Blog Articles

Traveling in a group? You are the holiday packagers dream! Imagine being able to offload bulk airline seats, rail passes and entertainment packages in one booking. A group traveling is a wanted commodity and because of this you can secure great deals for your group. But as always, beware of any hidden ‘extras’ such as cancellation policies and preferred partners when stepping outside the package. Be prepared to shop around for the best deal. 

Here are some tips for the traveling group on a budget:

1. Travel insurance can be bought through some companies where savings can be ten percent or more. A group usually consists of four or more. Contact a number of travel insurance agencies and compare quotes.

2. Pack as many people as you can into your hotel room (keeping it legal). The more heads in the room, the higher the number to divide the cost by.

3. Renting a car when traveling in a group of four is usually cheaper than buying travel passes – and more convenient.

4. Food, guidebooks, taxi fares can all be split between the group bringing costs down.

5. Rail passes for groups or pairs may find discount offers in some countries.

6. Some airlines offer discount rates to groups of ten or more traveling together.

7. Group package bookings that have everything included in the price will have all expenses covered so you won’t be surprised by any extra costs, apart from shopping!

8. Discount holiday packages for large groups of travelers are offered through a number of travel agencies. Sports fans may be able to travel to big events using one of these travel packages for much cheaper than organizing it on their own.

If you want to join a group tour so you don’t have to travel alone consider all the pros and cons. Will there be like-minded people? Is there any flexibility to the travel arrangements? If not, will this outweigh the savings you’ll make on joining the tour? Some travelers like the convenience of all the travel arrangements being made for them. Group tour operators will find the best fares and reputable places to stay in. This saves you the hassle but it may mean that some of the cultural experiences you want will have to be put aside for the relatively cheaper ride.

Traveling in a family group can also benefit from a number of offers. Inform your booking agent that it is a family and ask about any special offers or deals. Can you visit any amusement parks or tourist attractions at family discount rates?

When traveling in a group, never be afraid to ask for a discounted rate. Everyone involved in the tourism trade is looking to get large numbers on seats or through doors. Groups are welcomed and catered for accordingly.

This article is brought to you by: Stuart S. Travel – Your Online Travel Guru

www.stuartstravel.com

Cruise Blog

Stories of ordinary people becoming millionaires overnight with the help of some wonderful programs are flooding us from all directions and even though many of these stories are exaggerated at best and total lies at worst, there are many ways in which you can make money, even if you are not a unique talent. Well, I don’t mean that photography does not require talent, but even beginner photographers can make money by selling their photos. Most likely you will not make your first million selling photos, but this is a viable way to earn some extra cash. Photos are a product and as with all products, you need to know what to offer and where to sell it.

What You Can Sell

For those people, who have no idea about photography, a photo is just a photo, but for people who are familiar with photography and arts in general, there are separate distinct groups of photos. The most obvious distinction of photos is based on their content, but for the purposes of selling photos, this distinction is not as important as what the photo can be used for.

The two major uses of photos are for the Web and in print. Web photos tend to be low resolution and lower quality is acceptable for them, while print photos generally are high resolution and low quality is unacceptable. As a beginner photographer, you will most likely target the Web market first because the entry barrier there is not as high as with the printing market. Additionally, if your camera is not a high-end one, your skills in photo processing will hardly be able to compensate for this, so in this case, print photos are not an option for you because of technical reasons. This shouldn’t discourage you because the Web market is vast and there is a lot of space for beginners.

The main buyers on the Web market are Web designers, who make sites for their clients. For many Web designers it is much easier and cheaper to buy ready-made photos than to take the pictures themselves. A solo Web designer can make 10 or even more middle-sized sites a month, which means that he or she will need at least 200-300 photos and illustrations. This does not mean that you will be able to sell 200-300 photos a month to each Web designer you contact, but even if you manage to sell him or her 10-20 photos a month, or more realistically a batch of several hundred photos for him or her to use in the next year, then you can make a lot of money.

