Widgets fit perfectly into a world where information makes it’s self available where ever the end user wants it. Widgets offer the great ability to be placed where the community will use it the most thus maximising a marketers message within the product.

Tracking widgets is easy with tools such as clearsprings and Gigya. These services allow users to virally spread your message throughout the net easily integrating your product in social networks and blogs. A site that’s bringing widget making to the masses is Sproutbuilder.com. Just out of Beta Sprout gives you the ability to create rich media widgets like the one below. Sprout offers a really great user interface built completely in Flex it’s a great example of an online application. Allowing you to embed RSS feeds, Twitter feeds, Yahoo maps, Google Forms, and much more. Design and style are completely up to you which is great as most sites only offer drag and drop interfaces with pre-set placeholders for content. templates are available for the less adventurous. Check out the video below on how to create your sprout.

Making money from widgets

Widgets are a great environment for brand advertising as they offer a real media experience and in time brands can leverage that experience to find ways to engage users with their product. We are seeing more and more brands sponsoring already popular widgets to get their message across.

Sites like Amazon and Ebay offer users affiliate programs encouraging them distribute their widgets with products. This is a great marketing initiative by these companies to take their products off the site and onto the users sites and networks, and the incentive to embed the widget is cash to the site owner of a visitor buys a product. So everyone wins. This has been a brief look at widgets and how your business can use this emerging form of media to target your audience.