Clustrmaps is a free widget for blogs that simply shows you where in the world your readers are coming from. There aren’t a lot of bells and whistles, just a nice visible view of your audience.
It updates all the time so the map isn’t that out of date. It’s really easy to embed the code and takes up very little screen real estate so I think it’s worth having.
Here are some of the best tools that can assist you with creating and sharing your own viral marketing campaign for anything you want to promote. It can be your blog, political candidate, a book or screenplay you wrote and just about anything else you can imagine. The possibilities are limited only by the imagination. Also, it can be a lot of fun too.
gydget is the easiest viral marketing service that I’ve tried thus far. You can create live widgets with feeds for videos, events, news and more. Whenever something changes on the source website such as your events on MySpace then the information is updated in every gydget that is loaded out there on the web! This makes the widget a useful information tool in addition to entertaining (thanks to the video feature).
Here’s a gallery of existing viral marketing campaigns created with the free gydget. Most of the widgets are for music artists, but there are many that are not. For example, you will also find promotions for comedians, actors, actresses, movies, and much more. Just about anyone or anything can benefit from viral marketing tools such as gydget. This includes even non-technical people or ventures like writers and their work.
This video from a local news station shows how a fan of the Oakland Raiders uses a Gydget widget to share the latest news and information about the team with other fans.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WLMVM7a5w7M]
Here are two viral marketing distribution services that allow you to setup websites to provide widgets and track them. They offer some free accounts but also provide premium services that include more bells and whistles.
http://www.gigya.com is the creator of wildfire which is most popular platform for websites that distribute viral marketing widgets such as gydget.
Here is a video promo for Gigya.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1XfW_5tQh18]
http://www.clearspring.com is a competitor to gigya and gaining some attention lately.
Final Thoughts:
I think viral marketing is a brilliant way to get the message out about yourself or anything else you want to share with the world.
Who says that press releases have to be dull and boring? Why not use some of the these tools and create exciting and refreshing new ways to spread the word?
Links:
Here’s an excellent link to a free eBook on Viral Marketing as well as an insightful podcast in mp3 format.
Here’s a quick and easy (and free!) way to see realtime stats on the number of people visiting your website or blog: http://whos.amung.us
They don’t describe themselves as a page counter, but as a people counter.
http://whos.amung.us/learnmore shows how to add a counter that shows live visitors
These other two widgets work with the data generated:
http://maps.amung.us/ displays world map of where our visitors are coming from
http://graphs.amung.us/ does all kinds of graphs in varying sizes and designs.
Quick! Tell me the difference between a widget and a gadget! Who makes which one and how are they different? BUZZZZZ! Time’s up! I can’t explain it very well either. Here is what I do know about these twins that were separated at birth. Some work only on the web, some only work on Windows desktops while others only work on Macs! Here is a brief run-down.
Yahoo Widgets continues to improve their collection of widgets than can run on the desktop for windows or dashboard for Mac.
Google Gadgets offers an ever growing library of gadgets for their iGoogle homepage.
Microsoft Gadgets (Once again, why can’t Microsoft have one version of anything? Microsoft has three kinds while Apple only has one kind of widget)
Mac Dashboard widgets obviously offers an impressive array of widgets for the Mac OS dashboard.
Final Thoughts:
It is mind-numbing how many new widgets and gadgets there are every day. The best part is that just about all of them are free and easy to install. There is a wide variety of these tools that can actually provide useful productive information or just be fun. The choice is your’s which ones to use.
