For as long as travel has existed it has grown and expanded in nature and in revenue generation. In this modern society it is becoming more and more common for travelers to book their trips via the internet. However, there will always be a need for access to human communication to resolve those extenuating circumstances.
Recent statistics published by the U.S. Travel Association state that the travel industry is a $770,000,000,000 or 770 billion dollar industry. This number may decrease slightly in this time of economic recovery, but the number is certain to stay high.
Who is receiving all of this money? Here is a breakdown of a few of the more popular internet sites.
Originally started by Microsoft, Expedia is publicly traded so it’s owned by its stockholders. Chairman Barry Diller owns 58% of the stock.
Travelocity is a privately owned company and a subsidiary of Sabre Holdings Corp. 2005 revenue generated by Travelocity was $830 million (most recent statistic found). Travelocity was actually the first internet travel service that allowed customers to reserve, book, and purchase tickets without the help of a travel agent or broker.
Orbitz is another publicly traded company. This was a collaborative project of several major airlines starting in 2001. In 2004 all of Orbitz stock was purchased by Cendant Corp for $27.50 per share. As of the writing of this article, Orbitz shares are currently selling for $1.89 per share.
What does this mean for the prospects of working in the travel industry? There are internet based travel companies that allow you to promote the use of their sites and earn commissions on travel booked. Rovia is one provider of internet travel services that now has access to 3 Global Distribution Services, giving them a very competitive edge on the internet. Compensation plans vary as well as products and services offered. There is no physical office to go to and you can set your own schedule. There are even training programs available to extend your credentials in order to attract more customers and earn higher commissions.
Earn your way into the billion dollar travel industry. Take advantage of work from home options and earn direct commissions versus making risky stock investments! Do your research, and find a legitimate business opportunity that allows you to enjoy the benefits of the travel business without the old fashioned restrictions of a traditional employer.
Cheers to your success!
Laura Sorensen
http://www.elstravels.worldventures.biz
http://www.mlm-travel-ventures-business.com
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
Thursday, June 18, 2009
Use Affiliate Programs to Increase Your Income Potential and Offer Value to Your Prospects
If you’ve been marketing on line for any length of time you’ve probably heard about using affiliate programs to promote yourself, your business and to develop multiple streams of income to increase your earnings potential.
There is no shortage of affiliate programs to participate in. You don’t have to look very hard or very far to find an internet company that allows members to promote their products and earn a commission when a purchase is made via the member’s affiliate link.
Just a few examples of internet businesses that offer affiliate programs are Magnetic Sponsoring, Site Build It and iContact. Each of these companies allows you the opportunity to promote their specific products or services and earn affiliate commissions on sales made through your link. Some companies require you to be a paying participant in their products before you can become an affiliate but not all of them.
There is another resource for joining affiliate programs. Commission Junction allows you to search for advertisers that offer products and services that are compatible with your business and interests. Once you find an advertiser that you want to partner with, you fill out a simple application and submit it to them on line for approval. There is a short wait to see if you’ve been approved, usually 24 hours or less. Once you are approved you are given access to their links and banners to put on your web site or in your email newsletters. Different advertisers have different terms and may restrict the use of their links for some uses such as Google Ads. Just make sure you read the terms and conditions for each advertiser before you start promoting their programs.
Several nice features of using a service like Commission Junction are the ability to search for relevant advertisers, historical data on each company’s campaign, and an overview of the commission plan. Examples of advertisers that participate in Commission Junction are Mexicana, iContact and Travel Guard Insurance.
No matter which programs you choose to participate in, do some research and make sure they are legitimate advertisers that add value to you and your primary business. You don’t want to develop a reputation for exposing your contacts to advertising scams! Promoting reputable products and services creates a win-win situation for you and your customers. They receive something of value and you receive a commission for offering it to them. You also establish yourself as a credible advertiser and build a long term relationship with your contacts.
Cheers to your success!
