“Mobilegeddon” the masses cried when Google announced the mobile-friendly changes it would be making. Sites that passed the mobile-friendly test would be given a higher ranking than sites that were merely responsive or were not optimized in any way for mobile use.

Google did make mention of the fact that the changes were specifically designed for mobile results, but the masses had already cried and few heard the calming words offered up by Google.

Mobile-friendly is a GOOD THING. If your website is not currently mobile-friendly, then you are making it less likely that the largest percentage of users will ever visit your site. More people surf the internet through mobile devices than with any other method.

Mobile-friendly can also be an easy thing. Google has set up an explanation of what makes a website mobile-friendly. Google also offers a test to insure that your website meets the Google requirements.

Top Things to Include in Your Mobile-Friendly Website

1. Create a strong call to action what is displayed front and center of mobile devices. Know what you want visitors to do and ask them to do it when they land on your website.

2. Keep it simple. Clean and precise content that displays on the mobile device will make it more likely that mobile visitors will utilize your site.

3. Keep it short. Remember that answering questions or filling out forms on mobile devices can be more challenging than for laptops and desktops. Minimize the number of fields or offer autofill when possible.

4. Make “home” easy to find and use. Easy navigation is essential for mobile-friendly.

5. Keep it about that initial call to action. Your company may run specials or feature events, but ultimately your website needs to be about that call to action.

6. Make search easy. Keep the search button in an easy to find location.

7. Create a user friendly site. Although it is all about your call to action, it is also all about the visitor. Allow the visitor to use your site before she is forced to commit to the call to action.

8. Offer conversion buttons. Allow information to be easily accessed across platforms or sent to a second platform for use at another time.

9. One or the other. If you are not ready to commit to the mobile-friendly way of life, stick to the traditional website. Avoid mixing in elements of mobile-friendly until you are ready to optimize for mobile users.

10. Avoid making more work for the user. Create a site that will adjust the size of the screen appropriately so that users do not constantly have to adjust the size to get the information needed.

There are a number of things that you can add to your website that will continue to enhance the mobile experience without detracting from the desktop experience. Work with a website designer to discover which elements work best for your company. Embrace the Google mobile-friendly changes and elevate your website for the largest percentage of users today.

As mobile continues to outshine PCs in the content delivery market, it’s important to be aware that if you’re not ready for mobile, you’re missing out on the potential revenue that mobile can bring. Being ready for mobile can mean many different things but the first thing is to build responsive online real estate. The next thing is to determine how to monetize mobile for your niche.

1. Understand What Mobile Means – Any “on the go” devices constitutes mobile. It’s important to realize the difference between “optimized for” or “accessible to” mobile. You don’t need to be optimized for mobile to be available and usable on mobile devices. You just need to be accessible for mobile. Think of mobile as simply a new tool to view your content and offerings, not a whole new environment.

2. Make Your Content Mobile Ready – If you use a responsive design, you’ll be able to easily be viewable and usable on mobile devices. Ensure that any additional plugins, apps, and shops you add are also usable on mobile devices. If they’re not, find a different one because you’ll literally miss out on over half of your audience.

3. Release Your Own App – To earn money via mobile, one great way is to release your own mobile app that you charge for, offer a subscription to, use as a way to promote affiliate products, or for your audience to make in-app purchases to earn revenue. You don’t even need to know how to code. You can use PLR (private label) apps and rebrand them as your own.

4. Offer Mobile Checkout – If a shopping cart doesn’t allow for mobile purchasing, most shoppers will not go back to your site. In fact, they’ll likely complain about it all over social media too. To avoid this problem, ensure that people have the same experience on mobile that they have on their PC.

5. Increase Social Media Activity – The truth is, most mobile users spend an enormous amount of time using social media such as Facebook and Twitter. If you want to encourage mobile use of your blog, promote a lot more on social media. When mobile users see your promotions and click through to your mobile-friendly options, they’ll be pleased.

6. Create Highly Digestible Content – Shorter content that is optimized for mobile will encourage more mobile users to consume your content and answer your calls to action. Content for mobile needs to be a little shorter, more concise, and targeted. This type of content will also work well for PC users, so including a variety of content that works for both is easy.

7. Use Images Wisely and Creatively – Today, images are very important to bring attention to content. People enjoy reading an infographic with lots of data more than they enjoy reading a boring blog post with the same data. The infographic brings that type of content new life while imparting important information to your audience. Mobile devices have lower resolutions than PCs for these images, though. Keep that in mind as you create the content so that your images are still viewable on mobile. Plus, don’t overload your site with irrelevant images. Choose which ones you use very carefully.

8. Avoid Using Flash – While Flash has been an important component in many types of content on PCs, the problem is that Flash is not compatible with mobile devices. So, if you have been using Flash on your websites and blogs, you’ll need to use HTML5 instead to ensure compatibility with mobile.

