that as an indie writer for sure.

To circle back on intellectual property rights there, you get a contract and it's not really up for negotiation because maybe they're too powerful in some way.

But do you ever keep the rights to that article? For example with a short story, you could license it for first publication and then you could self-publish it later or use it on your blog later.

Do you get your articles back again?

Tim: That's a tough one. A lot of it depends on the publication. Again, the higher up it is, the more likely you are to be able to haggle over those details.

But it used to be when I started out as a freelancer, you signed off first North American rights or something like that but most of the contracts I see now are all rights.

It's work for hire or maybe you can do what you want with it later, but they own the right to do anything they want with it on the web and in print. Because they all have these print properties and online properties, the magazines do and they want to be able to use this stuff in perpetuity without having to ask.

Some people get more worked up about this than I do. I just figure I'm going to rewrite it and do a different slant if I want to use it for something else.

I consider my articles for pay. I just go in thinking they're going to be work for hire. If I ever was going to do a book around them or something, I would worry about it but I don't know. I feel like if you're prolific enough, unless you're really writing some major 8,000-word feature that can become a movie later, I don't think the rights are all that big a deal, not to me anyway.

Joanna: So then I wanted to ask you, because you've mentioned being prolific and you are prolific. When I have a look at all the different sites that you have I wonder if you could talk about how do you juggle writing articles, blogging or your books.

You have a family, you also have to travel. How do you manage your time?

And also you wrote a really great guest post for The Creative Penn about immediate cash flow versus building for the long term, which again are two different types of writing.

Can you talk about time management and those different time periods for income?

Tim: I've done a lot of reading and experimenting on this subject because I do run five different websites. It used to be six and then I've got books out and other things, so I've had to learn how to be productive or I would be in trouble.

I run a course on this called Productivity Power for Writers, not just for travel writers, it's for any writers because I think the concepts are pretty universal. Two of the key things are automate what you can and outsource what you can and I'm sure you do a good bit of both yourself.

If you can systemize something and make it automatic or if you can schedule your social media posts in advance and things like that, that will help automate what you can.

But then I also have a lot of help, I've got three different assistants that work on different aspects of my business and I pay someone who sells advertising a commission so I don't have to mess with that part.

I'm trying always to free up as much time as I can for what I think is my core competency, which is writing and running my sites, creating content and making sure everything is working properly and I would rather leave the drudgery stuff to someone else if I can.

Joanna: What about your own traveling? You still are a travel writer and obviously you still love traveling but you have a family and you're trying to do all this.

How do you fill your creative well and do everything else?

Tim: Well, I'm not nomadic for one thing. I've always had a base, except that during that first bout of around the world travel. I generally will go out and back.

I do a trip and then I come home and I write for a couple of weeks and then I go out again. So I'm generally doing an average of one a month, probably.

It is difficult when you travel and that's why I could never do it full time and do this. Some people manage it, but they often get burned out after a while and end up getting a base of some kind, or they'll go do real slow travel where they'll go somewhere for a month and have an Airbnb and then they'll go somewhere for two months and have a place. That's a lot easier.

I think what you can do on the road is basically maintain. You can keep everything from falling apart and you can put out the fires; you can respond to emails, but it's hard to really get ahead and do deep work, creative work.

I definitely need that time at my laptop in between. I did go off the grid for a whole week last year on a hiking trip, which was a real test because I basically could not get online for a week. I knew that ahead of time so I set up a lot of things in advance and I had my social media manager still sending out things for me so I didn't have to worry about that part. It's tough though.

Joanna: That's interesting you say that because I feel exactly the same. A lot of my fiction is written about my travels and but when I'm on my travels, I can't write. I need boring routine in order to do creative writing, so it really helps me to know that you do the same.

I'm always jealous of these people who are like, “I'm writing in a cafe in Thailand,” and I'm like, “No, I'd just be out doing Thailand things.”

Tim: Back to that service writing thing, I think I could sit in a cafe in Thailand and bang out the five best coffee shops in Bangkok kinda article because you don't have to think too hard about that.

But if you're doing something that really requires concentration, you need an hour or two of nothing with everything else turned off.

And that's another difficult thing I think that people in their 20s especially have to come around to is you really need to turn off all the distractions if you're going to write something that requires concentration and they're used to having their phone buzzing constantly and notifications coming in and that's really detrimental to doing good work, I think.

Joanna: Doing that deep work, I guess like Cal Newport. I'm 43 and I wonder if people who are two generations younger have a completely different brain.

