Blake Schwendiman's Blog and Blook

This is day 4 in my series: New ways of driving traffic to your site or blog. [Read Day 1]

Okay, so you're not sure how a Google module or a gadget for Pageflakes is going to help you out. Or maybe you can see the advantage, but don't have an idea. Well, don't give up. There's always something coming down the pipe.

Recently Google released its Google Calendar. As usual, they also provided a programmer's API to interact with it. Maybe you're organization could exploit a shared calendar to drive traffic. Do you hold regular events that lots of people want to know about? Do you have scheduled product releases that are calendared in advance? Are you a DVD reseller with a schedule of upcoming DVD releases? You can create a calendar using Google Calendar, then make it public or add it directly to your site. Google has made it easy to allow other Google Calendar users to subscribe to public calendars, so you simply need to publish your events and make sure in the details of each event that you link back to your web site. How cool is that?

Another type of gadget that has been successful for me is a Javascript-based gadget called EZFlickr. I created it for really one purpose: to drive traffic to my site. It works for several reasons. First, Flickr is a great place to keep images, so a lot of people already use it. Second, EZFlickr really is easy to set up, so you don't have to be a programmer to add it to your site. Third (this one is for me), EZFlickr refers back to my site. You'll see there's a little Powered by EZFlickr link below the image. That links back to my blog and so another person can set it up for their page. And that one points to my blog, and so on.

Okay, so I've pretty much covered the gadgets and the sites at this point. In my next article, I'm going to give some ideas for gadgets that I think should have been built already. Maybe some of those could be built by you!