Do you have a busy life but can’t seem to stay way from your blog? Are you doing any mobile blogging? I guess before I ask that question, we should take a moment to define mobile blogging. So what is it? How does it work? How can you become a mobile blogger and how can you turn your own blog into one?
To me, mobile blogging is very simple. There really isn’t anything complicated about it. Mobile blogging isn’t really any different than regular blogging other than the fact that you are doing all your blogging from a mobile device, such as a mobile phone, rather than from a desktop computer or laptop.
Mobile blogging goes both way here too. It isn’t just you, as the publisher, using your mobile device to publish content on the web. It is also you using your mobile device to read and follow all the blogs that you normally read on your computer. In other words, I consider mobile blogging to be identical to your normal blogging behaviors on a standard computer or notebook.
With that said, there is a third element to consider with mobile blogging, and that is in your blog design. What does your blog look like on a mobile phone? Do you know? Seriously, have you checked? I use my mobile phone every day to check the blogs that I read on a regular basis and more than half don’t load properly or look terrible. Have you considered looking into making your blog more mobile Internet accessible? If not, you should. However, even still, my own blog is mobile Internet challenged. A lot of that is due to lack of time though. Even still, I do try to make efforts towards making my blog more accessible for mobile Internet users.
Another element to mobile blogging is the fact that mobile friendly content has a superior ranking in mobile search engines compared to standard content. If you check the SERPs in Google Mobile on your mobile phone and compare those results to the SERPs on your laptop, you will indeed get different results. So consider that as motivation towards getting your blog more accessible for mobile users. If you do, it can possibly even get you more traffic. If you are blogging to make money online, then you know that the more traffic you get to your blog the more money you can make.
So what do you think? Are you going to work towards making your site more mobile friendly? Be sure to check my related posts below as I have written other articles that will show you how to make your blog mobile Internet friendly.
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Date/Time: 9-19-2008 20:23:09 Comment #22817
Hi Garry, I have been thinking the exact same recently & want to update my sites to be viewable on all phone platforms as much as possible, however I have done nothing so far.
With the millions of iPhones sold in the past year, I think it only shows the importance of providing mobile viewing platforms, not to mind the mobile publishing platforms.
Looking at the stats for one of my sites I currently get 20+ hits from iPhones weekly, pretty little I know but still worth considering.
I spotted http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wptouch/
a couple of weeks ago, just wondering if you have tried it out & if so, what do you think of it?
Dave.
Check out dave’s last blog post..Cabinteely
Date/Time: 9-20-2008 15:38:27 Comment #22875
That makes sense dude, and I feel it’s definitely a needed feature for all blogs. Folks are using the internet from their mobile devices more and more….if your content comes up properly for them, you may just find a new devoted reader. Good post.
Date/Time: 10-1-2008 11:58:55 Comment #23508
Okay well i couldn’t ignore this post without saying something. Have you tried Mippin Mobilizer? It mobilizes blogs for free, gives you the tools to customise the look and feel of it, then insert advertising around it if you’d also like to.
The coolest thing about Mippin Mobilizer though is that once you blog is mobilized, your blog can reach an audience of mobile readers who are already checking out other blogs on mobile. Mippin has created a wide community of content, people, news, blogs, video, images, listings etc, all of which is browsed and found by a growing mobile audience at the mobile site:
http://mippin.com (on a mobile browser.)
If you fancy an instant demo go to http://www.mippin.com/mobilizer and enter your URL to see how it looks. If you’re impressed then use the other features to make it look very snazzy on mobile, plus factor in some of the advertising features if you want to consider additional advertising revenue.
Let us know what you think – but we’re sure we’ll make your blog look amazing for the iPhone and any other phone.
Date/Time: 10-1-2008 22:21:55 Comment #23518
Mofuse.mobi
Mippin
Yeah… looks cool to me, I am sold. I currently use Mofuse.mobi, in fact, I have http://www.garryconn.mobi setup on that. Do you offer the same service?
Tell me more about how Mippin compares to Mofuse, I might switch and I am sure a few of my readers may too. However, explain more first. Thanks.
Date/Time: 10-2-2008 05:17:44 Comment #23524
Sure thing Garry – you can link to Mippin or to Mofuse just as easily using your own .mobi name. But in terms of comparison, the Mofuse site looks good, the Mippin site looks good, so perhaps its down to one or two of the following considerations:
Design aesthetics – whatever works for you and your readers? I might point out that you can include branding with Mippin too so your Mippin version above can actually be made to look exactly the same as the Gary Conn website, or even the Garry Conn on Mofuse site, if that’s what you want
But if its not aesthetics, then it may be what else you offer your readers. Mippin has in the region of 30,000 high quality blog sites and some cool web / mobile 2.0 features. So when your blog joins the Mippin community, your readers will be able to bookmark your site and then go off to browse a range of sites similar to yours. Why’s this a positive? Because they’ll discover other readers with similar interests too, and those other readers will then discover your own readers interests, namely your blog. It ultimatley means more readers for you, through mobile as well as the web. Plus with your blog on Mippin, you’ll find 100% of the advertising revenue going straight to you.
And one final thought. As I’ve said reader numbers impact on potential advertising revenue, but the size of an audience also embodies one of the core principles of blogging – connecting. Mippin currently now has one of the largest and continually growing reader bases for a mobile site in the USA and UK. If you’re a blogger going mobile, it must be good to know one of most common forms of connecting – mobile – can now quickly and easily work for bloggers!
Let us know what you decide and whatever you choose, keep blogging.
Date/Time: 10-4-2008 06:29:24 Comment #23608
Hi Justin, Garry, Thanks for the mention of MoFuse (I work there). Mippin does a really nice job and as you said both companies will give you great results. Just to clarify, MoFuse also has a ‘recommendation engine’ on sites in our network so when someone is reading a mobile blog there are links to other similar blogs for mobile readers to link to. This does a nice job of cross promoting traffic. You can remove this feature too – if you don’t want people linking off. We’ve also offered social bookmarking for readers for a while now: Digg, Twitter, Delicious…people love that.
Another big difference is that we enable integrated commenting for WordPress blogs. That means your mobile viewer can post comments from the phone and they will show up on your PC blog.
We are growing fast getting to be the same size as Mippin and have many great blogs in our network including Mashable, ReadWriteWeb and ReadBurner. We would love to hear from you.