Today I want to talk a little bit about Mobile Marketing and how its going to become more popular in the coming years, you see the term actually has two meanings that a lot of people don’t know the first more common meaning is to market on or with a mobile device and the second more traditional meaning is to market in a moving fashion like technology road shows.

In 2000 mobile marketing really started to take off a lot more because of SMS (Short Messaging Service) and over these last few years SMS has became a more legitimate advertising channel. Its actually a lot more regulated then something like email marketing, you see with mobile marketing each carrier network sets their own guidelines and best practises for the media industry, even the IAB (Interactive Advertising Bureau) and the MMA (Mobile Marketing Association) has established guidelines for mobile marketing.

SMS marketing has became huge in Europe and Asia even though it received bad reviews at first because of the potential use for spam. In Europe alone over 100 million advertising messages are sent out each and every month, this type of marketing influence has been seen in North America as well with Labatt Brewing in 2002 where they would interact with the user using a short-code, which is a 5 or 6 digit number that the user could send out and receive a text message in return, all for a small fee.

Now that you’ve got a little insight into mobile marketing, I want to take a second to toss out some ideas for your next business venture, you see I feel that even though this industry is more regulated then most, it can still become a good source of income to the internet entrepreneur, just think about it for a second, how much money do you think those online joke sites make through SMS, I personally don’t know what the exact number is but I do know its a lot, for instance they simply get a short-code from a mobile carrier like Telus or Bell (Which were supposed to merge but didn’t). Once they’ve got their short-code they advertise online and offline saying text “joke” to 55547 or some other 5-6 digit number and when you do so it sends a message to an online automated system which in turn sends out a joke to that phone each and every week for a small fee (usually .25 cents per joke), the trick here is that most carriers won’t charge the end user until they open that message but the power is that a very large percentage of cell phone users use text-messaging so much that they will open it and not even remember about the charge at the end of the day.

In my own personal experience this area of advertising is still wide open for a variety of ideas, more and more as cell phones can connect to the internet faster the more opportunities will arise and I’ve already got a few things lined up for myself which I think could make quite a bit of money, you’ve just got to ask yourself the question “What can I deliver through SMS that isn’t being already delivered? Or how can I deliver it in a better manner?“.

What do you think about this area of marketing?, Do you think it could hold weight for another automated business?

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Lets begin talking a little bit about engagement marketing and what is it exactly, even if your unfamiliar with the term, there is a very large chance that you’ve already seen it in action, actually I bet close to 80 or more million member of MySpace don’t know what the term is but they are directly involved with it. You see engagement marketing is a strategy which encourages customers to participate in the evolution of a brand.

Instead of looking at customers as potential sales, an engagement marketer will make the customer part of the product or service, look at MySpace or any other online community that was unknown a couple years ago, each one of those communities encouraged their members (Also Known As Customers) to take part in the building of their brand, most people using those communities just look at it as a place to express themselves and to hang out but the real aspect lies with what the company had planned from the start and that is making money from an unsuspecting member.

Another interesting aspect of this type of marketing came from Alan Moore, founder of the “Comparative Media Studies Program” who said that “Engagement Marketing is a very broad term, and purposefully so. At its heart, is the insight that human beings are highly social animals, and have an innate need to communicate and interact. Therefore, any engagement marketing initiative must allow for two-way flows of information and communication. We believe, people embrace what they create“.

This is important for so many reasons, think about it people actually do embrace what they create, a long time member at a forum isn’t just going to stop contributing to that community for no reason, they’ve put their heart into it and don’t want to see it go down in flames, the long time members of MySpace or any other community are the same way, most don’t realize it and just think ohh this is a great service.

What I’m trying to get at with this is if your doing something online for the long term and want to be heard then you’ve got to get your customers involved with what your doing, this holds true for almost every aspect of online marketing, the more you can get the customers involved the better, look at blogs for example, the more comments a blog gets the better, it shows that people like or hate what you’ve said, it shows that your building a community of people and it also helps you gain a lot more unique content with no additional work.

That is going to be about enough for this little post but there will be a lot more to come, the whole aspect of marketing is influencing the end customer to perform a particular action, you cannot force someone to take that action, however you can use a variety of techniques to influence them and the less they feel pressured the more they feel like their in control, at which point you’ve successfully done your job (Assuming they eventually did perform the action).

