When traveling for vacation or business, most people find themselves traveling by airplane. Here are some airline travel tips for using up your frequent flyer miles that you may accrue.You’ll find that you earn frequent flyer miles faster if you do most of your flying with only one airline.Another tip is to get a credit card with an airline rewards program. It is often surprising how many credit cards can be used to earn points good for airline tickets. Still other cards provide points that can be used to buy products.Whatever you do, don’t let those miles go to waste. If you can’t use them yourself, some programs allow you to transfer miles to a relative or friend. Rules vary for different airlines, so you need to check with your particular carrier, but sometimes you can also cash in miles to buy a ticket in someone else’s name. This would be something you could do if your miles are getting ready to expire but you yourself have no plans to travel at the moment.Don’t just assume that your miles have been credited. When you return from your flight make sure you check your account to make sure your miles are there. If you wait too long it might be too late to get credit.Remember that only a certain number of seats on particular flights are set aside for people cashing in frequent flyer miles. Keep this in mind when making your reservations.Upgrades are often the best use of your frequent flyer miles.If you find a great super cheap airfare price, you’re better off just going ahead and paying cash rather than using your accrued miles. Save them for a more expensive flight or a first-class or business upgrade.Using these airline travel tips, you can be sure to put your frequent flyer miles to better use.
7 Insightful and Timeless Quotations on the Importance of Knowledge and Education
All through history, great thinkers from all areas of society have spoken on the importance of having a good education, but recently the importance of a good education has been under attack. Critic’s claim it’s gotten too expensive and has very little value compared to its costs.
History as well as the current geopolitical circumstances proves that the long term cost of an uneducated society can be even more disastrous. With so many nations developing at a frantic rate, the need for a top notch education system can’t be overestimated. In order for us to remain competitive we need people with the knowledge, skills and discipline for the next century. Many developing nations already recognize that their most valued asset is their young. In some countries after a person graduates from high school, they’re required to either join the military or go to college, cost free. Both are part of a continuing education that helps impart critical thinking skills, discipline, and life skills. Some countries even recognized that education is a right and not a privilege as some claim.
After years of researching and collecting quotations for my books as well as motivation material for my sales force, I’ve compiled an extraordinary amount of wisdom on the importance of having a good education. The amount of wisdom that I’ve compiled is too large for an article of this size, so I’m only listing several of my favorites. Some of my other articles are about the profound wisdom passed down the ages, but without a solid education and good critical thinking skills they lose most of their insight.
If you think that education is expensive, try ignorance.
- Derek Bok 1930 -; American lawyer & educator.
A proper education is now mistakenly thought as a business rather than an investment. We don’t live in a bubble and a society with a sub-par education system will feel its effects for decades to come in all sectors of society. The fact is that in the long run, education pays out dividends far more valuable than money or wealth.
Liberty cannot be preserved without general knowledge among the people.
- John Adams 1735 – 1826; American Politician, 2nd President of the U.S., a founding father of the U.S., diplomat, & first Vice President of the U.S.
People from all nations, in all areas of society; instinctually know that education is essential, if people want to keep their freedoms. An uneducated population is susceptible to manipulation by the powers that be, who can use various techniques to influence one or thousands of people into action or inaction. (See my other article on communication)
Let’s trace the birth of an idea. It’s born as rampant radicalism, then it becomes progressivism, then liberalism, then it becomes moderate, conservative, outmoded, and gone.
- Adam Clayton Powell Jr. 1908 – 1972; American politician & pastor.
One of the facts of life is change and most change comes with the birth of new ideas. At first people are suspect of new ideas because it challenges the conventional thinking, interferes with their current beliefs, will require people to make changes that many have gotten used to, or interferes with the benefits that most people derive from the current system, even though the current system cause a tremendous amount of problems for the vast majority.
As more and more people get used to the idea and see the benefits, it moves along its life cycle. Until finally, due to enormous other changes occurring in the world, the idea is no longer feasible because it’s incompatible with the changed world. Eventually needing to be replaced with newer ideas.
It’s useful to take away 2 things in regards to this quote. One: Change is always needed and constant. Two: The life cycle of an idea as well as where that idea is in its life cycle. Communism for example would be on the outer edges of “Outmoded” just about to cross over into gone.
New ideas are always needed but they also need to be critically scrutinized as to their costs and benefits without regard to the challenges they provide to the current established ideas. Emotions need to be taken out of the equation. Done properly, idea’s like Communism would never have taken hold and rightly so, didn’t in most parts of the world. Due to constant change cause by flood of new ideas, we need people with proper knowledge and education to critically evaluate every aspect of these new ideas.
I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.
- Confucius 551 BC – 479 BC; Chinese teacher, politician, & philosopher.
Nothing substitutes for experience. Knowledge and education are incomplete without experience. You can learn the concepts but to gain understanding, you have to put those concepts to practice or full use. This is why internships and apprenticeship programs are so essential.
Those that know, do. Those that understand, teach.
- Aristotle 384 BC – 322 BC; Greek philosopher, polymath, & one of the fathers of Western philosophy.
This quote has been butchered in recent times to “Those that can, do! Those that can’t, teach!” Nothing can be further from the truth. Why would someone that can’t do something, teach it? We need to honor our teachers and not degrade them. If you know a thing or two, spread the knowledge if you’re able.
