Latin American airlines, do not charge baggage fees, fees for booking with a live agent nor fees for booking online. Latin American airlines do not try to nickel and dime you with fees at every turn. Yet somehow, as a group, they are more profitable.

Yes, we can give some credit to the economic downturn, and the race to the bottom of the airfare barrel that North American airlines are in, but it’s still an interesting prediction n’est pas?

I think that part of the difference lies is that air travel in Latin America is still a luxury good, like it was in the “good old days” of the airline business in North America. Since it’s a luxury good, airlines can actually charge what the ticket costs plus a bit more for a profit.

Photo Credit: BriYYZ

At least, that’s my opinion, and I’m sticking to it. What do you think?

Joanna Shields speaks

Photo Credit: AIB London

The current vp of EMEA, Blake Chandlee, was the first Facebook employee in London. He will be vice-president of sales for emerging markets. He will focus on Eastern Europe, Asia Pacific and Latin America.

I’m not sure how he will manage the Latin American market for Facebook from Europe, but that’s something that they’ll need to figure out. No word on if he speaks Spanish or not, but I would hope that Facebook thinks that speaking Spanish would be an important skill to have if you intend to grow the brand/ usage in Latin America.

This post is based on reports from The Guardian UK.

Basically, here are the steps:

1. Find companies that are already advertising on Google, Bing or whatever.
2. Go to the advertiser’s site, click around and find their contact information
3. Reach out to them and tell them why your blog/show would be a good fit for their ad money
4. Convince them that your channel is a good place for their ad. At the very least, get an affiliate deal with them
5. Popurls is your friend
6. Never underestimate the power of cold calling and asking people

Basically, Gary Vee says that you have to Google your way to the people that are advertising in your space.

You have to take it, because that’s how you’re going to get it.
– Gary Vaynerchuk

The Wall Street Journal recently published an article where they talk about the history of Embraer, and its prospects for the future. I feel that they echoed what I said in my recent post where I talked about Airbus, Boeing and Embraer.

Embraer, also known as Empresa Brasileira de Aeronáutica SA, was officially started back in 1969 by the Brazillian government. Embraer’s, and Brazil’s, roots in aviation go back to the early days. However, it wasn’t until Embraer was privatized in 1994 that it started to become a player on the world aviation stage.

Despite a huge debt burden, and not selling a single copy of their first post-privatization product, Embraer managed to pull together a hit in the 50 seat ERJ-145. They learned that it’s better to have a product that customers want, than to have a great product that no one wants to buy.

Photo Credit: abdallahh
Embraer ERJ-145 in American Eagle livery

Right now, Embraer is a player in the 50-70 and in the 70-120 seat market. They offer small jets that offer big jet smoothness and efficiency that major airlines use on their short routes that used to be served by turbo prop planes.

Embraer is questioning whether they need to expand into larger capacity markets. A move towards bigger planes will put them in direct competition with Airbus and Boeing.

I like what the CEO of the company, Mr. Frederico Fleury Curado, says about expanding into larger planes. Mr. Curado says that he doesn’t see the market moving to buy a new airframe unless that airframe provided a major differentiator from the proven and known airframe platforms currently in the market.

I for one am glad to see Embraer is doing fairly well ($248.5 million in profit last year on $5.47 billion in sales) and has an order backlog of 1700 planes.

Despite increased competition from Bombardier with their new 150 seat regional jet and the new Japanese, Chinese and Russian manufacturers coming into the space I see a bright future for Embraer. To paraphrase Mr. Curado, I don’t foresee many airlines ditching the proven and established airframe in favor of newer and unproven airframes from new manufacturers.

Photo Credit: wbaiv
Embraer E-190 Series Regional Jet

It’s great to see a Latin American company competing on the global stage and doing well.

shill our products and services with mumbo jumbo and corporate rhetoric.

He’s right.

Your website is really an information publishing portal, and seeing it as anything other than that, is a waste of time and resources. Having the latest and greatest in widgets, videos and the best web copy money can buy will be useless if you approach your website using old paradigms.

Check out my blog

Credit: Loozrboy

Your website, is for content creation and content publishing. That’s it.

Your website is not for pushing your products, but for informing buyers about your products. To paraphrase Gary V, your website is not about selling, but rather it’s about helping people buy.

See the difference?

I’m actually going to go a step further and say that websites are media publishing portals. Your site should be a venue to publish your multimedia, your text based and photographic content. Your content is what you want your visitors to consume on their way to buying your product or service.

Your content is your product.

Marketing Latinos will be changing direction in the near future. We’re really excited about the changes that are coming. Stay tuned for our announcement!

Photo Credit: Nyghtowl

This message is from Mike Young. He’s a lawyer that specializes in internet business law and from time to time he sends out messages to his list that are at times inspiring and at other times a forewarning. Anyway, he sent this out on St. Patrick’s day and I felt it was appropriate for me to repost here.

Reposted with permission.

In the spirit of St. Patrick’s Day, an Irish blessing: “May
you live to be a hundred years, with one extra year to repent.”

Legend has it that Saint Patrick drove the snakes out of Ireland.

No one would believe a story about how Saint Patrick did Ireland a
favor by importing snakes to infest the Emerald Isle.

Why?

Fear of snakes gives credibility to the the myth that he got
rid of them.

Whether the fear is rational is irrelevant.

One of the most-feared “snakes” that I’ve encountered among
entrepreneurs is a sense of failure based upon expectations of
where they “should be” based upon the apparent success of others.

This is a no-win game because most of the “success” stories are
fraudulent at worst or overhyped at best.

