You’ve heard about it. It’s been whispered about on forums and shouted about on blogs for ages. But have you done any mobile marketing yet? Now’s the time to try it out, and it’s easier than ever. Let’s take a look at the major mobile networks that you can test on.

1. AdMob

AdMob was acquired by Google, that should tell you the potential there is for this marketplace. It was the first one that I can remember hearing about that allows you to market to iPhone users. If you’ve got an iPhone you’ve definitely seen the ads that show up in your Twitter stream, for example, or at the top of the app while you are playing a free game. Most of these ads are terribly un-targeted and you should easily be able to jump in and hit them with a relevant affiliate offer. More and more are being developed for mobile browsers. Even if they aren’t, the iPhone and Blackberry browsers are fine for loading most affiliate offer pages, as long as they don’t have Flash in them. The biggest advantage that AdMob has is the largest reach.

2. Mojiva

Mojiva is very similar to AdMob, only it gives you a few more targeting options. For each one that you choose, your click cost goes up by a couple cents. It’s an interesting model, and you’ll need to play around to see what works the best at a reasonable price. The category option is very nice though for helping you narrow down your users to relevant offer niches.

3. Quattro Wireless

This is the network that was snatched up by Apple, almost as a retaliation for Google snatching up AdMob. So far, it is staying separate from Apple’s own iAd, but will they eventually fold it into one? Only time will tell. In the meantime, this network gives you yet another option to test out for iPhone traffic. I haven’t personally used this one, so I’m not sure what advantages it has over the others.

4. iAd

This is the big boy. Steve Jobs made quite a fuss about it at the WWDC conference in San Francisco, and big brand advertisers have been lining up to get a piece of this new promised land of mobile advertising. For the time being, unless you are a Fortune 500 company, chances are you will not be getting any campaigns running with iAd. The possible upshot for the little guys, however, is Apple’s commitment to pay 60% of ad revenues to the app developers that are getting them the traffic. At least one developer is already tasting the profits from this new system, making $1,400 in one day from one app at a CPM of $150. That number was probably inflated by the relative “newness” of the iAd platform, and will no doubt even out with time. But still, this platform is the one to watch in the months to come.

So there you have it. At least three platforms that you can test out your mobile-ready offers (and simple one-page submits) right now. Mark my words, the pioneers in this new advertising frontier will reap the benefits for many years to come.

Popularity: 3% [?]