Web widgets for viral marketing - Truly fantastic or a fad?

Web widgets (or gadgets, modules, gizmos etc.) are things of all kinds that you can easily add to a website, start page, social network profile etc. To the user there’s many different kinds of usage. But to you widgets are comprehensive viral marketing tools with the purpose of driving traffic and getting links.

At the PubCon conference there was a session called ‘Viral and WOMM Marketing Management’ where Lawrence Coburn, founder of RateItAll, did a great presentation about widgets. I even had the pleasure to meet Lawrence one evening and he definitely seemed to be an interesting guy. And today Lee Odden of Top Rank Online Marketing posted an interview with Lawrence about widgets.

Here’s a part of the interview that should spike your interest.

What are some of the benefits to using widgets and how can they help companies engage in viral marketing?

From a site perspective, widgets are all about providing your users with the tools to promote your business. A properly executed widget can spread like wild fire - introducing your site’s content / functionality to new users who may not have known your site existed. Widgets are especially interesting to me as a site owner as a means of acquiring new customers at a minimal cost, pushing my site’s reach out to all corners of the Web, leveraging my site’s existing content, reducing my site’s dependence on SEO, and providing a nice source of organic, one-way, inbound links.

So unless you already consider yourself a guru in the area of viral marketing and link building with web widgets I recommend you check out the interview. Lawrence also runs a blog about widgets that you should consider reading especially his recent post “Building a Widget? Read this First.“.

I can only vouch for web widgets as a great viral marketing tool. I’ve created several different widgets with great success. One of them is a sudoku script I created more than a year ago. It was made as a widget webmasters could add to their website but I also made a Google gadget on it. Now a year later it has provided several thousand links and it has more than 300,000 daily views - numbers that is consistently increasing! Also worth mentioning is that because the links obtained with the sudoku widget the website associated with it is now ranked in the top10 / top20 in Google for ’sudoku’.