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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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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