Category Archives: Business

Home Travel Business – Make Your Love Of Travel Into A Business

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The diverse cultures and landscapes around the globe draw travelers to vacation in exotic spots worldwide every year. Experiencing these sights and sounds can be extremely expensive, especially in the current challenging economy. Finding discount travel opportunities can take copious amounts of research time and energy. However, some globe-trotters have found a way to travel widely and inexpensively while earning income with a home travel business. Individuals can strike out on their own in this endeavor or join established companies as associates. Another opportunity is to create a home based business in the travel industry using the resources of a multi-level marketing travel business.

Home travel businesses are usually based around the internet. Setting up a website that offers deals on travel, whether as an individual or with the help of an existing travel business, is the first step. This can be done using site-building companies, but the easiest way is to join multi-level marketing company that provides the website for you. Drawing people to the site through internet marketing strategies is the next key step. A website does you no good whatsoever if you never get people to visit it and book travel with you. To get people to your site, you may want to advertise on social networking sites or search engine sites. Information on internet marketing tips is available for free, for thousands of dollars, and everything in between online.

There are several types of home travel business opportunities. In one scenario, you act as a travel agent, booking specific trips for people who want to go on vacation. This can be done as an individual or by joining a larger company. This gives you constant contact with information about travel locations. Travel lovers get to plan vacations and book them all the time while they dream about and plant their own vacations. This is like the shop owner who loves a product so much, they decide to sell it so they can be around it all the time.

A second form of home travel business operations is where you become a part of a travel club business. In this method, you sell memberships to a travel club with their own website. People can easily access highly discounted travel opportunities and they book their vacation through that company. When a multi-level marketing approach is added to this type of business, you have the opportunity to sell not only the travel club membership but also the opportunity to work with the company.

Adult Billing 101 – A Quick Lesson on How to Make Money Off Your Adult Site

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While putting together an adult site may seem like the easiest thing in the world to do, making money off it is not quite as painless. The resources for content and images are a dime a dozen while payment processors serving the adult industry will barely reach a handful.

To start you off on this new world, it is important that you understand that in business, particularly in e-commerce, the adult entertainment world is considered a high-risk account. For this very reason, acquiring a merchant account for your billing needs usually proves to be the biggest difficulty adult merchants encounter. As a high-risk account, payment processors usually charge an arm and a leg for even the most basic adult billing service. That is, if you get an approval at all. Major credit card associations like Visa and MasterCard have very strict standards against high risk merchants. Both card association keep lists that will alert merchant account service provides of high-risk merchants that have high chargeback ratios.

So back to the basic question: How do you begin billing for your adult service? What you need is a merchant account. So, do a search on the Internet. Simply typing in “merchant account” or “Internet billing” maybe a complete waste of time. It will yield hundreds, if not thousands, of search results. Try to refine your search to focus more on your field. “High Risk Merchant Account” or “Adult Merchant Account” are good search strings to start with. Next, make a list of the possible candidates out there that you might want to check on later.

Now, prepare the questions you’ll be asking your candidate merchant account service providers. Jot down the things that are important to you. Check out what the sites out there are offering in terms of rates and depth of service to get a general idea of the fee range that you are looking at. Will upfront fees be a problem for you? How much are you willing to pay every month? Will per transaction fees work better for the kind of service that you are offering?

When it comes to service, what are you expecting? Do you need a quick response time to queries and emails? Is uptime important to you? What kind of security do you require for your site?
Now that you have all those questions ready, you should also be prepared to answer their questions. Be ready to provide information about your company, the adult services you offer and how much you process in a month.

Get in touch with the merchant account providers and get to know them better. Once you’ve found the one that can deliver the kind of service that you are looking for at the price point that you can afford, start thinking about the next step.

Submit all the necessary paperwork and obtain an approval. The paperwork may include the application form, your incorporation documents and proper identification for members of the board. Some adult billing service companies may even ask for the business credit report or statements from your current processor.

After all that is done and a decision has been laid down, you should now be ready to integrate the adult billing service provider’s payment gateway to your shopping cart system (if you have one). The billing processor should set up your merchant account on their payment gateway and provide you with the URL of your secure gateway as well as other technical details to complete the integration process. Once this step is finalized, you should be able to start server-to-server processing of live transactions. The payment gateway should be able to provide you with all the security you need to safely complete all transactions for your adult website.

