How to Plan a Business Trip – Part II
I wrote a post sometime back on how to plan a business trip. I had mentioned in passing that I would soon be writing a post that dealt with how to plan various events to attend during the course of the trip. So how do you really go places(excuse the mild pun) during a business trip?
1. Have a clear objective as to what are the type of people you need to be meeting with. Depending on that you need to choose your target locations and events.These can be networking events, seminars, conferences, referral meetings, unconferences, informal meetups, etc.
2. Plan in advance. Search for events in the cities which you are going to be visting. Some good resources include Meetup, Eventbrite, Upcoming, LinkedIn Events, Gary’s Guide, etc. From our personal experience, I would definitely recommend Meetup. It’s an excellent resource.
3. When you send out your RSVPs, try to coordinate with the organizers of the event beforehand. This can be handy if you wish to make a presentation or a talk at a networking event, for instance.
4. Make sure you have just the right number of events lined up for a day. Time is a valuable resource when you are on a trip, but you don’t want to wear yourself out either. Also, you need to plan it right in order to meet up with existing clients, because hey, they are as much important(if not more) as prospects!
5. Lastly, a few pointers – give out business cards, be on time, be polite and listen to what others say. Request for 1-1 meetings and follow up with people.
Check out Chaitanya’s post on OpenForum to know more about how to make networking and referral events work for you. Do you have any interesting pointers from your own business trip experiences? Let us know!
![[Bloglines]](http://www.p2w2.com/blog/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/bloglines.png)
![[del.icio.us]](http://www.p2w2.com/blog/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/delicious.png)
![[Digg]](http://www.p2w2.com/blog/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/digg.png)
![[diigo]](http://www.p2w2.com/blog/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/diigo.png)
![[Facebook]](http://www.p2w2.com/blog/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/facebook.png)
![[Furl]](http://www.p2w2.com/blog/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/furl.png)
![[Google]](http://www.p2w2.com/blog/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/google.png)
![[kirtsy]](http://www.p2w2.com/blog/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/kirtsy.png)
![[Ma.gnolia]](http://www.p2w2.com/blog/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/magnolia.png)
![[MySpace]](http://www.p2w2.com/blog/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/myspace.png)
![[Propeller]](http://www.p2w2.com/blog/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/propeller.png)
![[Reddit]](http://www.p2w2.com/blog/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/reddit.png)
![[Simpy]](http://www.p2w2.com/blog/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/simpy.png)
![[Sphinn]](http://www.p2w2.com/blog/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/sphinn.png)
![[StumbleUpon]](http://www.p2w2.com/blog/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/stumbleupon.png)
![[Technorati]](http://www.p2w2.com/blog/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/technorati.png)
![[Windows Live]](http://www.p2w2.com/blog/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/windowslive.png)
![[Yahoo!]](http://www.p2w2.com/blog/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/yahoo.png)
![[Post to Twitter]](http://www.p2w2.com/blog/wp-content/plugins/tweet-this/icons/tt-twitter-big4.png){kind=icon}
![[Post to StumbleUpon]](http://www.p2w2.com/blog/wp-content/plugins/tweet-this/icons/tt-su-big4.png){kind=icon}
Protected: Webinar Video – 14th July 2010
A Useful Fix for Duplicate Content Issues
I recently came across the concept of canonical URLs. It’s a useful fix for duplicate content issues within your site.
Say you have two different versions of the same web page, with very similar content. Maybe you use one of them is actually present in the navigation links in your website and the other is a landing page for your PPC ads. But obviously you wouldn’t want your page rankings and other metrics to be split between those two. An easy solution for this is to mark the “more important” page as a “canonical page” . According to the definition in Google Webmaster Tools Help , “a canonical page is the preferred version of a set of pages with highly similar content.”
So how do you mark a page as canonical?
It’s very simple, very similar to the concept of nofollow blogs. Lets consider the example I gave before. You have two similar pages in your website, one is an actual page in the website and another is a duplicate you use for PPC ads.
http://sample.com/website_page.php
http://sample.com/landing_ads.php
In this case, the more important page of the two is obviously “website_page.php”. So within the HTML code of “landing_ads.php”, all you have to do is add the following code in the <head> section:
<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.sample.com/website_page.php" />
When the search engine spider is crawling “landing_ads.php”, the canonical tag will instruct the spider that this page is simply a copy of “website_page.php”and that whatever backlinks or traffic metrics this page has should point back to the “preferred page”, or in our case, “website_page.php”.
Technically, this seems similar to a 301 redirect, though there are subtle differences in the way both work. A canonical tag is mainly for the benefit of a search engine, as opposed to a redirect which is intended for end users. There’s a good SEOmoz article in that explains this concept very well.
Are there some more useful other on-page optimization practices that you follow for your site? Do let us know in the comments section!
Webinar Video: SEO for Business Owners, June 16th
Quite a few registrants who couldn’t make it to p2w2’s webinar on SEO for Business Owners on June 16th (and some others who did!) requested for the recorded video of the webinar. For the benefit of all readers of our blog, here are the presentation slides and the recorded version of the webcast:
Here’s also a chance for you to order our ebook, which has complete information of all the information presented in the webinar, along with links to some useful tools and resources.
Our next webinar will be on July 14th, 2010. Register yourself now by sending an email to iswarya[AT]p2w2[DOT]com with the subject line “RSVP to p2w2 7/14 Webinar“. For more details check:
SEO for Business Owners Webinar
We look forward to meeting you!
How to Improve Google AdWords Quality Score
A couple of weeks back, I attended a webinar on improving Quality Score of Google AdWords, hosted by WordStream, a search engine marketing software company. Quality Score is a numerical measure of how well your Google ads are performing, and is thereby used to determine your ad position as well as your cost per click. Quality Score could be broadly thought as a sum component of all these factors:
- Click Through Rate (Number of Clicks/Number of Impressions)
- Relevance of Ad to keywords
- Landing Page
- Other Factors
The next part of the webinar focused on ways to achieve a better Quality Score. Some of the things you can do:
1. Showing ads only to targeted audience will bring down the number of times your ad is shown (impressions), and therefore improve your CTR. Some of the things you could do is filter out showing your ads by geography, day/night time (based on previous performance), making use of phrase/broad/exact search filters and implementing negative keywords for your campaign.
2. Write good quality ad text so that more people will click on your ads. For more information, check out this post on how to write good copywriting text.
3. Use targeted, long tail keywords and bind the keywords tightly to the ad text.
4. Maintain a good keyword density within your landing page.
The slides of the presentation are available here. Do you think there are more ways to optimize your AdWords performance? Do let us know in the comments section!
P.S: For more information on link building, social media and SEO/SEM check out our link building and SEO services.
