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Widgets Gone Wild - Download Create Share With Widgetbox
Widgets. If you've been blogging for any amount of time you'll have come across them for sure, and perhaps even thought that the widget craze had got a little out of control. Everyone was offering a widget and promising great things for them (remember Blogrush as just one example) and sometimes bloggers got so caried away you could barely find the blog beneath the widgets in the sidebar.
I came across this site recently that rekindled my interest in widgets and thought I should share it here. It's probably a little early for me to post about the site, as I've barely scratched the surface of what it can do, but here's a brief outline of what you can accomplish with Widgetbox.com
Create Your Own Widgets using your RSS feeds
Download hundreds of different widgets for hundreds of applications and incorporate them into your blogs/websites
Turn your own widgets into Facebook and Meebo Applications
Join Topic Specific Communities To Promote Your Widgets and drive traffic
Create Widgets specifically for other bloggers and cross promote with them
Add your widgets to places like Facebook, MySpace, Hi5, Orkut, Netlog, IGoogle and Friendster (coming soon)
It occurred to me whilst exploring the site that as far as bloggers go, this has a lot of potential and some great applications. When you create a widget, using your blog's RSS feed for example, you can then promote it to the world at large in a variety of ways. Widgetbox has a number of communities so, let's say you have a travel related blog and you create a feed widget. You then join the Travel community, and add the community widget to your blog in order to get traffic and visitors from other sites in the same niche. In theory that's great and I've implemented it on one of my non marketing related blogs so I'll report back on its effectiveness. The widgets, both the community ones and the ones you create are pretty customizable so people can make them fit the look of their own blogs pretty well.
I would say that bloggers who know each other however and feel like doing some cross promotion could always put their heads together and use the service to build each other widgets and display them on each other's sites. You could of course just grab another blogger's feed and do it yourself. Cross promotion is a good way to build blog traffic as evidenced by things like guest posting so if you want to work with other bloggers, exchanging feeds in a good looking widget might work for you and the ability to be very selective is more appealing than just showing links over which your control is limited.
The ability to share your widgets in a number of social networking sites is also a great tool and gives you the chance at some huge exposure. If you decide to make things like Facebook apps the potential traffic is of course quite staggering.
I've only just begun experimenting with Widgetbox, but I recommend you pop over and take a look to see what it can do for you and what you can do with it.
The site is a little confusing at first (although I may just be a bit dense) and when I first landed on their page I thought it was just a place to download widgets. Sign up is free and it looked to me as though there were plenty of cool widgets to grab so I signed up and started looking around. Once I'd got the navigation sorted out it all started to fall into place and it took just a few minutes to cobble together three RSS feed widgets for three of my blogs. Here's a screenshot of one of them below
As you can see the widget includes post titles and images - you can choose to display just titles, excerpts of your posts etc and also set the look with various color options and size choices. Customization is pure point and click and should a visitor wish to download and display your feed widget they can change the colors to suit their own pages as you can see from the menu on the right of the widget image. You can easily incorporate the widget code into your own blogs with either Flash or Javascript code and all major platforms are supported so you don't really need any technical knowledge. I think bloggers are going to love this site and can see it growing quite rapidly, so it could be good for your traffic in the future.
The internet marketing community is very under represented at present as far as I can see, but if you have niche blogs it could be another good way to promote yourself. Even without the traffic aspect which may or may not prove to be effective, it's a really simple way to get some neat widgets for Wordpress or any other sites you may be running and makes it very easy to include them on your sites.
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Directory Buzz | Affiliate Buzz | Free Software Downloads
I posted recently about several buzz software titles and am pleased to say that I have added two more to the library for my readers to download. Even better, there is no need to opt-in to get them, I have put a direct download button on the landing pages.
Directory Buzz Elite Edition is, as the name suggests, a free directory submission tool that semi automates the process of getting your sites listed in over 200 directories. Features include
Contains over 200 directories that you can submit your sites to.
The directory list is updated monthly (so all the dead links will be removed!)
Automatically rotate multiple titles, descriptions and keywords to make sure your links seem natural and be able to rank for multiple keywords.
Loads up to 10 browsers at the same time to speed up your submission process.
Saves your previous work and records the sites that you have submitted to.
Add, edit and delete anything in the directory list.
Unlimited user and site profiles.
Sort list according to Pagerank, Alexa rankings, alphabetical order, etc...
