Saturday, November 5, 2011

Brain Study


Good example of a Brain Study: If you can read this you have a strong mind: 

7H15 M3554G3 53RV35 7O PR0V3 H0W 0UR M1ND5 C4N D0 4M4Z1NG 7H1NG5! 1MPR3551V3 7H1NG5! 1N 7H3 B3G1NN1NG 17 WA5 H4RD BU7 N0W, 0N 7H15 LIN3 Y0UR M1ND 1S R34D1NG 17 4U70M471C4LLY W17H 0U7 3V3N 7H1NK1NG 4B0U7 17, B3 PROUD! 0NLY C3R741N P30PL3 C4N R3AD 7H15. 

PL3453 F0RW4RD 1F U C4N R34D 7H15 :).. 

Monday, October 17, 2011

Trend - Realtime Sites

You no longer need to wait months to get a web presence.

At Trend Empowered Marketing, we can get your site up and running in days. This is a fully functioning site, including web Pages, Facebook, Twitter, web traffic tracking, QRCodes, Mobile and an interactive blog site wired for social media. Your site can even be modified from your smart phone

Gone are the days where you have to play phone tag and wait weeks for website changes. You have the keys to your site, we will show you how to login to easy to use tools and make the changes. So if in the middle of the night you want to update that product photo, you can get it done in minutes, and sleep easy.

We are leveraging many open source "Free" tools and resources.
> This keeps your costs down, while making your presence known.

Information over-supply and customers’ short attention spans have created the demand for a new set of tools.
> Who wants to be forced to watch a cool flash intro screen or video?
>> Which does not work on an iPad or iPhone (70+million people).
> Who has the time to wast? 

> Everything on your site must have a purpose.

You want people go to your site for information, and to buy your products, not to be entertained. If your site is about selling, get them to your products. When people want to waist my time, they can go to uTube (plenty of free videos).

On the web, your customers are drowning in a sea of undifferentiated, unfiltered information.

We believe you now need tools and services that make it easy for them to find, filter, aggregate, and curate, targeted content that will appeal to your audiences. That’s where we come in to the picture, welcome to 
Trend Empowered Marketing (Tr-EM.com). It’s all about real-time marketing.


What keeps you up at night?

Be seen! Be heard! Get going!

Contact us today: info@Tr-eM.com


Tips for New Bloggers 
Phone: 978-913-8039

Come Celebrate With Us On The Island Belle: Halloween Ball 2011

Come Celebrate With Us On The Island Belle: Halloween Ball 2011

Sunday, October 16, 2011

SEO Tasks for a new site

Simple seo tasks to complete for a new site

Regardless of the business or the industry, there are a number of tasks you should perform to make sure your SEO gets off on the right foot. The good thing is, these tasks can take no more than 30-60 minutes to complete and are well worth it.

1. Setup Webmaster Tools
Using a service like Google Analytics is great, but you really should verify your site with each of the search engines webmaster tools. These services allow you to diagnose and analyze things on your site, that a website analytics solution can not. Submit sitemaps, find error pages, diagnose slow loading pages, and tons of other neat tools are provided by the webmaster tools.

Google Webmaster Tools
Bing Webmaster Tools
Yahoo Webmaster Tools

2. Install Analytics, Setup Your Goals
There is no reason why you should not be tracking your website visitors.
Google Analytics is free, easy to install and provides a wealth of information about your website and your customers. Sign-Up for a free account and install or pay someone to install the javascript code on your website.

Also go the extra mile and track key actions on your websites. Things like contact form submissions, downloads, video plays, and purchases should be getting tracked to understand your conversion funnel better and improve your conversion rates.

3. Fix Canonical URL Issues
Something that I would say 90% of all websites never do, it fix the www vs non-www duplicate content issue. This is such a quick fix, but so many websites overlook it. Going with either the www or the non-www, will solve the issue of having multiple URLs for the same web page. Also make sure your internal links are going to the / and on index.html or similar.