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Well one month into this blog and I’m already way off topic and if I keep it up I’ll be headed down an unknown and potentially damaging road, you see my original goal with this was to be a marketing blog, with having a little bit of a personal touch here and there, well the problem with doing that is its became all personal stuff and less marketing stuff.

So I’m doing a complete re-design on this and on a number of other blogs I own, the first thing that’s going to happen is no more off topic talk, for instance there will be no more SEO, How-To-Guides, Internet Real Estate, Arbitrage, all that will end as of right now, no more, this blog will now become a full out marketing blog, only talking about marketing, what type of marketing is unknown but for now I’ll focus on general marketing and some affiliate marketing, I’m going to try and keep to more online marketing then anything else.

Now onto whats going to happen with the articles already on the site and what I’m going to do about writing how-to-guides, seo examples, code examples, splogpress, and everything else that I consider personal in nature, another words anything that I won’t have a single topic for will be placed on my new truly personal blog which is called “The Geeky Blog”.

It will be located at http://thegeekyblog.com however as of writing this its not yet set up, I’m going to spend my night time hours for that because I’m busy programming the commentor, so to sum it up, from here on in, this blog will be fully dedicated to marketing and The Geeky Blog will be about everything else that I started talking about here, the SplogPress tools, any future tools, How-To-Guides, the SEO, Internet Real Estate and other general things will be placed there.

You’ll also be noticing yet another re-design on this blog which is not a bad thing because I was looking at some really clean and amazing designs last night that I might follow up on and as a very last point I would like to make is, don’t think this blog will now start to suck because I’m going in the proper direction with it, its going to still help out the online entrepreneurs a lot because learning about the overall marketing is just as powerful then ranking your sites or automating the process.

If your interested in having a look at The Geeky Blog, I should have it up and going before midnight (-700 GMT) tonight.

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Here is something pretty interesting that I just came across today and it would not surprise me for a single second if it happened, these types of things make me want to learn about true hacking, not to cause harm but to protect our rights as individuals on the internet, I mean seriously the internet has become one of the few hopes that a small individual can make a huge difference in the world, maybe not on a global scale but the opportunities are immense so if our connections are limited back because of corporations, that’s like putting a cap on our knowledge.

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I would like to talk about a little idea I’ve had earlier today, this idea is one of those which sound good on paper but you never really know until you test it out but I’ll share with you what I was thinking to see if others might think it has potential.

What I’m talking about here is unique content and what makes unique content unique in the search engines, well when you think about it unique content is technically not unique until it gets indexed in the search engines, lets take this particular post for example, this post is not yet unique in the eyes of the search engines because they have not indexed it yet, when they index this post and then find another site with the same content the search engines will say “I found this post on blog A first and it was indexed yesterday, but then we found this same post on blog B today which means that blog A posted it first and its unique to them and blog B must have stolen it“.

That is a really simplified version of what goes on with the search engines, so we know that content is not unique until it gets indexed in the search engines and we know that the search engines can only give a duplicate content penalty to a blog if it has something in their index to compare it too.

Now for the real examples, lets say we create a simple bot that goes out to relevant sites and monitors what the average post times are for that site, for instance we can say over a period of 6 months they’ve made an average of 1 post per week, now the search engines also know this information and if you only post once per week for awhile then Google will only send their bots to your site once per week because why send them each day when we know they only have fresh content once per week.

We can leverage that, so the simple part would be to create a bot to monitor certain blog post times and once we know the average post times we can now send our bots to their site more then what Google does, so when that user makes a new post we will know before Google does because we are sending our checker bots more frequently then Google is, when they make a new post we scrape that post and automatically post it to our own blog, from there we use various techniques to get as many Google bots to our site as possible in the shortest time frame.

What that will do is get Google to index the content on our blog before it indexes the new content on the other blog so now Google can say hey we indexed this post on blog B before we indexed it on Blog A, which means that blog B is the unique owner of that content and blog A should get a duplicate content penalty.

See what happens there we fool Google into thinking that we are the unique content owners instead of the other blog because we got Google to index that content before it indexed the content on the other blog, giving us the unique content rights. As you can tell this could very easily piss off a lot of content writers if they continually create new unique posts but are still getting duplicate content penalties when the scraper site is claiming that content as their own unique content.

So its a method that sounds good on paper but would require some tests to see the effectiveness of it, but if it works it could be quite easy to have an automated site with full unique content, even though you never wrote that content.

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