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6 Mistakes That Can Ruin Your Online Travel Business

Travelling is one thing that you may find common in everybody’s hobby nowadays. In fact, it is a passion for many. People are getting busier and stressed out with each passing day. And traveling is the only thing that can help them to cut off from their busy schedules and get a bit relaxed. As a result, more and more people are in continuous search of online travel businesses that can help them plan their dream holidays. This has led to a massive rise in the competition in the travel business industry. You have to be distinctive to make your online travel business a success.

A considerable amount of work goes into setting up your travel business, enhancing the showcase, and getting the desired number of customers. And a few mistakes here and there can ruin your venture even before starting.

Here, are the most basic mistakes that you must avoid or it might kill your online travel business even before it takes off:

1. Not offering complex travel services
People can easily plan their routine point-to-point tours or trips with the help of the Internet. What they need is someone to help them plan their trips with varied & complex requirement combinations. You must allow the customers to create and plan their travel packages as per their convenience. Providing regular travel packages will do no good to your online travel business but will instead lead the customers to continue planning their trip on other travel websites.

2. No prompt support
Customer satisfaction is the first & foremost requirement in the travel business. You should be within your customer’s reach at any point of time. Yielding prompt support to your customer’s queries & complaints can save many of your customers from moving on to other travel portals. Try giving quick solutions and clearly mentioning all the instructions can help your business from getting bad reviews on Google & other social media platforms.

3. Poor user interface
It’s very simple: “People buy what they look at and like”. So, it becomes necessary to have an attractive and engaging user interface. Customers should be easily able to traverse through your travel portal and get all the things they want. Your travel portal needs to have a simple yet classy design with an appealing call to actions, appropriate sorting filters and easy payment & checkout options. All these will help the customers to take up your proposal at the most opportune time.

4. Not having a Unique Selling Proposition (USP)
There are numerous travel websites on the Internet. Following the same strategies like them won’t do any good to your business. It’s tough to beat them & move forward. At this point, you need to have a Unique Selling Proposition (USP). USP is the thing that differentiates you from the rest of the crowd. This means that you need to deliver something that none of the businesses from your niche does. For example, you can transform your business message to sell expert advice & personalized services rather than some deals, offers & discounts.

5. No promotions or marketing
Promotions or marketing is the best way of reaching out to your target audience. Most of the travelers start searching online or on the social media platforms before planning their trip. Lacking marketing and promotions will make you lose some of your potential customers. You can hire an Internet marketing company to do this task for you.

6. Lack of personalization
People don’t like to spend much time browsing all the options. They prefer websites that provide them with relevant suggestions as per their needs and interests. In this scenario, personalization can help you. Personalization allows you to learn about each customer so that you can suggest relevant solutions aimed at their needs and interests like What is their budget? What hotel brand do they prefer? Are they flexible with their dates? etc.

By doing just a bit more than your competitors, you are sure to stand ahead of all the other online travel businesses and guarantee that you have a continuous flow of travelers for quite a long time to come.

Senior Employment Can Be A Golden Prize!

Do you want senior employment? Are you 50 years of age or older and hoping and praying to land a job?Whatever your motivation to find work is, welcome to a labor market seemingly tilted against senior employment seekers. But take heart! Golden opportunities now abound for senior job seekers and the ball is in their court. There’s great news for you and dire warnings for all the critics.Newspapers trumpet headlines about seniors unable to get even minimum pay jobs. Employment fairs advertise work for anyone breathing, but they’re generally low paying $10-$12 openings. The young people staffing the application desks at these fairs seem to be mentally jotting down your age when you ask for a sign up sheet.Why is this good news? Because contrary to appearances, The United States is on the brink of an incredible labor shortage. Well respected economists predict a huge labor shortage that is making itself felt even at this moment in time. How big a labor shortfall is looming on the horizon? Some estimates run as high as 10 million unfilled positions by the year 2010.Millions of senior employees are rapidly nearing retirement. At the same time fewer and fewer younger people are coming of age to fill the vacuum. Many astute business executives of today are growing keenly aware of the worker shortfall on the horizon.Even Congress is now taking notice of the coming labor shortage. Legislation is being discussed now to provide tax credits to companies opening up flexible senior employment work schedules.All for senior employees 62 years of age or older. The icing on the cake is that health and pension benefits will be included. Be optimistic if you’re an individual seeking senior employment! With a little homework, preparation and a small dash of creativity, you can get excellent work for yourself right now.Don’t be surprised at all the opportunities out there. You’ll discover that there are a lot of options for you to choose from, more than you ever dreamed of. You won’t have to settle for just any old job that’s offered. Take out a piece of paper right now and begin jotting down a list of jobs you’d like to have. And please underline the word like. Along with it, write out your work experience and what you want to do. If you’re a senior employment seeker, then you’ve earned a lot of experience in many different areas over the years.Don’t forget to put in your hobbies too! You’d be surprised at what things like fishing and bowling can add to your job description. And this is a campaign just as important as any battle waged by the general of an army.Do you like reading about sports and politics? Add those to the mix too! Now, when you’ve finished the list decide what type of jobs you’d like to have. No matter how far afield from what you’ve worked at in the past. Meditate about it until you come up with several possibilities. And remember, the sky’s the limit.When you’ve decided on a few jobs you’d be happy doing, research the businesses that offer senior employment. Then call them and get the names of the managers that do the hiring.Finally, make out a brief resume of your work history. Now is where creativity comes into the picture. Compose a short, single page cover letter. Make it brief, and don’t just rehash the things you listed in your resume.On the cover letter, itemize what you’ve done to warrant hiring you for the position you want.Be truthful, but tell them what you can do to fulfill the job’s bottom line. You’ll be surprised, because the cover letter is often the deciding factor in hiring.When you’ve finished, make a personal visit to the business and ask to see the hiring manager. It’s a good idea to call first and make an appointment if possible. But don’t hesitate to make an unannounced visit if needed though. Whatever the outcome of the meeting, leave a copy of your resume and cover letter.Within the next three days, if you haven’t heard back from the hiring manager, call on the phone and ask for him/her. The follow up phone call will demonstrate your desire for the job. Most personnel specialists agree that this course of action is one of the most effective methods to acquire senior employment. Even if the company isn’t advertising an opening, it can often lead to a job in an anticipated opening in the future.So, don’t figure the only job you can get is flipping burgers or packing groceries. You have talents and experience that companies are hungry for now, and you’re valuable. As a person seeking senior employment, you also come equipped with an old fashioned work ethic not in over abundance in today’s workplace.Pick out the type of work you want to do…and go for it!Be assured, the national and local labor markets now realize that being a senior employment applicant carries with it added experience, talent and knowledge.

