The famous Greek mathematician and inventor Archimedes of Syracuse is known for saying: “Give me a lever long enough and a place to stand, and I can move the earth.” For an affiliate marketer (and any online marketer, for that matter!) the “place to stand” remains the same as in 2010 — the Internet. Now let’s look at the “levers” to use in moving towards success in 2011.

There are a number of directions we can explore this year; and I believe there are at least 5 trends to take advantage of:

1. Marriage of Search & Social – At the end of 2010 both Google and Bing confirmed that Twitter and Facebook signals influence search rankings [more here]. While I do not believe Social to be the new SEO, it is hard to overestimate its importance. How will you leverage this in 2011?

2. Local Marketing Opportunities — More and more people are searching for local products, services, coupons and deals. Are you taking advantage of this tendency yet?

3. Rise of Mobile — Mobile Internet devices market is expected to overtake the traditional PCs in the next 5 years, and the mobile Internet will eventually grow to “at least 2x size of Desktop Internet” [source]. Are your websites even mobile-friendly yet?

4. Pay-Per-Call is Hot — Whether you’re reading this as a merchant, or as an affiliate, you don’t want to miss out on this one. For merchants pay-per-call works beautifully with other payment models [more here], while affiliates should take notice of the impressive conversion rates PPCall draws.

5. More Networking Opportunities — The number of affiliate marketing forums and conferences has at least doubled in 2010. Many of them present affiliate marketers with good networking opportunities which can also be leveraged for success.

Have I missed anything?

A little over a week and a half ago, I blogged about my discoveries on the mobile traffic my website gets.

In my case it accounted for some 3.5% of all my traffic, but this, in fact, meant thousands of mobile visitors every year.

I ended that blog post with the following words:

The fourth quarter is quickly approaching … but there is still time to analyze your websites, and make them (especially those of them that are in any way related to the Q4 shopping season) more mobile-friendly.

But how exactly do you “make them more mobile-friendly”?

I was happy to find an article on this very topic in this month’s issue of the Target Marketing magazine. In it Brian Klais gives a few good tips on how “to optimize your mobile Web results.”  Here are the 8 best practices (both for mobile sites in general, and mobile-optimized landing page, in particular) that I’ve picked from that article:

1. Provide a clean, and swiftly-loading interface. No page should exceed 100 kilobytes in size.
2. Navigation must be “intuitive and uncluttered”
3. Links must be labeled with proper descriptions (not just “click here”)
   
4. Provide a search function
5. Do not forget your CTAs (calls to action)
6. Flee from serving them pages that require any horizontal scrolling
7. Individual landing page URLs should be as short as possible. Keep them under 40 characters
8. Unlike it is with regular page titles (which are recommended to be kept at 67 characters or under), mobile browsers display only the first 45 characters, and when bookmarked, only the first 25 characters are displayed in the bookmark section. So, you want to keep the titles short and sweet too
   

Got anything else to add? Feel free to do so by adding your comments below.

Good thing Dave Chaffey tweeted a link to Gary Robinson’s Your 60 Second Mobile Review post yesterday. I got hooked on this immediately, and was indulging myself in the analysis of my site’s mobile visitors literally seconds after reading Gary’s post.

My Observations:

• Approximately 3.5% of visitors view my website via mobile devices
• Regardless of how small the above percentage may seem, it accounts for (or translates into) thousands of visitors every year
• The top 3 operating systems over the past four months have been: iPhone (58%), Android (13.6%), and iPad (12.9%)
• The lowest bounce rate registered with “mobile devices” has been with iPad users (natural, isn’t it?)

My Conclusions:

• Start monitoring this particular set of stats more frequently/closely
• Work on optimizing my mobile visitors’ experience (especially those accessing the website on their iPhones and iPads)

My Screenshot:

The fourth quarter is quickly approaching (yes, the first day of calendar Fall is here already!), but there is still time to analyze your websites, and make them (especially those of them that are in any way related to the Q4 shopping season) more mobile-friendly.

Mobile is gaining more and more popularity, and who else should be more prepared to embrace it than digital marketers? Nobody, right? Well… Experience shows that mobile Internet and mobile commerce are somewhat different from mainstream Internet and e-commerce, and while may of the digital marketing skills will be of benefit, to succeed with mobile you need to know the differences and peculiarities of mobile website development, mobile SEO, mobile usability, etc.

Here are the 15 Twitter accounts you must follow if you’re really serious about mobile marketing:

1. Mobile Marketer — The news leader in mobile marketing, media and commerce.
2. Cindy Krum — Mobile marketing evangelist, founder of Rank-Mobile, and author of author of Mobile Marketing: Finding Your Customers No Matter Where They Are.
3. Mobile Marketing Association — Premier global association that strives to stimulate the growth of mobile marketing and its related technologies.
4. iLoop Mobile — Tweets about measurable mobile marketing.
5. Matt Parzych — Tweets on useful, effective, innovative communications between businesses and their mobile audience.
6. MobiAd News — Tweets about mobile advertising and mobile marketing.
7. AdMob — Official Twitter account of AdMob.
8. Mashable Mobile — Mobile news, app reviews, information and more from Mashable.com/mobile.
9. Kim Dushinski — Founder of Mobile Marketing Profits, author of The Mobile Marketing Handbook, co-host of Mobile Presence radio show.
10. Mobile Marketing Magazine — Tweets of a London-based website devoted to serving the global mobile marketing industry.
11. Deborah Hall — Good informative tweets from Web2Mobile, a developer mobile marketing tools and solutions.
12. MobileCrunch — The official twitter account for MobileCrunch.
13. OnlyMobileNews — Twitter stream of the latest news in mobile technology.
14. The Text Works — Passionate about making the benefits of mobile messaging accessible to all organizations. Focused solely on SMS marketing.
15. Texting Forward — Mobile marketing (especially SMS marketing), mobile service solutions, and more.

If I have missed any that, in your opinion, should be on this list too, please post about them in the “Comments” are below. I would highly appreciate it.

Yesterday I have illustrated how popular and fruitful a marriage of social networking with comparison shopping can be. Today I’d like us to turn our eyes to some staggering stats.

We’ve heard that this decade will be the decade of the mobile Internet, which per Morgan Stanley is expected eventually grow to “at least 2x size of Desktop Internet” [more here and here].

We also know the exact demographics: 81% of adults between the ages of 18 and 29 are already actively using wireless Internet, compared to 63% of 30-49 year-olds and 34% of those 50+ years old. Additionally, it is being reported that the “adult use of social networking sites has risen significantly” since 2007, and today “47% of online adults use social networking sites, up from 37% in November 2008″ [see today's post with the detailed Pew Research Center report here].

But here’s the part that I find to be most fascinating: close to two-thirds of all mobile pageviews are to social networking websites! This data was published by GroundTruth, a mobile analytics startup with offices in Seattle and New York. Here are the exact numbers:

Apparently the marriage of Mobile with Social is another area that marketers cannot afford to overlook. eMarketer wrote back in November 2008 that “the number of mobile users accessing social networks from their mobile devices will reach 607.5 million worldwide by 2013, representing 43% of global mobile Internet users” [source]. Wow… There are definitely some great affiliate marketing opportunities in there too.