Just as RSS marketing serves to syndicate your content, so do widgets. Google calls them gadgets, some folks call them badges. You likely have a few on your desktop that keep you advised of weather or flight cancellations. Besides being a bit addictive, they serve a very practical purpose for business blogging and e-commerce.

“Widgets are mini-applications that generally come packaged in a little window, and can be dragged and dropped onto a Web page and offer a scaled down version of features you would ordinarily get at a full-fledged site.

For e-tailers, this means you can, for instance, showcase your eBay listings on your social networking page, bringing your merchandise to interested shoppers who might not have found your storefront, and those who like what you’re selling can even pass your widget on to their friends. Another way e-biz owners can earn extra revenue is by using affiliate marketing widgets at their Web store sites or blogs. Or, if you’re new to e-commerce, widgets provide an easy access point to online selling.”

There are so many ways to go with this, and like all of the new applications, more will be possible as time goes on. As it is, widgets can deliver any of your content; video, images, podcasts, blog content.

Shel, of ‘Shel of My Former Self’, describes just one way the widget can be deployed. In this instance, he was watching Discovery Channel’s Shark Show when he noticed a crawl across the bottom of the screen inviting viewers to go to Discovery Channel.com to get their shark widget. The widget, pictured above, is on the large side but offers the Discovery fan many options.

MediaRiver is designing widgets that can read your content offering, contextually relevant information,

“We build widgets that understand the content on the page and serves up information based on that,” he said, “so it’s all about driving traffic.”
[..]
Widgets built on the platform quickly scan the contents of a Web page, and search for related content, placing links to that content onto Web pages at a publisher’s Web site, at a partner’s Web site or on any Internet page, including user-generated content sites such as blogs and social networks.
[..]
“If you sell posters, and have a vast catalog, and put a ClickSurge widget at your MySpace site, when someone pastes the widget on their page, it will read the information there and list matches for that person’s favorite bands. It customizes itself for wherever it lands.”
(Source)

Definitely an application worth exploiting for purposes of marketing, increased traffic and search engine visibility.

Tags: affiliate_marketing, business-blogging, e-commerce, Google, RSS-publishing, social_networking, widgets

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 7th, 2007 at 2:05 pm and is filed under Blogging Technology, Business Blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.