widget marketing

[alohatony]

I'm having a Widget made specifically for Hawaii surf and tide. Has anyone had success trying to get a webmaster to put a widget on their site? I would like to hear any input.

I don't want to send a spammy sounding email, but i do want them to want my widget.

thoughts?

[webmaster]

It's a numbers game really - you want to email as many sites as are potential targets - but no matter what you are going to sound spammy or be ignored by some.

The best approach is to have your email personalized - spend 5 mins on their site and when you write your email (should take no more than 10 mins per email) try to personalize it to how your widget might benefit them (maybe even suggest a spot to put it) - it shows that you aren't just some spam bot.

The part in the middle (explain what the widget is and what it does) can of course be copy / paste - templatized - but I find the best response any time you are emailing a site is adding a personal touch.

Set a realistic goal - 10-20 (this isn't about thousands of links) sites keeping this thing on their site long term would be a great result IMHO

[Joelrunner]

We had OK luck promoting a costofcommuting.com calculator. Then we made it capable of "MLM link building" so any time someone downloaded the widget from THEIR site - they also got a link.

Funny thing is that only about 5% of them really promoted the widget so the majority of the calculator users didn't really get a lot of links, but the response rate went through the roof because of the POTENTIAL of them getting links using our widget.

We have hundreds of home-page backlinks because of this widget, but as Morgan said - it was a numbers game to get those links, and we had to email a LOT of personalized emails.