Over the course of putting www.inspireourtrip.co.uk together, Anna and I have had to learn a whole range of new skills. Some of these we anticipated; the fact that we would need to garner a new set of IT skills to actually build the site did not come as a shock to us.
Some of them, however, have been more surprising. Who knew how much hassle it was attempting first of all to write a press release, not to mention then the difficulty of getting anyone to read the thing? The couple of line items in our plan suddenly turned into lots and lots of work. Not really helped by reading a fraction of the many blogs around this subject, all of which offer contradictory advice.
After much patient help from our friends who work in PR / communications (especially Sheena & Matt, thank you, thank you, thank you) and endless rewrites, we finally come up with something that we are assured will pass muster. So we have sent it out into the ether and it has (apparently), actually been published by at least one newswire.
85% of Brits visit the same 4 US destinations
We are not naïve enough to think that suddenly this will catapult us into the public consciousness, but at last we have made our first faltering step. Hopefully it will fare slightly better than our first published content outside our own website.
The New York Times asked for readers contributions on what to do with kids in Chicago a couple of weeks ago. Given we have a whole article on Chicago with Kids we carefully crafted a précis for our reply. This was published in full on the NY Times website along with a whole load of other replies, but we got quite excited when we had an e-mail from them asking for our details as they were considering publishing our comment in an upcoming travel issue. In fairness, our comment did get published, Your Tips for Tacking Chicago with Kids, but we were rather hoping for more than a sentence…….
Never mind, onwards and upwards.