Laura Sorensen
http://www.mlm-travel-ventures-business.com
There is no shortage of affiliate programs to participate in. You don’t have to look very hard or very far to find an internet company that allows members to promote their products and earn a commission when a purchase is made via the member’s affiliate link.
Just a few examples of internet businesses that offer affiliate programs are Magnetic Sponsoring, Site Build It and iContact. Each of these companies allows you the opportunity to promote their specific products or services and earn affiliate commissions on sales made through your link. Some companies require you to be a paying participant in their products before you can become an affiliate but not all of them.
There is another resource for joining affiliate programs. Commission Junction allows you to search for advertisers that offer products and services that are compatible with your business and interests. Once you find an advertiser that you want to partner with, you fill out a simple application and submit it to them on line for approval. There is a short wait to see if you’ve been approved, usually 24 hours or less. Once you are approved you are given access to their links and banners to put on your web site or in your email newsletters. Different advertisers have different terms and may restrict the use of their links for some uses such as Google Ads. Just make sure you read the terms and conditions for each advertiser before you start promoting their programs.
Several nice features of using a service like Commission Junction are the ability to search for relevant advertisers, historical data on each company’s campaign, and an overview of the commission plan. Examples of advertisers that participate in Commission Junction are Mexicana, iContact and Travel Guard Insurance.
No matter which programs you choose to participate in, do some research and make sure they are legitimate advertisers that add value to you and your primary business. You don’t want to develop a reputation for exposing your contacts to advertising scams! Promoting reputable products and services creates a win-win situation for you and your customers. They receive something of value and you receive a commission for offering it to them. You also establish yourself as a credible advertiser and build a long term relationship with your contacts.
Cheers to your success!
Laura Sorensen
http://www.mlm-travel-ventures-business.com
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
Network Marketing on NBC
Check out this real video about the legitamacy of MLM, or Network Marketing. Enjoy!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=x-BcwoMvlas
Courtesy of
Laura Sorensen
http://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=x-BcwoMvlas
Courtesy of
Laura Sorensen
Thursday, June 11, 2009
Meetup – Beyond the Internet, a Face to Face Social Network of Like-Minded Individuals
There’s no question that the internet is a powerful and effective resource for promoting your business and attracting leads. Social networks like Facebook, Twitter and various community forums have taken the internet by storm. There are definite advantages to having the ability to reach virtually unlimited people via the reach of the internet. There are distinct disadvantages as well.
When you meet people using a computerized social network, you have limited access to information about those individuals. There is a risk that not everyone is who they present themselves to be. There is also the limitation of real time interaction. Granted, there are chat rooms, instant messengers, skype and program specific chat capabilities. This is only useful if the people you want to communicate with happen to be on line at the same time you are. If they aren’t, you can tweet them, write on their wall or leave them a written message. There’s no guarantee they will respond to your message assuming they ever get it to begin with.
Not to give up on electronic socializing entirely, but there is an additional community that can offer some of the benefits of computerized social networking and eliminate some of the shortcomings. The interesting thing is that this particular group begins on the internet, but takes their socializing to a whole other level.
Meetup, hosted at meetup.com, offers a wide range of opportunities for people to come together and share their ideas or interests in person. It’s free to sign up, although there is a nominal fee if you decide to administer your own meetup group. Once you set up your account, you can search for an unlimited number of topics that you would like to participate in group discussions about. You can request email notifications as the groups you’ve targeted create new meetups, schedule new meetings or host special events. If you don’t find a group that fits your agenda you can start a new one yourself. Each group determines what fees if any will be associated with being a member. Actual meetings are hosted on site at a physical location and participants who attend can interact with each other in a live setting.
Some examples of local meetup groups in this area are: Business Success Forum, geared for entrepreneurs and small business owners; Madison Web Design & Development Meetup; and The Madison International Travel Meetup Group. Anyone can start a meetup group in their particular locale, and the list of countries that participants can search for groups in is quite extensive.
Take a break from the computer, after you’ve registered with Meetup.com and joined your interest groups of course. Experience the old fashioned social networking style, greet your friends and associates with a handshake and a smile instead of just a tweet.
