Hi, I’m Mary Wilhite. After being in politics for over 30 years,
and working every aspects of business, government,
and running for public office.

I decided to leave the political world, and focus on Internet and Mobile marketing full time.

I was down-on-my-luck and watched over $100,000 of my own money
vanquishes. I was in debt, and dead broke. In other words I was a
broke ass politician, and felt hopeless. I didn’t have much to show for it.

So with no money, in debt, and almost loosing  my home, I turned to internet and
mobile marketing.  And  WOW!!!! What the difference a day make 24 hours!

Not only did I paid off my debt, but also I am thriving in my business.

And I want to show you step by step how I did it. Through hard work, and perseverance.

That why I created this BLOG to share my thoughts.

Mobile marketing is the future, and I want to give you tips, tricks, and strategies on how I made hundreds of thousands of dollars with mobile marketing campaigns.

So if you’re a entrepreneur,  business owner,  marketer or consultant that is pursuing Mobile Marketing as a part of your overall marketing strategy or just wanting to put together a quick Mobile Marketing campaign, I want to show you how to use mobile marketing in your business.

So please take a few minutes to cruise my blog, and I promise with
all my heart to bring you timely and meaningful information that will
drive up your bottom line.

I look forward to serving you through my Blog!

Cheers,
To your success!

Mary

With chapters on mobile advertising, mobile web development and search engine optimization, Krum’s informative book is a great resource for first time entrepreneurs looking to take advantage of the mobile platform. There is also an entire chapter dedicated to the iPhone, a testament to the device’s influence on the mobile Web space.

“The iPhone has brought mobile Web access and mobile search to the masses,” writes Krum. “The iPhone represents only 8% of the mobile handsets but roughly 75% of the mobile search, and iPhones now account for one out of every 333 Web hits worldwide. The desire for Web access and Web search was always there – it was just being slowed by the bad user experience that other mobile phones provided.”

Krum also includes case studies from prominent businesses that have used mobile platforms to market their products. These include Nike, Nationwide Insurance, Land Rover, Visa, Corona Beer and CNN. I was disappointed to not find any mention of the efforts being made by numerous companies to use augmented reality for mobile marketing, but the book does include the use of quick response (QR) codes.

Various types of bar codes and QR codes are described, as well as case studies of companies that put the technology to practical use. The book itself even joins in the QR fun by including a ScanLife EZ Code on the back cover. ScanLife is a mobile application and short code provider that allows companies to market specifically to camera phones. Users take a picture of the code using a ScanLife app and can be redirected to various forms of mobile content.

The strange thing about the book’s implementation of the ScanLife code is that it failed to include any mobile-specific content. After scanning the code with the ScanLife app on my iPhone, Safari launched and took me to the book’s homepage. Yes, Safari on the iPhone is a fully capable web browser, but it would have made more sense to create a website optimized for the iPhone’s smaller screen. A similar code I found while on a recent trip to Las Vegas took me to a special mobile promotion page with a video and special hotel rates.

The lesson to be learned here, and from other forms of mobile marketing, is that the content used should be native to the devices being used to view it. Simply adding a link to your normal webpage on a mobile device is not the best use of the technology. The hotel example was a much better implementation because it provided me with exclusive content that was also optimized for a smaller screen. It isn’t enough to shift the same marketing materials to mobile phones; mobile marketing is all about making the content unique and native.

Much more can be learned from the book and from the advice provided straight from the CEO of a company in the trenches of mobile marketing. Research shows that smartphones could be used more than personal computers in just a few years, so getting ahead on mobile marketing strategies is an important step for any early-stage company.

Being in mobile for a decade, I have heard it all, especially from those who think mobile marketing is stupid. There is a common theme among companies that believe mobile marketing is intrusive. I speak with prospects all the time that have either tried mobile and said it was not successful or won’t try it because they feel their customers will get upset. After asking a number of questions about what went wrong or drilling down to what their fears are, I almost always come to the same conclusion:  there is a big misconception about how mobile should be managed and, guess what, it all starts with email.

