Guest Post: Five Tips When Promoting a WordPress Widget
Today we have a guest blog from Marcus Taylor, a social media executive at SEOptimise. He has provided you with 5 tips on promoting wordpress widgets in order to obtain backlinks to your website, and there are some good tips to be had here.
Promoting a web widget for links can sometimes be a tough task, as you need to ensure that you can reach a certain level of adoption before the widget begins to snowball and gain adoption naturally. Here are my five tips when promoting a WordPress widget during the launch phase.
1) Contact bloggers directly via email, blog comments, and in forums.
If your widget relies heavily on being adopted, which most do, then you should aim to contact as many bloggers relevant to your widget as possible. I find that as well as sending the usual emails it can also be beneficial to leave threads in blogging forums and commenting on blogs to try and build relationships with bloggers prior to asking for adoption – the great thing about this is if a blogger refuses to install the widget you can still ask for insight into why not and how you could improve the widget.
2) Be Extensive When Building Your WordPress Holding Page
Possibly one of the best quick wins when promoting a WordPress widget, that doesn’t fully rely on the widget’s shareability is to ensure you create an extensive holding page on WordPress.org. By adding a large number of relevant tags, creating thorough descriptions, and ensuring you have a significant amount of positive compatibility reviews, your plugin page will have a far better chance of appearing when users are searching for a widget to install. I recently did this for Gartoo, who received 3 – 4 downloads a day from their WordPress plugin page before any promotion outside of WordPress even began. It’s definitely worth the extra time and effort.
3) Submit it to widget directories and widget review sites
There are so many widget directories out there such as wigipedia.com, and Yahoo Widgets that I don’t seem to receive many submissions. It’s pretty easy to get your widget featured on these sites and as they receive good amounts of traffic it can be a very beneficial place to promote your widget.
4) Create a recursive loop to install the widget
The great thing about widgets is that if they have a good concept, then they will keep getting installed over a long period of time without too much ongoing work. One tip to encourage this is to create a recursive install loop – i.e. when a blogger installs the widget on their blog there is a link or embed code allowing their visitors to install the widget on their blogs, which will then allow their visitors to download the widget and so on. Widgetbox do an excellent job of this on all of their free widgets.
5) Joint venture on the widget promotion
A really simple way to gain promotion of your widget is to partner with another company or website by offering them promotion as a ‘case study’ of a website that has installed the widget. You could include a screenshot of their site with the widget installed on your WordPress landing page, and mention them in the various promotional releases that are published about the widget.
This blog post was written by Marcus Taylor, a social media executive at SEOptimise
2 Comments
Tip 6) Publish guest posts about it targeting the big players in your target market. I published a youmoz about one of my SEO plugins about two years ago.
10,000 installations since then.
Not saying they all came through that post, but it got me off to a good start.
Great tip Martin, that’s a pretty impressive # of installations!
I think investing the time and effort in researching the niche to identify who’s influential and worth targeting, as well as finding ways to cross-promote the widget in other niches (and identifying alternative angles to promote it) is an absolute must when promoting widgets.