Shop Til You Drop in Los Angeles

Los Angeles is the second-largest city in the United States, and this sprawling, sweeping metropolis offers many different opportunities for vacationing visitors to have fun. Riding thrill rides in amusement parks, taking a boat to Catalina, surfing and people-watching on the beach, nightclubbing, mountain hiking and star-gazing in Hollywood are just a few. But people in the know realize that shopping in Los Angeles is also great fun. So much so, that in some ways shopping in this hub of entertainment almost seems like a sport.

Unlike the enclosed, traditional shopping malls of many American cities, most shopping venues in Los Angeles are actually outdoor affairs. In Los Angeles shopping is usually alfresco, making it ever so much more pleasant than the normal indoor variety. Many of this great city’s shopping areas even feature outdoor courtyards that permit food and drink, but they do double duty as rich hunting grounds for celebrity-watching.

Shopping in LA combines two activities that are popular with tourists on vacation: the thrill of the hunt for hard-to-find items coupled with the spectator sport of constantly keeping at least one eye peeled for celebrities. And just like the city, shopping is incredibly diverse. Whether you’re looking for expensive couture items or fine antiques, high-priced bling, kitschy souvenirs or other funky merchandise, there are at least a few places in LA that will have them up for sale.

But Los Angeles is such a huge city, where are tourists even to begin? In some ways the answer depends on what they want to buy. But no matter what they’re looking for, all shop-a-holics must at least stop in for a morning or afternoon at the ever-so-chic Rodeo Drive.

Even just hearing the name “Rodeo Drive” strikes a chord that resonates through any eager shopper’s heart and soul. Located in tony Beverly Hills, Rodeo Drive fully deserves its reputation for expensive, sophisticated high fashion. Cartier, Gucci, Prada, Ferragamo, Armani and Dolce & Gabbana all entice celebrity fashionistas to spend huge amounts of money there every day. Whether you’re looking for a pair of high-end blue jeans, an exquisitely tailored suit, glamorous designer jewelry or stylish shoes, you’ll be sure to find it in one of the shops along Rodeo Drive. And who knows, maybe you’ll catch a glimpse of one of those celebrity fashionistas that haunt the place. Truth be told, Rodeo Drive is a unique shopping experience that’s almost unrivaled.

LA vacationers who are shoppers also visit West Hollywood in order to simultaneously shop and enjoy superlative pop culture experiences along Melrose Avenue and Melrose Place. Much like Rodeo Drive, the Melrose area showcases a large number of internationally-renowned designer boutiques. Carolina Herrera, Balenciaga or Oscar de la Renta, anyone? But unlike Rodeo Drive, Melrose also features an assortment of vintage shops for those more down-to-earth shoppers who like to focus on buying new-old items.

Robertson Boulevard may provide the best opportunity for combining possible celebrity-sighting with a fine bit of shopping. Tourists who would love to shop shoulder-to-shoulder with celebrities should consider making a trip to this shopping neighborhood.

The entertainment industry’s influences are scattered throughout LA, and the city’s shopping venues are no exception to this rule. Entertainment’s effects on the shopping scene can be seen in more ways than just the high-end shopping that is available in several of the city’s districts. LA offers a large assortment of recorded music stores as well as bookstores that specialize in works relating to film, television, theater and other performing arts. The Hollywood & Highland Mall complex is an energetic shopping and dining area that also tips its hat to the film industry. Conveniently located in Hollywood near the Walk of Fame, Hollywood & Highland connects to Grauman’s Chinese Theatre as well as the Kodak Theater, home of the Academy Awards.

If your shopping tastes run to the less expensive, shopping on Broadway in central LA offers the less-polished, less-posh, more reasonably-priced shopping that much of working-class LA enjoys. The merchandise there includes brand-name merchandise at bargain basement prices, but watch out for counterfeit or pirated goods.

As you can see, each shopping neighborhood has its own distinct reputation and personality. Some are chic and tony, others are hip and funky. And some are downright cheap. Los Angeles, surprisingly, even offers more conservative shopping areas, so whatever type of shopping “sport” you like, you’ll be able to shop til your drop during your Los Angeles vacation.