SMS costs money, and 95% of SMS messages are read within four minutes–two facts that can bring together a horrible user experience if not executed properly. Almost every company looking at mobile is an email marketer, and I know email marketers are jaded because of their experience with email and realizations about spam. 72% of the 320 billion emails sent on a daily basis are spam, so who could blame them? Most companies don’t understand email best practices and, as a result, they have felt the burn of user complaints, poor open rates, getting blocked, and ending up on blacklists. Legitimate companies are not spammers; they are generally just ignorant. They don’t realize that you should not upload a list that has not been sent to in two years or fail to confirm an email address upon opt in.

So back to those who think mobile marketing is stupid. Mobile is very different from email and it has to be done right. I like to help people understand that if your strategy was to build the largest email database possible, then mobile needs to be about building a database of your best and most loyal customers. Mobile is about loyalty–period. Those who are willing to have their day interrupted as their pockets buzz are going to be your best customers. If you have the email marketer mentality of “batch and blast,” mobile is going to be a disaster for you. However, if you learn to treat mobile as a totally different type of channel, it can be truly successful. With mobile, there is a new set of best practices and they are different from email.

Your first approach to a mobile strategy should be to offer something only available via the mobile phone. The incentive should be good and be the only place your customer can take you up on your offer. I am sure most of you have been to a nightclub before. Ever been in line when someone walks right past you up to the front of the velvet ropes and right into the club? He or she is what is known as a VIP. This is how you should treat your mobile club. They are VIPs that can get exclusive updates, offers, and content only available in the mobile channel. Make it exclusive and make it appealing. Make sure when you are opting people into your database, you not only get them to respond “YES” to join, but you manage their expectations with the types of messages they will get, how often they will get them, and how they can opt out.

If I was to tell you that by sticking to this very basic strategy you could build a solid database of loyal customers who will not only not be mad at you but will look forward to your messages, would you still be afraid?

Of course, your mobile database is not going to be as big as your email database, but is that important? Answer this:  which is a bigger return –a call-to-action that sees a 20% take on a mobile database of 3,000, or a 5% take on an email database of 10,000 people?  If you guessed the mobile database made you more money, you guessed correctly.  Time and time again mobile has a higher response rate.  Let’s take a look at the reasons why:

1. 95% of cell phones have SMS capabilities and 87% of the population has a cell phone.
2. You can reach someone no matter where they are.
3. 95% of text messages are read within 15 minutes.
4. There are virtually no delivery issues with SMS. If you send it, they will get it, and right into their inbox.
5. All mobile clubs should have a double opt in so you cannot sign up anyone but yourself. The subscriber takes the action of responding with a “YES.”
6. 33% of email addresses change on a yearly basis, but with number portability (the ability to take a number from carrier to carrier), people are ditching their home phones and keeping their cell phone number for life.

Shall I continue?

These six stats alone should perk up the ears of any marketer who doubts the power of mobile. Think about the value of a phone number; it’s like having your customer’s IP address. What other channel can you say that about? People move, people get fired, people leave their email account for another because of spam, people are getting rid of their home numbers. But what stays consistent? If you said mobile, put a little gold star on the fridge. It goes with your customer for life wherever he decides to go. Deep, huh?

Those who think mobile marketing is stupid only do so because they treat it like email and don’t understand that mobile is about loyalty. They think that if they cannot have a database of half a million people, it’s not worth it. They don’t have email best practices down so, of course, they are going to screw up mobile best practices. If you want to make it work you can–you just need a plan and someone to help shine the light on the path ahead.

A mobile marketing campaign will only prove as successful as the strategy, effort, and financing behind it.

It’s a lesson many online retailers have learned. And, as a result, new findings from Forrester Research, Inc. indicate that approximately three-quarters of online retailers either presently have or are actively developing a “mobile strategy.”

Incredibly, Forrester’s study, which was produced in partnership with Shop.org, also found that one in five online retailers already has a fully-implemented mobile strategy in place.

