Bill McRea

When it comes to buying advertising space for mobile devices you’ve got lots of options, but one of the major players in this space is admob, which was acquired by Google last year. In this article we’re going to look at how you can place ads for your products and services on this mobile ad serving platform.

Jason Spero, of AdMob, in his article, Mobile: It’s Not Too Late to be Early, “Most (businesses) have not yet meaningfully engaged with mobile consumers and adapted their strategies to capitalize on the mobile opportunity. But, it’s still not too late to be early to mobile.” Spero goes on to share these tips for businesses looking to explore the possibilities of mobile Marketing:

1. Create a mobile website
2. Focus on local marketing
3. Get personal with your audience
4. Track your mobile site separately from your website
5. Iterate, change, evolve

Source: techcrunch.com/2011/02/10/mobile-its-not-too-late-to-be-early/

AdMob

If you have used Google’s AdWords program before, then signing up with AdMob should be simple for you. Simply fill out the standard registration page and you will be brought to the AdMob marketplace where you will have the option to either, ‘start advertising,’ or ‘monetize your sites.’

You will find five tabs in the AdMob Marketplace:

• Campaigns

Under the Campaigns tab, you will find new advertiser training videos, which will walk you through the entire process of setting up your ads, an advertiser starter kit with tips for optimizing your campaign, and the AdMob help section. You’ll see the, ‘Create a new ad campaign,’ button, and a list of all of the campaigns that you have in operation.

• Sites & Apps

Under this tab you can add a site or an app and integrate the AdMob install code for monetization.

• Reporting

Here you’ll find Campaign reporting, sites & apps reporting, manage reports and site geographic stats.

• Tools

Under the tools tab you’ll find app conversion tracking, AdWhirl, which is an open-source, mediation layer that allows you to allocate your traffic across the various networks, and the AdMob API, which is still in beta.

• Account

The account tab is where your billing management takes place. You’ll find an account summary, transfer funds, add funds, adjust notification settings, and edit your account information.

Placing your ads on mobile phones and tablet devices such as the iPad is as simple as using any other online advertising platform. Google makes it simple for you by providing tutorial videos that walk you through every step of the process, and there is a support forum where you can ask questions and get answers while you are creating your mobile marketing ad campaigns.

Don’t wait any longer to get your ads in front of your target audience using the powerful medium of mobile. People take their phones with them everywhere and they are interacting with them constantly throughout the day.  Today when you want to capture eyeballs and attention, gain more exposure, increase revenue and engagement, mobile marketing is the prime medium to achieve those goals.

Now that you are clearly ready to learn more about mobile marketing and what it can do for your business, visit, http://mcreasite.com/blog, where you will discover lots of tips and strategies for growing your online business.

Mobile Marketing is making use of the exploding popularity and ubiquity of mobile devices to create demand and generate exposure for your products and services. Over 300 million americans own a mobile phone, and for many of them it is their only access to the Internet. Since most people who own cell phones carry them with them practically everywhere, your message gets delivered directly into their hands while they are in action, on the move and living their lives. Mobile marketing is about effectively bringing your message to your audience where they are.

Because there are so many different kinds of mobile devices available right now with various operating systems that have different kinds of functionality, let’s break down some of the different kinds of mobile marketing campaigns.

• Text messaging (SMS) using common short codes

Users see or hear the short code and send a blank text message to that number, which then subscribes them to a mobile messaging list. You can then send future marketing messages to those subscribers. They can opt-out by replying to a text with the code: STOP and they will be automatically removed.

Most cell phones have the capability to send SMS messages, however,  subscribers can choose to not purchase a text messaging plan.

• MMS (Multi-media Messaging Service)

MMS messages can include photos, text, audio or attached video.

• Internet browser

Your marketing messages would appear as banner advertising on mobile websites, games and apps, you can create landing pages and use any other form of online marketing strategy.

• QR Codes

Quick response codes appear ‘in the wild,’ so-to-speak. These are two-dimensional, graphic codes that have contact data or a URL embedded in the image. A smart phone with a QR reader app installed can scan the code and access information on the web for your business. QR codes are used in print ads, on flyers, tee shirts, car decals—anywhere potential customers might see and scan them using their phones.

• Bluetooth proximity marketing

Proximity marketing is the localized distribution of advertising content that is location specific. Transmissions can be received by people who are in close proximity and who have mobile devices equipped to receive the messages. Proximity marketing is often used at concerts or large events such as conferences, it can be used to broadcast  information specific to that venue or audience.

Again, mobile marketing gets your message directly on devices that your target market is engaging with for a good portion of their waking hours during the day. By the end of 2011, about half of the mobile phones in use in the U.S. will be smart phones, which have:

• Internet access
• Email
• Camera
• Video
• GPS
• Music player

With the hundreds of thousands of apps that are being developed and either sold, or given away free, this provides yet another venue for mobile advertising. As people use the apps and play the games, your ad is displayed where they can click on it if it interests them.

Mobile marketing is the way to grab and hold the attention of your target audience, engage them and promote your products and services.

