25/11: 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.

Explore WidgetBox Here