Internet Marketing Trends: Gadgets and Widgets

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Another hot internet marketing trend is the customization of your own homepage. Google has released iGoogle, Yahoo! has MyYahoo! and there is another website that is dedicated specifically to personalized startpages – Netvibes (my personal favorite). All of these websites that allow you to customize your own homepage provide modules such as calendars, email, instant messaging, news feeds, and more to help users organize their life. Google calls these modules gadgets, netvibes calls them widgets.

As more users are starting to customize and personalize their start pages, companies are starting to design their own gadgets and widgets so that they can be on their client’s homepage. This does two things for companies:

1. 1. If a client has your company’s module on their homepage you have the opportunity to constantly be in the front of your client’s mind and give them the latest news about your company, enticing them to use your service or buy your product

4. 2. For every client that uses your module you will get an inbound link to your website (inbound links are a key component to search engine optimization)

As the competition to get on everybody’s homepage increases by the day, companies are working to create the most innovative gadgets and widgets in order to get this key real estate. You can either provide your clients with customized functionality, or an rss feed to your blog. Examples of customized functionality that are currently being developed include: American Airlines has one that allows you to quickly search for flights, PixieLabs has developed a mini tv that allows you to watch television from all across the world, and Overstock has developed a slideshow of interesting pictures to accompany their search tool.

If you want to move to the front of the internet marketing class, contact Deep Blue Computers today to start brainstorming about a Google Gadget or Widget that you can design for your clients to put on their homepage. At Deep Blue we can help you come up with an innovative idea and design the module for you.