Blake Schwendiman's Blog and Blook

This is day 1 in my series: New ways of driving traffic to your site or blog.

If you're not familiar with the Google Homepage or the Google desktop (sometimes called the sidebar), you definitely need to get to know them.

The Google homepage is a web site that allows you to customize the information you like to see when you first start up your browser. You can add local news, weather, stock quotes and just about anything else you can find on the Internet to your personalized page. You can see in the image that I also have information about Netflix.com and some pictures from Flickr on my personal home page. This is where the Google homepage gets cool.

Google opened up their site by providing a programmer's API so that technical people can develop gadgets that can be easily added to the Google homepage. I'm the guy who wrote the code for the 2 Flickr modules you can see on my page and the code for the Netflix module you see. Initially I developed one Flickr module just to see how it worked and what impact it would have on my web stats. I never expected the results I got!

I reported the initial increase in traffic on January 19th. I did a follow-up post more recently. To be very specific, for this month, my Flickr modules have been viewed over 270,000 times every day. That's 270,000 times each day that I could, if I wanted, put a personal message out to the world. Additionally my Netflix module is viewed about 60,000 times each day.

This is all Google traffic. I haven't done any marketing at all. Do you see the opportunity? Do you have something that you could easily modularize on your web site? Could you develop a module that would get your message in front of the Google homepage market? Here are some ideas:

1. On online art store could create a module that displays a thumbnail of new artwork that links to the shopping cart information for the work.
2. A specialty bookseller could list an item of the day in a module.
3. A blog could develop a better RSS reader or a specialty RSS feed for a homepage module.
4. An online movie ticket boxoffice could provide a module to display local movie times with links to purchase tickets, learn about the movie, movie reviews, etc.

If you're selling something directly from your web site, you probably have an opportunity to easily get your product in front of more eyes very quickly. However, know that people have to opt-in to use your modules. If your module doesn't do something interesting (think nice pictures, special offers, etc.), then people won't use it. If you're a blogger or run a site where you don't sell directly, you might have to be more creative to develop the right kind of module and to then turn that new traffic into something meaningful for you.

The Google desktop is similar in concept to the Google homepage except that it runs on the client computer, not inside a browser. The API for the Google homepage is also available online, but it is interesting to note that some Google homepage modules will work directly in the sidebar. Read the documentation for details. If you don't have the Google desktop installed yet, the following link to the Google Pack will provide you with a download:

If you would like more information about developing Google homepage modules, visit my Squidoo lens on the subject. Come back tomorrow to learn more about this subject as it relates to Pageflakes.