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How to Create a Profitable Mobile Web Site

The beauty - and challenge - of mobile web sites is that they are used while the user is interacting with the real world. This presents a unique opportunity for certain advertisers.

Consider the point at which a potential customer is about to make a purchasing decision. Perhaps this point is negotiating a purchase of a car. Your challenge, should you choose to accept it, is to create and advertise a tool that is really useful at that exact moment. For car negotiations, it would be nice to know what tax, insurance, manufacturer rebates, and so forth are available; a loan calculator and lease calculator would also be useful.

Make your tools so good that nobody making the decision would want to make the decision without visiting your site (or a similar one).

Then find advertisers who would dearly love to be in the user's consideration at exactly that moment. Perhaps local dealers who have fixed rather than negotiable prices, or a pre-approved car loan at a bank independent of the dealership. The value to the user is high: these represent highly relevant offers for a decision currently being made from a trusted source. The value to the advertiser is high: the response rate for a particular ad will likely be an order of magnitude higher than usual.

Your challenge: find those points of decision and create a good tool to support them.

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Comments

Bill on 08 April 2005 - 12:13a.m.

Mobile Web Business is more profitable than traditional Web sites because you can easily sell your WAP/XHTML service directly towards end-consumers and charge them on their phone bill through TelcoPay.

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