Affiliate Buzz Elite Edition is for anyone who wants to create a suite of tools for their own affiiate program and is packed with useful features for you including:
Creates your affiliate promotional pages just by following some step-by-step instructions (if you know how to click the mouse and follow instructions, you can use this software!)
Includes templates for the following promotional tools: Text links, Email Ads, Signature Ads, PopUp Ads, Image Ads, Articles & PPC Ads (leave all the hard work to us! You do not have to sweat over the various types of tools)
Add your affiliate link to the 'Powered By Affiliate Buzz' message at the top of the page. (so you can make some easy money just by creating your own promotional pages for your affiliates!)
Automatically embed the affiliate links of your affiliates into the promotional tools with just a click of the mouse! (literally spoon feed your affiliates!)
Provides your affiliates with ready made promotional tools that they can instantly use for their promotional efforts (and let your affiliates do all the hard work in promoting your products with the tools you provide!)
Make your affiliates WANT to promote your products because of the wide array of tools you provide
Keep your affiliates happy and at the same time, build an ARMY of hungry affiliates who will increase the amount of sales and profits you make!
Both software titles come with full giveaway rights and an editable landing page so that you can customize it for your own use. Doesn't get any easier than this, and you will even be able to rebrand the software if you check out the "make money" button inside each application.
tags: directory submitter, directory submission software, directory buzz, affiliate buzz, affiliate management software, affiilate tools creation, affiliate management tools Related Posts
Creating Your Own Ebooks | Tips and Tools For Digital Info Product Creation
Many marketers they will tell you that one of your key online strategies for making money should be product creation. In this post I thought I would take a look at just what you need to start creating your own digital information products, ebooks and reports. Before we begin however, there are a couple of points to consider, after which we'll move on to the slightly technical stuff which is the part that often scares people away.
The first important thing is to know your subject and to research just how much demand and how much competition there might be for your intended target audience/niche. If you really can't be bothered, you can always outsource the whole process, including the writing and then just sell the resultant product. All joking aside, many info products have been born this way and if your pockets are deep enough maybe it's something to consider.
Secondly, you have to have a clear idea of the purpose of your book - from your perspective. Are you going to make a saleable product, or do you want to use the report or ebook as a viral marketing/promotion vehicle? This will have significant impact on how you proceed.
In the first scenario, let's assume that you decide to write a free report. You either want to
a) use it as a means of gaining subscribers for your list or
b) to promote and spread site(s) or services in which you have an interest, perhaps as an affiliate or perhaps as the owner of said product or service.
For option a. all you need to do is create a product that you think your target audience will find useful. You can add in some affiliate links to relevant sites and services and create opportunities for sales or to send people to sites where you are running Adsense or similar PPC ads. The concept is simple - give good free information and point people to places where they can find out more and where you may be able to make sales or commissions.
For option b. you may want to consider making your report rebrandable, therefore making it more attractive for people to pass along to others. If they can populate your ebook with some of their own links, they will be more likely to do so. You can still ask people to opt-in of course, it is just a question of whether you think that might stunt the viral effect. Many people are reluctant to offer up their email addresses, no matter what reassurances you offer, so you viral ebook may well do better if you just let visitors download it.
Having decided the direction in which you are going to go, you do not need many tools to do the job. Creating a PDF ebook is the obvious choice because practically all computer users can read PDF's on their machines. Creating PDF's is a lot more straightforward than it used to be. I prefer to use eWriterPro because you can write and edit the book, insert all your hyperlinks and convert the finished product to PDF all with one program.
Alternatively, you can use Open Office, which won't cost you anything at all and will do a good job. For those needing instruction take a look at this post on PDF creation with Open Office.
To make a rebrandable ebook you are going to need some rebranding software. By far the best known is ViralPDF which is very easy to use and represents excellent value. It uses a simple system of tags, enabling you to create special links in your ebook that will convert into rebrandable fields in the finished product. People who download the book can also download a small rebrander software. Whether you give this away or ask people to opt-in to a list or even charge a fee for it is entirely up to you. However, if the viral effect is your biggest priority, you will probably want to make it all as quick and painless as possible for your customers.
The biggest drawback with rebrandable PDF's is this - many affiliates will not have a website of their own, and this method will exclude them from promoting and giving away the book, even if they want to. If your product is non internet or techie related, a great number of people may therefore be unable or unwilling to promote your viral book. Until recently this has been a problem you just have to live with, but, if it concerns you, read on.....
