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building an online widget

-Quick tip: Build your own widget for your call to action

For years, I’ve told clients that an ideal call to action gets prospects back to their website.

And a great way to do that is to offer a little online calculator or widget.

Then your call to action sounds like fun, not work.

Find out how much you can save using our new enterprise widgets!

—Take the 30-second survey to see how your company compares to the rest of your industry!

—Use a quick checklist to get an AI readiness reading for your team: red, yellow, or green!

No one disagrees with me.

But everyone raises the same objections:

  • We’d have to go through IT, which would take forever
  • We have no budget for coding
  • We’re not in charge of the corporate website

Well, I have good news.

A host of online services now exist that offer DIY online widgets and calculators.

You don’t need IT: The tech person on your team—maybe that’s you?—can likely build a widget in an afternoon.

You don’t need a budget: Most of these services charge very little, like $20 a month, to host a few widgets that can handle thousands of hits.

You don’t need to run the company website: You can create a webpage with your calculator on it, and just ask your web team to post it.

A real-world example I built

Here’s a little calculator I built during the pandemic using a free account on Calculoid.

It was for a white paper on how harried HR people were hiring less-than-qualified people in a rush to replace some of those who left during the Great Resignation.

The point was that every new hire who fell a little short added to a big problem: a huge dip in company-wide performance.

And we provided a back-of-the-envelope way to find a number for that.

This calculator was just a proof of concept. I seem to recall it took me one evening.

Calculoid makes the process quite straightforward.

Go ahead, play around with this. Then imagine how much better you could do!

 


 

There are lots more builders out there

I have no particular loyalty to Calculoid. It’s just one service I found that I liked.

The company offers lots of templates, reasonable pricing, and a solid track record of close to 20 years.

I’m not going to try to maintain an updated directory of widget builders.

To find more of them, Google “online calculator builders” or “online widget builders.” You’ll find lots.

Do feel free to share your calculators with me. I’d love to see them!

 


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About Gordon Graham

Worked on 323 white papers for clients from Silicon Valley to Switzerland, on everything from choosing enterprise software to designing virtual worlds for kids, for clients from tiny startups to 3M, Google, and Verizon. Wrote White Papers for Dummies which earned 60+ 5-star ratings on Amazon. Won 16 awards from the Society for Technical Communication. Named AWAI 2019 Copywriter of the Year.

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