Oh, you’re a travel writer are you?

Some job titles just come pre-loaded with comedy value for me. Like these ones:

Travel writer

You’ve been to at least a few different countries. You wrote a blog. A few people told you that you should do this for a living, or write a book, you write so well. You’ve had enough time to develop your own style, and now you’ve updated your blog with a khaki background, a biography you wrote about yourself in the third person and a great photo of you on top of a mountain.

You have so far been published in numerous tips on Tripadvisor.

SEO expert

You have been trying to make money from the Internet since 1996. You spend a lot of time online, gambling. You started off by trying to flog affiliate marketing and dabbled in developing websites for escorts, before you realised that you could charge gullible people vast sums of cash to get their site ranked on Google. If you’d been honest, you would have just told them to make sure their content was logically arranged and accessible, but fuck ‘em, it’s time you got paid.

Life coach

You can’t figure out what to do with your own life, so you figured you’d make a career out of telling people what to do with theirs.

Social media expert

You use all the major social networks. Well, not MySpace. You think you’ve been on Twitter long enough to grasp the etiquette, but that doesn’t stop you tweeting thanks to endless lists of people for retweeting that link you posted to that really interesting article on that affiliate marketing blog you write, where you wrote about 5 Things Social Media Can Do To Leverage Your ROI Synergies.

To some people, your fifteen thousand followers makes you look like a pretty serious player, but those fifteen thousand people are all also social media experts. Your days of thanking people and retweeting people are so full that all of this activity in itself gives the appearance of successful communication, but in fact fifteen thousand social media experts on Twitter removed from Twitter are fifteen thousand people who have been recycling the same blog entry from some affiliate marketing blog for the past week, and who all automatically followed each other because everyone said, at some point, the phrase “social media” and it came up in a search.

Or am I being unfair?

Possibly related posts:

• Lonely Planet writer? Yes, that’s me
• Please make me a Lonely Planet writer
• Why blog?
• It was all fields round here
• If you keep fiddling with it, it’ll fall off