“It’s imperative for online retailers to stay on top of what their customers want and these days it’s all mobile all the time,” said Scott Silverman, Executive Director, Shop.org. “Mobile commerce has tremendous potential and will no doubt grow to become a significant part of overall sales volume in years to come. Whether to increase customer satisfaction, grow their brand or drive traffic and sales, online retailers are in this game to stay.”

The survey included input and data from more than one hundred companies. All told, the data gleaned helped contribute to “The State of Retailing Online” research series, the goal of which is to help bestow upon eBusiness “an annual industry benchmark for marketing and business investment and activities.”

Proving that financial backing in mobile emarketing is catching up to the demand for it, the report estimates that a substantial sum of money ($170,000 per online retailer) will be spent on mobile websites in 2010. Of course, that dollar amount will be exponentially larger for mega online retailers.

The report, it should be noted, found that most retailers view social media marketing favorably, but the ROI for driving online sales “remains murky.” Overall, some 80% of retailers contributing to the report revealed their use of social media strategies to experiment, learn, and better understand their customers. 28% explicitly stated that social marketing has “helped grow their business,” although direct sales from social tactics “are not widely measured.”

some valuable best practices for mobile coding, navigation and basic optimization:

Code Best Practices

• Traditional browsers are forgiving. Mobile browsers are not. You must code in XHTML, which has a rigid accessibility standards that make it ideal for mobile.
• Avoid unnecessary code which will cause the page to load slower.
• Separate content from design with CSS. It will minimize the code required to render the page, decrease your page load time, ensures correct display on different screen resolution and allows you to specify rendering based on the device.
• Have a mobile specific CSS for your Web site to make elements appear or not appear on your mobile site.
• Use appropriate headers and MIME type.

Navigation Best Practices

• Organize buttons logically and consistently. People won’t learn your site; you have to cater to their needs.
• Name buttons clearly and use good calls to action.
• Include text links for the main navigation on the page.
• Have a site map.
• Keep important pages within three clicks of the home page.
• Make navigation appear below the main content, including menus and submenus. This will keep the more optimized and unique content at the top (this requires you to change your source code).
• Use optimized jump links to help people move around on the page without scrolling.

Basic Best Practices

• Follow all SEO best practices (use title tags, short descriptions, keywords, etc.)
• Use Interchangeable Keyword Elements. This will give you more phone phrases and more chances to rank for shorter keyword phrases
• Submit your site to all major mobile search engines
• Send confirmations. (People fear the Web because they fear dropped calls/searching)
• Test with mobile devices and device simulators
• Validate your site with mobile code checkers
• Initiate a mobile visibility campaign
• Offer an RSS feed for mobile RSS feeders
• Purchase text links from mobile and traditional sites
• Consider mobile PPC with Google
• Offer social tagging/bookmarking options
• Mention mobile in press releases
• Provide information that would be important to people on the go
• Make phone numbers clickable
• Offer “Send me this page” links
• Include your main address in the footer
• Optimize videos and podcasts for mobile too
• Submit your site to the mobile search engines

Gregory Merkel noted that there are already 206 million mobile phone subscribers (take that, Susan!). [Yes, yes. I'm a Luddite, I know.--Susan] Interestingly, he also noted that the average number of words entered in a mobile query was 2.3 on a cell phone or 14.5 characters on a PDA. That’s noteworthy because it means your search engine optimization tactics will need to be entirely different based on the device your customer is using (and you’ll need to know what device they are more likely to use!)

It makes sense though that the difficulty of entering keywords on your phone would influence keyword usage.

Other notable stats: Seventeen percent of queries are URLs (that’s not surprising), users are said to average 29-36 seconds scouring search results page, only 85 percent of queries had more than 1 search result requested, and users appear to favor local search focused sites over local queries on a general search site.

Google Mobile Search is the most widely used mobile engine. Google Mobile Search will automatically render any Web site to help promote a better user experience. They translate the pages by analyzing the HTML and converting it to a mobile-ready format. However, to entice users to create mobile specific sites, they allow users to search either the entire Web or ONLY sites designed for the mobile Web. With the mobile Web still in its infancy, creating an optimized mobile site puts you at a significant advantage over your competition.