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Video Marketing For Lawyers – 9 Things You Must Ask Your Video Producer

Here are the 9 most important things you need to ask any video production company:

1. How long will my video shoot be?
2. How many actual video clips will I get for that length of video shoot?
3. How long will each video clip be?
4. Will you upload my video clip(s) to my website and blog?
5. Do you upload my videos to the video sharing sites?
6. Do you blog about my videos?
7. Do you put my videos on your own website and blog about the newest video you created?
8. Do you use your social networks to tell the world about my new video?
9. How much will you charge me to create another series of video clips?

If the video company you’re choosing doesn’t do all of those things with an all-in-one, turn-key system, ask them “Why Not?”

AM I TOO EXPENSIVE?

You’ve decided to produce videos to market your law practice. You’re now looking for a video production company. Here are 3 reasons why you won’t hire me:

1. I’m too expensive
2. I’m an attorney with years of experience creating and producing educational videos
3. You don’t want the commitment of creating video over 6 or 12 months

There. I’ve said it. These are the main reasons why you will not hire me. Now, I’m going to address each one and by the end of this article, you decide who you need to hire.

Most video production companies charge anywhere from $500-$35,000 to create attorney video. At the low end of the spectrum, you can get the cookie-cutter video where they use a fixed template that you cannot change and get only one video clip for your money. At the other end of the spectrum, you get a custom video channel with 3 or 4 video clips.

In the Lawyers’ Video Studio I shoot one hour of video. From that one hour I am able to get about 4-5 usable video clips lasting 2-3 minutes each! I do not recommend having video clips less than one minute; that’s a waste of your time and money. That will not give you enough time to explain to your viewers the information that they need to know.

Most video studios only offer an a-la-carte menu, where you pick and choose your options. That’s not the way we work in the Lawyers’ Video Studio. Contrary to most video production studios, we create a turn-key system where all you have to do is show up and start talking. You do not need to know anything about how the video is created, edited, compressed, uploaded or distributed. It’s totally done for you.

WHO IS YOUR VIDEO PRODUCER?

Ask any of the video companies you are considering whether their video producers are practicing trial lawyers. Why is that important? It’s only important if you want someone to create video that online viewers want to watch. If you just want to create a video to ‘get your name out there’ and give the world a verbal resume of who you are, then you don’t need a producer who is also an attorney. That would be a waste of your time and money. There are plenty of good video producers out there who can create that type of video for you.

A video producer must have experience creating LAWYER video. Not wedding video. Not commercials. Not verbal resumes that do not help a viewer understand how you can solve THEIR legal problem. They may have won awards for work they did in TV or film, but you must ask any video producer these 3 IMPORTANT questions:

1. Do you know what a [fill in your specialty] lawyer (immigration, workers comp, DUI, personal injury, business transactions, etc.) does?
2. Do you know who my ideal client is?
3. Do you know what an online viewer looks for when searching for a lawyer in my specialty?

A producer who is a practicing attorney will know the answers to these questions. Other producers will likely not know the answers.

YOU DON’T WANT TO CREATE 24 to 60 VIDEO CLIPS THAT WILL GET VIEWERS TO CALL YOU

Ok, I understand. You’d rather stick with your very expensive (and useless) yellow pages ad that does not distinguish you from any other lawyer. Maybe you want to try some display ads in the newspaper again. Maybe you’ll try TV commercials or direct mail. Maybe even dabble in radio spots. That’s fine. One year from now I’d like you to come back to this article and objectively look at your stats to see how many calls you received from your other advertising; how many turned into actual clients; how much revenue you generated from that advertising and what your actual return on investment is.

One year from now, you will have lost the opportunity to create 6 months worth of videos. You might even have lost the opportunity to create 12 months of videos. Just think about how many viewers come to YouTube alone: Over 100 million people EACH MONTH! The goal of creating video is to greatly improve the likelihood that an online viewer will call you instead of your competitor. Anything you do to increase those chances will place you ahead and distinguish you from all of your colleagues.

By creating new video every month for six months, you create 4-5 video clips PER MONTH. That gives you 24 to 30 actual videos that will be online. For attorneys who realize how incredible that value is and the tremendous savings you receive, they will eagerly take advantage of the 12 month video incentive program and create 48 to 60 videos by the end of one year. That’s a huge number of videos.

Creating video is the best thing to have happened to me in my law practice. I receive calls from people across the country every day thanking me for educating them and asking me for legal help. Obviously not all callers have valid cases, but just think…if they hadn’t seen my videos, they would have never called.

So, are you willing to create useful video that will get viewers to raise their hands for more information and seek your counsel, or do you want to wait and let every other attorney get the opportunities you’re passing up? The choice, as always, is up to you. My goal is to make you an informed attorney and let you make an educated decision about which path you want to travel.

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