PHP Sites: Add to .htaccess file

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^domain.com
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [L,R=301]
RewriteRule ^index.html$ / [R=301,L]

ASP Sites: Done through IIS

4. Add Your Robots.txt File
Go through your web files and identify directories that you don’t want the search engines to index. Things like your administration files or miscellaneous files found on your server, restrict them from being indexed.

Upload robots.txt file with below text. Make sure you replace “/folder name/ with the folder(s) you want to restrict.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /folder name/

5. Submit XML Sitemap
Once your website is 100% completed, use an XML sitemap generation tool to crawl your entire site and create an XML sitemap that you can submit to the search engines. Each search engine allows you to submit your sitemap right from within Webmaster Tools. This will help get your new site crawled faster and make the search engines better able to find ALL of the pages on your site.

6. Setup Your Local Business Listings
As you may know, Google, Yahoo, and Bing all have local business centers that allow you to add a free business listing that has the chance to show up in the local results when a user performs a local query in one of the search engines.

I would suggest going to GetListed to help manage all of your local business listings. This free service will help you manage and check to make sure you are properly submitting and verifying your local business listings in Google, Yahoo, Bing, Yelp, BOTW and Hotfrog.



GetListed will cover the main local business directories you should submit to, but a service call Universal Business Listing will help you syndicate your listing to all of those 2nd tier local directories like InfoUSA, YellowPages.com CitySearch and Superpages.com. Instead of manually submitting your listing to lots of other local directories, pay $30 and have UBL submit your listing for you.

7. Add 301 Redirects
If you are redesigning a website, try to keep the same URL structure if possible. This way you will reduce the risk of losing any organic search engine rankings and traffic. However if for whatever reason the URL structure needs to change, identify the key pages that are ranking well and gaining traffic and 301 redirect them to the most relevant page on the new site.

If a client has purchased multiple domains and has mirror sites up, direct those sites over to the main site. There is no point in risking a duplicate content penalty for having multiple sites with the same content.

ASP Sites – 301 Redirect

<%@ Language=VBScript %>
<%
Response.Status=”301 Moved Permanently”
Response.AddHeader “Location”, “http://www.example.com/keyword.asp”
%>

PHP Sites – 301 Redirect

<?
Header( “HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently” );
Header( “Location: http://www.new-url.com” );
?>

Now it’s your turn. What other basic SEO steps do you do when launching a new website???



Read more:
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/7-simple-seo-tasks-to-complete-for-a-new-site/24419/#ixzz1JX7SjEC8


Curated by Tr-EM.com

Sunday, October 9, 2011

A wise man

There are many things of which a wise man might wish to be ignorant. 
- Ralph Waldo Emerson




Ralph Waldo EmersonImage via Wikipedia
Curated by Tr-EM.com


Thursday, October 6, 2011

Visual design

Improve your conversion rate.

With a test and learn approach.


1) Create multiple versions of your website pages with a visual designer

2) Define what you want your visitors to do (buy, sign up, download, etc.)

3) Split your website traffic amongst different versions.

4) Select the best performing version. Make extra $.

Goto step 1

Sample rate conversionImage via Wikipedia
Curated by Tr-EM.com

Friday, September 23, 2011

Harry's Wine Blog: Beer Tasting 4 - 7pm Friday, Sep 23

Harry's Wine Blog: Beer Tasting 4 - 7pm Friday, Sep 23: Your host is Brett from Berkshire brewing. Brett came down from Mass. to taste us on this rainy Friday night. Renzo's pick tonight is th...

Thursday, September 15, 2011

Generate Dynamic QR Codes For Free

This is all you need to generate a dynamic QR Code for your business.
This is using free google web services:
Simply replace PUT_YOUR_URL_HERE with your URL. 


<iframe code"="" frameborder="0" height="140pt" name="QR" src="http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?chs=130x130&amp;cht=qr&amp;chl=PUT_YOUR_URL_HERE" width="140pt"></iframe> 
Sample output:

Here is the link to a QR Reader for your smart phone. 
Free QR Code reader. Support over 26 Smart Phone Brands.


