Just like most things I seem to stumble across, iGoogle had no home page themes for darts. So, just like the screen savers I made for my phone, PDA, Blackberry and laptop I decided that needed to be addressed and submitted a darts theme. Also, being the Internet Marketing tool that I am, I branded it with my dart shirts web site URL. My vision of course was to draw dart players to the web site to shop.
Can I say it was successful as an Internet Marketing venture? Unfortunately, the nature of the theme limits you to providing a static image. So without a functional link to track statistics from users there is no way to tell.
The theme page does have a counter that shows how many users currently have the theme installed on their iGoogle home page, and I have seen it as high as 4000 users since submitting the theme. From a branding perspective, considering a few thousand Internet users have my web site URL on their screen I would venture to say many will visit the web site. I would also guess that the majority of users who are enjoying the theme are dart players, which is a slam dunk in terms of reaching a targeted, qualified audience.
This is just another example of finding creative ways to get exposure and traffic - especially qualified traffic - to your web site. The Internet is full of widgets, bells, whistles and inter active features that people use quite often, and if you keep your eyes peeled for ways to market yourself through them you can discover stones left unturned.
So, if you're a dart player please enjoy this iGoogle Darts Theme and drop some comments - good or bad - on the iGoogle theme page!
During the day it looks like this:
And at night it changes to this:
