How to Promote Your Site by Creating Tools and Widgets

It's not that easy. Tools can really improve your link profile and drive traffic but it's not as simple and not every tool will help you. Many webmasters download a free calculators from Hotscripts or as a Wordpress plugin and expect their visitors will share the page on social networks. Others invest hundreds of dollars to create their own mortgage planners just to figure out that no one except few regular readers of their site notice them at all.

Before rushing to invest a lot of time and money in creating tools, have few things in mind. They will help you really achieve some meaningful results.

Your tool must be unique or better than the existing ones.

If you have a really unique idea for something that does not exist, then it's fifty-fifty game. You may make huge success or you may find out no one likes what you have built. Your chances with unique tools are usually better than with copying some existing widget. But there is rarely anything really unique, so better focus on making your tool better than an existing popular tool. What does "better" mean in this case? It could mean better design, better user interface, more features, better explanations on how to use the tool, more related information etc. Just look up the key phrase about your tool in Google and select the first 3-5 results. See what are their tools like and think how you can improve on them.

Very often user interface, design and ease of use makes more people share and link to your widget than having more features. Only in some niches like software development and engineering having more features might be the winning strategy.

Give your tool to other webmasters and/or bloggers.

Wait... why would you give your investment to others for free? Here's one of the secrets of tool marketing: when sharing with other webmasters, you gain more than you lose. Yes, you will no longer be the only one who has the tool. But wait a second, unless your tool is super hi-tech, what stops others from copying it? Perhaps a few hundred dollars at best. So there is really no point to try to protect it and keep it for yourself.

Sharing freely with other webmasters on the other hand will bring you a lot of links. Some webmasters will link directly to the page where you give the tool especially if your license include a requirement for linking back. Other links and traffic will come from script directories - there are many of them and most often they allow listing all kind of downloadable scripts and tools. Third party bloggers and webmasters are also a lot more likely to link to your page when you give the script for free use. So many bloggers publish lists along the lines of "50 free scripts to make your site better". Here's your chance to get more links.

Publish your tool for different platforms.

Don't just limit yourself to listing a free PHP script. This is the most popular technology, but there are also many other options to get even more traffic and links. Think about creating your tool as Wordpress plugin (you can gain very strong links here), Joomla extension, Drupal extension, Windows installable program, Iphone app, Android app, Google Chrome extension... You can keep adding more. Of course each of these requires some development but once you have solved the main logic and made the marketing research this is the easy part.

Make your tools easy to embed or share.

Another way to allow webmasters use your tool is to embed it as a widget. The advantage of this method is that it allows you to output a link or advertising to your likes inside the widget. Some webmasters who are not comfortable installing scripts may prefer to simply embed a widget in their site or blog too.

Finally, make sure the pages which host your tools have easy to use share buttons for sharing on social networks. A Facebook like, Google plus and tweet/retweet buttons are the minimum. You can use services like Addthis to handle most of the other social network buttons for you.

Tools and widgets marketing can be very powerful but it works only for these who put more than the average efforts in it. If you expect that simply placing a widget on your site will lead to traffic explosion you will be disappointed.

Guest post by: Bob H is a software entrepreneur who explores tool marketing for years. You can check my free calculators as an example. Once your site gains traffic you can improve the revenue by using my membership management software to sell premium access to your content.

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