Widgets offer tremendous marketing potential for any business, website or blog. You can spread your message far and wide, as well as create tremendous amount of backlinks to boost your SEO, Google ranking and visibility.
What’s a widget?
A widget is a portable piece of code you can embed (insert) in any HTML-based web or blog page, desktop or mobile phone to display text, images or links. It is a “website within a website”. Widgets can be made to appear on a website/blog, desktop; or mobile phones to market your business.
How to market with a Widget?
Widgets can be used:
1. As an advertisement for your business
2. To display content containing an advertisement which generates ad revenue
3. As a means to drive traffic and backlinks to your website or blog
4. A source for viral marketing distribution, especially via social sites like Facebook.
5. To encourage installs by others on their websites or blogs
6. Create brand awareness and value.
What is the attraction to users?
The main attractions are valuable content and a unique or interesting experience. Widgets should contain useful information, such as weather, news, stock quotes, home listings– anything you provide that fulfills a need or meets a demand. Updated regularly, widgets provide fresh information. Widget that entertain are also in demand. Some widgets contain rich media, such as music or video and some are interactive. It is possible to sell advertising within or around the widget. If you create an interesting widget, it can go viral.
Here are some examples of widgets:
These are typical desktop widgets: time, weather, calculator :
A mobile phone widget:
Blog Widget: contains your blog posts
Widget carrying an ad: This Scrabulous widget has a Lending Tree ad:
This widget has dynamic, updated useful content:
The Meebo Chat Widget is interactive, allowing visitors to talk to you:
National Geographic Widgets entertain. They contain music, video and photo of the day. National Geographic gives away interesting content via its widget to promote its brand. You could do the same.
YouTube has a widget for videos you can add to your iPhone:
What if you created a widget that displayed your Listing of the Day or Video Home of the day and displayed it on your website or blog and allowed consumers to access it via their iPhone?
Even the Oscars have a widget.
Related Post:
Promote your site with a Blidget.
Widget sites:
16 Widget Sites for your blog (Sueblimely Blogspot)
Technorati Tags: widgets, marketing, real estate marketing, clearspring, widgetbox, yourminis
You should also check out: http://sproutbuilder.com/
A great toll for building widgets, mashups and mini-sites.
Thanks for the tip Brad.
A friend of mine is behind Skribit (www.skribit.com) which is a widget that allows your readers to suggest topics and vote on them to help you decide the next topic to blog about.