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What to Expect From an Online Travel Agency

admin — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 10:01:58 +0000

If you’re ready to finally take your dream vacation, or if you’re just travelling for work, there are a number of things you can reasonably expect from any reputable online travel agency. Obviously, you don’t just want bare bones service. If at all possible, it’d be nice to have someone you can talk to, a wide range of options, and so on. A quick checklist might read something like this…

Good Customer Service

If you have any questions, you’re going to want them answered, right? An online travel agency should provide some degree of direct, one on one customer service, via email or telephone. Even if you’re just going through a simple, bargain-ticket site, you really should look for a site with a live helpline.

A Wide Range of Options on Flights

A low price is great, but you should also be looking for options. You might not want to fly economy class every time. If you’re planning a dream vacation (or if it’s business travel and you can talk your employer into footing the bill…), you might want to give business or even first class a try. Ideally, an online travel agency should be providing you with a seat on any section of the plane.

Great Deals

This one is kind of obvious. A travel agent’s job, after all, is to find you a great deal. If you want to find the best online travel agency around, you might want to shop around for quotes or customer reviews. ). Some sites let you set up and compare foreign currency calculators for multiple destinations of your choice so you can get a better picture of the total costs of your travel beyond the base package price.

Plenty of Hotels to Choose From

If you’re not going to be spending a lot of time in your hotel room, you don’t really need much but a bed and a television set. On the other hand, if you’re going to be stuck in your room for hours on end, you might want something a little classier. Basically, you want to work with a travel agency who gets you great deals without sacrificing a wide variety of choices. Another benefit to shopping for a hotel online: virtual tours.

Impartiality

A real travel agent is just going to try to find you the very best deals available. They’re not going to try to lean all of their customers towards one airline or another. There are a few so-called “travel agents” out there who are secretly receiving bonuses from certain airlines, but this isn’t a common practice, nor is it encouraged within the travel agency industry. These people represent the exact opposite of what travel agents stand for and should not be associated with the countless honest travel agencies out there.

Quick Flights

Anyone can find you a great deal if they’re willing to book you on a flight with a half a dozen twelve-hour layovers. If you like hanging out in airports, this might not actually bother you, but let’s be honest, most people hate hanging out in airports for hours on end. Ideally, you should be able to get a good price on a flight without a lot of layovers.

Convenient Online Profile

Most online travel agents will maintain a customer profile that allow you to customize your options, track expenses and save preferences in order to streamline future trip planning (for example, you prefer the aisle seat). You can benefit by storing any corporate or membership discount numbers, frequent flyer numbers and other pertinent information to assist with faster and cheaper reservations.

User Generated Experience

An extension of just saving your past purchase data and current itineraries is forward-looking user generated content. There are two types of user generated content: reviews and information posted by other registered travelers, which can be a lot more helpful than the standard marketing-speak; and real-time content requested by the subscriber such as weather forecasts, customized news feeds based on interest keywords, and fare alert services based on the user’s parameters, including a general timeframe (so you can see which travel days cost more or less) and region (e.g., Baltimore to Europe or Denver to the South Pacific).

So Basically…

What you want, really, is a wide variety of options at a good price. It’s not always easy to get the perfect balance. You might have to pay a little extra if you want to avoid a lot of layovers, and you might have to sacrifice business class flying if you want a low, low price. A travel agent’s job is to find a nice compromise between these two goals.

Again, you’re not always going to find the perfect balance. Luxury doesn’t come for free, and a lower price usually comes at the cost of some minor sacrifice. But, if you find a great online travel agent, you might get a better deal than you would expect.

Pro Blogging: Making Money From Blogs

admin — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 03:43:26 +0000

A weblog (or simply blog) is a website that ‘publishes’ or features articles (which are called ‘blog posts’, ‘posts’, or ‘entries’), written by an individual or a group that make use of any or a combination of the following:

· Straight texts

· Photographs or images (photoblog)

· Video (videoblog)

· Audio files (audioblog)

· Hyperlinks

Usually presented and arranged in reverse chronological order, blogs are essentially used for the following purposes:

· Online journal or a web diary

· Content managament system

· Online publishing platform

A typical blog has the following components:

· Post date -the date and time of the blog entry

· Category – the category that the blog belongs to

· Title – the title of the blog

· Main body – the main content of the blog

· RSS and trackback – links the blog back from other sites

· Comments – commentaries that are added by readers

· Permalinks – the URL of the full article

· Other optional items – calendar, archives, blogrolls, and add-ons or plug-ins

A blog can also have a footer, usually found at the bottom of the blog, that shows the post date, the author, the category, and the ’stats’ (the nubmer of comments or trackbacks).

There are numerous types of blogs. Some of them are the following:

1. Political blog – on news, politics, activism, and other issue based blogs (such as campaigning).

2. Personal blog – also known as online diary that may include an individual’s day-to-day experience, complaints, poems, and illicit thoughts, and communications between friends.

3. Topical blog – with focus either on a particular niche (function or position) that is usually technical in nature or a local information.

4. Health blog – on specific health issues. Medical blog is a major category of health blog that features medical news from health care professionals and/or actual patient cases.

5. Literary blog – also known as litblog.

6. Travel blog – with focus on a traveler’s stories on a particular journey.

7. Research blog – on academic issues such as research notes.

8. Legal blog – on law (technical areas) and legal affairs; also known as ‘blawgs’.

9. Media blog – focus on falsehoods or inconsistencies in mass media; usually exclusive for a newspaper or a television network.

