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If you have done any kind of marketing, you need to consider the marketing that can be done on cell phones.


Why?


Because there is something like over three billion cell phone users in the world, which dwarfs the amount of people on the internet.

But even cell phones these days have the ability to connect to the internet.

The basic feature phones which many people have can even access the internet. They use a method called WAP (Wireless Access Protocol) to get on the internet and display its stuff on the little screen of such cell phones (cell phone - a term used mainly in the United States, is also known as a mobile phone - a term more common to the rest of the world).

Then there are the more advanced smart phones. These devices are primarily small computers, with a secondary function as a mobile telephone.

Smart phones connect to the internet in the same manner as desktop or laptop computers. For many people, especially in the developing world, these devices represent the primary method of internet accessability.

SMS vs Web


To take advantage of these ubiquitous mobile devices, smart marketers employ a variety of marketing schemes to attract customers.

Text message marketing (or SMS marketing, where SMS stands for Short Message Service) is one method used by marketers to broadcast a message in the hope of attracting customers.

But even though text messages have an outstanding open rate of well over 90%, this type of marketing has very stringent rules set by the carriers, who understandably want to avoid spam messaging and the resulting alienation of its customers.

Perhaps a better approach is to utilize the internet browsing capabilities of cell phones in a marketing campaign.

The advantage here is that this form of marketing is more familiar to most marketers and offers greater flexibility. Click to call and banner ads are just two ways to market on cell phones.

Google and Microsoft offer advertising in these formats.

A good introduction to this form of marketing is a course called Mobile Money Bandit.

For a one time fee of around $70, you gain access to a member's area filled with content on how to market on cell phone. There are upsells but the main course is enough to get started.

The content is the usual tutorial videos, pdf's, and resources to make money with mobile.

There's info on how to market using organic as well as paid advertising.

A big focus of the course is Click To Call marketing using Google search ads (Bing ads has low traffic).

There are a couple problems with these types of ads however: limited ad slots and very high cost per click.

The cost for a Click To Call click was routinely multiple dollars in many of the markets I tested.

Also Google only has room for a couple of ads on its mobile search results page, so you're competing for very limited ad space.

Another drawback of Adwords' Click To Call search ads is that often times you pay for these expensive clicks and instead of the click resulting in a phone call, it results in a click to a website. This happening even though the option is selected to send all clickers to a phone call.

The bottom line is that you need to blow through a big budget to test a market and get data, because the clicks are so expensive. Then if you're lucky enough to find something that works, you can make your money back and more because affiliate Click To Call offers typically have nice payouts.

It must be said in all fairness that clickers who do make it all the way thru and actually call, do convert very highly.

Mobile Money Bandit discusses in length the opportunities with Click To Call ads on WAP phones, but it seems that market is dying quickly. The traffic is low, as most people are now carrying smart phones in the US, where most of the Pay Per Call affiliate offers take place.

Creating campaigns on Adwords for WAP phones is much easier than creating campaigns for smart phones. Smart phone ads require a website (WAP doesn't) even if you want only phone calls coming from your ads.

In summary, Mobile Money Bandit is a good introduction to the world of marketing on mobile devices. However it's not as easy to make money promoting Pay Per Call affiliate offers as one may be led to believe.