Cheers to your success!
Laura Sorensen
http://www.mlm-travel-ventures-business.com
When you meet people using a computerized social network, you have limited access to information about those individuals. There is a risk that not everyone is who they present themselves to be. There is also the limitation of real time interaction. Granted, there are chat rooms, instant messengers, skype and program specific chat capabilities. This is only useful if the people you want to communicate with happen to be on line at the same time you are. If they aren’t, you can tweet them, write on their wall or leave them a written message. There’s no guarantee they will respond to your message assuming they ever get it to begin with.
Not to give up on electronic socializing entirely, but there is an additional community that can offer some of the benefits of computerized social networking and eliminate some of the shortcomings. The interesting thing is that this particular group begins on the internet, but takes their socializing to a whole other level.
Meetup, hosted at meetup.com, offers a wide range of opportunities for people to come together and share their ideas or interests in person. It’s free to sign up, although there is a nominal fee if you decide to administer your own meetup group. Once you set up your account, you can search for an unlimited number of topics that you would like to participate in group discussions about. You can request email notifications as the groups you’ve targeted create new meetups, schedule new meetings or host special events. If you don’t find a group that fits your agenda you can start a new one yourself. Each group determines what fees if any will be associated with being a member. Actual meetings are hosted on site at a physical location and participants who attend can interact with each other in a live setting.
Some examples of local meetup groups in this area are: Business Success Forum, geared for entrepreneurs and small business owners; Madison Web Design & Development Meetup; and The Madison International Travel Meetup Group. Anyone can start a meetup group in their particular locale, and the list of countries that participants can search for groups in is quite extensive.
Take a break from the computer, after you’ve registered with Meetup.com and joined your interest groups of course. Experience the old fashioned social networking style, greet your friends and associates with a handshake and a smile instead of just a tweet.
Cheers to your success!
Laura Sorensen
http://www.mlm-travel-ventures-business.com
Wednesday, June 3, 2009
Implementing a Five Step Marketing Plan – Kill Three Birds with One Stone
If you’re keeping up with internet marketing techniques, you are probably familiar with the concepts of online article submissions, blogging and email marketing. These don’t necessarily have to be performed as independent tasks. There is a way to combine these three concepts that will no doubt save you some of your precious time.
For each of the marketing strategies mentioned above, you need an article, letter or form of written presentation. A good place to start is by writing something that would be appropriate for each. Using a word processor that allows you to save your work in plain text format usually works the best.
Once you have your text written, formatted and proof read, you are ready for the first step. It doesn’t really matter what order you go in, but if you keep it consistent you will establish a routine and the process will become completely natural in a short period of time.
For example, let’s say the first step in your routine is to take your article or text and submit it to an ezine such as ezinearticles.com. You copy the text from your plain text document into the article submission form. Now you can copy and paste the same plain text document into your blog. You may want to preview it before posting to check for paragraph spacing and other formatting issues. Finally, you can copy and paste your document one more time into your email newsletter template. Using this routine, you can ensure that your information is exposed to as large an audience as possible with a minimal amount of effort.
If you really want to expose your literary creations however, there are a couple of other steps that you can take to increase your audience awareness.
Once you’ve posted to your blog, you can submit your specific blog url to different bookmarking sites such as Propeller, Delicious and Stumbleupon. The final step of your marketing routine is to go to Pingomatic and ping your blog submissions to multiple internet services simultaneously.
Those are the five steps to establishing a basic marketing plan. Notice that the entire process should not cost you one dime out of pocket! Once you’ve written your document, the actual marketing process should take no more than half an hour. This means you have more time to spend generating leads for your business and following up with those leads.
I hope that you find this information useful in marketing your business, whatever industry you are in.
Cheers to your success!
Laura Sorensen
http://www.mlm-travel-ventures-business.com
For each of the marketing strategies mentioned above, you need an article, letter or form of written presentation. A good place to start is by writing something that would be appropriate for each. Using a word processor that allows you to save your work in plain text format usually works the best.
