Blake Schwendiman's Blog and Blook

As promised, I am starting a series of blog posts regarding how to drive more traffic to your web site using some non-traditional methods such as creating a Google homepage module or writing some custom plugins for other personalized web sites. This is a viral concept not unlike creating reusable content such as this article by copyblogger that you can see I used on my site. Seth Godin has also used free reusable content to drive traffic to his site. The difference here is that I'm not an expert in marketing or blogging, but I am a good programmer, so my methodology is to create reusable software content rather than reusable knowledge content.

This series won't be particularly technical -- I'm not going to teach you how to program -- but you'll probably need to be fairly technical or at least have someone who can develop your idea for you. The reason that I'm qualified to talk about this at all is simply because I've done it. I have developed several Google Homepage modules, a Pageflakes module and some Javascript add-ons that have drastically improved my traffic and my Technorati rank.

So, the plan is that I will write one article each work day starting on Monday until I finish the series. If I miss a day, don't sue me as I make no guarantees that I'll get to it every day. The outline for the articles is:

1. Google Homepage/Desktop Overview
2. Pageflakes Overview
3. Windows Live Overview
4. Other Opportunities: Google Calendar, Blog Plugins
5. Theoretical Example of a Google Module
6. Real Example using del.icio.us
7. Getting the word out
8. Review

If you're interested, I've already created a Squidoo lens covering some of the technical aspects of this topic. Otherwise, just subscribe to my blog feed to stay in the loop.

Update

Okay, now it's the 10th of July and I've finished up the series. I've updated the outline to make it an index of all the articles to this one so you can quickly jump to all of the parts of the series very quickly.

Thanks again for the interest and please let me know if you have any questions or comments about the series!