How to Create Your AC Widget to Drive Traffic to Your Pages

Widgets are amazing. You have seen them...they are little snippets of javascript code that you can place on your blog, myspace page, facebook page, etc. If you are in the Page View Bonus program, you may be wondering how to increase traffic to your pages. One answer is to create and syndicate your very own widget. Once you have created it, anyone at all can grab it and put it on their page.

I am completely non-technical, but I set up a widget in less than five minutes, and put it on my Typepad blog with a minimum of effort. Here is a quick step by step approach to how to do it. Perhaps someone will also create a video of this process.

1. Go to http://www.widgetbox.com.

2. Click on Make a Blidget, which is a widget for a blog, but we are going to use it to create a widget for your content producer page.

3. Enter your blog URL: In this case, you are going to put in your content producer page. In my case, I used http://www.associatedcontent.com/user/51816/andrew_boer.html

4. Now it will tell you don't have an RSS feed. Ah but you do! It is right on your content producer page...click on the RSS feed link and copy and paste the URL. Mine is http://www.associatedcontent.com/rss/user_51816.xml

5. Now you can customize your widget. The only suggestion I would make here, is that if you want to make it look really sharp, you should put in the following image where it asks you to supply your own image. This is an image that is specially created to be the right size for the widget. http://www.associatedcontent.com/images/ac_horizontal_tiny.gif

6. Thats it. If you don't have one, you have to briefly create an account. But now you can seamlessly publish your widget automatically to a number of different places, including MySpace, Typepad, Blogger, and many others. You can also create a "panel" that allows you to put more than one widget on a single panel.

All in all, this is a very simple, attractive, and effective way to promote your content, and it will get you up to speed in the new world of the widgeted web.