Radium

Originally this post was supposed to be a non-rant about companies utilizing Google AdWords and mobile landing pages. However, a little bit into my research it became clear that most of the ads I clicked on directed me to the main company website. For mobile users, with a tiny 3.5-inch display, regular websites don’t always render images and text in a useful manner making these landing page useless.

If you’re familiar with Google AdWords, then you probably know that within the campaign settings you have the ability to target consumers with smartphones (i.e., full HTML mobile browsers). Google calls this “device platform targeting.” Even better, AdWords allows you to directly launch the iTunes Apps Store, Google Maps or YouTube applications from the sponsored ad.

This seems like a no brainer for companies selling apps and music downloads. Create a campaign – target only mobile users and direct them to your offering in the app store or on iTunes. Keep in mind that you can’t target specific types of smartphones (i.e., only iPhones or only Blackberrys) but with smart keyword and negative keyword choices, you can get pretty darn close.

Tom Tom AdWords ad and corresponding mobile site

Tom Tom provides a soft landing for mobile users and quick access to buy the app in the iTunes App Store.

When not searching from a smart phone, the same ad directs you to the regular website.

Recently I have been working with clients on their affiliate marketing programs and it dawned on me that many of the skills that make affiliate marketers successful could be appropriately applied to search marketing (both paid and organic) professionals.

What makes a good affiliate marketer?
Here are 3 strategies that you can employ to become better at search marketing.

Facebook, twitter, YouTube, FriendFeed, Wordpress, Blogger, Digg, Delicious, Reddit, Flickr, Stumbleupon…

I could fill an entire blog post with all of the available social media sites and tools that you can use to promote your business on the web. But the fact is, it’s not about the tools.

With all of the press these companies receive it’s easy to forget about this and focus on the delivery method.

Often marketers fail to consider the ramifications that new marketing campaigns and incentives will have on existing customers. Sure, slashing the price of your offering will move a ton of units but what about those customers that paid the original price. What effect does the price drop have on them?

We all know that Google doesn’t like paid links and encouraging natural links is the future of SEO. But, for many websites natural links are hard to come by and often have poor anchor text associated with them. So what is a company supposed to do to encourage people to link to their website? Well, you could spend time building value for users or you could simply give away your offering for free in exchange for an inbound link.

Advanced web ranking's free offer.