Marketing your small business on the mobile Web
This blog entry was posted on February 13, 2009.
More and more people are accessing websites from their mobile phones but this experience can be frustrating. Most Web sites were not designed to be used cell phones with their small screen, smaller keyboard and no mouse.
There are about 4 billion mobile phones in the world. This is about four times the numbers of PC’s. The potential for marketing on the mobile web is much bigger than the traditional World Wide Web.
The number of web enabled cell phones is growing. A new generation of 3G phones with web browsers are quickly replacing the older cell phones. Smart phones such as the iPhone and Blackberry Storm offer PC like functionality and are growing in popularity. New “flat rate” data plans have made web access by mobile phones more affordable.
Businesses are responding by quickly developing mobile websites to take advantage of this growing market.
Two mobile website options
- Place your mobile website on a sub-domain of your main website. (m.domain.com).
- Purchase a .mobi name and place your mobile website there (domain.mobi)
Two ways to create your first mobile website.
- Find a mobile Web developer who can build your mobile website from scratch.
- Use a mobile website template such as mobiCreate.com or site.mobi.
As you create your mobile website, design and structure your website around your mobile visitor. They are looking for fast access to short bits of content. You will want to use short, direct sentences. Keep your content brief and to the point. Navigation and number of pages should be streamlined.
Think about the most important things your visitor is looking for and give them easy access to that information. Make it useful for your mobile visitor.
Acknowledgement: This information was taken from the eBook on mobilethinking.com
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Related posts:
- Why a Local Business Needs a Mobile Website
- Designing a Website for the Mobile Web
- Mobile Web Pages Need to be Simple
- BLIF Marketing: Zero Cost Small Business Marketing
- Do You Use Relationship Marketing in Your Small Business?
Filed under: Mobile Web
This entry was posted on Friday, February 13th, 2009 at 5:26 am and is filed under Mobile Web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.No Comments
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Some additional points for small businesses to consider on the mobile Web:
1. Using a .mobi address is better for businesses than an “m.” subdomain for being found by search engines. A site only gets one entry in the Internet zone files — the files search engines use to start every crawl. A .com, etc., entry is already used for a PC home page. You won’t get an entry for m., mobile., wap. or any other non-standard convention. But you do get one for .mobi — the entry for a mobile home page. That means a .mobi domain makes your site perform better on search engines and come out higher on the results pages of relevant searches.
dotMobi has a lot of information on best practices for mobile SEO at http://mobithinking.com/best-practices/mobile-seo-best-practices.
2. The site where the information on SMBs and mobile sites can be found is called mobiThinking and can be found at http://mobiThinking.com.
3. This week, dotMobi has launched a special service for SMBs called “Instant Mobilizer,” which uses an existing SMB’s Web site elements to instantly create a mobile-friendly site that works on any phone, on any network. It is a no-cost solution — other than the cost of a .mobi domain name, which is generally $10-20 per year. Full information is at http://instantmobilizer.com.
Comment by Vance Hedderel, Director of PR & Communications, dotMobi — February 19, 2009 @ 3:12 am