Image by Getty Images via @daylife

The Christmas Holiday themes are rolling in for Brand Thunder’s Best Holiday Browser Theme of 2011 Contest. It’s one of the easiest ways to win an iPad 2. Just design your browser theme with the world’s only DIY browser theme creator for Firefox and IE.

Here are examples of early entries. You still have plenty of time before the December 15 deadline. So, enter your holiday browser theme today! Feel free to also sit back and enjoy by downloading one of these or any of the Christmas or Holiday themes in our browser theme Gallery.

Pictures of Christmas

It’s the time of year spent looking for Christmas wallpapers and holiday wrapping paper. Since many of us spend hours looking at the computer, Brand Thunder thought it’d bring a little incentive to adding Holiday joy to your desktop. It’s as easy as capturing your own picture of Christmas and transporting it into your browser with BT:Engage.

If you don’t have your own Christmas photos to use, there’s a special selection of Holiday images for you to use. It takes less than 5 minutes to build your own holiday browser theme. You just double-click or drag and drop the images in the theme creator. The longest part will be finding your own Christmas pictures or holiday images that you want to upload into BT:Engage.

Christmas Lights and Christmas Tree

Your time on the Internet has never felt so Merry and Bright.

Spirit of Christmas and New Years

With this theme titled “A Year to Celebrate” you get the feeling of the season and it won’t run out by New Years.

Kinkade Kind of Christmas

It’s like it was inspired by the painter of light. These bucolic scenes of small town Christmas.

Silent and Holy Night

This holiday imagery captures the magic of the season.

Enter with Your Picture of the Holidays

Whatever your vision of the holiday season is, you can capture it in a browser theme and enter the contest for your chance to win an iPad 2. Build the theme with BT:Engage and send us an email. It’s definitely worth the few minutes of time it takes to build a theme. Find all the details at our Best Holiday Browser Theme of 2011 Contest blog post.

Good luck with your entries!

Related articles

• Best Holiday Browser Theme of 2011 Contest – Win an iPad 2 (brandthunder.com)
• Christmas Wallpapers and Your Browser Theme (brandthunder.com)

Chrome, Firefox and IE Christmas Themes:

Traditional Christmas Browser Theme with Wallpaper Option

Snowman Christmas Holiday Browser Theme with Wallpaper Option

Our latest Christmas theme features Santa Claus and his Reindeer

Available for Firefox and Chrome.

Christmas Wallpapers

One of the secrets of Brand Thunder’s browser themes is how easy it is to turn our “new tab” image in Firefox into a desktop wallpaper on your computer. After you install one of our Christmas holiday themes above, open a new tab. Move your cursor over the picture and Right Click then select View Background Image. That will load a new page showing just the image, Right Click on that image and select Set As Desktop Background… You’ll immediately have that image as your Christmas holiday wallpaper on your desktop.

Your Personal Christmas Holiday Theme

If you’re like a lot of us that tend to handcraft our own holiday experiences, whether it’s baking family recipes or your own holiday decorating traditions – here’s your chance to build your own Christmas holiday browser theme. Brand Thunder has a selection of holiday background images and logos in BT:Engage, where you can build your own browser theme., including images for Hanukkah and Kwanzaa. Once you’re Finished building your holiday theme, you can easily share with friends and family through Facebook, Twitter, Email and more. Start a new holiday tradition!

Don’t forget you can always add your own images to make the best holiday theme for you and your family.

Examples of the free holiday themes you can create

Family Theme

Family & Fun Theme

Religious Theme

Santa Claus Theme

Free to build, share and use.

1. Go to BT:Engage and click the Get Started button
2. On the Background and Logo tabs, click the Holiday link to see the special image options
3. Double Click or Drag & Drop those images to add them to the theme. Use the green arrows in the Properties box to move images to the front or back.
4. Widgets are buttons and feeds you can Drag & Drop into your theme. You’ll need to select where to point them, like your online gift wishlist, Facebook page or Flickr photo album.
5. Add your own photos under the My Images tab. They can be uploaded as Backgrounds or Logos
6. Find links to videos tutorials at the BT:Engage FAQs.

Holiday Theme Contest

If you really want to show case your browser theme talents, be sure to enter our Holiday Browser Theme Contest. First prize is a new iPad 2 and gift certificates for the runner’s up. All the details are found in the contest blog.

Image via CrunchBase

Win an iPad 2 in less than 5 minutes

You can win an iPad in less than 5 minutes. Sound easy? It is.

