Promote your gadget
Make it easy for people to discover and add your gadget.
A gadget that's interesting to use and popular among users will drive lots of traffic from iGoogle to the gadget owner's website. If you already have an interesting gadget, then you just need to make it popular through smart promotion.
Identify placements on your website for gadget promotion.
Make the most of the iGoogle directory.
To ensure that iGoogle users can find your gadget and add it to their pages, add it to the iGoogle directory. Your gadget will also appear in gadgets for your Webpage and the Google Desktop gadget directory. The more popular your gadget, the higher it will appear in these directories.
- Provide detailed information about your gadget (description, author name, email, etc).
- Submit a thumbnail image of your gadget to the directory to give users a preview of what it looks like.
Promote your gadget on your own website.
Visitors to your site are likely to be interested in your content, so you should make it easy for them to take a piece of it with them by placing your gadget where they can find it.
- Promote your gadget on your homepage and in other high-traffic portions of your site.
- Promote your gadget where it's going to be most relevant for your users. If your gadget features news, link to your gadget from a portion of your website that features news. Or similarly, if your gadget updates with travel vacation deals, place a promotion near the deals section of your website.
- Increase awareness of your gadget by promoting it more than once.
- Experiment with your promotions and see which work best.
Add links to your gadget for your visitors.
Make your gadget promotions pop! Depending on the amount of real estate on your site, consider using a combination of text and graphics, such as the "Add to Google" button.
- The most effective promotions read "Add [your gadget's title] to your iGoogle homepage" and also include the "Add to Google" button. The more information you give your users to let them know which action they should take, the better.
Leverage the Google logo. Google research has shown that users click more freely on links that contain the Google logo than on text links, so using the the "Add to Google" button in your promotion may lead to better results for gadget usage. - If you have several high-quality gadgets, you can promote several at once using the "Add to Google" button.
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