How much should I pay for mobile advertising?

The answer should be: as much or as little as you want. But the reality is completely different.
I have been trying for quite a while to find mobile advertising networks, or mobile social networking sites to run one of my small campaigns targeting South Africa. By small I mean $100. I know is not much money, but I would have thought that if I had money to spend, mobile advertising companies, social networks and mobile search engines would be happy to take my money and let me try out their services.  But the minimum expenditure by campaign in some of them is so high that only the big fish can swim in those waters.

Let’s be honest, everybody says that is still early days for mobile advertising…well, no kidding! There are only a number of brands that can afford and are willing to test out a new medium like mobile for the reasonable price of $10,000. I am no fool, I know that big money comes from big companies, money calls money. But what happens to the long tail of advertisers that don’t have the big bucks but still see potential in mobile advertising? In this case, you have very few options – Google, Admob, Decktrade, Mojiva or Buzzcity (that I know)…which are great ad networks, but maybe not the only ones I would like to target.

Let’s say that I’m interested in local search and I’m a local garage that wants to target people in my city only, my only choice is to go to Google as Yahoo! would cost me a minimum of $10,000(ekk).
Let’s say I want to promote my new song from my small independent band: Nokia wouldn’t let me for less than $5,000 and Itsmy – on a more reasonable range – would charge $500 (although I want to thank them again for letting me try their services with a $100 campaign). In this same range is another mobile search engine, Taptu.

So isn’t the Mobile advertising industry interested in the long tail? Thanks to mobile analytics solutions, such as Bango Analytics, we see traffic from all over the world accessing the mobile web. We see new markets using the mobile web more and more. Small businesses with small budgets have potential customers in those markets, and guess what – they all have mobile phones.
I wonder why advertising networks that have the online back end to manage mobile campaigns don’t open their networks to smaller advertisers. And those ones that haven’t got the online platform, what are they waiting for?

If you are a mobile ad network or a mobile search engine, and have a flexible pricing model, please send us your website so we can tick you as friendly small advertiser provider.  We should create a badge for these kind of companies!!!

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Mobislim is climbing up the Google Mobile Search rankings!

Since we started the site optimization a couple of weeks ago, we have seen some market improvement.

Even though Google hasn’t picked up our new site map, changing our URLS to include keywords has made a big difference. We believe this due to a higher number of links strategically spread going to mobislim.com.

The rankings are increasing, now we rank at position #39 for “slimming” while we were at  #250 a couple of weeks ago! For the keyword “calorie charts” we rank #2 and for “slimming diets” #1 and #2, “sliming products” is in position #17. This is quite amazing as all these keywords are highly competitive keywords! In the particular case of “slimming products” this what we did:

We changed the page from being http://mobislim.com/viewZone.jsp?p=zx3 to

http://mobislim.com/k-fve/zone/3/slimming-products.htm and it went from not being ranked, to now being ranked in position #17.

However we have purposely not changed the page title to be “Slimming Products” yet, just to see how big a difference this makes. It is currently the standard site title of “Mobislim | Slimming Diets & Health”

Tom Thurston, our WAP master and his Mobile SEO partner David Carruthers at One Result crew at  is now sending the sites to the list of directories that we provided you, so we are expecting to get better positions too. The good thing about taking steps one at a time is that we can really see how they affect the results.

Now, let’s see what keywords are using our visitors to get to our site. I can see this by exporting a traffic report on Bango Analytics and checking the referrer information. I find terms like “weight lost” “not eating” “cayenne pepper for diet” which makes me realize that I should be writing a page with this content!

So what am I learning from this?

1.     Applying SEO PC sites techniques to mobile sites work.

2.     Highly competitive terms in the PC internet are not so difficult to rank on the mobile internet.

3.     Mobile analytics tools such as Bango Analytics give us that extra insight about what terms our visitors are using to get to our site, so we can review our keyword strategy and our mobile site content.

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Mobile SEO, search engines and directories for the mobile web

In our effort to get our  Mobislim mobile site ranking and SEO optimized, I found this blog post “The place to be: mobile search engines and portals where you should register your site” at mobithinking.com, which is just exactly what we needed for our mobile site mobislim.com.  Thank you mobithinking for sharing this with all of us! This is great information and I thought I would help to spread the word.

Not all the big operators and content sites uses Yahoo!, Google  and Microsoft as default search , so they advise you to register with white-label providers such as Medio or Jumptap. Here is a list of search engines where you should register your mobile site

• Find.mobi: search for your site on find.mobi.
• Yahoo oneSearch: search for your site on yahoo.mobi; and submit site here.
• Taptu: search for your site on taptu.mobi; and submit site here.
• Seek4Wap: search for your site on Seek4Wap; and submit site here.
• Microsoft Live: search for your site here: live.mobi; submit site here.
• Medio Systems: submit site here.
• Jumptap: submit site here.
• Google: search for your site on google.mobi; submit site map here.