Once you have your text written, formatted and proof read, you are ready for the first step. It doesn’t really matter what order you go in, but if you keep it consistent you will establish a routine and the process will become completely natural in a short period of time.
For example, let’s say the first step in your routine is to take your article or text and submit it to an ezine such as ezinearticles.com. You copy the text from your plain text document into the article submission form. Now you can copy and paste the same plain text document into your blog. You may want to preview it before posting to check for paragraph spacing and other formatting issues. Finally, you can copy and paste your document one more time into your email newsletter template. Using this routine, you can ensure that your information is exposed to as large an audience as possible with a minimal amount of effort.
If you really want to expose your literary creations however, there are a couple of other steps that you can take to increase your audience awareness.
Once you’ve posted to your blog, you can submit your specific blog url to different bookmarking sites such as Propeller, Delicious and Stumbleupon. The final step of your marketing routine is to go to Pingomatic and ping your blog submissions to multiple internet services simultaneously.
Those are the five steps to establishing a basic marketing plan. Notice that the entire process should not cost you one dime out of pocket! Once you’ve written your document, the actual marketing process should take no more than half an hour. This means you have more time to spend generating leads for your business and following up with those leads.
I hope that you find this information useful in marketing your business, whatever industry you are in.
Cheers to your success!
Laura Sorensen
http://www.mlm-travel-ventures-business.com
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
Create an Audience for Your Blog Articles – Use Social Bookmarking to Attract Readers
So you’re writing articles and posting them to your blogs. The question now is, how do you get your literary work in front of interested readers? There are a few different ways to accomplish this task.
One resource to submit your blog site to is FeedAgg.com. This is a one time submission per blog site. FeedAgg is a form of RSS, or Really Simple Syndication. This means that once your site has been submitted, it will update here automatically as you add new “feeds” or pages. It is then available for public viewing sorted by category and subject matter.
Another way you can bookmark your site is to install a button on your browser bar for a site called Stumbleupon. This installs a button with a thumbs up or thumbs down icon. When you stumble upon a web site that you like, you click the thumbs up icon. You choose a category for the site and type a brief review and it is bookmarked in the Stumbleupon library. The advantage of this feature is that you can use it to improve the popularity of your own web sites and blogs by clicking the thumbs up icon when you visit your own site!
Other services that work very similarly to each other are Delicious.com, Propeller.com and Digg.com. These require you to set up login information before bookmarking sites. These services are also designed to bookmark your individual blog posts rather than a single submission per blog. Each time you write a new page you want to submit to these services with the URL containing the specific post title. For easy submission to over 130 other bookmarking sites, visit Google’s socialmarking.com page and follow the instructions on the page.
Once you’ve completed all of your social bookmarking submissions, be sure to go to Pingomatic.com. Type in your blog post URL and with the click of a button send a ping to multiple internet services to let them know you have a new post to share!
Cheers to your success!
Laura Sorensen
http://www.mlm-travel-ventures-business.com
One resource to submit your blog site to is FeedAgg.com. This is a one time submission per blog site. FeedAgg is a form of RSS, or Really Simple Syndication. This means that once your site has been submitted, it will update here automatically as you add new “feeds” or pages. It is then available for public viewing sorted by category and subject matter.
Another way you can bookmark your site is to install a button on your browser bar for a site called Stumbleupon. This installs a button with a thumbs up or thumbs down icon. When you stumble upon a web site that you like, you click the thumbs up icon. You choose a category for the site and type a brief review and it is bookmarked in the Stumbleupon library. The advantage of this feature is that you can use it to improve the popularity of your own web sites and blogs by clicking the thumbs up icon when you visit your own site!
Other services that work very similarly to each other are Delicious.com, Propeller.com and Digg.com. These require you to set up login information before bookmarking sites. These services are also designed to bookmark your individual blog posts rather than a single submission per blog. Each time you write a new page you want to submit to these services with the URL containing the specific post title. For easy submission to over 130 other bookmarking sites, visit Google’s socialmarking.com page and follow the instructions on the page.