Mobile is a highly important and rapidly changing. The more popular it becomes, the more important it will be to learn all you can, optimize your websites for mobile, and realize that new tools will be invented in the future for people to access your information. Will you be ready?

Google makes changes and adjustments to the algorithm that ranks websites all the time. Many website owners grumble that the changes are designed to either make money for the designers or to drive the owners insane.

While both may feel true, Google makes the changes to create the best experience for the users. The goal for Google is to provide the most relevant search results that provide the best quality content for the one doing the searching.

The newest changes, that began launching on April 21st, are the attempt of Google to provide the same quality results but specific for mobile device users. Mobile devices became the leading way that people search the internet at the beginning of 2014 (a full two years before most experts predicted that shift would occur). The numbers are sure to continue to rise as mobile devices get smaller, more powerful, and easier to use.

Google sent out mass scale notifications to alert webmasters if a site was not considered mobile-friendly. You can also use the Google mobile-friendly test from the tools to see if your site makes the cut. If it fails, then you have several things that you can do to fix your site and bring it up to the Google mobile-friendly standards.

Top Fixes for Google Mobile Standard Fail

– Upgrade your theme. The skin of your website (the theme) dictates a great deal of what goes on within your website. This includes the mobile-friendly quality of your website. Check to see that your theme is the current release. A simple update of your theme could correct any mobile-friendly issues.

– Change your theme. Some themes will never make the cut. The designers have stopped upgrading and moved on to other projects or created a similar theme that will meet more up and coming needs of the changing internet world (including the Google mobile-friendly tests). Be certain that your current website is backed up before you begin making any changes to your theme. Also remember that a name of a theme does not mean it is mobile-friendly according to Google standards. You should review the theme before making the move and you still need to run the new website through the Google mobile-friendly test.

– Add a plugin. You may not be in a financial position to make a big change. You may not want to go through the hassle of a big change at the moment. No matter what your reason, there are plugins and software specifically designed to fix the mobile-friendly issues of a website. Again, be sure you back up your website before installing new plug-ins or other software that can affect the function of your website.

Google makes changes to make things better, even if it may not feel like it at the time. These recent adjustments to make websites more mobile-friendly have come in the wake of a shift to more mobile device usage. Making the changes necessary to pass the Google mobile-friendly test will be good for your website and your visitors in the end.

Even though mobile sales are outstripping PC sales, and over half of social media users are using mobile – and probably one third to half of your audience is using mobile to read your email messages, so many marketers are making serious mobile marketing mistakes. Thankfully, you can avoid these issues if you think ahead. Here are ten common mistakes to avoid:

1. Creating Complicated Opt-in Processes – You can always get more information from customers later, but creating an easy and streamlined opt-in process is super important with mobile. When a customer is using a finger instead of a keyboard to click boxes and type in information, they will become frustrated if the procedure is too complicated. Make it easy; remember that less is more.

2. Not Ensuring Links Work for Mobile – When you send any email link, it’s imperative that you assume it will be read on a mobile device and that the link works no matter which device your audience member is using. Can the user click through easily and then does the website work well using any device? Can the user get around the navigation?

3. Not Being Targeted in Your Actions – Know why you’re sending any message or putting any content up for anyone to consume, and know to whom you’re sending it. You can use your email and website metrics to determine which devices your audience uses so that you can ensure that any user using any device can access the info and understands why they should.

4. Not Understanding Laws, Rules and Regulations – Like with most things to do with marketing, there are laws, rules and regulations. Ensure that you become familiar with these laws so that you don’t break any of them. Opt-in regulations and privacy concerns are important to most people, and they should be to you too.

5. Using Too Much Text for the Space – Remember the size of most mobile devices is about 3.3 inches of space. If that small space is overrun with text and your user has to stretch and scroll around to read the content, they’re going to get frustrated and give up. There are ways to optimize your content within the code to ensure that it automatically adjusts based on the device your audience is using.

6. Not Creating Ongoing Value for Customers – As important as access is creating value. When you create an app, for example, if you don’t want to lose that customer eventually it’s important to remind the user about the app by offering updates, extensions and more to anyone who has downloaded it. The value of a long-term customer cannot be underestimated.

7. Not Knowing Your Purpose before Sending a Message – Any message must have a point for being. Is it to get more opt-ins? Is it to get more sales? What is the purpose of the message and how can you be sure that your audience understands the purpose quickly?

8. Building an App without a Planning for Marketing – Apps are a great way to involve yourself in the mobile marketing landscape; however, creating an app is like creating a whole other business. You not only need to create the app, but you also need a marketing plan for the app if you want to be successful.

9. Not Having Clear Calls to Action – Once you know the purpose of a message, it’s imperative that you craft clear calls to action. Sometimes you may need to test different CTAs to find out which works best for your audience.

