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The Mobile Friendly Project

Published September 2, 2010 | By Blog Meister
Mobile web standards evolution
Image via Wikipedia

You may have noticed that I have been… maybe obsessing is too strong of a word… paying a lot of attention to mobile web developments lately. There is a good reason for this, plus its led me to build a new site… Which is good news for you. Here’s the story…

I was doing some research for a new article a few days back (August 30th to be precise) and was looking at keywords and what domains were available for them when I happened upon an excellent top level domain name for the mobile market. The keyword “mobile friendly” gets more than twice as many searches as “mobile ready” and the dot net name was available for it. Being a good marketer, I snatched it up and quickly put up a new site.

OK… This where it gets good for you.

Basically, I am going to outline from start to finish over the next thirty days the processes that I go through to make this site successful. You will be looking over my shoulder, so to speak, as I build this site into a money maker and receive step by step updates (and a bunch of other goodies) so that you can create your own.

So, let’s get started…

Why did I choose the mobile web niche?

It was a bit of luck, really. I know this niche is just starting to get hot, so I was already doing research and writing articles about it. When I discovered there was an excellent name with not much competition, I had to create the site. It was an AHA! moment… Plus the niche will be exploding in the next 12 months… guaranteed.

After registering the domain and adding it to one of my hosting accounts, I installed WordPress. To WordPress I added the Suffusion theme and an assortment of plugins including the WordPress Mobile Pack… Kind of pointless to have a blog about mobile friendly web sites and not being mobile friendly yourself.

I created a header and background image, it was the middle of the night and I wanted it done quickly so I did it myself instead of waiting for someone else to do it the next day. I then customized the Suffusion theme and added the header and background images.

I next added an article to the site and added my main keywords and meta description to the Suffusion theme. Another reason that I like this theme is that it is SEO friendly and doesn’t require you to add in a plugin for SEO purposes. A big plus there.

I did a little looking around on Clickbank and found some suitable items to promote through the banner ad zones that I had set up on the site earlier during my customization. I then went to a couple of my CPA networks and browsed for some additional items to promote. Affiliate monetization done.

Since that time I have added a few more articles and did some tweeking to make the site more productive. I’ve added in a special report as an enticement to join the sites mailing list, set up the autoresponder and created a few backlinks. I also added a product of my own to the monetization process for those 100% paychecks.

Today I added a couple of backlinks from a some of my Blogger blogs after adding a new article. I then created an article for a social networking site that includes backlinks to the Mobile Friendly site and to the sign-up page for the free report.

Tonight, I’m going to rest… Its been a long four days and I need to get busy on my next steps in building traffic for the Mobile Friendly site tomorrow. Also tomorrow, I will give you a link to a PDF file that shows all of the plugins that I am using on the site and what purpose each of them serves. Until then…  Just about forgot…

Check the new Mobile Friendly dot net site to see what I have done so far.

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Posted in Blogging, Miscellaneous | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 11 Comments

Your Blog Needs to Be Mobile Ready

Published August 26, 2010 | By Blog Meister
Person with PDA handheld device.
Image via Wikipedia

In recent weeks I have been focused on having mobile-ready blogs because there is so much traffic coming to sites from mobile devices these days. Mobile devices, smart phones, internet ready tablets , etc. are all gaining in popularity for web browsing, so it makes sense to have a site that is viewable by those devices. If your site is not mobile compatible, you are losing a ton of potential blog readers and customers.

I’ve added the WordPress Mobile Pack plugin to all of my blogs which converts them to a format that is mobile friendly. It also supplies basic stats that show the percentage of mobile users that are viewing your site. To show proof of the traffic that you are missing if your blog is not mobile-ready, here is a list of statitistics from a few of my sites and the number of mobile hits that they are getting:

  • 5% of your traffic is currently from mobile users. (this site first)

You’ve had 28941 desktop hits and 1780 mobile hits in the last 9.3 days.

  • 10% of your traffic is currently from mobile users.

You’ve had 10730 desktop hits and 1233 mobile hits in the last 9.3 days.

  • 3% of your traffic is currently from mobile users.

You’ve had 16185 desktop hits and 544 mobile hits in the last 9.3 days.

  • 10% of your traffic is currently from mobile users.