The next step is of course the most important. Payout. With consistent and regular transaction processing you should be able to get consistent and regular payouts as well. Some merchant account providers have a threshold before they release your first check (for instance, some wait until you reach your first hundred dollars). Others process payments on a monthly basis with payouts set on a certain date of the month (usually the 15th or the 30th). Still, there are other adult billing service providers who offer an even more ideal weekly processing where you can get your money every week. It is often the standard for the merchant account provider to hold 10% of your gross volume of transactions for the rolling reserve fund. The purpose of this reserve fund is to provide security against potential credit risks. After a certain amount of time, when the credit risk has ceased, the amount is repaid to you.

This article should give you a general idea of how to start billing for your adult site. Adult billing, while a long and often times tedious process, is not all that difficult if you understand the basics.

Automotive Advertising Agencies Must Promote Training To Help Them Sell More Cars And Services

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To train – or not to train – is not the question according to automotive advertising agencies who understand the importance of investing in the people part of the sales and service process by providing training before, during and after the sale. Training has often been considered as an afterthought by auto dealers who have enjoyed the luxury of having more customers than cars with a never ending supply of salespeople and service writers who earned a higher than average income for their efforts. Today’s consolidating auto industry has changed the math for auto dealers who now have to deal with shrinking sales volumes, reduced profit margins and the resulting loss of a ready willing and able sales and service staff whose incomes have been reduced along with dealer profits.

Automotive advertising agencies have always been tied to their auto dealer clients bottom line – whether they knew it or not – and today’s automotive advertising agencies are realizing that their areas of responsibility do not stop at the front door of the auto dealership. Automotive advertising plans geared for the Internet using digital marketing platforms coupled with internal sales and service processes powered by integrated technologies provide efficiencies that allow auto dealerships to operate with reduced budgets and support staff in sales and service.

Unfortunately, many auto dealers and automotive advertising agencies have been operating with the false sense of security that the people aren’t as important as the technology and/or the processes that they have applied to replace them. That is as untrue today as it was yesterday. People still like to do business with people that they like and human nature has survived on the world wide web. The real solution for auto dealers forced to operate with fewer sales people and service writers is to train them in the use of the new technology, however, not at the expense of training them in understanding human nature and proven old school best practices to sell a car.

New technologies and automotive advertising applications include training solutions that offer efficiencies similar to other sales and service processes that have been applied to reduce expenses for auto dealers. However, even the best training system can’t teach someone to be a nice person and/or to place their customer’s interests ahead of their own. These applications must be coupled with people skills that are best hired vs. taught and they start before the sale or even the hiring of the sales person or service writer ever begins.

Internet based applications like Hire The Winners help human resource departments sort through applicants in the hiring process. Their focus is on personality traits and people skills surfaced in a series of videos posted on a site that is linked to help wanted ads. This screening process allows the auto dealer to determine how the applicant will react to various real world scenarios in the sales and service process. Applying this filter before investing in training and lost sales opportunities caused by a bad hire provide an R.O.I. that can be easily verified with improved employee retention, C.S.I. / S.S.I. scores for the dealership and incremental increases in sales and service productivity by a well screened employee.

Similar advantages in training during the sales and service process can be applied by applications like DealerMouth that allow sales and service staff to promote themselves through their own websites hosted – and monitored – by the auto dealer to promote best practices. This ongoing training by senior management compliments the desire by the automotive advertising agencies to extend the reach and frequency of their online automotive advertising messaging beyond the auto dealerships websites and or third party automotive advertising platforms. Training by example is a proven practice that can be applied on the internet super highway in the virtual showroom much like it used to be applied in brick and mortar facilities.

Newly developing applications focused on enhancing the sales process with integrated training components are also in development. Applications designed for kiosk, desk top and even mobile platforms promise to support sales and service staff before, during and after the buying and shopping experience for customers. Providing sales people and service writers with best practices and word tracks to enhance the customer experience during their sales and/or service presentation will empower the staff by offering them relevant information to help the customer make a buying decision. In addition to increasing their individual productivity on a real time basis, there is a residual benefit of training the sales and service writer who will be better able to apply and retain the information built into their more consistent presentations to their customers.

Automotive advertising agencies are tasked with evaluating new technologies and automotive advertising applications to provide more for less for their auto dealer clients. The presumption that these technologies can – or should – replace people in the process is misguided if it doesn’t increase the productivity of the people that remain. Training will increase the R.O.I. that auto dealers receive from their staff. More importantly for automotive advertising agencies is that training will directly impact the auto dealers bottom line which is certainly part of the job description for automotive advertising agencies in today’s challenging auto industry.