There is no purchase necessary to enter or win.

Just create your own Christmas or holiday browser theme using BT:Engage and share it with us – you’ll be entered to win. It only takes a few minutes. A panel of judges will select 5 finalists, then the public will vote on the winning entry. Enter by 12/15/11, finalists will be announced on 12/17/11 and winners announced on 12/23/11. First prize gets a new iPad 2, the other finalists will each receive a $25 Amazon gift card.

All the details for participating are below. Enter early and often, and have fun!

Holiday Theme Your Way

BT:Engage makes it easy to create your own browser themes for Firefox and Internet Explorer. For a completely custom look, upload your own images then drag & drop to the browser theme. In a few minutes, you’ll have a new Internet experience that’s personal and fun.

The Rules for Winning

1. You must create your holiday browser theme with BT:Engage. It’s 100% free.
2. Tweet: I entered @brandthunder’s holiday browser theme contest (http://ow.ly/7pFcY). See my theme: PASTE YOUR THEME URL
3. Email info@brandthunder.com with the URL to your theme’s download page by 11:59PM EST on 12/15/11.

***NOTE: If you don’t use Twitter or have a Twitter handle, simply indicate this in your email submission and you won’t have to Tweet it to win.

Finalists will be promoted in our blog. You can send your fans to that post to vote up your theme!

How BT:Engage Works

Here’s a short preview of how the BT:Engage product works. You can always find more help and links to “How to” videos at http://bt-engage.com/faqs.

Free to build, share and use.

1. Go to BT:Engage and click the Get Started button
2. On the Background and Logo tabs, click the Holiday link to see the special image options
3. Double Click or Drag & Drop those images to add them to the theme. Use the green arrows in the Properties box to move images to the front or back.
4. Widgets are buttons and feeds you can Drag & Drop into your theme. You’ll need to select where to point them, like your online gift wishlist, Facebook page or Flickr photo album.
5. Add your own photos under the My Images tab. They can be uploaded as Backgrounds or Logos
6. Find links to videos tutorials at the BT:Engage FAQs.

Eligibility

NO PURCHASE NECESSARY TO ENTER OR WIN. THE CONTEST IS VOID WHERE PROHIBITED BY LAW.

Contest is subject to all applicable federal, state and local laws. Open only to permanent, legal U.S. residents who are physically residing in one (1) of the forty eight (48) contiguous United States or the District of Columbia (excluding Hawaii, Alaska, Puerto Rico, Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands and other United States territories), and who are eighteen (18) years of age or older and of the age of majority in their state of residence as of the start of the Contest Period.

The Contest is governed by U.S. law and subject to all applicable federal, state and local laws and regulations. By entering the Contest, participants agree to accept and be bound by all terms of these Official Rules and Regulations.

The competition among coupon websites is high so companies are looking to get a leg up on the competition to provide instant access to the latest coupons and deals. Online Coupon site “Presto Savings” looked to Brand Thunder to help them create a more persistent presence with their visitors along with instant access to the latest coupons and deals delivered directly through their custom browser theme.

Brands that have used custom browser themes have regularly seen more engagement and more traffic from fans that use their browser themes over regular visitors. In fact, brands like the Huffington Post have seen 8X more visits on a regular basis from users of their theme than from regular website visitors. Presto Savings Coupon Site saw the potential and then looked to Brand Thunder to help them create this type of engagement with their fans.

Introducing the Presto Saving Coupon Theme

Download the Theme

The Brand Thunder team worked to provide a theme that matched the look and feel of the PrestoSavings.com website with the light blue background. Fans of Presto Savings love coupons and great deals, so the addition of quick links to top “Grocery Coupons” and other “Online Coupons” was added to the lower part of the theme.This provides instant access to the top deals and coupons available on the Presto Coupons website. Now fans have access to their coupons every minute they are surfing the web. Pretty powerful, huh?!

On the right side of the theme, a “feed” of the latest coupons was added so fans could scroll through and find the coupons that appeal to them. A quick link to their homepage is also added on the far right along with the logo of the company for branding purposes.

Again, this persistent engagement provides users with quick access to many of the coupons offered by the company, AT ALL TIMES. Unlike a Facebook fan that “might” see your Facebook wall post, a browser theme user WILL see your offer every minute they are surfing online. I’m not sure what other social media tool can provide this type of engagement other than toolbars.