Google Mobile Search Engine Optimization Tips from Gregory Merkel

• As mentioned earlier, the basic rules of SEO still apply.
• Build multiple PDA/cell phone handset/browser versions of your site and use a ‘user agent’ detection script to identify the PDA/phone and browser type and thereby serve the best possible users experience.
• Economy of page space, graphics (no Flash), and messaging is key.
• Assume visitors will not want to scroll.
• Remember users use 2-4 word queries.
• Your titles and descriptions are more important than ever.

Establishing a company presence on the Web means that you have access to your audience whenever and wherever they happen to be. It’s your job to deliver the right message, to the right customer, at the right time. As mobile becomes important, it means integrating mobile into your already established campaigns.

Mobile can build brand awareness, generate revenue, drive up attendance to events, encourage engagement and improve customer loyalty. Basically, it’s the Swiss army knife of marketing, with tools you never knew you didn’t have.

But how do you start? What should you keep in mind when creating your first mobile initiative? Here are some tips.

• Panelist Laura Marriot noted the first step in your mobile marketing campaign should be to define your strategic objectives. Your goals don’t have to be complex, but you should be able to define them in order to measure success later on. Let your customers dictate where you choose to stick your toe in the water. They’ll tell you what sites they are interested in, don’t try and dictate them.

• Find a carrier that you’re compatible with. Realize that your audience is also the customer of the carrier, meaning they may dictate what you’re allowed to do. If carriers aren’t 100 percent on board with your marketing campaign, they may shoot down your marketing ideas. Know this in advance.
• Another tip, understand that mobile marketing really is similar to marketing on the traditional web. Its choices may be more complex, but the actual medium is no different.

What about obstacles?

According to panelists, the biggest obstacle to mobile marketing is coming up with a valuable consumer proposition so that users want to communicate with you. Your first meeting about mobile should be why a consumer should let your company send them a text message. There must be some sincere value or users won’t opt-in. Your mobile marketing campaign should address user needs, not your own.

A second obstacle is the lack of education. Getting the word out about mobile marketing is still a difficult process. Users are more engaged now than before, but there is still a hesitation to accept a new format. The existence of browser charges is always keeping many users off the Web.
On the marketing side, many companies still don’t know what it means to market on the Mobile web, so there’s a learning curve that needs to be addressed there, as well.

To sum things up, the panelists gave their predictions on where will mobile marketing go in 2007?

• Mobile video
• Mobile search
• More locally-based

Overall, this panel gave a good introduction to mobile marketing. I would have loved to have seen more in-depth analysis and more information on starting a mobile campaign from scratch, but this session gave more tips than new information.

How does mobile marketing fit into your business strategy?

This service provides a clear understanding of mobile for corporate marketers outside the traditional mobile technology space. It is for marketers who recognize the need to leverage the emerging mobile channel as part of their brands’ ongoing marketing and advertising efforts – for marketers who perceive that consumers are reaching out to brands through mobile phones in powerful new ways. These consumers want to know what companies can offer them on and through these devices. This emerging mobile channel will be one of the defining marketing methods of the new decade. ABI Research offers new insights into this area with a combination of market data, forecasting and analysis that consumer-facing brands can leverage in powerful new ways. This service helps savvy marketers break down the complexity inherent in mobile marketing with a sensible strategic approach.

Who needs mobile marketing advice today?

• Automotive
• Consumer Packaged Goods
• Financial Services
• Restaurants
• Retail
• Travel/Hospitality
• Media/Advertising covering the industries above

Mobile Data Generation and Consumption

As cellular voice minutes and related revenues peak in developed markets, network operators have sought the next major growth opportunities. The addition of data services over mobile networks has blossomed from that revenue growth strategy into its own market. This study examines the non-voice, non-SMS/MMS messaging traffic transferred over mobile data networks.

This report describes the growth of traffic transferred over mobile data networks. It defines the market and technology issues, with particular emphasis on subscribers, devices and wireless protocols. In addition, it details the salient market trends and forecasts both regional and global traffic levels through 2014.

What Questions Does This Report Answer?