Once you’ve completed all of your social bookmarking submissions, be sure to go to Pingomatic.com. Type in your blog post URL and with the click of a button send a ping to multiple internet services to let them know you have a new post to share!
Cheers to your success!
Laura Sorensen
http://www.mlm-travel-ventures-business.com
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
Blog Your Way to Success – The Hottest Trend in Internet Marketing
These days the buzz in internet marketing is all about blogging. If you’re familiar with the internet or other people who use it frequently, you’ve probably heard the term “blog.” Maybe you shrugged it off as one of those social network sites where people just post random information about their hobbies or interests. That is certainly one purpose for using a blog. However, blogging has also become one of the hottest marketing tools on the internet today.
There are several ways to use blogs to inform people about you and your business, and get them to visit your other web sites.
First, the search engines recognize your blog in the same way they recognize other web sites. They will base their search ranking on keywords that you use in your titles and content, how often you add content and whether what you post is original and relevant. So the more frequently you post and the higher quality information you add, the more likely your blog will show up in the search results.
Second, you have the ability to write a bio associated with your blog site. This is where you can give your visitors some personal information about yourself, your business and the link to any other web sites you may be promoting. You can also display URL links in your signature whenever you make a new post.
A third way to use blogs to gain recognition is to post comments to other people’s blogs. This increases your exposure and the opportunity for people to go check out your pages and your other related web sites.
Finally, the search engines are very favorable to web sites that have a lot of quality inbound links. When you put your other web URL’s in your blog signatures or bio data sections, you are automatically creating a new link to your other sites. This will cause “link popularity” and help move your related sites higher in the search engine results.
There are other creative things you can do with your blog, depending on which services you use and whether you use free or paid blogging. For example, Google has their own blog called Blogger.com. You can use it absolutely free, and install Google ads on it so that if visitors click on the ads, you recieve a commission for each ad clicked. Word Press is another popular blogging service. You can also put ads on your Word Press blogs, but only if you upgrade to a paid subscription. You can have multiple blogs with either service, and you can blog to more than one service if you like.
With blogging being such a popular internet activity, there are many sites that you can join and start blogging your way to success. Check them out and see which ones fit your personality and blogging needs the best.
Cheers to your success!
Laura Sorensen
http://www.mlm-travel-ventures-business.com
There are several ways to use blogs to inform people about you and your business, and get them to visit your other web sites.
First, the search engines recognize your blog in the same way they recognize other web sites. They will base their search ranking on keywords that you use in your titles and content, how often you add content and whether what you post is original and relevant. So the more frequently you post and the higher quality information you add, the more likely your blog will show up in the search results.
Second, you have the ability to write a bio associated with your blog site. This is where you can give your visitors some personal information about yourself, your business and the link to any other web sites you may be promoting. You can also display URL links in your signature whenever you make a new post.
A third way to use blogs to gain recognition is to post comments to other people’s blogs. This increases your exposure and the opportunity for people to go check out your pages and your other related web sites.
Finally, the search engines are very favorable to web sites that have a lot of quality inbound links. When you put your other web URL’s in your blog signatures or bio data sections, you are automatically creating a new link to your other sites. This will cause “link popularity” and help move your related sites higher in the search engine results.
There are other creative things you can do with your blog, depending on which services you use and whether you use free or paid blogging. For example, Google has their own blog called Blogger.com. You can use it absolutely free, and install Google ads on it so that if visitors click on the ads, you recieve a commission for each ad clicked. Word Press is another popular blogging service. You can also put ads on your Word Press blogs, but only if you upgrade to a paid subscription. You can have multiple blogs with either service, and you can blog to more than one service if you like.
With blogging being such a popular internet activity, there are many sites that you can join and start blogging your way to success. Check them out and see which ones fit your personality and blogging needs the best.
Cheers to your success!
Laura Sorensen
http://www.mlm-travel-ventures-business.com
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