Widget Bait for Link Love

The recent launch of an amazing MP3 widget by Amazon, made me do a little research on some very interesting widget ideas in the market and the role such widgets can play in a successful link building campaign. For those of you, who are unaware of the term widget, widget is nothing but a small stand alone web applications that can be installed and executed in web page without installing extra plugins. Check out these cool widgets Apple & Amazon. Even Yahoo! has a dedicated widget gallery featuring some really cool widgets for free download.

The Power of Widgets
The god of widgets as I call him, Mathew Inman (why god? Check out his widget gallery) generated thousands of links for his website Justsayhi with widgets like this and this, just untill when Google decided to ban Justsayhi. But wait, why would Google ban a website for distributing widgets? Actually Justsayhi wasn’t baned for distributing Widgets for link building but for cross-promoting a spammy website network with its widget & quizzes. If you still doubt the power of a widget, go and ask Zillow, how much money and links did they raised from Zestimate (property evaluation widget ) and out of the famous Zillow-Yahoo teamup.

Widget Bait for Link Love:
Generating server crashing traffic and links requires four things – good idea, designer, programmer and a crystal marketing channel to promote the widget (Email Marketing rocks). After you develop your widget, insert URL link in the interface and showcase it on your website for a free download. People use it and if they find it cool, they embed it in their own website for free with the help of the simple instructions on your website. But make sure you use different keywords in links otherwise same anchor text may go against you on Google. Here are two smart ways how you can generate links for your website and make your green bar go dancing.

• Create some rocking Wordpress themes and showcase them on your website as free ware with back link to your website.
• This one is too good. Create a contact form widget that uses Google Docs as database.

If you are creative and have good understanding about your industry, you can also come up with hundreds of such widget bait ideas. But remember, for the success of your widget, it’s important that an average non-techie user should be able to understand and use the widget application and it must be really easy to implement/install.

There are many powerful widgets that can help you to control the web around you. Here are few of them:

1. Bookmark This
2. Email Subscription Widget
3. Picture Badge
4. Recent Visitor
5. Search Blog
6. Snapshot widget
7. Twitter Update
8. Playlist Video Widget
9. Web Poll Widget
10. What I am Listening