The Earners’ Blog gives useful tips on how to build traffic to your site using links. The author even lists Grazr widgets as a good tool for link building, and The Earners’ Blog widget is currently one of the most popular at Grazr.com.
jameskm03 made a great Grazr that collects the blog feed authored by Wofford College’s webmaster, Kyle James. Kyle’s blog is all about Internet marketing and Web development, from a higher education perspective. Take a look at some of the posts - you may find this Grazr worthy of a spot on your own site.
Guy Kawasaki is a combination entrepreneur/heat-seeking venture capitalist who tries on new ideas like teeshirts. The latest jersey is Truemors.com, an SEO bloggers dream that posts any and all rumors about well-known people, places, and events. Truemor readers are even allowed to contribute posts.
Kawasaki built a “private label” Grazr widget, meaning the Truemors logo is prominently displayed at the top of the widget. With it, he collects the Truemors site feed, posts it on his “other” blog, and pushes it out to anyone else who wants to post the widget on their site. “It drives traffic from one of my efforts to another,” he says, “so that people who are reading my blog go to my Web site.”
Kawasaki says no technical know-how is required. “Between my web guy and the Grazr people, I didn’t have to do much at all.” He thinks a Grazr widget is a good way to add value to site content. “In my case, it’s from one property to another, but others can incorporate content from sites that they don’t own. It’s an easy way to enrich the information provided.”
When I talk to knowledgeable users about the new version of Grazr, the idea of it being an aggregator always comes up. The obvious problem is the association with feed readers, which we want to avoid. We are not Google Reader or Newsgator, and don’t want to be compared directly with them, but we do allow you to aggregate information from all over the Web: feeds, links, social network identities, etc. In effect, we let you aggregate and organize all aspects of your digital life. In Marc Cantor’s terminology, we truly are a Digital Life Aggregator. Not in the sense of just Lifestreaming, but in a much larger way. When I explain this to people, they get excited, because they can suddenly see all the possibilites.
So do we say that Grazr is a digital life aggregator? This can be explained as the next generation beyond simple feed readers. We do that and a whole lot more. It does bring up lots of exciting use cases. Then when people say, “Oh, like Google Reader,” we say “Well, we do that, but let me tell you all the ways we go beyond the old style feed aggregators.” Instead of hiding from Google Reader, or going right up against it, which is clear suicide, we position ourselves as a next generation product.
Now that Grazr 2.0 is launched, we have to find a way to explain it to the world. We have moved well past the “Grazr is a widget” stage. One of our investors recently sent me a link to the acquisition of HowStuffWorks.com. Looking at the site it is clear that this is a site based on building high search engine rank and then reaping the benefits of the resulting traffic. It is stuffed with keywords, and is the type of site that others will link to as authoritative. This site illustrates the marketing decisions we have to make.
Websites are a medium. HOWTOs are a genre based on that medium. The HowStuffWorks site is content, but some tool was used to collect and manage that content. That tool is now generically called a CMS (Content Management System). The tool to display the content is the Web browser.
I believe that the Grazr editor and widget combine to create a new medium. They are the tools. The lists created and displayed with these tools are the content. That content can be applied to specific genres, like HOWTOs and travel itineraries.
This goes beyond marketing to the existential question, what IS Grazr? Do we focus it on a genre, and let the medium idea take care of itself? Do we find a model that grows the content, and let the fact that we have a tool be self-evident? Or do we try to explicity convince people that this is a tool to manage a new medium?
All of our friends and advisors are pushing the need for clear use cases presented as lists and videos. How would a librarian use Grazr? How would a university researcher use Grazr? The extreme focus on use cases seems to imply that we are a content site, not a tool. I must admit that my instincts are to be a tool, but then I have to remember the early days of selling dBASE. In 1981-82 I always said, “People buy inventory systems, not databases. They don’t even know what a database is.” We are at that stage today. In the earliest days of computer retail the mantra was “Sell the solution.” But, by 1983-84 the public knew what a database was and sought that out as a solution to many problems. So we must keep that history and path to larger awareness in mind. Grazr is a type of tool (name TBD) that can be used to solve many specific problems (clear instances TBD).
Any suggestions for solving this dilemma are appreciated.
Viral is an over used marketing term at this point, but it is also a very useful marketing technique. Simplifying the cloning of Grazr as a way of spreading it to other pages is one aspect of a viral approach. Another essential step is increasing the number of distribution points, so it spreads faster. We have now launched our private label program to give other companies the ability to give away their own branded copies of Grazr. They get a free tool that acts as advertising for their site, and we get greater adoption among users who might not otherwise have seen Grazr.
Our first group of private label partners includes: Feedburner, Talkdigger, and Zimbio. Here is an example of a Feedburner Grazr.
If you click the Feedburner logo on the bottom panel, the Feedburner.com site is opened in your browser, so this Grazr acts as advertising for Feedburner, not just for Grazr. We think this type of win-win approach is necessary to make the private label program attractive for our partners. Feedburner will be using this as part of their new ad networks.
Running a private label Grazr is done by adding the argument pl=[private label name] to the list of arguments used to call Grazr, or the URL for the config page. For example, you can reach the Zimbio private label page with http://grazr.com/config.html?pl=zimbio.
Once a private label Grazr is added to any Web page, its special status is propagated to any Grazr cloned from it. So the partner who initially distributes the private label version gets an ever widening advertising vehicle for their own site. It is essentially a multi-level marketing approach to widgets. The private label program is free, so if you want your company to participate, you can contact us at [bizdev AT grazr DOT com].
Right now we are creating individual private label versions as we receive requests, but we want to simplify that. We are also planning an extension to OPML that will allow any OPML file to be displayed in Grazr with a custom logo. This means that application developers can brand their Grazr applications, and be assured that as the the apps propagate across the Web they will all point back to the developer’s site.