5 Tips to Help You Prepare for International Business Travel

Travel overseas for business can be a fun adventure, but it also needs to be taken seriously. Before traveling to another country, whether for work or pleasure, it’s important to learn the customs and procedures of your destination, while also preparing yourself for your trip.As a business traveler, you’re not only representing your country of origin to all of those you meet, but you are also a representative of your company. It’s important to be knowledgeable about the country you are planning on visiting as a way to show respect.Besides requiring the correct documents like a visa and passport, there are other obligations you will likely need to complete before making your way overseas. Many of these requirements are specific to a particular destination based on the laws and regulations for the countries you are visiting. Make sure you do your homework well in advance so you know each of these requirements.5 Tips for Overseas Business TravelInternational travel for business can be a very exciting opportunity. You not only get to see new and interesting parts of the world, but you even get paid while doing it. In order to have the best experience possible, there are things you can do in advance to prepare. Here are five tips to help execute the perfect international business trip.

Create an Organized Itinerary: Make sure that your days are packed with opportunities to help your company. Scheduling time for appointments, meetings, and personal time is very important to executing a beneficial international business trip. An itinerary should be a good guide for your trip’s goals and achievements. Because you do not want to waste any time on this trip, it’s better to plan in advance to take full advantage of the opportunity.

Learn about the Culture and Customs: Before landing in said country, it’s important to understand the environment, culture and practices of this region. Knowing up-to-date news and information about your international travel destinations will help you avoid inappropriate comments or disrespectful behavior. Not only is it important to understand the culture, but it is also beneficial to know protocols, customs and etiquette as well. This includes things like: common greetings, religious practices, business manners, dietary practices, and acceptable humor.

Learn the Native Tongue: While not every business trip requires learning a whole new language, it’s always advisable to seek out some basic vocabulary for the region you are visiting. The use of a translator might be beneficial as well. Communication is a huge part of business and breaking down those barriers will only help you with your business endeavors.

Protect Yourself: Traveling internationally can be exciting, but also very stressful and sometimes dangerous. A new environment can mean new hazards and threats. Don’t avoid protecting yourself to save money. Sometimes travel insurance is a valuable way to reduce the risk of health crises and other types of risks.

Stay Connected: Plan to use your communication devices while staying overseas. Make sure that your plan is available in other countries, or rent a cellphone from the airport. Communicating back and forth between your headquarters, while in a different country, is often an important part of international business. Communicating with your coworkers back at the office is an important part of international business travel.
Traveling internationally for business can be a new adventure. It’s becoming increasingly common as more and more U.S. companies also have offices overseas in places like Ireland, Costa Rica, the United Kingdom, and Hong Kong. In 2014, Forbes rated Denmark as the #1 country for business.Regardless of where you are traveling, planning ahead helps to make the experience as positive as possible. Know the culture of the places you are visiting, and when possible, make ongoing communication a vital part of your trip. Try to maximize your time spent overseas by preparing in advance for productivity. The more organized you are, the more time you’ll likely have to enjoy some sightseeing and leisure. Always remain respectful, while keeping your goal in sight.

What Is the Connection? What I Am Learning About Social Bookmarking

There are hundreds of social bookmarking sites. What is the purpose or use of these sites to me was a mystery. Here is what I found out.The original or traditional social bookmarking sites were and still are used to bookmark our favorite websites. Our browsers have a spot that we can save our favorites but we can only access them from that computer, with a spot online we can access them from any computer.What are the advantages of Social bookmarking?We can store, organize, search and manage bookmarks, then we can access these from any internet connection no matter where we are in the world.
These sites are browser independent, so you can get into your account from any browser on any computer.
These sites allow you to share bookmarks with anyone that has an account.
Most importantly It provides a way for you to tell people about your website and build one way links to your site.Some of the most popular social bookmarking sites are: Delicious, Digg, StumbleUpon, Sphinn and Reddit. I found there is a difference between Social Networking sites like Twitter and Facebook – that might be for another discussion.Why do we want to use Social bookmarking sites?Social bookmarking does now has and it continues to grow, a wide user base.
Teenagers and younger internet users like it because it does such a great job of bringing them current, relevant content without having to really go out and track it down online.
It is a way to find and organize online content – It is a way that you can go to a site recommended by a real person rather than a search engine.
They are finding that web marketers are using social bookmarking sites more and more. When it is used in a way that makes them effective they are finding many marketing benefits. Some think that this is just the beginning of this wave.The biggest question that I had is, how does Social Bookmarking work? I found I needed to find this out a before I could really make it work.Tags are important in social bookmarking. The bookmarks are organized by keywords or tags that you place on your bookmarks. Tags “allow you to provide a quick and efficient way to categorize your bookmarks” You create the tags and put as many in your bookmark as you like. I was told that Tags form the foundation of a social bookmarking site.
Everyone knows when the go the site who created each bookmark and then you have access to that person’s other bookmarked resources. This allows you to make social connections with people that are interested in the same topics you are. The you can discuss, rate and vote on the content.
This was one of two new words to me that I was told was a concept that I needed to understand about Social Bookmarking. The first word was Taxonomy: it is a set of words that classifies or categorizes a system. This classifying of sites within the system, into a directory for searching purposes is usually done by internet professionals.
The second word was Folksonomy: through the process of multiple people setting up bookmarks to a given URL and assigning their own tags to describe it, a whole set of keywords describing the site begins to take shape. Thru public opinion or communities a taxonomy develops as dozens, hundreds or even thousands of people come to a social bookmarking sites and enter a tag for a specific website or webpage. The advantage they say of the folksonomy is it provides a democratic tagging system that reflects the opinions of the general public. Some other words you may here to describe this are collaborative tagging, social classification, and social tagging.
I wondered why on some of the social bookmarking sites like delicious these squares with words came up some words larger and some smaller came up. This is called a Tag Cloud. These are a visual way to see the foklsonomy. The larger the font the more popular the tag word is, you can then click a tag in the tag cloud to see the latest bookmarks saved with that tag.Well I think that is enough to absorb for today in a couple of days we will talk about some of the things we need to do to make social bookmarking work for us.