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Work at Home Opportunities

Being your own boss is a challenge. You will need to have discipline to be successful. To help you to understand this concept let me point out some of the pro and cons that work at home businesses have.- You don’t have to report to anyone except to yourself but keep in mind that your clients are your bosses now. If you make them mad, you will not make money.- Vacation flexibility is a huge pro and a huge con. You can go anywhere anytime but if something happens with one of your clients you will have to postpone your plans because you don’t have a boss to cover you.- You can establish your home business in your bedroom, garage, attic, etc and these are pro for you but also a con because you don’t have hours to work unless you make yourself to have them. Most of the self-employed work more ours that the ones that have a regular job.Why people choose a work at home business opportunity instead of work hours for somebody else: because the potential earning is bigger.There are several business ideas that make millions of dollars a year for people. Let me give you some of them:- Handyman Agency
- eBay PowerSellers
- Buy and Sell homes
- Buy a Franchisee
- Be part of any affiliated programThe most important thing for you to remember is to research about any business that you want to start before you make the decision to jump on it. There are several good ones but also a lot scam. Another thing for you to consider is to have goals. By setting goals you can:- Achieve more in your lifetime
- Improve your overall performance in life
- Increase your motivation to achieve the most out of life
- Increase your pride and satisfaction in your achievements
- Improve your self-confidence
- Plan to eliminate attitudes that hold you back and cause unhappinessIn summary: if you want to work at home look for a business that is fun and profitable. The one that gives your all the tools to succeed. The one where you can use your computer and it has a low start up cost. Don’t believe in the one that will tell you that you can make money starting with no money. The products need to be good. The home business opportunity that choose needs to have some kind of coaching that will teach you how to run the business from your own home.

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Joint Ventures For Health and Fitness Vendors

Marketers will often cringe when they hear the words “joint venture”. The idea of having to share the workload for a project with another party, and the profits, can seem like an impossible scenario for an entrepreneur who has always made project decisions on their own. Of course, when 9 out of every 10 entrepreneurial efforts fail you have to ask just how much of that was due to poor decision making made in the vacuum of a one-man (or one-woman) committee?Joint ventures do have something to offer even the most obsessive entrepreneurs, and it is something quite valuable: the chance to succeed where before the path looked impossibly difficult. This is why every business owner needs to look at the chance to joint venture as yet another opportunity to expand their business when such an opportunity arises.So how exactly do joint ventures work, and how do you know when to embark upon one?Called JVs for short, joint ventures are often the result of two business parties coming together accidentally and discovering that they each have something that the other might be able to exploit for profit. For example, two business owners might meet at an industry conference and find they have a lot in common, but whereas one of them is great at producing products the other might excel instead at the marketing end of things. They discover they each own one half of a coin that can be banked if they pool their talents and decide to concentrate only on the tasks they are good at, and leave the others to their partner.Marriages are a perfect example of the classic joint venture, where one spouse agrees to stay at home and rear the children while the other builds a career and brings in the money. By exploiting each others talents, they build a family together with relative ease compared to the solo parent who finds the task a whole lot more demanding.Online marketers are often forced to work by themselves for a very long time. This is because they are required to build a certain level of expertise in their business before others will take them seriously. So they get used to the idea of working alone. But there comes a point when they recognize that certain weaknesses are holding them back. Unfortunately the realization is often accompanied by an admission that they have neither the talent nor the time to rectify the weakness. This is when the thought of a joint venture starts to look sensible.Health and fitness vendors are usually passionate about their products because they are pursing a lifestyle profession. Because of this, their marketing skills might not be as well developed as they would like. If this sounds like I am talking about you, then it might be time to begin leveraging the marketing skills of other health and fitness vendors like yourself.The first step, of course, is to find other vendors who share your interests. This is not always easy, but if you CAN find a group of similar vendors there are several options open to you. One of them is to approach other vendors with the aim of initiating an adswap. Adswap is a term used to describe two vendors who are willing to advertise the existence of the other vendor to their own list of customers. But in order for this to work, the two vendors would not want to be direct competitors. If both sell a blood sugar monitoring device, they have little to gain by sending clients to each other.But if one sells a blood sugar monitoring device, and the other sells a diabetes management information product, the exchange of clients makes perfect sense, since the sale of one vendor’s product does not rob the other of a sale. Instead, a client of one vendor may even discover that the product from the second vendor raises the value of the first vendor’s product in the eyes of clients. Such partnerships work well for both vendors, and they would be keen to share as many clients as they can.This is the appeal behind the adswap idea, but it represents only one possible form of joint venture between two different parties in the health and fitness industry. To learn about more opportunities, and to join a like-minded group of health and fitness vendors, get yourself across to Carolyn Hansen’s joint venture membership signup page where you can meet others like yourself and start communicating with the aim of starting your own joint ventures.

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