Pathik Bhatt

Author: Pathik

  • On Dhanteras We Worship Lakshmi The Goddess of Wealth

    Diwali 2017 Dates:
    Dhanteras (10/17) | Kali Chaudas (10/18) | Diwali (10/19) | New Year (10/20) | Bhai Beej (10/21)

    In 2017 Dhanteras is on Tuesday, October 17, and this day marks the beginning of the most exciting Hindu festival of the year: Diwali! “Dhan” means wealth and “teras” refers to the 13th day of the lunar calendar month Ashwin. This day is a time to reflect on our wealth, and a tool prescribed to us by our sages to help us do this is Lakshmi Puja. The family gets together to thank Lakshmi Mata, the Goddess of wealth, for all of their blessings and to ask for continued wealth in their lives. (more…)

  • Kelley Direct – Top Ranked Online MBA Program in Bloomington IN

    I am a student in the Kelley Direct MBA program at Indiana University – Bloomington, and I chose to go there over Booth because it made more sense for me. I am writing this post because I want to help you make an educated decision about your future, especially if you’re considering Kelley Direct. Yes, this post is for you taking the GMAT next month (hope you’ve discovered www.beatthegmat.com), and you applying to the top ranked part-time MBA programs near you, and definitely you who didn’t even know what Kelley Direct was until a few days ago.

    Kelley School of Business Building in Bloomington, IN

    First of all, congratulations on your decision to pursue an MBA while working and good luck on your GMAT and applications. Depending on where you are in the process (more…)

  • 10 Takeaways from the 2012 Dex Small Business Summit in Chicago

    I was pleasantly surprised by the size and quality of the (free) Small Business Summit in Chicago last week. They had a panel of quality speakers who all added value to the discussion. The panel members in no particular order: Carol Roth, Hedy Ratner, Mary McFarlin, Sara Glassford, and Troy Henikoff. The host, Barry Moltz, was entertaining, informative and generous enough to provide all the attendees with this book Small Town Rules.

    Without further adieu, here are the 10 takeaways for small business owners (and marketers) from the panel:

    1. All failures don’t have a valuable lesson to teach you.

    We are taught to hold onto our failures to try and glean some wisdom out of them, but often times there is nothing you could have done to change the outcome. Lesson: stop trying to figure out what you could have done better in the past and move on. (more…)

  • Conversion Rate Optimization Using AdWords Search Term Report

    Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is becoming part of every online marketer’s vocabulary and soon will disseminate into the general working public’s vocab too (just as SEO and PPC have). For those of you who don’t deal with websites much, SEO is search engine optimization (trying to get your site to rank on the first page of Google, Bing & Yahoo), and PPC is pay-per-click advertising (all those great banner ads all over the web and text ads you see when you search on Google). SEO and PPC are used to drive traffic to a website or blog, while CRO is focused on what happens when those visitors get to the site.

    Getting people to visit your site can be expensive, so you want the people coming to your website to be happy with the content they find. A conversion is a transaction that you want your site visitors to perform: placing and order, submitting a form and commenting on a post are all common examples. After you decide what you want your visitors to do, you should optimize (the “o” in CRO) your site to convince people to convert. The more you pay for your visitors, the more important CRO becomes to your business. This is why companies using PPC are also starting to invest in CRO.

    Interested in learning more? I recently wrote a blog post about this topic, check it out: How you can use the AdWords Search Term Report and custom web forms to optimize your conversion rate 

  • Advertising Doesn’t Negatively Affect American Culture

    Since I explored how advertising negatively affects us in an earlier blog post, it’s only fair that I explore the other side. We can blame a lot of things on advertising and mass-marketing, but some of those critiques should be self-directed. Ultimately, each individual is responsible for how their environment & situation affects them. The way our advertising looks today may also be another chicken and egg case where some may argue that advertising shaped American culture into what it is today, while others will say (more…)

  • Things to do in Chicago this August

    For all the 21st Annual NetIP Conference attendees who are coming in early and those of you who live in the Chicago area. Here is your guide for free (or cheap) things to do in Chicago in late August leading up to the conference.

    The Navy Pier fireworks are a personal favorite, I make sure I go see them at least once every summer if not more. The Windy City puts on a 10 – 15 minute fireworks production set to popular music every Wednesday at 9:30PM and Saturday at 10:15PM. If you get there early enough, you can get a comfy couch just past where the Kanan boat (docks on the pier. There’s a nice hangout area right before the beer garden, where the pier narrows a bit. It doesn’t look that big on the map, but it’s quite a walk.

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    We’re going to be on one of these Navy Pier boats Labor Day weekend for NetIP’s 21st Annual Think Change Conference! Register for the conference and save $70 by using my promo code, NETIPPATHIK, before midnight on July 15th! http://chicago2012.netipconference.org/Registration

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    Another great event that Chicago has coming up is the Air and Water Show August 18th and 19th (Sat/Sun). Head on over to North Avenue Beach with your chairs, towels and a cooler before 10AM to get a good spot and then sit back and enjoy the show! One of best the highlights of the show is when the US Navy Blue Angels come screaming out in their F/A-18 Hornet jets (below).

