Bill McRea

With the rising popularity of smart phones, along with the fact that more people now access the Internet using a mobile device than with a computer, mobile marketing’s popularity is exploding exponentially. There are several different channels of mobile marketing that include banner ads on mobile games and apps, and location based Bluetooth marketing, but SMS or text message marketing remains the ‘work horse’ of mobile marketing. Even those with the most basic mobile phones will have SMS capabilities, and text messaging is popular among a wide range of age groups.

Think about it. Do your customers check their email constantly throughout the day? When they receive an incoming email from you, do they click on it and open it right away? With the lower deliverability of email, and the abysmal open rates, SMS marketing is one of the most responsive marketing formats available. SMS mobile marketing is a game changer where businesses large and small can benefit from building a SMS database of their customers mobile numbers.

Choosing a mobile marketing provider

Here are some questions you might consider when choosing a mobile marketing service provider for your SMS marketing campaign:

• Does the vendor provide a web-based system or a desktop software application for you to send messages from?

• Do they deliver across the various operating systems and protocols of mobile devices such as WAP, GPRS and 3G & 4G?
• Do they charge a monthly fee or a per message charge?
• Does the vendor offer a trial account so that you can test a campaign first?
• Does the vendor offer any training?

Setting up your SMS marketing program

Once you have chosen a mobile marketing vendor, you will set up an interactive SMS campaign. An interactive campaign consists of the subscriber responding to an ad telling them to text a specific keyword to a short code. For example, they might text the keyword, BRIDAL, to the short code, 55667 with the keyword being one that you ‘rent’ the use of for your campaign. The short code is owned by the service provider.

The visitor types your keyword and gets an instant text message response. This also opts them in to your mobile database so that you can send broadcast messages to them at a later date. Your messages are limited to 160 characters in length.

Measuring the effectiveness of your SMS marketing campaigns

Your mobile marketing vendor should be able to provide you with complete analytics for your SMS marketing campaigns. You will be able to see how responsive your subscribers are by reviewing interactive graphs that are often available in real time.

SMS marketing is an easy way to ‘get your feet wet’ so to speak with mobile marketing. Choose a vendor, try out a test campaign and see how your audience responds. If you have not been getting the results you’d like from your email marketing efforts, it might be time to try SMS text message marketing where you can grab your users wherever they are and get they attention on your products and services now.

Mobile marketing is just one way of engaging with your market. Visit, http://mcreasite.com/blog, to discover lots of other ideas for growing your online business today.

As  a small business owner you have no doubt heard all of the buzz surrounding mobile marketing. Well, if you have been paying attention, that buzz is getting louder and louder because of the exponential increases in the number of people worldwide who use mobile phones—which for some people is their only access to the Internet because they do not have or do not use a laptop or desktop computer.  Since the most effective marketing meets your audience where they are, you can no longer afford to ignore mobile marketing. This no longer new medium has vast, untapped potential but you must be prepared with knowledge and a sound strategy for moving into the mobile marketing space.

In this article we are going to look at some of the statistics around mobile marketing while separating the facts from the hype, and we will look at some of the different  mobile marketing strategies out there that will help you gain more exposure for your business.

What is the scope of the mobile device market?

You’ll notice that we’ve said mobile device rather than simply mobile phone because with the increasing popularity of tablet PCs that began with Apple’s iPad, mobile marketing doesn’t just reach phones anymore.

With 302.9 million wireless subscribers at the end of 2010, which accounts for 96% of U.S. households owning a mobile phone and fully half of those phones will be smart phones by the end of 2011. In fact 26.6% of those households are wireless only, meaning they have given up their land lines and only use their cell phones to communicate. There were 2.1 trillion text messages sent in 2010, and spanning all ages and types of phones used, 69% of mobile subscribers use SMS (text) messaging.

Source: CTIA

Examples of mobile marketing campaigns

Some of the different ways to reach consumers on their cell phones include:

• Mobile banner ads
• SMS text messaging campaigns using short codes
• QR codes
• Mobile website
• Location based marketing
• Bluetooth proximity marketing
• Voice (Interactive Voice Response
• SMS texting contests using short codes to build your mobile database (text to win a prize)
• Use SMS alerts to engage with customers informing them of upcoming events, and send service reminders
• Send mobile coupons
• SMS to email using short codes
• Geo-location apps. Customers text in their zip codes to find the closest store location.

Mobile marketing can outperform web marketing

InsightExpress conducted a qualitative study in 2009 that concluded that mobile marketing far outperformed online web marketing by as much as nine times with regard to metrics such as purchase intent.

Source: insightexpress.com/ommamobile

You can clearly see that mobile marketing is not the future it is right now. You are leaving money, more customers, market share and mind share on the table while you wait around to decide if you want to get started with mobile marketing. Jump on mobile marketing today and engage with your customers where they are.

For more information about how you can get started with mobile marketing, visit, http://mcreasite.com/blog, where you will also discover lots of Internet marketing tips and strategies for growing your business online.

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In the early days of the web in the 1990’s the landscape was a bit like the wild, wild west. Marketers were figuring out how everything worked as they went along. As the personal computer revolution grew in momentum and more and more people got computers and then Internet access at home, and at work and the audience began to grow, Internet marketing began to become more sophisticated, but the main through line for the medium seemed to be to meet and engage with users on the platforms that they used the most.

Towards the end of the 90’s we saw banner ads grow in popularity across the web. Back in the day when there was still the novelty factor, people actually clicked on banners, some of which enjoyed as high as 30% click-through rates.

Email, which got its start in the 1960’s in academic settings was adopted by the public and businesses in the late 1980s, and the early 90’s saw the beginnings of email marketing.

But everything changed in 2000 when Google launched its AdWords PPC program making pay-for-performance online advertising mainstream. PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising was very popular and very successful for Google. Today it still accounts for the largest portion of their revenues.

In 2005 video marketing explodes on the scene and youtube.com and hulu.com experiment with business models while video advertising revenues skyrocket.

Concurrently with the rise in online marketing, the mobile marketing bonanza begins to gather steam. As mobile phones become more sophisticated and able to access the Internet, people begin to access the Internet using their cell phones more than with desktop or laptop computers.

When the iPhone hit the market in January of 2007 it was a game changer. With its sleek touch screen technology, and over 200 patents connected with the design, the iPhone was poised to transform personal mobile technology along with having a huge influence on the culture. Other similar smart phone devices came on to the scene and even more recently with the release of the iPad in 2010, tablets are changing once again how people relate to and interact with technology, which in turns influences how marketers try to get the attention of these tech-savvy users.

Forrester analyst Sarah Rotman Epps said, “The post-PC era represents a change in consumer behavior. It’s not just the device. It’s the social behavior. It’s a social trend. The post-PC era represents a social shift and a technology shift.”

Here are some fascinating mobile marketing statistics:

•87% of Americans own a cell phone, 95% of them have text capabilities

•84% of cell phone users have their cell phone within reach 24/7

•90% of text messages are read. Email compares at about 20%

•23% of text coupons are forwarded to friends

•text messages are green

•text messages out number cell phone calls 2 to 1

•10 million digital coupons were redeemed in the first 6 months of 2009 a 25% increase over 2008

Technology experts have predicted that by 2013 most customers will be online using their mobile devices rather than a computer !

250+ million Americans carry mobile phones—over 80% of the nation’s population

Source: CTIA Wireless Association

As more and more people move from computers to tablets and mobile devices—what Steve Jobs calls “post-PC era” products, the popularity of these products are changing consumer habits. Marketers will need to keep up or get left behind.

For more information about mobile marketing and  online marketing, visit, http://mcreasite.com/blog to discover lots of tips and strategies for growing your business online.

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Affiliate bloggers know the power of WordPress for creating and managing their blogs, and affiliate marketers know the challenges of dealing with issues such as ad blindness when trying to find ways to capture visitors attention and click where you want them to click. Well, UContext is a contextual advertising program that uses the keywords on Your blog and transforms them into text links to ClickBank products.

With other contextual advertising programs you might earn a few cents when visitors click on the ads on your site, so why not set up ucontext and earn $15. and more when your visitors click on your links and make a purchase.

With Ucontext you get to decide how many links are created and what the links will look like on your blog. If your visitors have been suffering from ad blindness and ignoring the banner ads on your site, these in-text links will get clicked because they are a part of the content that the visitor is reading.

