Widgets, Grommets and Thingamajigs…
Posted on November 20, 2007
Filed Under Internet Marketing |
That title came from a module which was part of a three week residential operations analyst course I went on back in the 1980s when I was working in IT for a UK Bank.
The course was, of course about becoming an Ops Analyst and entailed studying various analytical methodologies that applied to IT operations in those days. Part of that course was centred around a fictitious company that used IT to handle its day to day working and inventory. The widgets, grommets and thingamajigs were the fictitious products it produced and distributed and we were charged, in a role-playing situation and in teams, to work out how to make the company run more efficiently and economically.
That was before the idea came about that simply getting rid of three quarters of your loyal and hard working workforce would make your company a ton more economical…
What has any of this got to do with blogging in the twenty first century?
Well, as a blogger and internet marketer, I still use some of those old ideas to run my online business as economically as I possibly can. That’s out of necessity as well as being an interesting challenge, so it’s one I enjoy racking my brains over in the constant and perennial scramble to make this online business profitable – and some.
When you put your economy hat on, your mode of thinking alters drastically. You go into survival mode and begin looking for every trick, technique and means for making money out of nothing but your own guile!
And every free product, system or service you can get your hands on!
What actually inspired this article was in fact a widget. One widget in particular, actually. The one sitting in the sidebar furthest from the top of the page – yes, the WidgetBucks widget. The reason it inspired an article all to itself is not because I want to promote it – far from it, in fact. It is to put my own two penn’orth in here.
I installed this widget on several of my blogs about two months ago when it first hit the blogosphere and thought they’d make me a nice little sideline. All they made me was angry because they were irritatingly slow to load up and tended to clog up the smooth scrolling of my pages until they had completely loaded. After over a month on my higher traffic sites and zero money to show for their trouble, I started to remove them, one by one. Two or three still remain in place (only because I haven’t gotten around to removing them too), but I found they simply didn’t have the range of products that I could reasonably display on my sites and expect to get clicks from.
Maybe the product range has improved now, so I don’t want to put anyone off if you’re thinking of trying it out. It is *free* after all and I believe they have increased the load up speed (although I didn’t notice much of a change there).
The moral to this story I suppose is that of course you should try all the free stuff that comes your way because you might just hit upon a winner for your particular site or niche. But don’t expect miracles whatever the sales blurb might say.
Producers of products or services like this want you to use their free resource, of course, because if you can make some money out of it, then they will make a whole lot more!
Terry Didcott
Author and Begetter of Blogging Web 2.0
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Now I have to comment in my own post and backpedal like a lunatic here.
Since I put this up, I checked my WidgetBucks account and now I have made a little money! Isn’t that always the way!