p2w2 blog » Marketing

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!

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!

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!

SEO: A Quick Primer on the Difference Between Ecommerce and Content Sites – On Amex Open Forum

Iswarya — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 12:31:41 +0000

Did you know that on the Web, 4 seconds is all the time you get to capture a visitor’s attention? Find that fact astonishing? Well, read more to know how you can get the best out of those critical 4 seconds.

Gone are the times when an ice-breaker topic was “Does your company do SEO?” Now the question has become downright simple – “Which SEO are you?” This in some sense, reflects the inevitability of SEO as a part of any company’s overall marketing strategy. We as a company, realize the importance of SEO. Learning how to optimize for search engines is a long-term process, just like SEO itself. Based on our learnings, Chaitanya recently wrote an article on AMEX Open Forum titled SEO: A Quick Primer on the Difference Between Ecommerce and Content Sites.
The article talks about the following:

1. Difference in SEO strategies for Ecommerce sites and content sites

2. Importance of good, targeted landing pages. (To know more about landing page optimization, check out this post)

3. Importance of backlinking

You can read the entire article here. Do let us know your thoughts and feedback!

P.S: Check out our Link Building page to know more about p2w2′s link building services!

A Beginner’s Guide to Landing Page Optimization – on AMEX Open Forum

Iswarya — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 12:52:27 +0000

Chaitanya’s article, A Beginner’s Guide to Landing Page Optimization, recently got published in AMEX Open Forum, and we at p2w2 are pretty excited about it The aim of the article, as the title suggests, is to help the reader gain a better understanding of Landing Pages. Chaitanya has written this article, based on his own research, as well as the experience derived from creating p2w2′s landing pages.

As Chaitanya puts it in his article, a website’s home page is not necessarily your website’s landing page. So it is indeed necessary to devote some time and effort towards creating a winning landing page. Here’s a brief outline of what the article covers.

1. Effective usage of pictures on your landing page
2. Importance of having a Call-To-Action or Sign Up button
3. Relative importance of factors that drive customer conversion(based on a webcast from searchmarketingnow.com)
4. Significance of user surveys and testing

Do read the article, and let us know if it benefits you!