You’ve had 3267 desktop hits and 365 mobile hits in the last 9.3 days.

  • 5% of your traffic is currently from mobile users.

You’ve had 8045 desktop hits and 478 mobile hits in the last 9.3 days.

  • 7% of your traffic is currently from mobile users.

You’ve had 3922 desktop hits and 326 mobile hits in the last 9.3 days.

That is 4300 plus hits that I would have missed out on in just the past nine days alone!

Included in the WordPress Mobile Pack is the ability to link your mobile-ready blog to their Mpexo directory for mobile sites. Having your site listed in that directory helps, but all sites get mobile hits. Here are the stats for a new site that I am developing for a client and just put online a week ago:

  • 1% of your traffic is currently from mobile users.

You’ve had 1680 desktop hits and 25 mobile hits in the last 7.1 days.

This site has very little content (4 posts and 2 pages) and has not been added to the mobile directory but it has received 25 mobile hits in a week without any promotion.

Many popular websites like Twitter and Facebook are mobile friendly and actually encourage their users to interact with mobile devices. With the number of people using these devices on sites that you are (or at least should be) marketing your blog on, does it not make sense to have a site that they can move directly to and view while still using their smart phone or other mobile device?

Now you probably want to know how to monetize this traffic… Admob is a contextual ad site just for mobile devices. How big is the mobile ad market? Google recently paid $750 million for Admob! The money from your mobile ads is probably not going to be as good as your regular site where you have more flexibility in your ad types, but it is a way to profit from that traffic with relative ease.

To close I just have one question: “Is your blog mobile-ready?”

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Going Mobile With WordPress

Published August 9, 2010 | By Blog Meister

With my recent dilemma of not being able to update my blogs because of my phone line being cut, I began to think about using my mobile phone to do the work. On top of this, I have been doing some research in the area of mobile blogging plugins because more and more people are using their smart phones, like the iPhone, Blackberry and Android, to access the internet. It just makes sense to make your site accessible to those users and also to yourself when you come into a situation like I experienced this past week.

Sometimes its just more convenient to post to your blog from your phone. You could be sitting at a football game and have a super idea and want to get it out before you forget it… If you can post to your blog by phone, you can quickly send your idea on to your readers. Same as if you are driving in your car or doing any number of other things. There are many places that you go where you have internet access via your smart phone, that you will not with your laptop.

Before all of this trouble, I was making my sites viewable by smart phone. I’ve taken this a few steps further and searched out some of the more highly rated WordPress plugins for added mobile functionality for your blog. Here are a few, in no specific order:

WordPress Mobile Admin

This plugin allows you to manage your WordPress blog via your phone. According the developer it works on every phone. Whether you have an iPhone, Blackberry or some other web-enabled phone, you can manage and update your WordPress site while you are on the go. You can:

  • Post new articles by phone
  • Post pictures from your phone and decide where they appear in the post
  • Manage Posts, Pages, Categories and Tags
  • Moderate comments
  • Edit User profile pages
  • Supports Gravatars
  • Works in any language WordPress has been translated into

Wapple Architect Mobile Plugin

From the same developer as the plugin above, this plugin will have your blog mobile-ready in just a few minutes. It was the first plugin that I used on this site to make it mobile-ready and, truthfully, it scores better on the mobile test sites than the one I am currently using. I will probably return to this plugin on this site and maybe others at a later time… I’m still in testing mode right now.

From their description:

“Every single mobile device is detected and all aspects of your blog are tailored to the visiting handset. Sites aren’t dumbed down to the lowest common denominator but instead use the features and functionality that advanced phones offer.

“Devices are detected by using Wapple’s advanced web services instead of relying on inferior 3rd party tools. If you view your blog with a brand new, never before seen handset, it’ll still work perfectly!

“Any theme you’ve installed and have styled for web will be carried across to mobile giving you a consistent look and feel for each and every one of your visitors.”

BTW, Rich Gubby (the designer of the plugin) sent me an e-mail wanting to know the reason why I quit using it. If his support follows the same line, I’m sure that I will be using it more in the future.

Mobile version with Onbile Plugin for iphone, blackberry , smartphones, mobile theme.

With this plugin, users can visit your WordPress blog with theirs smart phones and visualize all of the content.

