What if you could aggregate all of your favorite celebrity blogs and display them in your website with a clean navigation, a design that matches your website, full length articles and videos as well as the ability to post comments? Would your visitors appreciate it? If you had an auto updating content plug-in that provided your visitors the most up to date articles and videos, such as news, specific to your niche market would it make life easier for you? What if your widget had such great tools and interesting content that other bloggers or other website owners wanted to share your widget with their users, would they enjoy the free promotion and money making opportunities? Today you can do all of this with widget technology brought to you by Outdoor Hub Connect, and with the right content selections it’s easy for you to achieve significant value even beyond your website.

The keys to choosing great content for your widget is to be creative, solve a specific problem, know your content options and understand how placement on your website plays a role in what content users expect to see.

Be Creative

Do you want to display very specific local news and events, showcase a culmination of celebrity social posts or the current weather displayed alongside the regional fishing report? The content you choose to display in a widget can be broad in nature so as to appeal to a large audience or you may choose to be very dynamic to appease a niche group. When you build a widget in Outdoor Hub Connect you’re not limited to just one widget. In fact we recommend you build multiple designs filled with different content so that you can find the perfect fit with your website users. We also recommend you build a large quantity of branded content widgets for other websites so that you can increase your user reach as well as branding. Overall, don’t be afraid to think big and challenge yourself on aggregating the right content for your users because anything is possible.

Solve a Specific Problem

Use a widget on your homepage to showcase your recent content, thus driving traffic deeper into your website. Create a widget to aggregate content from all your sponsored celebrities or fellow bloggers you admire. Use a widget to provide layers of entertaining content that you could not have found time to aggregate on a daily basis. In general we highly recommend to Outdoor Hub Connect users that they focus on solving a problem for their website or a specific marketing issue that will help get their branded widget embedded by others. The main reason why a widget fails to get traction is because little thought was put into placement, content and its purpose. Be sure to take the time to identify an opportunity and then use an advanced widget builder such as Outdoor Hub Connect to build the right solution.

Know Your Content Options

Widgets are powered by content (RSS) feeds created by you or aggregated from other websites. Website owners, such as bloggers, who are publishing content can sometimes provide thousands of RSS feed combinations based on how they categorize their material. However, most RSS feeds promoted to the public by a website are running blog rolls of the most recent posts. In the Outdoor Hub Connect widget builder users are provided an extensive library of outdoor related content. Because this material is categorized in OutdoorHub.com on so many different levels we can provide you several unique ways to extract the content you need for a perfect widget. Outdoor Hub Connect users are also allowed to insert their own custom RSS feed. Here are just a few ways you may want to leverage custom RSS feeds:

• Look around the web for blogs and websites that promote their RSS feed. If the feed only contains the article title and a small abstract consider contacting the website owner and ask for a full read RSS feed so that your widget readers can enjoy their content without having to jump from website to website. It’s important to note that because you will be displaying their RSS feed within a widget rather than reposting directly to your website the search engine optimization (SEO) for their website will not be affected. This will help you retain a full read RSS feed from the website owner.
• If you have areas of your website, such as popular forum threads, that you would like to promote then you should consider using them in the widget. This will drive traffic deeper into your website, and should someone else wish to share your widget on a different website you will be marketing to their users with your content.
• Insert a custom RSS to promote your Facebook and Twitter posts.
• If your building a local content widget consider grabbing the local weather RSS feed from weather.com

Placement is Key

The placement of your widget can mean the difference between massive user engagement and limited action. It is vital that as you build a specific widget for the correct location as well as constantly testing what placements work best. Even if you build the most relevant high quality widget it won’t receive any traction if the placement is incorrect. Common mistakes for placement include publishing below the fold on a website or embedding in a web page that has low traffic numbers. It is also equally important that if you promote your widgets to other websites for embedding you should lobby for high traffic locations.