Tim: I've read a lot of research on this and the thing that comes out of it is people who think they're good at multitasking really aren't when you test them.

Your brain can still only do one thing at a time. It's just a matter of how fast you are switching back and forth and how well you can handle that, but it's very hard to get back on task after you get distracted no matter how young you are.

Joanna: I agree. Now, you mentioned having a home base there, and in your book “A Better Life for Half the Price,” you really talk about downsizing and moving to another country to cut living costs and also still have a good life.

When I decided to become a full-time author, we sold our house. We did move countries, but it didn't quite fit your definition because we moved from Brisbane, Australia to London, one of the most expensive places in the world.

But we did move from a four-bedroom house to a one-bedroom flat. We did some of the things that you talk about.

Tell us about what you did and also how you live now and why you're moving back. And some of the pros and cons, and what's in people's heads when they consider that, because it's quite dramatic.

Tim: When I was younger, I taught English. My wife and I both taught English in Turkey and Korea and we really liked that experience of actually living somewhere as opposed to just passing through.

When our daughter was born, we had to stay put for a while, but then we kept talking about, “Wouldn't it be nice to go live somewhere else for a while just to give her that experience as well?” Then we settled on Mexico partly because it's close and easy as far as getting back and forth on a plane.

I fell in love with the city with the first time I went there called Guanajuato in Mexico. It's an old colonial city but it's up in the mountains, it's 6,500 feet so like 2,000 meters, so the weather is really nice all year, it's one of those eternal spring kinda climates and buildings from before there was a USA, very old buildings and that's always interesting. It's not a big city, it's kinda mellow and so I liked the pace and everything.

So anyway, we moved there for a year and we came back to the U.S. for a while and then we moved there for two years the second time and then this time we're going back with no end in sight so we'll see what happens.

My daughter is going off to college and so my wife and I are going back there. But it's funny, the house is actually bigger than where we live now, but when we go down, all we can take is suitcases. It's too far to drive from Florida to the middle of Mexico. So we ended up buying a lot of things there as opposed to bringing them down, which is kinda fun anyway, especially in Mexico where there's such great handicrafts and cool Talavera pottery and all that stuff.

My job doesn't change at all so that's one of the beautiful things about being a writer or any other job where you have mobility, is as long as you got your laptop and a good internet connection, you can work from anywhere so that's the point I'm making in that book.

There are jobs, physical jobs you can get in other countries, but the best is if you can keep earning in your home currency. You can live in a cheaper country and there's a lot of them out there, then you have so much more money to spend, which is so much, or you don't have to earn as less, so maybe you can work less either way.

It literally drops in half when we go from one country to our neighboring country and we're not very careful either. It drops in half with us going out more so that's a nice. That's why I say a better life for half the price, just because everything gets cheaper, including healthcare, that's a big one for Americans.

Joanna: I've lived all over the place, so I get what you mean, but I know that some people have an inclination not to ever do that. Especially when the things in the press that's make some of these countries sound very violent or dangerous.

Some people think, “Oh, if somewhere is cheaper, then it must be worse.” Obviously there are areas of any country that are horrible and dangerous.

Is there anything that you would say to soothe people's anxieties? Is it just a case of going visiting?

Tim: That's part of it and yeah, there's always that fear of the unknown. But I always tell Americans, “Watch your own evening news, your local news and tell me where you're living is safe.”

If somebody else from another country saw your nightly news, they would think, “Oh my God, what a hell hole because it's scary.” There are cities in the U.S. that have a much higher murder rate than cities in Mexico.

St Louis, New Orleans, which nobody is scared to go to New Orleans, but they've a really high homicide rate. D.C., even our nation's capital. We've got way more guns here than anybody else and so I don't think the U.S. has any safe, stable even either.

I was just in Canada a few weeks ago and there were 10 murders in one night in Toronto and they were freaked out about it. Canada is generally seen to be safe, but there are problems everywhere.

I would say there are places that are quite safe that are still very cheap, especially in Europe. The Balkan countries these days, eastern Europe, Romania, Czech Republic, Bulgaria, those places are relatively safe and Portugal is quite a deal for living there and they have a very low crime rate.

A lot of times people are just scared of what's different more than the actual safety problem. There is serious violence in Mexico, but it's generally not where gringos are living.

Joanna: It's funny you say that because I remember being in Jerusalem and I was talking about going to New York and this Jerusalem native was like, “You're going to New York? That's so dangerous.”