  • Multiple Configurations
  • Complete Customization
  • Change color, text, icons, backgrounds, etc
  • Visitors can comment
  • Compatible with all smart phones

Mobile Content Sender

Adds a sidebar widget that enables you to send any kind of mobile content to United States and Canadian cellular phone including ringtones, images, wallpaper and video.

Features:

  • Includes built-in widget
  • Add your own header and bottom text
  • Enables any of your blog visitors to upload content from their computer to their own cellular phones

WordPress Mobile Edition

WordPress Mobile Edition is a plugin that shows an interface designed for a mobile device when visitors come to your site on a mobile device. Mobile browsers are automatically detected, the list of mobile browsers can be customized on the settings page.

Note: This plugin has not been updated since well before the release of WP 3.0, so it might be a good idea not to test it on your main site, first… Although; there have not been any reported problems at this writing.

WordPress Mobile Pack

This is the plugin that I currently have running on all of my sites. It does a very good job and is very easy to set up. I posted about it here if you want to read more.

There are many more paid plugins out there. I have just focused on the free ones that have a good rating and appear to work with the current version of WordPress. The bottom line is that mobile computing is rapidly expanding and we, as bloggers, need to keep on the cutting edge of technology to make sure that we are not losing that traffic to other sites.

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3 Free WordPress Plugins You Need

Published July 20, 2010 | By Blog Meister

I’ve been doing a lot of experimenting with different WordPress plugins recently and have found three free ones that you need to be using. The first makes your site mobile-ready for people browsing the web on their iphone, android or whatever. The second adds the ability for people to comment on your blog using their Facebook account. The third one is more of a specialty plugin for people who are charging for content or want to build a membership site with WordPress. The good news is… They are all free!

More and more people are browsing the web with their cell phones and mobile devices these days. Is your blog mobile ready? If its not, you could be missing out on tons of readers and comments. There is a very handy plugin that will make your WordPress site mobile ready, automatically. Basically, you just load up the plugin from your admin dashboard or FTP program and configure it and your site is ready for mobile traffic.

The WordPress Mobile Pack is very easy to use. I installed and configured it to ten sites in under an hour… When installed, the plugin will automatically detect your users browser and customize your WordPress site for their mobile phone. If for some reason it doesn’t switch, there is a link where they can manually change it over.

The other cool thing about the developers of this plugin is that they are also creating a mobile-ready web directory. When you configure the plugin, you can also add your site to their mobile directory. Its still in the beta stage at this point, but it is still giving you backlinks to your site from another source! A couple of mouse clicks and you are automatically added to the directory.

How would you like to have a constant stream of backlinks from Facebook (PR 10, Alexa #2) and at the same time make it where more people are commenting on your posts? With the Facebook Comments for WordPress plugin, you can.

This handy little plugin allows your readers to comment on your blog without having to enter their email address. If they are signed into Facebook they can leave a comment and even post that comment to their page… complete with a link directly back to your article!

This one takes a bit more time to set up because you do have to register a Facebook app. Its free and easy to do, but it is one more step that you don’t normally have to go through for some other WordPress plugins. I believe its well worth it. Besides, after you have it registered, you can use it on any number of sites using the same App number assigned to you by Facebook.

The last plugin is by far the best free membership plugin out there. The S2Member plugin does many things that membership plugins costing $100 and up do and even more than some of the other paid plugins. To quote from their site:

S2Member is an extremely powerful ( and free ) membership management system for WordPress®. The s2Member Framework ( free ) integrates seamlessly with PayPal® ( very easy ), and fully supports recurring billing, with the ability to track affiliate commissions on a recurring basis. s2Member supports custom Pages for registration ( including Custom Registration Fields ), account access, and a whole lot more.

Besides being able to sell memberships, you can also use this to sell access to specific pages with “buy now” buttons. By doing this, you could make a virtual shopping cart with protected downloads. If you develop a product to sell, you could set up a sales page with a “buy now” button and when they paid they were given access to the download page. The page cannot be accessed any other way, so your download is secured from hackers and thieves.

You can also integrate the S2Member plugin to work with PayDotCom. Use PayDotCom’s affiliate program to generate sales to your memberships or for the products that you have set up using S2Member.

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