Stay at home moms (and dads) are often looking for ways to earn some extra money. The one thing keeping a lot of parents back is that they want to be at home with their children. An online home based business is the perfect business. This type of business allows you to stay home and be with your family. It gives you the freedom to work at a time that is convenient for you. All you need is a computer and an internet connection.Most people are afraid to start their own business. People are afraid to fail, but if you never try you can’t succeed. With the right amount of training and a great marketing system, an online home based business can give you back your freedom; both financially and mentally. It feels good to be your own boss and run your own company. A home based business doesn’t tie you down; it gives you freedom to do what you want, when you want and where you want. An online home based business can be managed anywhere around the world, as long as you have an internet connection.With the right kind of online home based business, you can also raise money for schools, charities or your place of worship. You can live a healthier lifestyle with a green home based business. Teach your children how to be eco-conscious. Show them by example. It is not just the food that they eat, but it is also the home they live in. You can start by changing your cleaning supplies to a more eco-friendly one. Just like your children started with baby steps before they walked, so can you by taking baby steps and slowly change your cleaning products. If everyone started to make small changes just think of the impact it would have on our planet.When you begin to look for an online home based business, do your homework so that you can be successful. Check out the product and make sure that it is one that you like or love. Does the product appeal to everyone or just one type of person? Can the business be easily duplicated? Does the home based business have a great support system and an amazing marketing system already in place? What about their management team? These are just a few questions you need to ask and find the answers.

Like other niche industries, the travel industry is an entity of its own. Consequently, the ideal marketing solutions for this industry are travel-specific and dedicated to this large and very dynamic field. Marketing to the travel industry involves its various sub-categories like hotels, tour operators, airlines, etc.Yet like most marketing done today, travel marketing is intensely data-driven-it has to be in order to be cost-effective and ultimately successful.

It’s All about the Numbers
A careful examination of data reflects a minutia of details that are important to businesses working in the travel industry. Depending on the data you examine, it might tell you whether it’s profitable to market your boutique hotel to families or what time of year it’s best to market your airline ticket specials. Marketing, of course, is an investment so it’s important that the investment pays you back. Choosing a travel marketing specialist with reliable data is, of course, the ideal way to begin your strategic marketing plan.

Data for Business Optimization
How can data help specific travel-related businesses market better to increase business? Agencies that capture data find it so important that their entire business models are completely based upon it. Moreover, it has fallen to their expertise with managing this data to update it. When businesses contract with a travel marketing firm they have access to the data sets they need to make the smartest decisions about their marketing campaign-and ultimately about their money. Of course, it isn’t always easy to understand the numbers or the trends within those numbers so companies have also come to rely upon the optimization specialists in their preferred travel marketing agency who understand how to transform data into an actionable marketing plan.

Translating the Numbers
How can data help you if you are a car rental company or a hotel chain? In other words, what can a travel marketing agency do for you? Whatever the business-hotel, car rental, cruise ship, airline, or some other tourism-based endeavor-a travel marketing agency can help the business expand its customer base, tailor its operations to its most successful offerings, and inevitably make more money. It does this through various measures depending on the business in question.

In the case of hotels, for instance, a travel marketing firm can drive bookings through the hotel’s website, increase brand awareness with data-backed results, reach likely customers, and even find ways to engage frequent flyers. Similarly, travel marketing agencies can increase bookings for cruise and airlines by recommending timely offers. Moreover, it may increase profit for these businesses by identifying ancillary revenue opportunities.

Working with the Experts
While a company’s own marketing executives have definitive know-how and a level of business-specific expertise that is immensely important for any company, the travel marketing agency has a broad level of travel-specific expertise that regularly looks at the big travel picture-a perspective that can be essential for a travel-related business. Working with a renowned agency is a decided way to expand and improve business through carefully wrought marketing solutions that are based on reliable data. Chances are if you are a business that relies on tourism or travel, this data and these experts could dramatically help you too.

WHAT IS A PENNY AUCTION?

Penny auctions have exploded in popularity with the massive growth of the internet. However, few people know the true origins of penny auctions.Beginnings actually stretch back to the Great Depression. Those were hard times for everyone, but even harder for farmers. Farmers struggled to bring in steady income because of droughts and crops not selling as well as they had previously. As a result, the banks would foreclose on the farmers who couldn’t keep up with their mortgage payments.

The banks weren’t satisfied with just repossessing the house, they wanted to raise as much capital as possible, so they resorted to selling off the possessions of the owners of the repossessed houses. There was not much the farmers could do about it so they began bidding ridiculously low prices, pennies, on the items while threatening others who dared to bid higher than a few pennies.

The auctions of today hardly resemble their tremulous beginnings. Being part of a penny auction today is exhilarating, fun, and addictive. It combines the selling format of auctioning with a little bit of chance factored in.Auctions are a game of strategy but also a game of luck.

The premise behind penny auctions is giving people the chance to win an item at a drastically reduced price.Auctions make that possible by spreading out the cost of the product among multiple bidders. In order for a person to take part in an auction, they must pay a set price for each bid. For example, if a person wanted to bid on a fifty dollar Amazon gift card then he would spend a dollar for each time a bid placed. If he ended up winning the gift card, then he would only have spent a few dollars for a fifty dollar gift card. Usually penny auctions sell bids in packages.