It just depends on what country you're in, doesn't it, where so many people think going to Israel must be so dangerous because of all the press we get. Even in London, I don't know if you remember, there were riots in London a couple of years back and we had a phone call like they will literally around the corner from us and we slept through the whole thing.

People were phoning us going, “Are you okay?” And we we're like, “We didn't even know about it,” so it is all relative.

Tim: And the good thing these days is you could find out from people on the ground very easily what's actually going on. You can read local news but also you can go on Facebook groups or expat message boards or whatever and see what the real situation is.

Joanna: At the end of the day, people are people, that's as right as I think that's what we find out, isn't it? People love their children, you know, they love their country, they are genuinely nice to people, people are nice and then there's a percentage who are horrible the world over.

Tim: Yeah.

Joanna: Last question: your career has spanned the older way of doing things and now, of course, this new way of doing things in the new media landscape as you call it.

What have you found right now to be the most effective way of marketing yourself as a writer and marketing ways to sell your books and your writing?

Tim: The important thing is to build up a platform of some kind. Whether that's a blog or a podcast or whatever it may be, you need to build up a tribe of followers or people that are interested in that specific subject.

If you're blogging about Atlanta, for instance, and you become known as the expert on Atlanta, then that is going to bring in all kinds of other opportunities for freelance work, for books, for tours or whatever.

But it all starts with having an audience. If you don't have any kind of platform, a book publisher or an agent is not gonna be interested in you. If you self-publish something, nobody is going to buy it. You've got to have an audience in order to launch all these other things.

Find something that you care about enough to write about it every week for years on end and you'll probably be off to a good start.

Even if you're only a freelancer, it still can help if you have some kind of specialty that you're known for. If you're a person who writes about skiing all the time, you're going to have a lot easier time placing articles than if you write about something different every single week and you're just kind of a jack of all trades.

Joanna: I'm interested in your strategy around guest posting because a lot of people used to say, “Oh, guest posting is the way to get traffic to your website,” and then a lot of people have stopped guest posting because, I don't know why, it went out of trend.

Do you still find guest posting a really good strategy?

Tim: I do and I don't go crazy with it. I think that's what people did wrong. They would do 50 of them in the same week and then maybe that sends a flag to Google that it's a little suspicious, I don't know.

I just do them here and there where it makes sense for sites that are aligned well with what I'm doing like yours. So I do think it's a good way, not just people got into doing it just for SEO purposes, just to have a high domain link back to their sight as they say a high Moz rank or whatever.

I think it's important just to reach a new audience, to reach new potential readers and new potential book buyers or followers or whatever. And there's only so much you can do through social media and even email marketing.

You're only reaching the people who already know about you, so if you can guest post, you can reach some other people.

I did one on Tim Ferriss' blog maybe eight or nine years ago when he wasn't so famous as he is now and I'm still getting traffic from it, nine years later. I've gotten tens of thousands of people who have come over from there to my blog so that's worth a lot.

Joanna: I was having a look at all the places you've guest blog and I was like, “Oh, wow, that's amazing.” And I think that's the problem people have is who to target.

How do you find the best places to guest post?

Tim: Start with the ones that you already follow or like. If there's somebody's podcast you listened to already and it's related to your niche or your interest, then that's a good place to start.

You can always just go searching around or the the two degrees of separation thing. Who does that person follow or who do they link to in that way you can discover new ones.

But again, the more narrow your niche is, the easier it is to find one. Even writing is pretty narrow I think on its own as far as how many good blogs and podcasts are out there, but if you write about skiing or hang gliding or kite surfing or whatever, there's probably only a few of them out there you need to be on and so go target those.

Joanna: You're right, it's just about doing that research.

This has been super interesting. Tell people where they can find you and everything you do online.

Tim: Sure. The Cheapest Destinations blog is where it's only me writing and so that's the one site where it's just my work all the time.

My portfolio site is my name, timleffel.com and that links out to everything. It links to the books, to the sites I run, to some freelance articles I've written and that kinda thing, so if you can remember my name, that's the easiest way to find me.

And then my social media links are on there, which are usually my name, but sometimes not, because like my name was taken on Instagram so I got something else but anyway, search my name…

Joanna: So many of us have that on Instagram.

Tim: There's not a lot of Tim Leffels out there.

Joanna: Thanks so much for your time, Tim. That was great.

Tim: Well, thanks for having me. And I've got to say, I really like listening to your podcasts because I've been on others sometimes where I feel self-conscious because I'm laughing and you laugh with the absurdity of everything like I do and I like that.