The Naked Truth About Website Traffic

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I was speaking with a client in real estate today.

They didn’t know that you could use widgets to generate potentially large traffic to their site. The example I gave was the “mortgage calculator” example. If branded correctly, and created with a new, fresh, weird, funny, useful twist - visitors may use it (first) and find it great enough to email to somebody (second), who in turn send it to their friends/network (hey, did I hear ‘viral’?).

If set up correctly, with backlinks and not too “pitchy”, it can be a very worthwhile exercise. While many say formulas exist for viral marketing using widgets and gadgets, I say it’s all about “strategy” and “testing”. Google is a master at creating gadgets, and many other companies are creating Mash-ups to intermix technology, widgets and gadgets for useful applications.  Check out Ning.com as a platform to build your own

As Jeff Huber, VP of Engineering, at Google in a presentation at the Web 2.0 Summit (Oct 2007, San Francisco, CA) explains, “Gadgets are being created using rss, html, flash, and css and that gadgets are open, easy, mashable, packable, portable, and embeddable”. And, “what rss did for content, gadgets are doing for apps”.

Therefore, understanding Mashups and use of widgets and gadgets in online marketing programs are a valuable exercise, and can be fun too. Get your creative brains together, and think up how you can do this.

For the realty company, I suggested a Calculator that captures the origins of the user on the web, and use a Google Map to highlight top listings in the visitors geographical area, to show the power of the realtor’s services. They loved it! (Now, who will do the work?)

Reference: http://www.webguild.org/2007/10/gadgetizing-of-web.html