We caught up with the brilliant and insightful LAUREN MONITZ a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

LAUREN, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Covid has brought about so many changes – has your business model changed?

I had the foresight to see pretty quickly I was going to be grounded for awhile with the shutdown. Since I couldn’t travel to clients to do campaigns, I pivoted to focus more on social media and content management and things I could do remotely. But with budgets being slashed and many in the industry losing their jobs, I ended up actually taking a job in-house with one of my clients and moving from Denver to Deep South Texas to have a little more stability and more of a safety net.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your background and context?

I’ve had one of the most non-linear career paths one can possibly have. My first job out of college, I did what I thought was i was supposed to do and took a job at a buttoned up Fortune 500 company because it looked good on the resume. Selling biomedical grade freezers was the marketing equivalent of watching paint dry and I hated every second of it.

So I started throwing darts at the wall and seeing what stuck. I applied to ad agencies, publishers, anything that would let me be creative. Eventually I was hired to do marketing for the very first online tour operator in the travel industry. Their trips were insane — become a certified viking in Iceland (check), fly MIG fighter jets in Russia, adventures you could only dream about and some beyond your wildest dreams. It ignited a fierce passion to explore and desire to see and experience every corner of this beautiful globe. With each new place I learned about, with each new country I visited, the bucket list grew and grew.

I’d only been there about two weeks when that company realized there was a lot of overhead in trip sales and laid off basically everyone but our media department. I was given the choice to figure out how to be a managing editor as they were becoming a publisher overnight or move on. Never one to balk at a challenge, I decided to roll with it and was quickly pumping out 30+ articles a month with a team of 50 freelancers around the world. Little did I know this would be my first foray into the content world.

Tourism boards would come to us looking for help getting more adventure travelers, family travelers, whatever niche they were trying to target. This was like the wild west/early days of the Internet and we’d connect then with the right OG blogger to spread their message. But these were just people who figured out how to throw up a digital diary. Their posts weren’t brand-friendly or even grammatically correct, and inevitably I’d end up having to rewrite their content which typically resulted in doing the work twice.

Social media was still in its infancy and Instagram had just started taking off and my boss was begging me to figure out how to get my own followers and start my own blog so I could be their in-house influencer (before that was really a thing). It was a lot of right place, right time and once they saw the potential in the influencer space, they pivoted again, going from publisher to agency, which is when we parted ways.

That’s when I started freelancing full-time as a content creator, social media manager and travel influencer working with the same types of clients we had before. My niche is offbeat adventures and things you didn’t even know you wanted on your bucket list. From blackwater rafting in New Zealand to horse surfing in where else but Florida, I always seeks out the weirdest and wackiest attractions to show there’s no such thing as a flyover city or state and introduce my audience to a new side of their favorite place. I’ve been published in Fodor’s, Trivago, AOL, MSN, The Food Network, USA Today, Eater, and Huffington Post, among others and you can follow the (mis)adventures on my blog thedownlo.com or on Instagram (@lmonitz @anadventurestory and @onetastytrip).

With 195K followers, I’ve collaborated with over 100 brands in 25 states and founded the Influencer Institute to help educate brands on how to run best-in-class influencer campaigns and trips. I also manage the social media, content, and multi-influencer campaigns for many clients and at one point had three phones just for Instagram.

During COVID, I saw the inevitable writing on the wall that travel wasn’t going to be a thing for a minute so I took a job in-house at one of my CVB clients, making what some would call a crazy move across country to the deep South to be the marketing and tourism developer at the Beaumont CVB.. We were building new programs and attractions from the ground up and throwing never seen before events and festivals – it was awesome.

About a year into that journey, the city caught wind of all the momentum we were building and recruited me to build a communication division from the ground up. I now manage all the Marketing and Communications for the 38 departments and divisions of a town of 118,000 — everything from infrastructure and public works to events and the airport which includes all the strategy and execution through social, PR, website development, email, graphic design, you name it. It’s been a wild ride and one I never could’ve predicted but I wouldn’t have it any other way.

I’m most proud of how I was able to pivot so many different times without missing a beat and make myself a true triple threat in the industry.

Does your business have multiple or supplementary revenue streams (like a ATM machine at a barbershop, etc)?

The key to freelancing is absolutely diversifying your revenue streams. Every year I find it fascinating how different my income mix is, which is highly reflective of what’s going on in the world. The influencer market had a very obvious peak and saturation point and has since tapered, making it more important than ever to be able to pivot. I’ve also tried things like licensing photos, affiliate marketing, you just need to have a lot of feelers out there to see what works for you.

Year one started as a pretty even split 25% writing, 25% social media management, 25% consulting and 25% influencer campaigns. The next year was 50% influencer campaigns, 30% sponsored content, and 15% writing. Then, it was 30% social media management, 25% content campaigns, and 25% influencer campaigns. 2020 had the most dramatic shift with 60% writing projects and 20% social media management which could all be done remotely when travel came to a halt.

How did you build your audience on social media?

Social media’s all about info-tainment. People want to learn something in an entertaining way. It isn’t a place where you don’t have an active, captive audience, people are scrolling aimlessly looking for something, anything that catches their eye.

Spend time researching best practices by channel (not just repurposing the same content on every platform but really giving people a reason to follow you on each. Be specific about what your niche is (mine’s not just travel but adventure travel and outdoors), and use hashtags to find and engage with people with like-minded interests. It’s a place to share and be inspired.

The platforms reward those who utilize their new features and right now reels are the best way to grow organically (short, entertaining, vertical videos). Above all else be consistent and focus on quality over quantity. Come up with a schedule you can stick to.

Contact Info:

• Website: thedownlo.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lmonitz/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thedownlotravel
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lmonitz/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/LaurenMonitz

Image Credits
Lauren Monitz – all