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How to Plan a Business Trip – Part II

Iswarya — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 06:22:56 +0000

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!

Protected: Webinar Video – 14th July 2010

Ravi Kiran — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 16:15:25 +0000

Webinar Video: SEO for Business Owners, June 16th

Iswarya — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 07:18:07 +0000

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.

SEO for Business Owners Ebook

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

Iswarya — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 14:15:14 +0000

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.

Faster, Higher, Stronger?

Iswarya — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 12:23:38 +0000

Website speed might not just be important for user experience, it is now apparently also a crucial factor in search rankings, as revealed in the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog. Site speed in this context refers to the response time of the website. According to the post, Google Research studies have shown that visitors generally tend to spend lesser time on a page that responds slowly, and this is possibly the motivation behind Google making site speed an integral factor for search rankings.

The authors go on to list a few useful tools that will help in evaluating site speed.

Page Speed: An open source add-on for Firefox/Firebug that evaluates the performance of web pages and gives suggestions for improvement.
YSlow: A free tool from Yahoo! that suggests ways to improve website speed. Personally I really like the innovative name!
WebPagetest: It shows a waterfall view of your pages’ load performance along with an optimization checklist.
Google’s very own Webmaster Tools: You can go to Labs > Site Performance to see the speed of your website as experienced by users around the world.

This revelation has come under a lot of criticism as seen in the post’s comments. A lot of the commentators do not seem agree with the fact that site speed should be a factor in determining site rankings, as site speed can vary based on a lot of variables – including Flash applications, content with high resolution images, blogs that have many widgets, etc.

The post has however clarified that relevance to search terms still remains the top priority for ranking. Site speed is just going to be one of the additional parameters that Google will consider in its ranking algorithm.

All said and done it does seem like ‘light weight’ is the new buzzword. What are your thoughts about this? Do let us know in the comments section!