    If you don’t want to sit around and spectate, get to Millenium park Sunday, August 26th for the Chicago SummerDance by 4PM. They have dance lessons lead by professional instructors for the first hour, and then live music and dancing until 7PM. I went for the salsa night with the wife and it was a blast!

    MORE TO COME… but remember, You have to register by midnight Sunday, July 15th to get the discount! Enter NETIPPATHIK when you register for the conference here: http://chicago2012.netipconference.org/Registration

    Check back soon for more great things to do in Chicago!

  • Promoting The Gita

    Last Sunday in a pravachan (discourse/lecture) about the Gita, Dadaji stated how we promote and advertise good movies that we’ve seen, but we don’t do the same for the Gita. It’s true, how often have you seen a trailer on the tv or a giant sized poster marketing the benefits of the Gita? This was one of those recurring moments in pravachan where I felt like he was speaking directly to me. Who else besides a graphic designer was going to bother taking that statement at face value? That statement is what inspired this post and this:

     

    I’m sure many people have seen the original Pass It On ad and this quote before. Have either of them moved you to take action in any sort of way? Apparently, this supposed quote from Einstein has:

    I say “supposed” because there is an on-going debate about whether or not Einstein ever said this, and there don’t appear to be any sources for it. I found it ironic though that someone might have created a false advertisement for the Gita in the 1970’s by fabricating this quote AND that it actually works! This opens up a whole new can of worms though.

    One of the most important lessons from the Gita is that the motive behind an action is paramount, not the actual action itself. With that idea alone the Gita explains how to turn every action – even the routine, mundane ones – into an offering to God. So the dilemma here is that we have a positive result occurring by the creation of false quote – more people  are reading the Gita. Is that okay? Well, that depends…

    • Scenario 1: Bookstore owner has an overstock of Gitas in his inventory, “How do I get rid of these and make some money off of them?!”
    • Scenario 2: Gita devotee who genuinely wants to share its message, “How do I get the Western world to even know that this book exist, much less read it?!”

    Would you feel better about the quote if the person in scenario 2 created it? In the end isn’t it the same result? Why should it matter?

    Perhaps you’re curious about my motives as I write this post and ask you to share the ads below too. That’s fair. Here are my some of them:

    • I saw a design/marketing challenge that related to my interests so I had to accept it
    • I fully believe in the awesomeness of the Gita and want to try a creative approach of promoting it
    • I want to grow my personal brand (that’s why my site is in the corner of each ad)
    • I like messing around with social media
    There may be more, but I guess that’s between me and HIM.
    Now if those motives are alright by you and you share any sort of affection towards the Gita, please humor me and change your Facebook timeline background image to any of the following banners (or pick Einsteins from above).

    In the comments below, please share a quote, lesson, verse or anything you want to about why you think it’s worth sharing the Gita!

    Oh, btw here’s a link to the Gita, go explore!

  • Why I Don’t Drink Alcohol

    Someone recently asked me why I don’t drink, but more importantly they didn’t accept my generic “I don’t need it” answer – that’s why I’m writing this post. It’s an important question that I think most 18 year-olds don’t think about enough, especially kids going off to college. I assure you this is not going to be some morality rant where I tell you how bad it is to drink, but I do think it’s fair to say though that I do stand by my choice and that it was a conscious decision. I don’t drink because (more…)

  • The Hunger Games Movie Review

    The Hunger Games movie makers did well but I found the story much less compelling than I thought I would on screen. Everyone’s review of this book talks about how it was “made to be a movie,” but I think we all got it wrong. The book should have been a LOST style TV show with lots of time devoted to the back story and characters’ thoughts. Without that connection, the actual hunger games part of the movie just didn’t mean that much to me. They needed more time to build up the suspense, and mini-events instead of just jumping on to the next scene. Not enough time was devoted to the games, but then again without narrative of Katniss’ thoughts I don’t know that extending it would have helped. The movie definitely made me appreciate Suzanne Collins’ book more.

    Spoiler Alert: Don’t read on if you have not read The Hunger Games already. (more…)

  • Should My Business be on Pinterest

    Before you decide to start using Pinterest for business, ask yourself the following questions:

    1. Am I trying to reach women with my products or services?

    80% to 90% of Pinterest users are women depending on what reports you check. Men’s shaving product and cologne companies probably won’t benefit as much as home decor and fashion companies (see below for more categories) from being on Pinterest – that is unless those companies find a way to make those images appealing to women. Here’s an example of how men’s products can turn into women’s pins (pay special attention to the name of the board that it’s pinned on): (more…)