Similar to other arts, photography also has genres. Not surprisingly, photos of people, nature and cities sell best. Another category, which is especially popular with designers, is objects of different kinds. You can shoot a light bulb, a pen, some pills, or whatever object you choose, and this may be enough. Add some unobtrusive background to it and you get a cool photo for a Web site. But be careful with copyrights because not all manufacturers will be happy if you shoot their products and make money from this. Try shooting generic products, which have no visible branding.

Similar copyright issues apply to people. If you want to shoot people and you want to be on the safe side, ask them to sign a model contract, which clarifies all the issues in regard to copyrights and sales. Very often you won’t have to hire professional models and you can shoot your friends and relatives instead. Your models don’t have to be extremely beautiful because pictures of ordinary people also sell well. Shooting friends and relatives has one more advantage - they work cheaply or free.

Nature and urban photos are always in demand, but avoid photos which look as if they were taken by tourists because they simply look too unprofessional to be sold. Abstractions are also popular, so if you are creative with PhotoShop or another image processing program you can wake up the Picasso in you.

Where You Can Sell

The type of photos you have is one of the major factors in choosing your sales channels. Basically, the options to sell your photos are the following:

1. Stock photo sites. Stock photo sites are the most popular sales channel. Stock photos are photos you have already taken, i.e. you have in stock. You open an account with a stock photo site, upload your images and every time somebody downloads your photo, you earn a commission. Different sites have different policies, but it’s not unusual to earn $40 per photo each time it is downloaded.

If your photos are popular, it is not impossible to reach dozens of downloads per week. One of the prerequisites for success is to submit sought after photos and to use the right keywords in the descriptions of your photos. The best stock photo site I have found is Shutterpoint. They provide photographers an e-commerce store-front for selling photos, handle advertising and promotion, handle all purchase transactions, provide customer service, and securely deliver images to buyers. All of these features are provided for a very reasonable fee, and in addition, other members often provide valuable feedback on your photos. This is a great way to begin your career as a professional photographer.

2. Stock agencies. Stock agencies are similar to stock photo sites, but in addition to listing your photos, they consult buyers and handle all the legal and logistical matters. Stock agencies usually deal with professional photographers mainly but there are stock agencies, which are beginner-friendly. As with stock photo sites, you usually have to decide (if you have the choice of course) whether you want to sell exclusive rights or only per use rights.

3. Sell directly to newspapers and magazines. Although this is hardly the easiest way to sell your photographs, it is worth trying. Newspapers and magazines are a very tough market to get into but can be a very high paying one. For a start, you can try your local or community media.

4. eBay and similar auctions. Auction sites, such as eBay, are one more sales outlet you can try. Yes you really can earn decent income from selling photos on eBay. This is a good alternative if you sell other products in addition to photos, but even if photos are the only thing you sell, eBay and the other auction sites can do a lot for you. Make sure to avoid small and dark photos. Listings should be created which are descriptive and include realistic prices. Check the Completed Listings option when searching to see examples of photos which have sold.

5. Freelance sites. Unlike the other options listed up to here, freelance sites are generally a place for work for hire projects. This means that usually a buyer comes and asks you to make some photos especially for him or her, but very often there are buyers who offer to purchase your already made (or stock) photos as well.

6. Your own website. Even if the other options work great for you, having your own website is a valuable sales channel. You can offer everything you like - i.e. low resolution mockups for free, paid downloads, etc. The downside is that you need to market your site, otherwise you will hardly get much traffic and, respectively, sales. Search engine optimization is a must and if you are really serious about selling your photos via your website, you can even consider starting an affiliate program.

7. Free samples. These days advertisements are something one can hardly sell without. Instead of launching an expensive campaign, you can give photos away for free but keep your logo on them. This is a kind of advertisement and it will bring you new customers.

Photo Pixel

Online Dating Australia site suggests some ideas when it comes to internet dating. Chatting online offers people opportunities to get to know each other briefly before meeting up for the first time.

Online Dating - checking them out without the chat In these days, more and more people are finding their perfect match on the Internet – and some are finding their perfect nightmare! The Internet is a faceless communications medium in which any person can be anything they claim to be. This makes it easy for the liars to fool their way into your head and heart – but it can also make for the beginnings of a very strong relationship.

