Can You Really Get One of Those Work from Home Travel Agent IDs and Travel and Luxury for Next to Nothing?

July 26th, 2010 Comments Off Posted in work from home

Just one of these days I’d like to see a website pitch me a real high-priced “outsider deal” that no self-respecting shopper would ever touch. No, I’m not out of my mind; I’m just tired of how they keep advertising “special insider deals just for me” all the time. For instance, just the other day I got an e-mail from some travel know-all who proposed that I pay $250 for special travel deals that only travel agents (the ultimate insiders) could ever get. Was this for real, or was this one of those famous scams? I’d say that it was just barely legal.

What they call this is, a “card mill”. What they do is, they sign you up as a work-from-home travel agent. They issue you your industry ID, and sign you up for all the affiliations that any real travel agency would have. But they only do this so that you can get special travel deals for yourself that only legit travel agents get. As soon as you’re done with getting the discounts that you’re interested in, you can happily give your membership up. The travel agencies that sell these propositions keep churning out phantom work-from-home travel agent memberships to as many any people as they can persuade, and they do good business. If they ever charge you $500 for your membership though, you’ll know that they’ve broken the law. Anything under this, is just about legal.

As a work-from-home travel agent, you do actually gets to take care of the travel needs of all your friends and relatives, and reap commissions. Of course, the people who try to sell you the deal oversell the value of it all. You can’t actually make thousands of dollars in commissions as they claim. Airlines offer almost no commissions to travel agents these days, and hotel commissions aren’t that great either. Most people are just able to go buy there travel needs on the Internet; if they do need a real travel agent, they probably need someone with in-depth knowledge of the place they’re going to, and the ability to solve problems for them. None of this sounds like it could bring you thousands of dollars in easy profits, now does it? However, is there at least one part of truth to their claims when they sell you your ID? Do you get wonderful unheard-of discounts on your own travel needs at least?

This claim is something you need to take with a grain of salt. The hotel companies are completely aware of how people turn themselves into a work-from-home travel agent for a personal discount. Most hotels will only offer you their huge discounts if you sell at least $100,000 worth of travel each year. These days even real travel agents can’t muster those kinds of figures and travel cheaply. But there are some places that still honor your work-from-home travel agent ID, and give you perhaps 60% off. But if you look closely, those hotels are probably offering those discounts to anyone who walks in just the same.

People have to go on believing the things. Even if they’ve been told from the day they were born that you never get something for nothing. When you look more closely into anything, you’ll see that what they offer you his theoretical. What you pay them though is completely real.

How to Profit with 3 Overlooked Internet Marketing Principles

July 21st, 2010 Comments Off Posted in internet marketing

As the Internet moves forward into a new era, we see lots of changes happening in the Internet marketing world too. We are witnessing the techniques we use to generate visitors and generate sales evolve as time passes. We will look at some Internet marketing suggestions that will help you keep abreast of any new trends.

One of the first tasks in your internet marketing journey is to gain the recognition of the search engines. This means that if your site is not recognized by the search engines, you should take care of this before doing anything else. After you make sure that your site is indexed you can move on to larger issues such as researching and getting ranked for relevant keywords. The search engines can potentially get you more targeted traffic than any other strategy if you can gain a high ranking for some profitable keywords. When it comes to search engine optimization (SEO), the first thing you have to do is research your keywords. Your keywords must be chosen by doing research in your target niche.

The key here is to finding keywords that have a high search volume and low competition. The simplest way to rank for keywords and attract quality traffic quickly is to use long tail keywords rather than more competitive ones. It is not true, as some people say, that getting search engine traffic takes many months before you see results. Every day new sites appear that have gotten indexed and ranked within days of their appearance. If you optimize your site by building links and other effective tactics you can see results quite soon. Your job, as an internet marketer, is to deliver as much value as possible. The degree of your customer’s satisfaction is wholly dependent on the amount of value you offer. This applies to anything and everything, from the content you create to the products you sell. Even if you simply want to set yourself apart from the sea of competition, you need to remember that customers will compare the amount of value you offer compared to your competitors. To dominate your niche and increase market share you need to win over your clients and the best way to this is to ensure that everything you offer is met with approval. The more value you offer, the more progress you will see.

One of the secrets of internet marketing success is to promote your site in many different ways. It’s possible to get quality traffic to your site by using traditional offline promotional techniques, such as classified or display ads and mailing out postcards or flyers. You should always track your traffic if you use these tactics, as with all your marketing efforts. In order to measure how many of your visitors are responding to your offline promotion, set up a landing page especially for this. This way you will know how many people are finding your site from this ad or mailing.

You are then in a position to evaluate if your investment in this campaign was worthwhile or not. Internet marketing is all about putting in the work and time to create an awesome product for your target audience.