• How much mobile data traffic is transferred in a specific geographic region or for the world?
• What mobile data applications are driving the most traffic today and over the next several years?
• What role do 2G/3G/4G wireless protocols play in the generation and transfer of mobile data traffic?
• What types of devices will wireless subscribers use to send and receive mobile data?
• How much data does an average wireless subscriber transfer in a month?
• What issues does the mobile data network traffic market face in the coming years?

Who Needs This Report?

• Mobile network operators
• Managed service providers
• Mobile device and consumer electronics manufacturers
• Mobile processor and platform developers
• Mobile network equipment vendors
• Content developers
• Content distribution networks

Getting Mobilized! Mobile Marketing Strategies

As Matt Bailey explained during the last session I attended, SES organizers are working hard to drill down into topics more. More deep and focused content was requested through surveys that attendees submit following conferences. Solo presentations are one solution they’re experimenting with at SES. So here’s another solo presentation, this time by Cindy Krum, founder and CEO of Rank-Mobile. This mobile-focused session is part of the Search and the Fundamentals track.

Amanda Watlington, owner of Searching for Profit, will give a quick intro to mobile search. Mobile is the next big thing. How many of you carry a smart phone? Almost everyone. How many of you search on your phone. Also almost everyone. Cindy has authored a book on the topic and hosts the WMR show Mobile Presence.

She started in SEO so she likes to look at how to make your site work for mobile. Thre is mass convergence to bite right now. It’s the most personal marketing medium ever and there are more interactive marketing possibilities.

People usually like the audience to put their phone away, but she wants you to take your phone out. We’re going to be playing a game!

Mobile is different

• Mobile bots
• Mobile algorithms
• More interactivity
• Simplified rendering
• Smaller screen
• More sophisticated searchers
• More specific searchers
• Immediate intent

Why now?

• Real mobile Web browsing, in part thanks to the iPhone
• Flat-rate data pricing
• Faster download speed
• More processing power
• U.S. adoption has hit critical mass

iPhones only make up 5 percent of mobile phones in the U.S. but 75 percent of mobile searches. She thinks that shows that the hindrance was browsing experience. Flat-rate data plans means there’s no disincentive to search on your mobile.

How can I benefit?

• Mobile Web is not just a fad. If you embrace it now you’ll be ahead of your competitors.
• Master the medium before your competitors.
• There’s lot of market share to be moved.
• The cost of failure and testing is low.

Hurdles in Mobile Marketing

Challenge: Too many browsers that render the Web differently.

On the traditional Web we came to the realization that every browser ends up rendering in mostly the same way. We’re moving in that direction with mobile but aren’t quite there yet.

Challenge: Different handsets and different screen sizes, screen orientations and slow rendering speed.

Challenge: High mobile data chargers prevent mobile search.

Challenge: Slow download speeds, wimpy networks. You don’t have great coverage everywhere. That means it’s going to slow your message down. Also, if someone’s trying to access your site from their mobile, they might not get the message at all. Streamline your site and your messaging so that it doesn’t choke the network and gets to the phone faster

Mobile Search Landscape

• On-deck search, also called carrier search
  • Walled or semi-walled garden from the carrier
  • Monetized content and downloads
  • Search from white-label or traditional search engines
  • Preferred 38 percent of the time, when compared to off-deck search (but 87 percent said it was because of convenience and only 28 percent it was because of good results, according to iCrossings.)
  • On-deck search is going away because people are realizing they’re being limited.
• Off-deck search
  • Like regular Web search
  • Not controlled by carriers
  • Handset/browser can impact search results
  • Not location aware (yet)
  • Preferred 69 percent of the time, when compared to on-deck search

Searcher demographics: 20-29 year olds are using mobile Internet the most. As far as income, it’s pretty even. For gender, it looks like men have only a very slight amount more but it’s shifting toward equal.

What people are looking for, in order of most to least: maps/directions, weather, local info, news, entertainment, sports, finance and other.

