Smart widget promotion greatly increases your widget’s adoption – and your website traffic.

It’s not difficult to get 30,000 installs of your widget within your first month. Publishing your widget in widget galleries and download archives will help you boost your widget installations. The main source of installations for your widget is Live Gallery.

Follow these simple steps to get 1000 daily installations:

1. Create a widget from any web content, or convert your existing web widget to the desktop.
2. Make a nice screenshot, 60×60 pixels.
3. Add your widget to Live Gallery.
4. Attach the screenshot you created in Step 2.
5. Add tags to your widget profile, so users will be able to find it. Use as many tags as you need, and use different keyword variations.
6. Ask your users to vote for your widget and leave comments.

How does this affect your website traffic?

You can place an ad or link to your website on a widget, or make a widget that interacts with your website and sends users directly to it. For example, send users of your widget to your website database search.

The average CTR (click-through rate) on a widget ad or link is 10%. You can increase this value by interacting with widget users, sending desktop alerts, and making special offers and promotions.

Example:

Let’s assume that your widget receives about 30,000 installs each month. In 3 months it will get about 90,000 installs. Predicting that you have a 10% CTR, you can expect about 9,000 visitors to your website who have a high chance of becoming constant users.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 7th, 2010 at 12:12 pm and is filed under Marketing, Widgets. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.