10. Religious blog – on religious topics

11. Educational blog – on educational applications, usually written by students and teachers.

12. Collaborative or collective blog – a specific topic written by a group of people.

13. Directory blog – contains a collection of numerous web sites.

14. Business blog – used by entrepreneurs and corporate employees to promote their businesses or talk about their work.

15. Personification blog – focus on non-human being or objects (such as dogs).

16. Spam blogs – used for promoting affiliated websites; also known as ’splogs’.

Blogging is typically done on a regular (almost daily) basis. The term “blogging” refers to the act of authoring, maintaining, or adding an article to an existing blog, while the term “blogger” refers to a person or a group who keeps a blog.

Today, more than 3 million blogs can be found in the Internet. This figure is continuously growing, as the availability of various blog software, tools, and other applications make it easier for just about anyone to update or maintain the blog (even those with little or no technical background). Because of this trend, bloggers can now be categorized into 4 main types:

· Personal bloggers – people who focus on a diary or on any topic that an individual feels strongly about.

· Business bloggers – people who focus on promoting products and services.

· Organizational bloggers – people who focus on internal or external communication in an organization or a community.

· Professional bloggers – people who are hired or paid to do blogging.

Problogging (professional blogging) refers to blogging for a profit. Probloggers (professional bloggers) are people who make money from blogging (as an individual blog publisher or a hired blogger).

Below are just some of the many money-making opportunities for probloggers:

· Advertising programs

· RSS advertising

· Sponsorship

· Affiliate Programs

· Digital assets

· Blog network writing gigs

· Business blog writing gigs

· Non blogging writing gigs

· Donations

· Flipping blogs

· Merchandising

· Consulting and speaking

The following are a few things that you need to consider if you want to be successful in problogging:

1. Be patient. Problogging requires a lot of time and effort, not to mention a long-term vision.

2. Know your audience. Targeting a specific audience or group is a key to building a readership.

3. Be an ‘expert’. Focus on a specific niche topic and strive to be the “go-to” blogger on that topic.

4. Diversify. Experiment with various add and affiliate programs that enable you to make money online (aside from blogging).

5. Do not bore your readers. Focus on the layout. White spaces, line spacings, and bigger fonts make a blog welcoming to read.

Certainly, it is possible to earn money from blogs. One just needs to take risks, the passion, and the right attitude in order to be a successful problogger.

4 Ways to Make Money as a Travel Writer

admin — Sat, 17 Jul 2010 01:19:13 +0000

Have you ever wanted to travel the world and make money for writing about what you see? It’s not as hard as you may imagine. Using a few underground techniques, you can be making a healthy income in no-time flat for writing about traveling the world!

Here are the ways you can make money as a travel writer:

1) Traditional Method: Selling Your Stories To Travel Magazines and Newspapers.

This is the most common and most well-known method. Ironically, it also pays the least of all the methods.

You can take two paths when selling your article to a magazine. First you can query a magazine on their interest about a particular subject. If interested, they will agree to buy your article if it meets their standards. The second method is to write the article, then try and sell it.

To find magazines and periodicals that purchase travel stories, go to the library and check out the most recent Writers Market and you’ll have over a dozen periodicals that pay anywhere from a few hundred bucks to a few thousand dollars for an article.

The risky side to this is that there are no guarantees of payment, and you must either have a great story or be a great writer to make this work. Not impossible, just tough.

2) Writing For Other People’s Blogs.

If you can write a 400-1500 word post on any given subject, you can sell the post to a blog at a set price. Heres why: Blogs constantly need new content. It’s how they stay fresh with their readers and how they stay well-ranked in the search engines.

However, writing a new post every few days is a difficult task! If you take over that task for a blog owner, you’re going to be saving them a TON of time and effort, providing their readers with great value, and making an income for a project that is relatively easy for you to complete.

You can get paid anywhere from 20 bucks to a few hundred dollars for this kind of writing… and it’s a LOT easier to do that writing for a magazine.

Think of it: You spend a day writing 5 articles and sell the articles for $30 dollars each. Now you’ve made $150 dollars for a couple of hours of work and everyone is happy.

3) Writing for Your Own Blog.

Another option is to write your own blog and use your travel stories to drive traffic to it. You’d be surprised at the number of bored, lifeless people who want to live vicariously through someone traveling the world. You can then monetize your blog by selling adspace or selling products related to your blog. This sounds basic, but it has made many-a-traveler tens and even 100’s of thousands of dollars per year.

4) Completing Writing Projects on ‘Project’ Sites.

There are literally hundreds of writing projects posted every single day on Elance, Guru, DoMyStuff, and other ‘project’ posting websites.

All you have to do is set up a free account as a content provider, then answer people’s requests for writing projects. Once you’re done, the funds will be electronically deposited into your bank account, and you can withdraw the money from any ATM in the world. You can then pick up another project… or complete several projects all at once!

Many projects go for $1000+ dollars, so it doesn’t take a lot of these to be able to travel well and travel often. You can even do the work on the airplane ride to your next destination!

If you have any writing skill at all, you will be able to pick one of these methods and become a well-paid traveler.

**Attention Readers**

To get your copy of our free step-by-step guide showing you how to make money as you travel without ever holding a ‘job,’ visit http://www.moneyfortraveling.com. The expert authors at www.MoneyForTraveling.com

have all made a substantial internet income while traveling or they have been hired and paid well to travel the world and will show you how to do the same.

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Feel free to reprint this article in its entirety in your ezine or on your site as long as you leave all links in place. You may not modify the content and must include our resource box as listed above. However, you may sign up as an affiliate at MoneyForTraveling.com and insert your affiliate links to earn income for your efforts.