Mobile Search Applications

Yelp, YP Mobile, Urbanspoon = they’re taking feeds from existing search engines and integrating results from there. Figure out where they’re drawing their data from and make sure you’re ranking well there. There are mobile search apps for video, shopping and more.

Mobile SEO

• It’s an industry in its infancy
• Many aspects of mobile optimization follow traditional SEO wisdom
• Different bots/crawlers
• Very different results pages
• An optimal mobile experience = return mobile traffic = better results in mobile search engines
• Slow download speed and connectivity issues
• Device independence: traditional sites being viewed on mobile technology

It’s important to understand that with mobile search a click through isn’t necessary for success. If the user finds what they need right on the search page that’s great.

Quick Wins

• Follow all traditional and local SEO best practices
• Provide info relevant to mobile users
• Submit your site to mobile search engines and directions
• Don’t rely on:
  • Embedded images
  • Objects
  • Scripts
  • Frames
  • Flash
  • Pop-up windows
  • Mouse-over events

Code in XHTML and Use CSS

• Traditional browsers are forgiving but mobile browsers are not
• Infinite handset/browser/view setting combinations are possible
• Rigid accessibility standards make XHTML ideal
• External CSS is ideal for mobile

Have a mobile specific CSS: Use multiple style sheets: Use a “screen” style sheet for traditional computers and “handheld” for mobile devices. This means that you don’t have to have a separate site. You’ll avoid duplicate content that’s created from a separate duplicate site as well. “display:none” elements can hide elements in either rendering, but it can still effect download speed on mobile.

There are a number of mobile-specific search engines so submit to mobile directories and search engines. Next she shows a chart comparing different results that are displayed through various mobile search engines.

iPhone optimization: http://www.google.com/uds/samples/iphone/isearch.html is a search page for iPhone you can use to see how you line up.

dotMobi is rarely ideal. It’s not preferred in mobile search, not universally accepted, it has cumbersome development standards, there are no unique assets or features, it has a limited useful life, it’s bad for SEO (mobile and traditional) and bad for consumers.

Non dotMobi architecture options are:

• Do nothing
• Mobile only pages
• Page that works for both mobile and traditional Web — hybrid

Know that rendering can show columns of your site tracked; images may break and background images might not show; JavaScript and AJAX display in full; and forms, action scripts and embedded objects might not work.

Test your mobile site on Opera, Skweezer, the iPhone simulator and iPhone SDK.

Other ways to drive mobile traffic:

• Same email, rendering different places
• It should be compelling anywhere
• Do all email best practices
• Don’t replicate your site and especially don’t replicate your navigation
• Have a good header
• Include a phone number since it’s clickable

Text Message Marketing

• Turns everything into a direct response marketing effort which is more measureable
• Up to 160 characters of text
• Use clickable text
• Collect mobile opt-ins, phone numbers and email addresses via text
• Have your phone system interact with text (ex: send the word “Yes” to opt in to text message coupons and alerts)

When you send the first mobile coupon, give a link for terms and conditions and let people opt out. When you send the first text, be clear and precise and allow users to opt out.

QR codes and couponing hasn’t taken off yet but it’s he in Asia and she thinks it will be coming soon. She thinks new generation iPhones will come with QR code readers and that will likely bring QR codes to popularity in the U.S.

n social networking, it doesn’t get hotter than Facebook right now. The site boasts more than twice the number of visits than any other social network, and Facebook’s growth continues to outpace that of Twitter, MySpace, and LinkedIn by huge margins.

Here are 3 quick and easy tips to improve your Facebook marketing:

1. Post Content on the Weekend

Mobile usage continues to soar, and according to Facebook, people who access the site via their mobile device are almost 50% more active than non-mobile users. So keep mobile users in mind when updating your page and mobile-optimize content when you can. They’ll appreciate the good user experience. You’ll improve your response rate. It’s a win-win.

Winning Internet Marketing Strategies & Tactics is a course designed to demystify Internet Marketing for executives, consultants, and entrepreneurs– it will give participants a practical understanding of how websites, blogs, and social networks are changing the old rules of marketing. The course is anchored on a framework for achieving business & marketing objectives with the outcomes of internet marketing.