Widgets, widgets, widgets.

I’ve written a great deal about widgets since launching this site a few months ago because I do feel the future of affiliate marketing will find a secure footing somewhere in the widgetsphere among other places.

Just last week, ShareASale, a major affiliate network, opened up widgets to advertisers and publishers.  The move has been highly popular for both sides and generated a good deal of buzz about what can be done with this platform in affiliate marketing.

TechCrunch has an interesting post from this weekend on the Tumri advertising/affiliate widgets we covered here back in January.  The post is entitled “Attack of the Advertising Widgets” and includes this point:

Widgets are being turned into advertising delivery systems. Their nature - rich media applicatons that are easy to build, customize and add to a site - also make them an attractive way to add advertising to small sites. Google is now testing gadget ads, and we’ve written about services like boobox and AuctionAds (a sponsor) that easily ad affiliate advertising to a site via widgets. Last week eBay also launched “to go” widgets that let publishers embed ebay listings into websites, although for now there are no affiliate payments tied to those widgets.

The point that no one seems to be talking about is that widgets aren’t only great for customization, optimization and interactivity, but widgets can actually serve a purpose for your viewers and audiences.  The best affiliates realize that the best marketing is useful and serves a purpose rather than just serving an ad.

“Providing information” or “providing market choices” are not good enough reasons for audiences to interact with marketing platforms anymore.  That’s where plain text ads fall short.  They are increasingly being overlooked by increasingly more savvy web users.  People recognize them as ads which don’t provide much, if any, value to their overall online experience, even if they are shopping.

Widgets, on the other hand, offer the potential for serving interesting and compelling content that will drive up conversions.  Let’s make sure to keep them relevant and interesting and not go down the dark path to spam, though.