August 9, 2007 – A Routine Week

Most of this last week was just working on the ongoing items… 

I’ve been creating gadgets from Digg.com widgets. While they are not related to calculators, they are easy and quick to create and it helps with author ranking. 

I’ve been continuing to submit links to sites and directories, learning to use the software and getting a feel for the whole process. It’s kind of discouraging because I haven’t heard back from a lot of the ones I have already done. It’s also hard to remember if you’ve submitted already to them. You would think it would be easy to search the site and find out, but it’s not always the case. (Makes you wonder how effective that directory is, huh?) I have heard that it takes many sites a couple of weeks to get your link added. I’ll just have to keep myself busy so the time will go by faster. I’m trying to remember that I only need about 100 backlinks and things will start to happen. That sounds overwhelming from where I’m at right now, but it’s really not so bad.

We have managed to do a couple of new things to the sites: 

www.WebCalcSolutions.com now has tabbed section on the home page for rss feeds for articles and blogs.

www.BizCalcs.com allows users to submit comments. It’s not live yet, but should be before the weekend is over. Check it out and leave your comments. We’d love to hear from you.

August 2, 2007 – Getting Out There With Google Gadgets

Over the last couple of months, we have created about 40 Google Gadgets from our calculators. Of all the things I’ve done to promote my websites so far, Google gadgets has brought by far the most exposure to our product – and it was almost immediate.

In case you don’t know, Google gadgets are miniature tools that can be added to your Google desktop at igoogle.com. Anytime you log in, on any computer, your gadgets are available.

The way gadgets work, the exposure of our calculators hasn’t necessarily translated into traffic to the website, even though the links are there. I’m hopeful that the familiarity of the look and branding will, over time, lead to more direct results.

There are gadgets out there that function fully (as ours do) and some that partially function (a teaser). Some are simply RSS feeds, quotes of the day, tips of the day, video clips. There is a lot you can do with gadgets. I think most every online site can offer some kind of Google gadget to help generate exposure and traffic to their site.

Your site can, and should, feature your gadgets. You just have to add a link that looks like this  on your site next to your products that have a gadget. You can go to http://exercise.bizcalcs.com/ to see how we are using it.

We have also added a Google Gadgets page, http://www.bizcalcs.com/GoogleGadgets.asp , where we show the same image you see in the igoogle directory and provide an  link for each one.

Using  links and creating a Google Gadgets page from your main site can help send traffic to your gadgets. Maybe that’s all someone needs right now, but your product or service will be in front of them every time they see their Google homepage.

You can create and host your gadgets completely within the Google environment with tools they provide or you can create them with your own environment (Visual Studio, etc.) and host them yourself.

I have also found some information that is supposed to teach you how to turn your Google Gadgets into Yahoo Widgets, which actually run on the Windows desktop. Keep an eye on the Google Gadgets category (on the menu to the right) and I’ll report what I find on that.

We have more calculators to make gadgets from, not to mention the assessments or quizzes. So I’d better get back to work…