p2w2 blog » Small Business

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!

SEO for Business Owners Webinar: Recap

Iswarya — Fri, 21 May 2010 10:49:58 +0000

We hosted our webinar on SEO for Business Owners this Wednesday. We’re glad to inform that a lot of the attendees found it useful and informative.

Here’s some of the feedback we got:

“Listening to great webinar SEO for Business Owners #p2w2″

“Chaitanya, thanks for your webinar. Very informative.”

“Everyone should buy Chaitanya Sagar’s ebook due out June 1. GET IT!”

“Attending a great webinar on SEO on #p2w2″

On popular demand, we have also put up the presentation slides for your information. You can check it out here. We had also recorded our webcast and I will be uploading the video soon! Look out for it!

For those of you who missed out on the webinar, don’t worry. Here’s a great chance for you to get to pre-order our SEO ebook that will be released on June 1, 2010. All the information presented in the webinar, will be available to you in a convenient, readable format complete with all the links and tools presented in the webinar!
http://www.p2w2.com/seo-for-business-owners.php#pre-order

Don’t miss our next SEO webinar on June 16th. Do send us your suggestions and questions in comments to this post. We would love to hear from you!

How to plan a Business Trip

Iswarya — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 08:25:46 +0000

Chaitanya returned back to India from a 40 day business tour of the US. The trip was a good experience and all of us at p2w2 benefited greatly from what he had to share.

The success of a business trip is highly dependent on the amount of planning that you do beforehand. I’d like to share some insights and learnings that went into planning Chaitanya’s US trip.

1.Have a clear purpose

Make sure you know clearly what the end result of the trip should be(get new customers/expanding to a new geography/learning about new trends,etc). Plan your trip accordingly.

2. Decide the agenda of your trip well in advance

This is essential so that you can book tickets, hotel rooms in advance and thereby save money too. Make sure that you choose your place of stay wisely, so that you don’t spend valuable time commuting.

3. Chalk out events properly

If you’re looking to meet potential clients, attend referral meetings. If you wish to know more about what is happening in that geography, what are the new trends, etc. attend seminars and conferences. But more about planning events and seminars, later!

4.Popularize your meetings

If you’re conducting meetings, plan in advance and make sure it is well publicized. Use tools such as Meetup, Eventbrite, Upcoming, etc. to create buzz around your events.

5. Tweet and blog your experiences!

I hope you found this useful. Keep checking our blog to know what kind of planning needs to go into attending seminars and events specifically!

Letting Go of the Words – An overview

Iswarya — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 12:20:12 +0000

I recently created a presentation that gave an overview about the book Letting Go of the Words by Janice Redish. It is an extremely useful book that focuses writing good web content and creating user-friendly web pages.

The presentation covers the following topics:

1. Why it is important to learn to write good web content

2. How to communicate with the visitors effectively

3. How to focus on the essential messages that need to be conveyed

4. Designing web pages for easy use

5. Copywriting and tuning up your sentences

6. Effective Use of Illustrations

7. How to write good Press Releases

Please check out the presentation here at SlideShare. Hope you find it useful!

Essential Tips for Starting a Small Business Blog

Iswarya — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 06:08:35 +0000

Blogging is serious business. Almost every small business owner realizes the significance of maintaining a regular, updated blog on his/her website. Not only does it help in search marketing, it is also a great way of connecting with your customers.

Lee Odden recently wrote a good post on AllBusiness.com about tips for starting a small business blog. The article explains what thought processes must take place before you start a blog for your website.

The article talks about how much important it is to identify your goals and target audience. Odden also gives useful tips about technicalities such as design, choice of blog hosting software, analytics, RSS Feeds etc. We also get to know various ways of linking your blog posts’ feed to status updates in Twitter, LinkedIn, and other social bookmarking and networking sites.

Odden mentions that it is a good idea to have specific ‘categories’ to segregate your blog posts, as this will help in managing your content better. He also suggests keyword research before deciding the categories, which I think is an excellent idea to get relevant traffic as well as links.

You can read the entire article here. Please share your own tips about blogging in the comments section!