Guest Post by Dominic Fawver.

Session Description:  This presentation discussed how to enhance your site using various widgets, what works and what doesn’t, and how effective different widgets are to your site.  The panel consisted of:

• Woody Wood, Product Manager, Amazon (Twitter @AmazonAssociate)

This session gave an overview of what a widget is, and what it can bring to your site.  Many examples were given from the Amazon Associate program and a couple of examples from other sources.  One of the chief reasons for using a widget is to add interactivity and functionality to your website.   A key point that was mentioned was that a widget should be used to augment your site, along with all of the links and banners, instead of replacing them.  Several suggestions were made as to what works and what does not.  Included in the what works category were things like:

• Use the right widget for the job:  focus on targeting the widget at relevant material to your site.
• Place the widget in the most effective spot:  for example, in the center of the page for a one off topic specific item, or on the sidebar for something that is more long term.
• Use the widget as a self expression tool:  add comments and recommendations to the items to make the relevant to your audience.
• Change content regularly:  make sure that people want to return to your site.

The only negative thing I took away from this very well put together presentation was the mention of the very short duration of the cookie given by the Amazon Associate program.  This will most likely not stop me from using Amazon widgets on my site, but is a little disappointing.

This session took place October 1st and promised to teach those in attendance how marketers can reach very specific groups of users via behavioral targeting, niche social sites, campaigns at specific demographics, hyper targeting and more.  The panel consisted of:

• Chris Saad, Founder and CEO, DataPortability.org
• Will Moss, CEO, ConnectPlatform.com
• Ian Swanson, Founder and CEO, Sometrics

To be honest I didn’t like the unorganized nature the panelists took, but there were some decent take-home notes to be had from the session.

Bullet Point Review!

• Methods to find a niche are Google Search and Twitter Search.
• Don’t just observe, participate.
• Lots of people started with apps and then moved to a main web property.
• Find your audience – use demographics, psychographics, behavioral marketing – find them and partner up.
• Partner with fast growing niche networks or create one if it doesn’t exist yet in the niche you’re interested in.
• Experiment with creative ads with the owners of these networks.
• Advertising is yelling, marketing is having a conversation.
• Learn the social contract and participate accordingly.
• Have a process in place on how to respond and join the conversation.
• Put your money where your mouth is and allocate resources to monitor and respond in social media settings.
• There is a need for a new metric.  Keywords used to tell people, not so much anymore.
• Need for interests to be measured (APML).
• How do you target?  Try – do sample buys, experiment, do lots of little buys.
• Social networks are still cheap to advertise on because they don’t yet perform like traditional ad buys in terms of CPM.
• See what keywords people associate with your brand (quality, sucks, etc).
• Use social networking for lead generation.
• No one’s talking about your product, they’re talking about your brand – so collaborate and build a product that they’ll want to talk about.
• Use social media to saturate a niche market; brainstorm about communities of interest and participate and show your subject matter expertise.
• Use search engines to find individuals and follow them back to their communities.

Points brought up during the Q&A

• You might want to go local before going national – not all products and services scale effectively to a national audience.
• Widgets are the bumper sticker of the web.
• Develop content and specific tags (zip codes, city names, etc.) in targeting.
• Get analytics to see where your traffic is coming from.
• Keyword ads like AdWords, Facebook, MySpace are great for segmentation.
• Hyper targeting is growing in adoption.
• Open Social – create widgets that will work across multiple social networks.
• If you’re going to buy advertising on a social network, you should also participate in that network.
• Be part of that eco system in as many ways as possible.
• Using engagement to see how well ads work can also be used to see what a particular segment is interested in (e.g. how many people mouse over, click, etc.)
• Data portability will break down barriers to entry.
• Using a 3rd party metric contrasts vs. internal and lends credibility and gives you a comparison of you vs. your competitors.

Even the Q&A portion was just an extension of the session, so it was hard to really distinguish what people were asking.  It was a decent session but could have been perked up with a bit more empirical data and maybe some real-world experiences.

Yes that’s right – I have not abandoned the Free Toolsday feature.  Lots of things have come up, and I’ve been a bit uninspired, but like a flash it hit me what the best tool to feature today would be.  One that can make you money!

ScratchBack, a Jim Kukral project, is a great way for your readers and fellow bloggers to both show you some love and advertise their own blogs or websites.  It’s free to join and set up, with about 15 different stock designs for your widget.  You can also design your own using the guidelines from the website and they’ll hook it up with a nice custom one.  Obviously you can see over there ——> that I haven’t had the time or focus to do another custom design as I once had!

This is how it works: you put the widget on your site.  A reader comes by and decides that they want to tip you and get a link up all in one swoop.  So they click the widget, pay the tip to ScratchBack (YOU set how much of a tip you want!) and then ScratchBack pays you 90% of the tip (they have to keep the lights on, afterall).

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="540" caption="How it Works"][/caption]

You have the power to decide how much of a tip you want (the minimum is $5), how you want links to be bumped, if you want links auto approved, and more.  it’s one of the better widgets out there since it rewards you for your content while allowing other readers to promote their stuff as well.  It’s free to join if you just want to check it out and you’ll almost never get any emails from them – solicitation or otherwise. It’s also a great traffic source for you to go out there & reinvest – put your links on other blogs that employ ScratchBack!

I’m a big believer – so ask me if you have questions!