If you’ve had your blog for a long time and have lots of old post moldering away in the archives, this is an efficient way to monetize them and have them generate some revenue for you.

Ucontext saves you time because now you no longer have to go digging through the vast selection of ClickBank products to find those that match your blog’s keywords. Now once you have the plugin installed, when you publish a post, the software automatically creates text links that fit right in with your website’s content.

Concerned about links appearing where you don’t want them? Here’s the level of control that you will have with Ucontext:

• Filters: Refine what Clickbank products are shown by gravity, commissions, etc.
• Choose how many links show on a page
• Add your own Tracking ID’s
• Click Reports: Find out what pages and keyword phrases are getting the most clicks and when
• You can exclude specific pages from receiving in-text links

How to set up ucontext

Setting up the ucontext contextual ad links on your site is as simple as downloading and installing a plugin, which is available for WordPress, Drupal and Joomla. There is also a PHP library for those who want to create their own customizations.

While the plugin is free, membership to Ucontext and use of the API is billed on a recurring monthly basis, which can be cancelled at any time. Price points for membership range from an annual membership for either one website, the Pro level with five sites, and the Unlimited option for an unlimited number of websites.

Earn a referral income

Another way to generate revenues with Ucontext is through their affiliate program, which pays you a 20% commission at the first level and 5% at the second level.

With Ucontext you’ve got a cure for ad blindness, a fast and easy way to add highly lucrative contextual advertising links to monetize your website’s content and an easy to use plugin that makes it all very simple.

Alternative contextual advertising such as Ucontext is just one of the many topics that you will learn about when you visit, http://www.mcreasite.com/blog. Come check out the blog and discover lots of tips and strategies for Internet marketing success.

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Anyone with more than a passing interest in Internet marketing quickly becomes familiar with the acronym, CPC, which means cost per click. CPC and CPM are the prevalent revenue models for media buying online, and EPC is related to the realm of affiliate marketing. For those who are new to these revenue models, we’ll take a basic look at each one describing What they mean and what the differences are between them within the online marketing space.

What is CPC?

CPC means cost per click, and this revenue model is used to price many of the PPC or pay per click advertising models such as Google’s AdWords or Bing and Yahoo!’s Microsoft Ad Network. As the name implies, advertisers place ads in search engine results pages, or within a content network, but they only pay when a visitor actually clicks on the ad.

When tracking and testing mechanisms are put into place, CPC marketing can yield lots of data that can help marketers choose the most effective keywords,  and landing pages.

What is CPM?

CPM means cost per thousand (mille) impressions, which are page loads of an online advertisement. The CPM model is more advantageous when you are dealing with high traffic sites because you are banking on the fact that a certain number of people per thousand will click on your ad. On the right website with a steady flow of targeted traffic the CPM model can be quite effective.

What is EPC?

EPC which is short for average Earnings per 100 clicks, is a term used within the realm of affiliate marketing. It is used to measure the average earnings within a 7 day period that an affiliate can expect to earn for every 100 clicks that they are able to generate. This calculation can be helpful to affiliates when they are seeking out new products to promote.

Commission Junction, which is a popular affiliate network says the following about EPC: “EPC is an exclusive metric of the CJ Marketplace given for publishers, advertisers, and individual ads, and is a relative rating that illustrates the ability to convert clicks into commissions.”

CPC is the most effective pricing model for smaller advertisers looking to buy guaranteed traffic for their websites. EPC is a different kind of metric, that is actually limited to the world of online affiliate marketing .

At the end of the day, the most important metric in all of this is your website’s conversion rate, which can be expressed as its ability to convert visitors into customers, or getting visitors who land on your site to take a desired action such as subscribe to your email list or RSS feed. So the conversion rate is the percentage of visitors who take the action that you want them to take on your website.

When you are first starting out it is important to arm yourself with enough knowledge to get started taking forward action. Don’t wait until you feel like you know enough because that day will most likely never come due to the constantly changing nature of online marketing.

When you are ready to learn more about CPC, CPM, EPC and those other confusing acronyms  related to Internet marketing, you should visit, http://www.mcreasite.com/blog, and subscribe to our RSS feed. You’ll get a ton of information that you can use to make more money in less time and maybe even have some fun doing it.

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