Some sample QR Code uses: 
8 easy ways QR Codes can enhance your marketing efforts


Curated by Tr-EM.com

Saturday, September 10, 2011

This is what we can provide to get started



 We create a social media package including:

  1. A blog to provide a common source of curated information, news, events and a event calendar.    (using free services)
  2. A proven strategy on how to use search engines to help clients find your site.
    1. We incorporate the social media to increase your SEO ranking organically.
    2. This includes the use of linkedin, twitter, and Facebook to drive new customers to your    content on the blog.
  3. Wire google analyst into your current site and study the traffic.
    1. This will quickly help us identify and document issues with the conversion rate, the bounce rate, where people spend time on the site, …. .
  4. Training your staff on how to use and update the blog, social media and understand the google traffic analytics.
  5. Drive new customers from the blog to the, buy it now button.
  6. Optional: If you want to use SEM (Pay per click), we will study the demographics of your current customers and find other customers that look the same.
    1. This is then refined by combining the data with your domain knowledge.
    2. We will then find the most cost effective search terms by state, county or zip.
    3. All of this can be tracked daily using the google analytic tools.
    4. You will pay google for the click cost directly ( no markup ).
Image representing Google as depicted in Crunc...Image via CrunchBase
Image representing Facebook as depicted in Cru...Image via CrunchBase



















 To complete the a

bove our normal fee is $2,500 to $3,000.
 This can be paid over time as the tasks are completed.


Tuesday, August 23, 2011

Monday, August 15, 2011

Learn how you can deliver value to your customers…

Deliver value to your customers by bringing CCM to life, in what you do every day.

Five personal truths to help you embrace the vision and live it every day.

1. Talk to your customers like you know them personally.
2. Make every message personally relevant.
3. Communicate with customers the way they prefer—web, text, email, mail.
4. Learn from every customer interaction so the next message builds on the personal relationship.
5. Make sure essential communications are personalized, accurate, secure and on time, every time.

What loyal customers are looking for in a product / brand.

1. Loyalty starts with the basics and a brand’s ability to deliver on its promise.
2. Customers want the brands they choose to be open and honest.
3. Loyalty can be built by rewarding customers.
- Remember: Different customer groups want very different rewards.
4. Brands that succeed demonstrate relevance to people as they move through the different stages of life.

Remember!
Be true, be honest, surprise me, teach me new things, give me feedback, and be consistent.

Curated by Tr-EM.com

Sunday, July 3, 2011

Trend- Using Free Data and Graphics

Now you can create dynamic graphs with free open source data to make your point.



Energy expenditures (current US$) Retail Electricity





Curated by Tr-EM.com

Saturday, July 2, 2011

How to optimize twitter / Facebook for Amazon.

This is what worked for me.

1) The products you are trying to sell should be related to the topics of your tweets or Facebook posts.
   
2) Your tweets are most likely not read by your followers.
     - If you want to test this, give something away for the first 5 @Replys.
     - You will be shocked.

3) Create a google blog it is free and point the tweets to the blog page.
     - The blogger page is wired with google analytics so you can track how many people come from twitter, Facebook, google search, ...
     - This will also help you optimize your search keywords.
http://www.blogger.com

4) Create an amazon aStore to sell your products (free).
     - Select the products you want to sell and put them into catigories so they are easy to find.
     - Use step 5 to help in the product selection.
     - Create a blog "Page", this option is under Posting / Edit Pages / New Page,  and turn the Tabs on.
     - This creates a web page, and a tab, which you can name i.e. (My Running Store) and place the aStore into this page.  This makes it easy to find.
http://astore.amazon.com/

5) Find the top selling products around your topic.
- https://widgets.amazon.com/Amazon-Product-Cloud-Widget/

Let me know how it turns out.
Thank you

Curated By Tr-EM.com

Friday, June 10, 2011

Connecticut Affiliates Get a Pink Slip from amazon

More good news from CT Gov. 
First no growth in employment and companies leaving, now this.