How do you determine whether you’ve caught a keeper or a throw-me-back? So think you’ve found a perfect bloke! You’ve been hanging about in your favourite chat room, and just last week this new fellow came in. His nickname is RussellCrowe, which set your heart a-thumping the minute you saw it, and of course you had to talk with him.

“You’re not REALLY Russell, are you? No? Do you look like him?” He answers in the negative to both, telling you that he looks better than Crowe, actually. He’s a Sydney solicitor, with offices in the CBD. And you’re off and running.

Over the course of a few days you spend ten or twelve hours chatting with him online. You feel like you can tell this man everything, and he seems to be telling you all of the deeper thoughts and feelings he has. Is he too good to be true? Here are a few ways to find out. What does she look like? For starters, always ask for pictures. That is pictures, plural. Why? A poser may have found a generic photograph of some gorgeous Shiela on the web and downloaded it to pass off as her own.

It is unlikely that they will have more than one photo to share with you if this is the case. In this modern era of inexpensive digital cameras and high speed connections for uploading images quickly, there is almost no reason for a person not to have three, four, a half-dozen photographs of themselves doing various things, from sitting in their lounge to hoisting a schooner at the hotel and back again.

If you’re presented with pictures that were clearly taken all at one sitting, and moreso, if they appear to be professional sorts of images, this should raise a warning bell. If she looks like she’s flawless in the pictures, this too, should raise the alarms. Real people don’t tend to be flawless. What are his interests? Does the fellow seem to be interested in everything that you are? Or does he have any interests that you don’t share? If he’s just involved in the things that you mention first, ask him what else he enjoys. An answer of “Oh, you know, this and that! Let’s talk more about YOU!” is really unacceptable.

A real human being has strong likes and dislikes of his own, and is generally willing to share them, sometimes in nauseating detail. Do you have friends in common? You both live in Sydney or its environs, and you both chat in the Sydney chat room on your favorite website. It’s an odds on bet that you’ve got at least one or two friends in common, if not in offline life, then online.

Talk to your common friends and ask them about this girl. Be prepared to be disappointed, but hope for a good report. Is he consistent? The number of fakers who are caught through simple inconsistencies is phenomenal. If he tells you on Tuesday that he’s a big fan of Cold Chisel, but then on Friday he doesn’t recognize the lyrics to “When the War is Over”, you may have a problem there.

If she tells you that she’s a big Star Wars fan, but doesn’t know which planet Luke Skywalker was from, you should probably be concerned. If, on the other hand, she tells you every detail of Luke’s life, and knows how his face got mangled in real life, she’ll be apples, mate! Is she willing to let you ring her? If a person you meet online is unwilling to give you her home telephone number, this could be a sign that she’s got a reason she doesn’t want calls at home – for example, she’s married or living with somebody. This is not definitive, as, for example, some people these days only have mobile phones, and others may be concerned about giving out personal contact information to a total stranger from the Internet.

The show-down! Of course, nothing will guarantee that this person is everything that they claim to be, except for meeting them in person and really getting to know them. The first few meetings should be conducted with some amount of safety precautions, as once again, this is a stranger you are meeting. Just as you wouldn’t want to go off alone with a stranger you’ve just met at a pub, you want to ensure maximum safety with somebody you’ve just met online.

Meet in a well populated place, for example, under the dome at the QVB. Bring a friend, and suggest that he bring one as well. If you can’t bring a friend for whatever reason, make sure that at least two friends know where you are going and why you are going there. Arrange check-in times to ring them up and let them know that all is well. Don’t bring this person you’ve just met to your home, nor should you go to theirs. Save that for when you know each other better.

Recap The simple fact is that most of the people you meet online will be pretty much what they present themselves as, but there’s always one bad apple in every barrel. By checking for consistency, believability, and keeping basic safety in mind, you could end up meeting the person you will marry one day. Anybody who doesn’t feel that expecting these things from a potential date or mate is probably not somebody you want to seriously consider spending much time with, either online or off. Happy dating!

Dating Time