5 Ways to Take Your Blog Mobile

OK, so yesterday we talked about the importance of taking your platform mobile and what you are missing out on by refusing to adapt.

Today, I want to go a step further and share my 5 favorite ways for making mobile content part of your social media plan. The goal here is to simply make it easy for people to consume your content on the go…and so I present the list:

1. Wordpress Plugin – Alex King has released an awesome free Wordpress plugin that instantly transforms your blog into a mobile ready platform. Simply upload and install the plugin and you are good to go.

The great thing about this plugin is that you don’t have to buy a .mobi domain, as it automatically recognizes smartphones and instantly converts your blog into a mobile format.

2. Mobile Apps – This is perhaps a more complicated way of doing things, but I’m telling you…if you have the money to develop an app (around $500 and up), then you need to pull the trigger on it.

Why? Simply put…mobile apps are the way of the future. If you can get your app out in the public eye, you will have a chance to capture more eyes, which in the end means more customers and more branding opportunities.

Just take a look at how companies like Amazon, GoDaddy, Starbucks, Barnes and Noble, Evernote, and others have expanded their brand by creating apps for the iPhone. Although the idea works best if you can offer a free app, charging for an app can also be profitable if you have the right concept.

For instance, I plan on taking my Twitter Rockstar product mobile by making the content smartphone friendly and creating an app that allows customers to access it. Will it cost me? Sure, but the leverage you gain by being there first is tremendous.

3. Podcasts – Think about how you can take your web content and turn it into a podcast. It allows people to access your content on the go, and it puts your message on their hard drive, which is just one more method you can use to capture attention. There are plugins that create podcasts out of blog content, but why not pay someone to do it for you?

By spending just a little bit more on content, you can expand your reach and make it easy for your current readers/customers to grab and go. A win-win situation.

4. Amazon Blog Subscription – A lot of people don’t know about this, and by revealing it I’m probably giving too much away, but the reality is that this is a huge opportunity. You can post your blog on Amazon for free and then offer it on a subscription based model.

The goal really isn’t to make money with it, but to find yet another way to adapt to new technology and…you guessed it…expand your reach.

5. Kindle products – I’m amazed by how few people take advantage of the Amazon Kindle and other digital readers. As an example, I published a guide on the Kindle for .99 (they won’t let you give it away) and have seen a remarkable amount of downloads, which is great considering it is available for free on my blog.

The difference here, and the reason why people are willing to pay more, is that it is easy to access and stays on the device whether or not the website is loaded. This means that they can pull out my guide when they are looking to kill time or don’t have time to browse.

You can uploads PDF’s for free within 10 minutes and Amazon generally publishes them within a day or two…sometimes within hours. Think about all of the different ways that you can not only monetize your blog content, but also make it easy for people to consume on the fly.

Aside from the benefit you get of saying you are published on Amazon, it’s a free resource that you’d be crazy not to use.

I hope you can see the benefit of taking your blog or website mobile and more importantly, how efficient it is to do so. In most cases, you can do it for free, which makes it a no brainer. Your competition is probably already doing this or looking at getting started, so the sooner you can make the jump the better.

I’m curious if you have used any of these techniques successfully. If so, let me know in the comments.

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