For lots more mobile search providers, see wapSwap (also includes directories and portals) and the excellent WAPReview.mobi.

There are countless mobile directories and portals of varying quality and depth of content, as well as geographical and vertical focus (check which ones allow/disallow adult content for example). Most have links to submit a URL from either the home page or from a particular category. Some may request a link in return. There’s a good list of directories of mobile and PDA sites on WAPReview.mobi (including some non-English speaking ones).

Here is a handful of directories to get you started:

• Zerorubbish.mobi: to submit a site you need to sign up.
• wapSwap, visit the relevant category and click on link to submit site.
• WAP Review – mobile sites: wapreview.mobi, yeswap.mobi; submit site for review here.
• Oh! Mobile – mobile site: oh.dirlink.mobi; and submit site here.
• dir.mobi; follow guidelines to submit site here.

See this very handy list of both directories and search providers with many direct links to submit your site from UK mobile agency We Love Mobile (thanks to Simon Liss for this).

I guess Tom and his SEO squad will be quite busy these days sending our site to all these search engines and directories. I will report back on how this helped to our rankings.  We’ll use Bango Mobile  Analytics referrer information to check how much traffic the search engines and directories are sending us, and best of all which keywords people are using to get to our site.

If you have more search engines and directories that we should be mentioning please let me know so we can give something back to mobithinking.

Follow Mobislim updates on twitter  http://twitter.com/mobislim

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Mobile SEO, we want Google Mobile Search to love us a bit more…

http://mobislim.com

Apparently our mobile site mobislim.com wasn’t very (or not at all) SEO optimized…

Tom Thurston, our WAP master and  mobile SEO mentor, reviewed our site from an SEO point of view, and this is what he had to say:

“It’s dire. We don’t even rank for “slimming”, even though our site is all about it. (Annoyingly lots of non-mobile slimming sites come up in the mobile searches as well). I am therefore changing the Mobislim CMS to publish “SEO friendly” URLs as well as deploying a number of other SEO tactics.”

I love his determination! Check his blog to find out the technical bits about what he is talking about.

So yesterday he deployed Mobislim v2 which is now governed by the Scorch Controller, that he has created himself. This Java Spring MVC based controller framework ensures that our slimming diets and health site now benefits from SEO friendly URLs.

As an example:

Old URL for an article about a slimming product: if you read this, you wouldn’t know what that page is about…well, guess what, Google wouldn’t know either!

http://mobislim.com?p=ax5_zx2

New URL SEO friendly: just by looking at it you know is about hoodie gordonini, that is an article and that is a slimming product! Google has -at least- to like us a bit.

http://mobislim.com/k-zfve/slimming-products/article/5/hoodia-gordonini.htm

In addition to this – page titles and page meta tags are now based on the assets / articles being viewed. We are also using the heading tags when presenting article titles. The combination of the above should lead to a whole load of hot loving from Google mobile search.

We have a new site map that we have sent today to Google and now let’s see what happens in the next few weeks.

REALITY CHECK: Let’s see our rankings…

The only thing we rank for, and in the 9th position is for “slimming charts” 😦

This is what I would like to see mobilsim ranking for:

“Slimming tips” “healthy diets” “lose weight” “diets” “slimming” Very competitive terms on search, but focusing our efforts in content creation and SEO technical aspects, I think we can get there…

So here is my challenge Tom, will we or will we not be able to rank for these keywords in the next 2-3 months?

Follow our mobile SEO mission here and in twitter and learn with us how to get your site optimize!

http://twitter.com/mobislim

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Experimenting with Mobile SEO

Chances are that if you are interested in understanding how to run successful mobile advertising campaigns, you’ll also want to know how to get your mobile site found in search engines. This is no mean feat but we want to share our experiences for the benefit of all.

We are going to start off by adding a Google site map to Mobislim and submitting the sitemap to Google. We will compare where we appear on Google mobile search before and after adding the sitemap to see if it makes any difference. I guess we can add some meta tags in as well just to see if they make any difference.

As with most SEO I should imagine that incoming links will probably be the biggest help. Maybe we can get some links added to mobislim from some sites on wap.com. As soon as we get some interesting results, we’ll make sure to share them with you.

Curious to find out more? There are various moves afoot to improve mobile SEO, one of which involves getting the major search engines to support a meta.txt file. For more on this, read Mobile SEO gets a fix from Visibility Mobile.