If you are ready to get started with mobile marketing, visit http://mcreasite.com/blog , where you will discover how to expand your brand and grow your business online today.

apple’s cloud storage product called iCloud was announced at the world wide developers conference in June and it’s expected to roll out to users in the fall when the new, iOS5 is launched. iCloud is a virtual storage space where apple users can store their music, photos, applications, calendars and documents in the cloud, and wirelessly push them to their devices synchronizing the content automatically.

You can think of the metaphor of iCloud being a hard drive in the sky, where you can synchronize devices wirelessly and have the data  available to you wherever you are, as long as you have Internet access. This service will be quite useful for apples 5.1 million iPhone users and 1.3 million Mac OS users.

Currently, users plug their devices in to their laptop or desktop computer with an eye USB connection to synchronize their photos, videos. Contact information applications etc., but now that can all be done over the air quickly and easily. So if you have an iPhone, an iPad, and laptop at home and a desktop at work you can now manage and synchronize all of your data so that everything is up to date across all of the different devices.

When iOS5 is launched in the fall, Apple users will update their iPhones and iPads to the new firmware and then the apps that they have already installed will become seamlessly integrated with iCloud. Users will be able to access their iTunes,  photos stream, documents, allowing them to view and edit the same version of a document regardless of which device they are looking at it on,  all the stored content on their iPhone and other devices such as apps e-books and audio will be stored and accessible whenever you need it. All of your contacts, calendar and mail will live in the cloud and you can access it and synchronize it automatically in real time with your devices.

With the popularity of mobile devices such as iPhone, iPad, and iPod, people take their technology with them wherever they go allowing them to work and play and stay up to date with everything that is going on in their world in real time.  Cloud storage helps support that emerging digital nomad lifestyle where users can no longer stand being tethered to their laptop or desktop by a USB connection. In the same way that they can download the newest music or podcasts to their mobile devices, now they can sync all of their data automatically.

With iCloud, Apple has positioned the cloud as the central hub where users will store and sync their data while still maintaining local control of their data on their own devices.

On the Apple website they are saying that when you sign up for I cloud you’ll get 5GB of free storage for your content. There isn’t much detail about what the prices will be or how the billing structure will work. For those who need more than 5GB of storage.

For more information about cloud storage and other tips and strategies for growing your online business, visit, http://mcreasite.com/blog.

Google+ is Google’s hot new social network, which  is available now to people who have a Google account, and it is becoming one of the fastest-growing social networks.  It is estimated that it has grown to 10 million users already.  Google+ is Google’s latest attempt at launching a social networking platform Buzz and Wave just didn’t catch on as they had hoped.  So far it seems like people have stopped asking if this is going to be a Facebook killer. But it’s just getting off the ground and people are discovering what this new social networking platform has to offer. The UI is simple, intuitive and familiar, if you are used to the other social networking platforms, but there are a few unique features that will set Google plus apart from Facebook and Twitter.

+Circles

Circles makes it simple to quickly assign people to groups. You might have circles of family members work colleagues, college friends, business associates, sports fans, hobbies and other interests, etc. When you add a person to your Google+ you will assign them to one or several of your existing circles or create a new one to add them to. When you share content on Google+ you are asked to choose which circles you want to share that content with. You even have the option to share it with your e-mail contacts on Gmail, who have not yet joined Google+.

+Hangouts

Google+ launched hangouts, which is live video chat that can include up to 10 people at once, a full week before Facebook was set to launch its similar product in partnership with Skype. Hangouts have great potential for bringing online users together in real time.

+Sparks

Sparks is a massive feed of content from across the web that includes video and is available in over 40 languages. It provides a way for users to find and share interesting content from a wide variety of categories with their circles within Google plus.

+Mobile

The Google+ Android app allows users to take all of the functions of Google plus with them on the road with the exception of hangouts. But that functionality may be coming to mobile sooner than later. Instant uploads is supposed to make sharing photos from your mobile phone to the web super simple. For now the iOS app for Apple’s iPhone devices is not yet available to the public.

+1 Button

Now that Google plus has launched the +1 button takes on a whole new meaning as you collect book marks for pages that you like across the web. The +1 button collects all these links on a single page in your G+ stream. So if you want more traffic and more people sharing stuff from your site, be sure to add the +1 button to your website.

G+ hacks and tips

• To mention people in your posts on G+, add an @ or a + in front of their name

@Tom Jones or +Tom Jones

• Make a message private by only sharing it with one person and disabling re-sharing.
• Add photos, links or videos to your posts by dragging them directly to the share box.

*word* = word

_word = word

-word = word

• Clicking the +1 button on a post is the same as the ‘Like” button on Facebook.
• Clicking +1 on the web will add that post to your +1 page

Taking a look at Google plus in these first opening days it doesn’t seem like it will replace Facebook and twitter, but rather, they can all coexist happily as people adapt  to using the different platforms for different reasons.

Source: plus.google.com

If you’re looking for more information about how you can use social media marketing to get more exposure for your website, visit http://mcreasite.com/blog to find a ton of tips and strategies for Marketing your business online.

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.