10. Treating Mobile as a Separate Entity – While mobile is a huge consideration and should be for anyone who wants to market online today, it’s also important to remember that mobile devices are simply tools with which to access your content. Much like different browsers, different devices have different code requirements. Thankfully, though, by using HTML5 and responsive coding, you can make your websites work for all devices seamlessly.

Avoiding these common mobile marketing mistakes will help you become a winner in the online marketing game, which is increasingly becoming more mobile. Don’t avoid the statistics when bringing your marketing campaigns into the present. Otherwise you’re going to be leaving money on the table.

Successful mobile marketers share many characteristics with other successful marketers – such as the ability to stay ahead of their market, understanding their audience, knowing their niche inside and out, and then knowing how to impart their message onto the world in a unique way that resonates with their audience.

1. They Listen to Their Audience – No marketer worth their salt will ignore their audience. Everything they do is about the audience, from product creation, to services they choose to provide, to promotions they push out to their audience. It’s all about them, so they find ways to listen from watching via social media, to surveys, to being involved with the community.

2. They Know How to Be Authentic – Successful people in general seem to draw others to them in a way that seems almost supernatural. But, the truth is, they just know how to appear authentic. You can appear authentic too by actually being authentically you. If you’re not sure who that is yet, devote some time to self-discovery.

3. They Use Personalization – All marketing works better when it’s more personal. What’s more is that it doesn’t matter that people know that a lot of personalization is now automated. Consumers still respond better to personalization. So, the more personal you can be with your audience, the more successful you will be.

4. They Ensure Each Message Is Relevant – Don’t just send out messages to get a message sent out. This is a mistake that content-centric marketing often causes. You do want a lot of content on a regular basis, but you also want content that has a point with a relevant message.

5. They Are Always Unique – This isn’t to say you can’t use PLR or get ideas from others, but you must put your own unique and personalized touch on every bit of content that you put out to the world along with your products and services.

6. They Update Content Consistently – Sending out content on a consistent and expected basis is one of the keys to maintaining audience appeal. If that content is also relevant, speaks to the audience, and has a point, you’ll be even more compelling and successful.

7. They Make It Simple for Their Audience – Mobile devices are harder to use than a PC since mostly people are using fingers on a small keypad or more commonly a touchpad. Asking your audience to enter too much information will only cause them to stall in their purchases and consumption of your content.

8. They Pay Attention to Trends – Successful mobile marketers keep one ear to the ground at all times in order to pay specific attention to niche trends in regard to mobile marketing. They read industry news, learn all they can about mobile marketing and how it affects their niche and their audience.

9. They Are Mobile Obsessed – Instead of making mobile an afterthought, successful mobile markets are focused first on mobile and then everything else. After all, good design is good design. If it works well on mobile it will work well via PCs too.

If you want to be a highly successful mobile marketer, it’s imperative to incorporate these nine habits into your life as a mobile marketer. In fact, most of these habits can be important for any type of marketing.

Mobile devices are outselling PCs by leaps and bounds. That is going to continue for 2015 and beyond. As you make plans for your advertising dollars in 2015, it’s important to take into consideration the effect mobile marketing has on paid advertising. With over two billion consumers using mobile devices, it’s time to pay close attention.

How Is Your Audience Using Mobile?

It’s important to study your audience and find out how many of them are using mobile devices and how this affects the choices you make about where to spend your ad dollars. If your audience uses mobile for search and social media while on the go, or sitting on the couch while watching TV in the evenings, you need to know so that you can place your ad dollars where they need to be placed.

Does Your Audience Use Paid Apps?

Whether or not your audience will use paid apps, and will shop through their paid apps, is a question that should be on your mind. You can create two streams of income, or waste your ad dollars if you don’t answer the question accurately. Many mobile users love to use branded apps to do their shopping and searching. You should know if your audience is counted among them.

How Social Is Your Audience?

If your audience is super social, you may want to spend your ad dollars on social networks using PPC strategically where your audience lives. Mobile and social go hand-in-hand. Most marketers believe that social drives mobile and nothing can be truer than that statement. When you realize this, you’ll spend more ad money on social ads.

When you consider these questions, you quickly realize how much mobile affects paid advertising because without mobile, social might not be as popular. Without those things, mobile wouldn’t be as useful as it has become with increased ability to read and consume content, interact with others, and even make purchases directly from mobile devices.

Your Audience Matters Most

No matter how much mobile is affecting ad dollar expenditures overall, it’s more important to look at your own audience to determine how it affects your business and your ad dollars. If your audience is highly mobile then you best be highly mobile. If they’re not, keep an eye out because more than likely they will be in future. And as the younger audience ages, they’re going to stay mobile.

Keeping aware of the trends and the growth of technology is an important aspect of doing business today. If you want to be successful with your PPC campaigns, know who your audience is, what technology they use, and where they “hang out” and you’ll be that much more successful regardless of any trend.