HOW PENNY AUCTIONS WORK!

The main foundation of penny auctions is the pay-per-bid format. It is the key that allows bidders to win items at the fraction of their retail value and allows the auction owners to keep their site profitable. Most y auction sites run on the same premise: people pay a set amount for each bid, whenever a person places a bid within the closing seconds of the auction time will be added, the last person left with a unique bid after the clocks runs out will win the item. There are a large variety of items that can be won, but they tend to be popular electronics or gift cards to popular stores.

There are two types of auctions: lowest unique bid auction and highest unique bid auction. Lowest unique auction sounds confusing but it is actually quite simple. A unique bid is when only one person has a bid at a certain price. Bids usually start at one penny, a bidder can then place a bid at two pennies. Until another bidder places a higher bid, the most recent bidder will be the lowest unique bid because that was the only bid at two cents and nobody bid higher. However, penny auctions generally don’t stop at one penny. It is not uncommon to find auctions that end up at a couple hundred dollars based on the popularity of the item being auctioned. However, the same principles apply for those auctions. Highest unique bid auctions follow the more traditional auction format such as eBay. The person with the highest bid at the end of the auction wins the item.

Auction site owners turn a profit by selling bids. Say twenty people are bidding on a ten dollar gift card at one dollar per bid, at the end of the auction if there were twenty bids placed in total then the site owner would have made twenty dollars with a ten dollar profit.Auctions do seem like a win-win situation:The site owner makes money while the bidder gets an item for dirt cheap. However, not everyone wins in penny auctions. The people who paid one dollar each bid but left with nothing to show for their investments will not be so happy.

HOW TO WIN!

Penny auction has a lot of chance mixed into it, but one can incorporate strategy that will help raise the chances of winning. Playing smart can make all the difference between gambling and auctioning.

The first crucial tip to winning penny auctions is to know how to manage your bids. Your goal should be to win as much as possible without spending a ton of money buying bids. Managing your bids means that you should already know how much you are willing to risk in order to win an item. The amount of capital you are willing to risk will determine how many bids you can use. Once you know how many bids you have to spend on an item, then you will be better able to manage how and when you place a bid. That will keep you from blowing away all of your bids in the first few seconds of the auction.

The next tip is to practice time management. When fighting in the trenches of penny auctions, you have two enemies: other bidders and time. Knowing when to bid is a must if you want to have success. Placing a bid when there is a lot of time left on the clock is never a good idea. You have to remember that the key to winning a penny auction is being the last one standing when the clock runs out and that each bid increases the amount of time left. It would be a good practice to wait until the last few minutes of the auction before you begin to bid.

The final tip for successful auctioning is to keep your emotions under control.Auctions have a lot of similarities to gambling, and just like gambling, your spending can get out of control. If you keep your emotions level, it will keep you from making rash decisions and blowing loads of cash. Keep your mind clear so that you can gage the behavior of the other bidders and outsmart them.

HOW TO AVOID SCAM SITES!

Penny auctions are a great addition to the web whether you want to win an item that otherwise you wouldn’t be able to afford or if you simply enjoy the thrill that comes with bidding in auctions. Unfortunately, scam sites have tarnished the reputation of the legitimate penny auction sites. However, there are ways that you can protect yourself from scamers and enjoy your auctioning without having to worry about losing your money due to dishonesty.

Checking the reputation of the auction site before you start spending your hard earned money is always a good idea. Chances are other people have tried the site before you and some of them have left reviews. The reviews are your way to gage whether a auction site is trustworthy or not. If a site is getting overwhelmingly negative reviews, then that is a clear indication that you should steer your business elsewhere.

Another tool you can use to protect yourself is checking the Alexia ranks of the auction sites. Alexia rank will give a solid view of how much traffic the auction is getting. If you see a huge difference in the amount of traffic Alexia is projecting and the amount of active bidders on the site, then warning signals should be ringing in your head. Some auction sites have been known to set up robots that automatically bid on projects in order to keep the auction going and inflate the price. That is known as shill bidding. You can sniff out those sites by comparing the traffic the site should be getting to the amount of users using this site.

CONCLUSION!

New legislation may come out later down the road that will officially make penny auctions gambling, but until then, it is a fun, exciting auction that allows one to win the item they’ve always wanted but couldn’t afford.Auctions are also quite lucrative for the site owners because of the pay-per-bid strategy they’ve incorporated. Penny auctions had humble beginnings with farmers who just wanted to get back at the banks who kicked them out of their house. More recently, auctions have enjoyed an explosion in popularity with the rise of the internet.

There are two main formats fora auctions, lowest and highest unique auction, however they both run on the same premise where the last unique bid wins the item. Winning a penny auction will require a certain amount of mental tactic and a bit of luck. However, you can increase your odds of winning by practicing certain techniques such as managing your bids wisely, learning how to work with the time, and keeping a level head and your emotions under control. When you combine those three strategies to your bidding plan, you will find that you win a lot more often.

It is important that you do your due diligence to protect yourself when participating in auctions. Not every auction is run by honest and trustworthy people. There are people out there who just want to take your money. You can protect yourself by ensuring that you only bid on sites that already have a very positive reputation from real users.