Do you have a question about Internet marketing, sales copywriting, social media, split testing, advertising campaigns, email marketing, media buying strategies, branding, websites, landing pages, sales pages, or display advertising? We can help. We’ll answer them all, and the best questions will be published!

Here are our questions from April:

Question: Is mobile marketing via social media like Pandora the future of advertising? Refer to: http://www.audiographics.com/agd/022412-2.htm

Answer: Absolutely, 100% correct. This is the future of advertising. It joins up a major distribution channel (Pandora) with companies with a lot of resources (JC Penney and other major retailers) and, especially at this stage, likely costs far less to advertise here than it does in traditional media. Anytime a partnership like this is possible, it’s going to get popular quickly.

But it’s not the now of advertising. Mobile marketing is only within the last six months or a year becoming a viable option for major agencies. Here’s why:

1) It’s awfully hard to create metrics in many cases to track how the advertisement is doing.
2) It’s relatively new and untested waters, and nobody wants to be the first person to spend millions of dollars on a potential flop.
3) Five years ago, the smartphone-using slice of America was such a small percentage of users that it didn’t make sense to consider mobile strategies, and five years is an awfully fast timescale to go from zero mobile marketing to major ad campaigns across a mobile channel.

But there are a number of compelling reasons why it behooves any agency to consider launching mobile campaigns right now, without waiting any longer:

1) The adoption rates of mobile, especially iPads, are on an extreme growth trajectory.
2) iPads and iPhones are bought by the highest earning demographic, with a median income among iPad owners of $85,000
3) Industry research suggests that smartphone and iPad owners are several times more likely to make purchases, both online and offline, notably higher-end purchases, than any other segment-able demographic market.
4) Tracking is getting better. As marketing departments figure out how to show their bosses an expected ROI, and if their campaigns meet or exceed the ROI, more money will be thrown at mobile advertising in the future.

Question: Any golden rules of advertising (creative) to share?

Answer:I think the only tried and true golden rules that have stood the test of time in advertising are the following:

1) The idea is what drives advertising. Lots of agencies have come up in the past ten or fifteen years focusing on strategic planning, workhorsing their employees, positioning mediocre ads in a bullish cyclical and reaping the rewards. As Warren Buffet says, “When the tide goes out, you see who’s been swimming naked.” The only agencies still growing even in this market are the ones that sell ideas.

2) Test, test, test. If you don’t test, you’re usually taking one step forward and two steps back, often writing worse campaigns than your existing campaign.

3) And this one is specifically for creatives, demand recognition and responsibility. You should sink or swim with your ideas. If an idea is great, you should be recognized for it. If an idea flops, you should be forced to take responsibility for it. This is how we grow.

4) Finally, my last golden rule, learn something new every day. The first day you don’t learn something new, go to your boss and say “Hey, I didn’t learn anything today.” The second day, quit.

Question: Do you have any examples of using local, limited-edition print newspapers to support a business objective?

Answer: Of course. Here are our favorites:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/mashable/6834207122/in/set-72157629215036814
http://www.occupiedmedia.us

Question: If ‘proactive’ annoyed you in the late 80s, early 90s, what are the words or phrases that have the same impact on you today?

Answer: Anything hyphenated, including, but not limited to: high-impact, cutting-edge, easy-to-use

Question: I’m a writer who is frustrated with the prices people are paying for linkbuilding article writing. 2 cents a word is barely minimum wage! And they want well-researched, thought out, keyword-stuffed articles? If I write great articles, which take time, I don’t make any money. If I write crappy articles, clients are unsatisfied. What gives?

Answer: Most of your frustrations come from charging too little for writing. There will always be people scraping the bottom of the barrel for writing, but there are plenty of people with strong brands who want great, well-researched articles and are okay paying between $25 and $200 a pop. About 20% of my business is about putting together articles like this, and with length of content being the #1 determinant of how high your page ranks in the search engines, I sell more $200 articles than you’d believe to PR5+ sites who are happy to keep paying this, week after week.

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