Dashboard - Promote Your Widgets!

We've been upgrading our site over the past few weeks, adding robust search and sorting, better widget description pages and building in some new tools that can be used promote your widgets.

Almost every upgrade we added is focused on making your widgets easier to find and the promotional tools are free to use with any widget in our gallery, so I thought I'd invite you all in to try them out.

No matter if you have uploaded a great new custom widget or created a quick express widget, all the new tools that we have just added in will work to help you promote your SpringWidget!

So, what's new?

1. Tagging In case you don't know what they are, "Tags" are just words that describe your widget that are used when someone searches our gallery. "Tagging" allows you to make it easier for users to find your widget.

You should tag your widget with words that describe the content or nature of your widget. For example, the springwidgets blog is all about news on the SpringWidgets platform, so I'd tag it with "springwidgets", "widgets" and "widget news" but I'd leave out more obvious words like "blog" and "news" because they really don't help users find content that is specific to my blog.

2. Star-Ratings Another tool to help you promote your widgets is our new ratings system. You can rate any widget in our gallery and users can sort by the best rated widgets. The more that you rate, the better the system gets! Help us out and rate a widget or two in the gallery today.

Here is an important tip - we let you rate your own widget so you can start the ratings yourself... Go ahead, give it a try.

3. Favorite Widgets Every time a user "favorites" your widget, it's added to a list of favorite widgets on that users profile! The better your widget looks and works, the more likely you'll have fans.

Want to favorite a widget? Just click the "favorite widgets" button on any widget in our gallery. Much easier and faster than saying "What was that widget called again?" and banging your head on the desk. :-)

4. Social Bookmarking Links Automatically add (or help vote up) any widget in our gallery to the various social bookmarking sites like Digg and Reddit. These sites are great ways to promote your widget and find new users. Just click the icon and follow the directions to get started. The great news is that once you submit your widget with these links, users can vote your widget up with a click or two!

5. Widget Search The best way to be found is to make sure that you are accurate when describing your widget. Any user can search our gallery for your widget and find results based on your developer id, widget title and description and tags.

The more accurate and descriptive you are, the more likely that a search will include your widget in front of interested users.

6. Tag Clouds and "Sorting by" Navigation Users can now search by Ratings, Tag Clouds, Name Sorting, and Most Recent Widgets.

Since users will be looking through the gallery with these tools, the more descriptive you are when entering your widget into the gallery, the better!

7. User Comments The more talked about your widget is, the more users are likely to trust adding you to their page or desktop. Get the conversation started by adding your own comments to the widgets you like.

Find a widget you like? let the creator know that you like it. Just feel like saying "thanks for letting me use your widget?" That's ok too. We hope that the addition of comments will be a popular and helpful feature for everyone.

Now get out there and start promoting yourself!

We are continuing to make improvements every day and we'd love to have your input on what to build next, so pop on over to the forums and tell us what you think!

Thanks,

Don Read More