So some turn to amazon to help make ends meet. They have this fantastic program where you can create a store front in minutes (an aStore) and sell anything listed on amazon for an 6 to 8% commission.

Connecticut’s Gov. Malloy (D) has recently been successful in his efforts to pass a new tax bill calling for a change in the rules of taxing online retail sales.  In the past, only retailers with a physical presence in Connecticut were charged sales tax on sales made in Connecticut, whether directly to a customer or through a Connecticut-based affiliate link.  That has now changed.

Continue reading on Examiner.com 


Connecticut Affiliates Get a Pink Slip - Hartford Family & Parenting 101 | Examiner.com

Curated by Tr-EM.com

Tuesday, June 7, 2011

Your twitter account as a news paper


Friday, June 3, 2011

Harry's Wine Blog: Smart phone app helps with wine selections!

Harry's Wine Blog: Smart phone app helps with wine selections!: "This is pretty cool! The picture on the left is a wine we carry in 750ml and 1.5l (pictured is the 1.5), I found out, not too long ag..."

John put QR codes on our pages that allow you to find our blog, our website, telephone # and even find a map to the store, really good job by him. He is also the owner of Tr-EM (Trend Empowered Marketing) and we're appreciative to him for all of his help. Check out his website (link at the bottom of the blog) for more info. on how he can help you too.

Thursday, June 2, 2011

Tuesday, May 10, 2011

8 easy ways QR Codes can enhance your marketing efforts

Without having to type in or remember a URL, QR Codes make it possible for prospects and customers to respond to you on the spot. They scan codes from their daily newspaper, on the Web, or on the go.

With a QR Code on your printed materials or in your store window, take advantage of this technology and increase online and offline traffic by directing visitors to:


  1. A special offer on your Web site.
  2. A YouTube video that provides helpful how-to information or a product demonstration.
  3. A personalized survey landing page to get customer feedback.
  4. A Facebook Fan Page.
  5. A coupon offer good for an on-site promotion at your store, restaurant, etc.
  6. Your place of business by providing your address or directions to your front door.
  7. Your blog to view and comment on your post.
  8. Attend your event. Keep your eyes open this year, especially this summer, as more movie and concert promoters use them to generate excitement & increase their audience attendance.

Read More:
QR Codes: 8 benefits to those funny looking B&W squares
Curated by Tr-EM.com

Sunday, May 1, 2011

Zazzle

Sign up with Zazzle:

Build your brand.
Print your logo on over 2000+ items.

Thursday, April 14, 2011

Wednesday, April 13, 2011

Trend - Dynamic Views for Readers

All about Dynamic Views for Readers (Click to read more)

This allows you to reformat your current blog content, making it easy to read
on smart phones and tablets.



Blogger currently offers five dynamic views for its public blogs.
These views are only accessible if allowed for by the blog author.
Flipcard: available at [blogURL]/view/flipcard
Mosaic: available at [blogURL]/view/mosaic
Sidebar: available at [blogURL]/view/sidebar
Snapshot: available at [blogURL]/view/snapshot
Timeslide: available at [blogURL]/view/timeslide

As an example, the URL for accessing the Sidebar view for Blogger Buzz would be
http://tr-em.blogspot.com/view/sidebar


Curated by Tr-EM.com

Saturday, March 12, 2011

Trend - QR Codes

Reading QRCode with your phone
Get a receipt:
Ever wonder what the funny looking square bar-codes are?
They are QRCodes.  Which can directly link you to products, web sites, coupons, recipes, maps, phone numbers, ... without typing. 

The key to unlocking their value is a QRCode reader.
Click here to get a QRCode reader from NeoReader

Or type this into your phone's Web Browser
http://get.neoreader.com/

Supported devices

Curated by Tr-EM.com