There is now an ingenious way around this, and no, it's not using .exe format ebooks (which are not a very great idea in my opinion). It basically enables your visitors and customers to rebrand something without having to download any software, without having to host any files or build any landing page or do any of that tedious technical stuff that so often prevents people from taking action. You can find out more by visiting my page at the Ultimate Rebrander where it is explained in detail. To my mind this could well be the way of the future when it comes to rebranding electronic products.
Moving on to the second scenario - you decide to create and sell a PDF ebook.
Having decided that there is a market for your product, the process of PDF creation follows the same format as the first example. You probably won't want to create rebrandable links, but if you do, the options are also the same.
Once you have written the ebook you will need a few other things in order to bring it to market. These are all vitally important for a commercial product and can signify your success or failure.
Professional graphics are a must, unless you are a Photoshop wizard yourself. You could conceivably use a graphics authoring program like The Web Graphics Creator, but sometimes it's best to stump up for a design professional. The cost should be easily recoverable if your product is a good one. (My last free report recovered the cost of graphics within a couple of days.)
You also need to decide how you are going to sell your product and the obvious choice would be Clickbank or PayDotCom. The cost to list a product in Clickbank's marketplace is a one off $49.95 but again, you should soon make that back if you are selling at $27 to $47 for example. The benefits of using either service is that you will access the huge number of affiliates. Bear in mind that you will need to pay decent commissions if you want affiliates to promote for you - the norm for Clickbank is anything from 30-75%.
You could go it alone of course and stick to selling through PayPal or Alertpay for example, but you lose out significantly by not leveraging the large number of affiliates working with the aforementioned services. Then again, you could use your own affiliate program and if you are launching a low cost or even free product you might want to take a close look at something like the $7 Secrets Script by Jonathon Leger.
Alternatively, for serious product launch power you could also consider using the extremely comprehensive Rapid Action Profits. You can see exactly what this script can do for you over at the sales page, (a long but impressive read) and although it's not cheap, you can see the potential for selling a lot more product is entirely genuine and therefore makes the software a very good investment. I haven't used it myself yet, but when I finally put together a commercially viable ebook it's going to be right up there on my list of marketing must haves. It really does do everything that would normally require a host of various scripts that may or may not all work together to achieve the same end result. I've not mentioned a high end item like RAP on my blog before but for those launching a new ebook, it really is a great solution to a host of problems.
The other thing you will need is a way to ensure that you don't suffer from theft of your product. (if you're not using something like RAP). Using a static download page is a no no nowadays, especially with social bookmarking sites being so prominent. The last thing you want is your download page plastered all over any one of them. There are several options, but I would recommend SmartDD which I have posted about here in the past - for the full details you can read about SmartDD here. The best thing about it is that it is free for up to five products and can be integrated with Clickbank, taking care of your thankyou page which is a requirement for selling anything through their marketplace as well as protecting you from theft and automating all your sales.
When it comes to launching your product there are plenty of options. If you can persuade anyone to JV with you and plug your book, all well and good, but you will need to offer something in return. Sometimes handing out a copy to potential partners for free is a good starting point and enables them to make a decision about promoting your work from a position of knowledge. If you don't know anyone well enough to offer that kind of trust you could always offer some copies for sale at a heavily discounted price to help things get moving. You may want to post about your book on a few forums and spread it around your social networks too. When it comes to promotion there is much you can do to get the word out. Hopefully you can achieve a snowball effect once you start things off.
If a free viral book mentions certain products, get in touch with the owner, they may well agree to promote to their own lists and members if they think it will help them make more sales. When approaching potential JV partners don't be shy - fire off an email - the worst they can do is say no, and plenty probably will, but don't let that dishearten you, you might be surprised at some of the support you can get.
So, there is some advice and things to consider. For many people the thought of creating an ebook is intimidating and yet it shouldn't be. If you can write and have a subject on which you have a decent amount of knowledge, you are already good to go. With the technical aspects covered in this post you should now be able to get your product up and running and hopefully selling like the proverbial hot cakes.
I'm sure there are plenty of things I've not covered, but if you have anything to add please leave your comments and share your knowledge with other readers.
Photo By Athena
tags: ebook creation, publishing ebooks, digital info products, launching info products, viral ebooks, viral marketing, selling ebooks, writing an ebook, product creation tips Related Posts
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