Let me give you two examples.

I know a “guru” who claims to be making over $30K per month from
one website. Based on the traffic stats for the site, if 100% of
the visitors bought from the guru, it still wouldn’t be enough to
support the claims.
Another “guru” claims to have had a high six-figure product
launch recently. Yet the guy is broke and has creditors breathing
down his neck.

Don’t compare your business to others based upon earnings claims.
There are too many variables involved for the comparison to be
accurate, including the probability that your competitor is lying
about how much money he’s making.

Here’s a key point. Even if the claims were true, it wouldn’t affect
where you are now. Your success is not dependent upon others’ failures.

Focus on the fundamentals of your business and when you achieve
your business goals, don’t brag about it.

To your success!

-Mike

P.S. Remember that your online business fundamentals include
putting the right legal protections in place. Resources created to
help you do this can be found at this link.

Recommended Resources

Michael E. Young, J.D., LL.M.
Attorney & Counselor at Law
Law Office of Michael E. Young PLLC
Tel: 214-546-4247

MATERIAL CONNECTION DISCLOSURE: You should assume that the
sender of this e-mail has an affiliate relationship and/or
another material connection to the providers of goods and services
mentioned in this message and may be compensated when you
purchase from a provider. You should always perform due diligence
before buying goods or services from anyone via the Internet or
offline.

5068 W. Plano Parkway, Suite 300, Plano, Texas 75093, USA

I think it bears repeating, that we need to “focus on the fundamentals.” Thank you Mike!

Patrick doesn’t mention it, but some of the communities that he manages are quite large, he knows what he’s talking about.

He gives us some nuggets about how to not look like a __________ whenever we’re in or on community based sites. Go to iFroggy.com for more info on managing online communities.

Last night, I had a great conversation with Scott Allen, Fernando Labastida and Alex Barrera. We talked about social media in Spanish and how come there’s not a lot of content being produced in Spanish that is actually useful. I have a lot of video from that conversation, I think we can have that posted sometime soon.

Go here to see a list of SXSWi attendees on twitter: SXSWi twitter list

There’s 1 session in particular that I’m looking forward to, it’s the one that proclaims Austin to be the Latino Blogger capital of the world. Can’t wait to see what that’s all about. I’ll give y’all a full report once the dust settles from the conference.

Gracias!

Here are 3 things to do if you want to avoid looking like a spammer:

1. Avoid keyword stuffing. What does that mean? It means avoid putting too many of your keywords in your posts. You should also avoid having your key words close together. So, pay attention to the density of your target words to the rest of your text, shoot for 2-3% density and you should be OK.

   Here’s an example of keyword stuffing:
   

   Did you notice how many times the writer of that passage stuffs uses the words “marketing,” “online,” and “internet”?

2. Avoid talking and not saying anything. This is, I believe, an acquired skill. Most people, when they speak, they have a point to make. When talking to prospective clients or when blogging etc. make sure that you say something. Anything other than “sign up to get the 20 secrets to the best internet marketing widget known to man that they don’t want you to have.” Teasing someone in the text to entice your reader to take a next step is OK, but you have got to give me a real reason to take that next step.

   By the way, only scammers and spammers have “secrets” that “they” don’t want you to have.

3. Avoid being too religious. Let me explain, a lot of scammers and spammers will hide behind the guise of being pious. They believe that by acting and pretending to be pious that you will trust and believe them. Unless you know the person personally, be on guard any time any one tells you that they wanted to talk to you while they are “on their way to Bible study.” I feel strongly that someone’s piousness, or appearance thereof, should not be the reason that you do business with them.

Bonus: Pay attention to the comments on your blog or website. If you have a site where people can comment, such as a blog, or a squidoo lens or something along those lines, do yourself a favor and pay attention to what people are saying in the comments.

Here’s an example from the same site where I took the sample stuffing text from:

Looks like that site owner should’ve activated Akismet and enabled comment moderation.

I am a big believer in article marketing. If you’re looking to generate traffic to your website, writing articles and then posting those articles on various sites is the cheapest and quickest way to get visitors to your website.
There are a lot of nuances when it comes to article marketing. For example, 90% of the success of your article depends on the title. If your article doesn’t have a good title, people won’t open it and read it. Yes, you should provide good content in your article body, but that won’t matter if no one wants to read your article because the title sucks.

The next most important part of an article, is the resource box. It’s the signature box at the bottom of the article. That’s where you invite people to come to your website and get a free something or another. The quality of the article and the relevance of the free something or another will help with getting people to your website, but more important than that, is that the resource box should flow out of the body of the article.

So, where do you go post your articles?

There are many, many, many websites out there that allow you to post your articles for free. There are also a lot of services that purport to automatically submit your articles for you. My experience with automated tools is that your mileage will vary. Some of the automated tools are good, but expensive and if you have money to burn for an article submitter service, just buy PPC ads instead and save yourself the time and hassle or writing articles, but I digress.

While doing some research for this post, I found a website that uses a proprietary tool that ranks the effectiveness of article marketing sites. I don’t know anything about the formula they use, so I can’t vouch as to how precise or accurate it is, but I do like that they have a list of over 450 article directories. They even recreate the list every month.

http://www.masonworld.com/masonworld-article-directory-rank/

Here are the top 20 article directories from the above site for the month of January 2010.

Notably absent from the list is Associated Content, I’m not sure why they didn’t make the cut, but I like posting my articles on AC because they split their adsense revenue with their authors. I like to say that every little bit of revenue helps.