How Do I Blog? Tips For Creating And Maintaining A Powerful Money-Making Company Or Personal Blog

Creating and maintaining a blog is one of the best ways to market yourself or your company on the internet. Blogging provides a wealth of opportunities for both yourself and your readers.Few internet marketing strategies afford you with the flexibility of your own blog. In this article, we’ll explore exactly what a blog is, how to create one, promote one, and manage a blog so that it drives traffic to your website and helps promote your business and make you money online.What is a blog?In reality, a blog or “web log” is nothing more than a very simple website dedicated to a topic or closely related set of topics. A blog can stand alone as an independent URL, such as yourblog.com, or it can be hosted by a blogging website such as Google’s blogger.com or you might embed a blog directly on your own website.A blog generally consists of a few basic parts. The main blog title, which describes what the blog is about and tells viewers the general topics they’ll find there. The blog will also have multiple posts or small articles that are dated and feature the bi-line of the author. Finally, the blog will feature a comments section where readers can post comments on a blog entry and interact with each other as well. Additionally, most blogs will have social sharing mechanisms where readers can share the information on their Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and other social networking accounts.A blog can be more complex than this, but in essence, what has been described above is the core of every online web log you will come across. Blogs should be informative and interesting, as well as optimized for search engine traffic.How do you create a blog?As stated above, a blog is a website, or a part of a website. If you are a programmer, you can easily write your own blogging scripts. However, there are generally two types of blog creation and maintenance options for the average internet user.First, you can use blogging or website creation software to make your blogs. These systems include WordPress, Joomla, and other CMS type systems. These allow a great deal of flexibility and give you the ability to create entire websites around your blogs.The second most common method is to use a pre-existing blogging application like the afore-mentioned Blogger.com. This website will allow you to build and maintain your own blog with only a very few clicks of your mouse. They provide themes, editing tools and social interaction that is very simple and very effective.As mentioned earlier, a blog should be focused on a specific topic or category of topics to be effective. For example, our blog is about internet marketing, business development and website design. Very inter-related topics. It allows users and other entrepreneurs to share their thoughts, ask questions and gives them an ongoing resource.A blog should not ramble and cover multiple unrelated topics. Stay focused on what your blog is about. If you want to blog about several unrelated topics, create more than one blog. You can even network and cross-link them. Just try to keep each blog focused on its intended purpose. You’ll find it is a lot more effective at capturing and keeping interest.How do I manage my blog?Probably the most important thing about a blog is the way you manage it. Blogging is unlike all other forms of marketing and content creation due to several factors. First, blog readers come to expect and will respond to consistent postings. You can’t treat your blog as a once in a while activity.Second, because of the interactive nature of a blog, you will have to monitor and interact with those of your readers who comment. You may even get requests for guest bloggers. You must be attentive and responsive.Write at least once per week, if not more. If and when your blog begins to grow in popularity, you’ll find that you will have to be on top of it on a daily basis. There will be a constant desire for new information as well as many comments to be addressed. Of course, if you get to a point where your blog requires more than an hour a day of your attention, you will be glad to do the work.How to promote your blog and use it to promote youMany people wonder how you promote a blog. How do you get readers? Keep in mind what we’ve already mentioned. A blog is nothing more than a small website. It’s going to be indexed by Google, yahoo and Bing like any other website. Further, it will get indexed by some special blogging search engines as well. So the first thing to think about with your blog and all the posts you write is SEO.Second, just like a website, begin to build back links to your blogs. You can do this by actively pursuing link exchanges as well as writing good quality content that others will want to syndicate to their own blogs and websites.Another great way to promote your blog is to comment on others’ blogs. It’s like that old saying about writing letters, “You’ve got to write them to get them.” Become a contributor to other people’s blogs and they in turn may contribute to yours, thus allowing you all to exchange active links.Finally, use social networks. Let people know about your new blogs and about posts they may find interesting. Ask them to comment or even write a guest post about a topic on which they’re knowledgeable. Just keep in mind, you want to provide this network with real valuable information, not just a constant stream of self-promotion.If you do all this, and some other internet marketing strategies too numerous for this article, you will not only see your blog visits and comments increase, but this will almost automatically do the same for a website you want to promote via this blog. You can even embed the latest one or two blog posts on your site to keep its content growing and send visitors back and forth. Provide your blog readers with quality valuable content and they’ll not only keep coming back, link to you and comment, they’ll tell others about you. So go out there and create a place for sharing your thoughts and information. And if you want, let us know about it!