The ignorant are always prejudiced and the prejudiced are always ignorant.
- Charles V. 1500 – 1558; Holy Roman Empire Emperor.
Ignorance and prejudice go hand in hand. Prejudice usually grows out of ignorance. Most of the time people are prejudiced because they don’t have full knowledge or understanding of the other person or idea. They haven’t taken the time to acquaint themselves with the other side. Once you fully understand another person or idea, only then can you fairly judge. One of the perks of a good education is realizing how limited your knowledge is, which is why education should be a right.
Sell (or give) a man a fish, he eats for a day, teach a man how to fish, he eats for the rest of his life.
- (Possibly coined by Karl Marx. Often attributed to Chinese philosophers Lao Tzu 6th century BC; Chinese philosopher. (A.k.a. Laozi, circa 5th century BCE) and Confucius 551 BC – 479 BC; Chinese teacher, politician, & philosopher. Although sometimes attributed to Jesus Christ, this proverb does not exist in the Bible’s New Testament.
It is better to teach someone to self-sustain rather than sustain them indefinitely. This is one of the primary reasons for a good education system. A person with a good education will not only survive in the real world but depending on their level of education, can thrive. Thus creating opportunities, exemplifying creativity, and discovering new knowledge that benefits all of humanity.
Bonus
Experience is a hard teacher because she gives the test first, the lesson afterward.
- Chinese Proverb
Sometimes, the only way to get good experience is to get in there and make your mistakes. Take your lumps. Failure isn’t failure but lessons toward success.
Certain Online Marketing Stratagems That Are Essential in 2017
Online marketing has imposed a big impact on both the smaller & bigger organizations. In fact, it is actually wiping out the traditional marketing through its approach. The concept of online marketing is also relative and varies from organization to organization depending on their amplitude, work culture & capital. With a lot of techniques that belong to different categories, online marketing has a bouquet of strategies for all the organizations, whether small or large, whether with a huge capital investment not.A big part of the online marketers think that online marketing is limited to SEO, SMO & SEM, where in reality, a lot of other online marketing strategies have already arrived at the end of 2016 and some of them are still coming since the beginning of 2017. So, as the field of online marketing is quite vast and very much volatile, therefore, the biggest online marketing experts always do the experiment and upgrade themselves to cope up with these changes.But geniuses are geniuses and we can’t wait for being one of them without doing nothing. So, before we lose the game and stay backward, here are certain strategies for you that are dominantly impacting the field of online marketing in the present year of 2017 too!Voice searchNot to say much, Google itself is emerging to the voice call search process. As online marketing majorly works around the search protocol, so the evolution of this latest search technique makes the game easier! Search by voice takes comparatively lesser time and freedom to choose the language users to want and is practically a very optimized method than the general search because it is easier and rapid in terms of showing results on the SERPs. With the rapid growth of voice search on the smartphones over almost all the countries of the world, the reach of this type of search has grabbed half the world of online marketing with its flexibility, smoothness and facilitated terms & conditions.Niche Content CurationGoogle now supports GIFs & videos on the SERPs that directly approach the viewers once they open the page. Once any topic is searched, along with the text contents and images, videos and GIF files also open up to optimize the understanding of the users. The crawler of Google crawls the websites and find out the videos and GIFs and when anyone searches for the niche term, the related videos and GIFs are displayed from the cache. This process has already started in the larger portion of the USA and in the near future, it is expected that this feature will dominate the entire virtual world.Mobile Responsive MarketingThe ‘big switch’ from the big screen to the small screen, more specifically, from desktop to smartphones has compelled the invention of responsive content. As more and more people are accessing the websites through the smartphones, along with the design, the contents need to be mobile friendly. To keep pace with this change, the online marketing strategies are also evolving into being mobile responsive.Live Streaming Cuts The Snow!To redeem online marketing from its old, almost obsolete freezing mode, the social media sites have launched the live streaming in the year 2016. The concept clarifies the objective that checking out the ‘at present scenario’ of the host makes the branding strong. With the help of the faster internet facility and the omnipresence of the smartphones, live video streaming channelizes the constant flow of endorsement and grab the attention of more public. As the amenity gets more and more attention, it is to hope that in the present year, we are going to get this feature more optimized.The ‘Go Getter’ Influencer MarketingInfluencer marketing is the latest in, in the online marketing in 2016. As a consequence, more and more industries are striving to apply this strategy, but without a proper knowledge of how to leverage it for a proper business progression. As influencer marketing focuses less on the direct approach to the targeted group of customers and focuses more on the key leaders or influencers to generate more traffic to your business, it empowers the online marketing from a new perspective.Content Marketing & Dense ContentContent density is the major requirement of organic SEO services. High-quality content and proper keyword stuffing in a website helps to grab the attention of the viewers and enables the website to gain the traffic easily.The ratio of the content on a page and the size of it is referred as content density. If a web page has a higher content density rate it ranks better in the Search Engine Ranking Pages or SERPs. This is because, with a higher content density rate, the crawler crawls the website and finds it more quickly.As people have less time to read the entire article, highlighting the particular portion of the articles that can make the deal is the key to success. Dense content marketing focuses on the chosen content that helps in achieving a good deal of traffic through content marketing.