Looking to increase online market share, conversions and create new revenue streams?

As I mentioned in a previous post, LA Web Ventures is a meetup group that I started in order to provide a venue for Los Angeles web entrepreneurs to network with and learn from others who have launched successful entrepreneurial ventures online.

On July 26th, our next meeting will include a discussion on how to identify and create opportunities through strategic partnerships. This discussion will include practical, real-world examples for small, medium and large businesses. The group will learn about how businesses are succeeding by leveraging their current assets in new ways through partnerships.

Jeff Rohwer will be leading this discussion. He is an interactive marketing strategist and consultant with over 10 years of experience in designing, developing and deploying strategic, technical solutions for a wide range of industries including health care and hospitality.

If you’d like to attend the next meetup, you can get more information and RSVP here.

Kurt Daradics and Baron Miller held another “Meeting of the Minds” last night at Suki 7 Lounge. The invite-only MOTM events (pronounced “modem”) are a fresh approach to networking and idea-sharing with hand-picked individuals here in Southern California.

Brian Monroe, Director Product Management at Eventful.com was the featured guest for the July MOTM. An interactive discussion lasted about an hour and focused on how to tap into their “Demand It’ feature, which touts over six million registered users. The group brought up some good points and asked very engaging questions; providing feedback on how to best monetize Eventful.com.

Of course, I had to snap a few photos of the July MOTM event at Suki 7 Lounge.

This weekend I held an initial gathering for the meetup group that I recently started. The goal of LA Web Ventures is to provide a venue for Los Angeles web entrepreneurs to network with and learn from others who have launched successful entrepreneurial ventures online.

The meeting was hosted by CitrusByte, a high end web application development agency that operates out of a 4000 square foot mini-mansion. I was happy to find that the group was made up of a diverse range of friendly people with equally diverse backgrounds, for example:

• She owns a growing party planning website (and brought along her publicist)
• He works as an Apple engineer - and has great ideas on how to provide useful information from mining and compiling overlooked customer data within companies
• He is a QuickBooks Counselor, representing a local SBDC (small business development center)
• He works for Experian Marketing Services, helping fortune 500 companies with their email marketing programs

Since this was a first meetup, the discussion was kept open and free flowing. We began talking about the importance of the “little things” that you can uncover in your analytics and quickly dove into a discussion on shopping cart abandonment. It was brought up that re-engaging lost site visitors via email or other mechanisms can be a great tactic for increasing the overall conversion rate of just about any website. A few tools were mentioned, which I am gathering the links for and will post soon.

Some of the tools and platforms that were mentioned in the discussion:

• Google Analytics - free website analytics platform
• FeedBurner - RSS (and other seemingly un-trackable) channel analytics and promotional tool
• SpyFu - competitive analysis tool
• iContact - email marketing and surveying platform

Afterward, CitrusByte held a barbecue which brought in people from all corners of the interactive space and went on well into the night.