Pathik Bhatt

Tag: online marketing

  • Guest Post for Future MBA Students Featured on TopMBA

    I’ve made a habit of sharing my takeaways from conferences that I attend on my blog. My most recent post about what I learned at the 2014 Higher Ed Conference got some decent visibility after I made many of the active tweeters from the conference aware of the post. That was enough for one of the leading MBA websites to take notice and share it on their blog. Someone from QS TopMBA followed up with me shortly after they linked to my blog post:

    topmba-emailWhat do you think I said? (more…)

  • Why MBAs Should Be More Like Noah and Less Like DRose

    As mnoah1uch as it hurts me to say this, Derrick Rose is approaching his off-court role as a Chicago Bull all wrong. He did not see it as his job to recruit talent such as King “flop-master” James to the team when we so badly needed him. I like everyone else outside of Miami will diss LeBron, but that’s only because he’s so freaking good and would gladly take him on my team. Back to my point: Rose said he didn’t have a problem with recruiting and would do it if the team asked him to do so. That, my fellow MBA candidates and alumni, is precisely the attitude that results in 2 championships in ANOTHER CITY. (more…)

  • Tips for Entrepreneurs From Aalap Shah – Co-Founder of SoMe Social Media

    Aalap Shah of SoMeI had the opportunity to work with Aalap Shah on the board of the 2012 NetIP Conference hosted in Chicago last year. Both us were Social Media Co-chairs and Aalap also spoke on a digital marketing panel with other marketing experts there. It was great working with him and I’m glad he took some time out to share some lessons he’s learned about entrepreneurship while starting his company, SoMe Social Media. (more…)

  • Link Building Strategies for 2013 from SES Chicago

    I was fortunate enough to attend the 2012 Search Engine Strategies Conference last week in Chicago (Twitter: #seschi) and saw several great presentations about link building strategies for 2013. Link building is an essential part of search engine optimization (SEO), and the techniques required to acquire more links from other websites are becoming more and more time consuming. For years SEO’s have tried to find ways to automate and speed up link building by submitting to every Web directory that will give them a link. Google’s Penguin update earlier this year was launched to devalue links from those types of sites and to discourage site owners from pursuing more “black-hat” link building. (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 

  • Why You Need To Start Using Social Media Marketing

    This is a case study on how I used SEO, Social Media, and a little good fortune to bring thousands of visitors to my blog post about the fake Diwali satellite image of India.

    It is a good example of the power of social media marketing (when it works), and can be used to help convince the doubters. I’m not guaranteeing this kind of success with every attempt you make, but you have to give yourself the opportunity by participating in the conversations out there. Note that “success” for my blog meant:

    • visitors
    • likes
    • shares
    • comments
    • number of backlinks acquired

    The success metrics will change for every person, and it’s important to determine what that end goal is before selecting the marketing channel or channels. It’s not always easy to tie social media to sales, but if you know how to convert all those extra visitors then you should be fine (heh).

    I’d love to here your about your experiences with social media marketing, what worked, what didn’t? Please share in the comments below.

    SEO + Social Case Study | Pathikbhatt.com