A mobile version of Password Incorrect blog
Posted on by Piotr Kowalczyk

5 Reasons Why Writers Should Mobilize Their Blogs

Password Incorrect mobile version

In this article I’ll try to describe how important is for a writer to mobilize a blook, blog or a site. In a next post I’ll give tips on how to easily do that.

Mobile Web is growing fast

According to a study by Morgan Stanley, there will be over 1 billion “heavy mobile data users” by 2013. It’s a major trend: people switch from desktop activity to mobile activity. On the other hand, mobile readers are disappointed when using mobile web. Non-mobilized pages are too slow to load on cellphones, they look ugly, and most importantly – they are unreadable.

Social sites dominate mobile web

A report by Openwave shows that four out of ten top mobile destinations are social networks. Why is that so important for a writer? Because probably for most of us social networks like Twitter, Facebooks and alikes are an effective way to communicate with readers. Ask yourself a question: how many of the readers of your blog and potential buyers of your book are opening your messages from a mobile device? In my case it’s a prevailing majority.

Links from mobile apps

And here comes the problem with links. If you tweet a link to your site, which is (still) not mobilized, it’s OK when a reader opens it from a computer. It can be disastrous when opened from, let’s say iPhone’s Tweetie. The reader will probably never try it again. You loose a chance to be read – and to be retweeted.

Do yourself a favour and open in a cellphone’s Twitter app a link to your blog you recently tweeted. Is it readable? Does it load well? Does it load at all? As a reference there are two iPhone screenshots of my blog: mobilized and non-mobilized.

Password Incorrect mobilizedPassword Incorrect non-mobilized

Mobile feed readers

In fact, loading problems with articles I tried to open from my Tweetie have made me switch to read on an iPhone RSS feeds instead. A mobile feed reading app is a guarantee, that you’ll have access to a readable form of subscribed blogs.

It’s a good idea to make a full text of your post available for feeding. However, if for some reasons, you choose the option to show only an excerpt, we’re back with a link problem.

Future habit of reading

And here comes the most important part. It’s about a change of a reading habit. Reading electronic content goes mobile. Ereaders, smartphones and tablets help with this process. Technology doesn’t stick us to a desktop computer screen any more. E-books become mo-books. I start a day from reading Twitter updates on an iPhone – before I start a computer. I read on the iPhone a book or feeds in the evening – after I shut down my laptop. That’s why I fixed a major issue – my blog being a missing (or broken or slow-loading) link in the mobile reading experience.

A reader (especially the one who reads fiction literature) will never be back to read an e-book on a computer screen, if he tried it once on a mobile device. Why not being there with all what you need to say to make YOUR book or writing being chosen for a mobile reading pleasure?

17 Replies to “5 Reasons Why Writers Should Mobilize Their Blogs”

  11. >Dedicated ereading devices,

    and maybe you can make the effort to spellcheck your articles…

    Like

  12. >Dedicated ereading devices,

    and maybe you can make the effort to spellcheck your articles…

    Like

  13. RT @thecreativepenn: 5 reasons why #writers should mobilize their blogs http://ow.ly/CZ4R #mobile (via @namenick) Recommended!
    This comment was originally posted on Twitter

    Like

  14. RT @thecreativepenn: 5 reasons why #writers should mobilize their blogs http://ow.ly/CZ4R #mobile (via @namenick) Recommended!
    This comment was originally posted on Twitter

    Like

  17. Pingback: 5 Reasons Why Writers Should Mobilize Their Blogs | Fiction Matters

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