Making Sure Your Mobile Website Looks Good on All Devices
New research from Pew Internet Research (www.pewinternet.org) and others indicates that the United States is still in a frenzy over all things mobile—and that you’re losing money if your mobile website is not rendering properly on all devices. It’s not enough to simply have a mobile-optimized website these days. Businesses must also verify that their mobile sites look good on as many mobile devices as possible.
How to Optimize YouTube Videos for Search Engines
 Google employees like this one will reward businesses that follow some basic, YouTube optimization best practices. |
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Making Your Website Mobile-Friendly for $100 or Less
Businesses looking to quickly establish a mobile-friendly presence on the web can take heart: There are scores of mobile template providers and conversion services that can now make your website mobile-ready for $100 or less. The nine out of 10 small businesses that still do not have optimized mobile sites because of technical or financial restraints now have the means to build their own professional-looking, brand-identical mobile sites at rock-bottom rates, said Ben Seslija, CEO of bMobilized.
Mobile to Be Most Popular Device for E-mail by Close of 2012
While the tech world is riddled with paradigm shifts, the latest is a doozy: By the close of 2012, mobile devices will overtake PCs as the most popular devices for reading e-mail. That fast-approaching upheaval is expected to be a brain-rattler for marketers who will be forced to reconfigure their marketing e-mails to fit much smaller devices, which take longer to download e-mail—especially when those messages are laden with bloated multimedia.
While there are any number of online services eager to manage your e-marketing for you, the downside to those services is cost. Unlike the one-time fees associated with PC-based software, online service billings generally recur monthly and never disappear. Not surprisingly, many small businesses are deciding to opt for PC-based e-mail marketing software instead, which starts at about $100. Such packages can be every bit as sophisticated as an online service while offering users much more control over how their data and analytics are managed.
Web marketers looking to get the most from social media can no longer ignore Pinterest (www.pinterest.com). This social network devoted to the posting of photo and image collections has quietly become the number-three social network in the world. Indeed, according to figures released by Experian Hitwise in early April, Pinterest brought in 104 million visits in March, lagging behind only Twitter, which drew 182 million visits, and goliath Facebook, which attracted 7 billion visits.
While Facebook’s new look has left many businesses in a scramble, migrating to the new, mandatory change need not be accompanied by gnashing of teeth. Armed with insights from web marketing experts, companies will be able to cruise through the upgrade—and perhaps dust a competitor or two—unfazed.
In the most fundamental terms, the Great Facebook Migration of 2012 represents a move by the digital hangout to standardize the look and feel of every Business Page on its network. Essentially, Facebook wants every business on its site to be able to express what’s happening with its brand right now—as well as the heritage behind that brand—all on a single page.
While tech-giddy employees are prone to fawn over every new iThing smuggled into the workplace—devices that are often used in violation of company policy—IT security pros see something very different: a security breach waiting to happen. The hard fact is that many of those unauthorized devices can slash gaping holes in company security systems in a nanosecond, exposing company data and applications to hackers. Indeed, even some authorized devices keep security IT up at night, since their current software solution may not be designed to handle some of the brand-new phones and tablets.
While the Internet’s white hats have done a great job of keeping the medium’s darker forces at bay, security experts predict that the web will still remain a dangerous place for businesses in the coming year—especially those without digital smarts.
Given that Facebook has become critical to any serious social media strategy, it’s no surprise that a number of tools, software packages and apps have sprung up to give businesses a leg up on maximizing their marketing campaigns on the service. Here’s a sampling of some of the most promising: