Create Add-ons, Tutorials, & Resources For Third Party Products

The number one best strategy that you can employ in driving more traffic to your website is leveraging the success and visitors of other websites. A great way to do this is by creating add-ons, tutorials or third party products for an existing product or service. Before worrying about the How and For What, consider the benefits of going in this direction. Companies love when you extend or talk about their product or service for the same reason you would appreciate the gesture, free advertising. You single handily increase their exposure and the usefulness of their product or service.

With that being said, most companies would be more than willing to help promote your add-on and they may even have some insight into promotional areas you can leverage on your own. Taking a look at Apple’s online store we see a multitude of third party products that customers can purchase. The extra exposure these companies get by providing an Apple related product greatly enhances their product reputation and provides free advertising for their website. They can than leverage this extra exposure to help promote other product lines.

In another example, RAGE Software’s MapDesign provides a great way for website developers to easily add interactive media to their websites. Of course, there are dozens of software packages that users can use to design and build websites. One of the most popular for the Mac, RapidWeaver, was being used by many of our RAGE MapDesign customers. We leveraged the success of RapidWeaver by making it easy to use RAGE MapDesign along with it. We created an online video tutorial to show step by step how the two applications can integrate with each other and posted it to the RapidWeaver forums. Since we were the first to do this, we were able to attract a large portion of RapidWeaver users over to our product line. As we introduced more products, these customers kept coming back. In addition, we also increased our search engine rankings by branching off into new features that were searched often in many major search engines.

Now you may be wondering what you can do in order to leverage the traffic and success of other products and services, and in turn, gain new customers and higher search engine rankings. At the very least you can write articles pertaining to your area of expertise. However, by getting a little creative you can go further in leveraging the traffic of other websites.

First and foremost you must consider the industry you are in. Whether it be law, religion, technology, SEO, there is always creative options you can take advantage of. Very generically you can use special deal websites such as Red Flag Deals to announce your one time deals on products or services.

How To Brainstorm New Traffic Generating Ideas

Here are the steps involved in determining the websites to go after;

1. Make a list of all the ways your customers use your products or services. Get specific and creative here. Do a search for your product or service name to see if anyone has been talking about using your product in a way you may not have thought of yet.
2. Find other products or services that your products can be used with to help make those customers more productive.
3. Look for any communities that may already have been established around these products or services to see if their customers could benefit from your offerings and to find places you can promote your product/services.
4. Create your free add-on, tutorial or resource for these third party products. The important strategy here is to make this add-on free because it gives you more of an opportunity to promote and will lower the barriers required for new customers to come try it and discover what else you have to offer.
5. Evaluate the traffic and feedback you get from these new users to see if your promotional efforts have paid off and whether you should consider additional add-ons for this segment or move on to a new one.

We were extremely pleased to find RAGE Domainer chosen as a Staff Pick on Apple’s Mac OS X download pages. It joins RAGE Google Sitemap Automator and RAGE MapDesign on Apple’s Staff Pick list.

Check it out here: Domainer on Apple’s Staff Pick List.

So we have gotten a lot of emails asking whether or not RAGE MapDesign can easily be used with Rapidweaver. It definitely can be, and it is actually quite easy. We have created a short movie to show exactly how it is done.

The point where most users were have trouble was due to specifying the correct paths to your image files. The following tutorial will show how to add your interactive image maps to Rapidweaver. Although this shows how to add Effects based (CSS) image maps, adding purely HTML image maps can also be done easily. If you are having trouble with that, please feel free to contact support and we will be more than happy to walk you through it, and if necessary create an accompanying video.

Update: As of version 1.2 you no longer need to edit the files to rename the images directory to assets. Just go to the Preferences in RAGE MapDesign and select ‘Create Rapidweaver compatible image maps’. This will automatically use an assets folder instead of an images folder.

Recently Yahoo performed a number of tests to determine what are the major factors to slow loading web pages and provides 13 useful tips to help improve your web page load time. Having fast loading web pages is important for a variety of reasons including;

1. It has been estimated that visitors will spend less than 8 seconds waiting for a page to load before going somewhere else

2. Search engine bots will be able to scan and index your web site faster

How does this relate to RAGE MapDesign? Well Yahoo found that the number one factor to speeding up page load time is too reduce the number of HTTP requests sent to your web server. A web browser sends a request to a web server for each image it must load according to your HTML code. Yahoo actually recommends creating one large image map instead of splitting up your images manually. And of course RAGE MapDesign is the faster and easiest way to create web site image maps.

This reduces the number of requests sent to your server and in return helps speed up your web page load time. You can read the 13 Tips To Faster Loading Web Pages at Yahoo’s developer web site.

Some tips get very creative so go through them to see what else you can do to help reduce the amount of time it takes web browsers to display your web site.

We recently released an update to RAGE MapDesign which adds support for transparent PNGs in image maps. This means that you can easily overlay any mouse over or mouse down effect in your image map by using png images. This make it really easy to make beautiful transitions using only CSS and XHTML.

I created an example to show off what you can do with the new transparency features. Check out this sample CSS Based Image Map with transparency. The image will overlay the background image with a transparent PNG as the mouse moves over the specified hot spots. This example took about 10 minutes to make including creating the PNGs and putting it up online.

In contrast, when I used version 1.0 to create this image map, it took a while to fake the transparency by using the same section of the main image as the background image for the mouse over effects.

We have some great new features already planned for the next free update of RAGE MapDesign, so keep checking back!

We have just posted two new beta updates for RAGE MapDesign and RAGE WebDesign.

Firstly, RAGE WebDesign, which a lot of users have been waiting for, now includes the new text engine we have been promising for a while now. It did take us some time to work out all the issues and get it ready for Intel Macs. But it is here now and works beautifully on both Intel and PPC Macs. It also provides better support for double byte languages such as Japanese and Chinese, among many other improvements.

We have also released a beta version of MapDesign which adds support for transparent PNGs. Now you can create beautiful, interactive image maps with transparent images.

You can sign up to beta test by creating a beta testers account at http://www.trybeta.com/home/

You will see both applications listed there.

Thanks for the patients and we are eager to here what you think of the new updates.

We’ve just released RAGE MapDesign 1.0 today. RAGE MapDesign lets you create image maps that response to user actions such as when users click their mouse down or when their mouse hovers over a certain part of an image. It uses only standards based CSS and HTML so you can be certain that it will work with virtually all major web browsers.

RAGE MapDesign is very easy to use since it is fully WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get). You don’t have to know CSS or HTML.

We have included some sample maps and media that you can easily create on the RAGE MapDesign product page. We put a lot of effort into making it as easy to use and possible and giving it a beautiful Mac interface. We look forward to hearing what you think and how you use it.

Last week we also released 15 beautifully designed, CSS and HTML templates. If you have not already seen them, be sure to check them out. Prices range from $14.95 USD to $24.95 USD for a pack of 5.

We’ve got some great products coming and some amazing updates due out this summer. Stay tuned, July will be a big month!