To give you a feel for the look of what this might look like on your entire computer screen, take a look below…

If you are a coupon website or an E-commerce website offering “hot deals”, coupons or related items, consider offering your users a custom branded browser theme. It has been proven to increase engagement, visits and clicks to commerce offers. You can have Brand Thunder design your custom theme, but if you’re looking for a quick and FREE way to develop your own, consider using our Browser Theme Creator tool to develop your own.

Here’s an overview of toolbars, browser themes and what each can do for your web site, business or community.

One point I’d emphasize, these products are not mutually exclusive. It’s never a question of which one to implement, but what each brins when you offer them to your audience.

Conduit.com Community Toolbars

Conduit.com is the leader in the community toolbar space, and they have an amazing product. In a matter of minutes, anyone can register at their site, upload a logo and start building a custom community toolbar that they can share with their online community. Additionally, the web publisher can choose from a host of web apps and tools to make the toolbar serve the wider needs of their audience.

The toolbar gives the web publisher a toehold into the online experience of the user by placing a small piece of branding, some icons and feeds for your site. Then it strives for retention (continued use) of the toolbar by adding icons to other products like email, Facebook, YouTube videos, MochiGames or whatever that publisher feels is best for their user.

It’s a proven strategy of rolling the attraction of brand affinity with personalization that gives the user the elements of the Internet they use on a daily basis. Conduit offers thousands of ways to personalize the toolbar experience. The web publisher defines the default experience for their community, but the user can adjust the toolbar to their own liking over time.

Browser Themes

Brand Thunder, long the leader in the interactive browser theme space, offers similar capability with its BT:Engage DIY browser theme creator. In a matter of minutes, a web publisher can build a unique browser theme full of visuals and interactive content.

Where the Conduit community toolbar goes wide, the Brand Thunder browser themes go deep. The brand and theme provide a visual immersion complemented by integrated content and functionality. It’s a rich experience between the web publisher and their online community. A suite of personalization features have been added like Facebook and Weatherbug, but not to the full extent offered by Conduit.

Core Value Proposition of Toolbars and Browser Themes

The basic promise of both the toolbar and the browser theme is a persistent connection to your online user, which has huge value. Think about the expense that goes into building and maintaining a web site, then add in cost of getting people there. Then consider that while people spend hours online, they spend seconds on a web page. And, unless you’re Facebook, you’re not likely getting a large percentage of that time.

With persistent placement in the browser, you capture awareness and interaction the entire time your user is online. That drives up exposure, engagement and return visits. Without that exposure, at best you’re one stop among many. At worst, you’re an afterthought.

Affinity Marketing – Visual Identity

Both toolbars and browser themes fall under the concept of affinity marketing tools. Visual identity plays a large role with affinity groups and both toolbar and theme play to that connection to varying degrees. Also, each of your users will have a level of comfort as to what they like.

You can put a toolbar on your computer, and like a bumper sticker, you eventually look past it. It’s present but doesn’t always capture your attention. If you trick out your car, you’re not going to miss it. I can no longer find the traffic increase data point for toolbars, but if my memory is correct, the contribution difference is similar to the difference in visual impact of these two images. And while I don’t have any data to compare, my gut tells me the toolbar has the edge in terms of lifespan of usage. I’ve seen the dips when our sports teams lose.

vs.

Pros & Cons – Shared

There are pros and cons to both approaches, and there are those shared by both.

Pros

• Free and easy to set up.
• Free tools for promoting and sharing.
• Increase site visits, commerce and engagement.
• Great for mainstream and passionate audiences.

Cons

• Web development community tends to avoid products like these. If that’s your audience, may not be the best fit.
• Require ongoing promotion to grow audience – like most products.

Pros & Cons of Toolbars

Pros

• Toolbar apps for every conceivable use.
• Revenue sharing.
• Available for four major browsers: Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari

Cons

• Limited visual presence.
• Added to bottom of browser chrome.

Pros & Cons of Browser Themes

Pros

• Entire browser chrome part of experience .
• New ad inventory including sponsorships within the browser chrome and sidebar ad inventory.
• Available for three major browsers: Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer.

Cons

•  Apps limited to most popular.
• DIY product has limited feature set in its early stage of release.

Related articles

• Browser Toolbars & the Added Power of Branded Themes (brandthunder.com)
• BT:Engage How To: Make Money Online with Your Browser Theme (brandthunder.com)
• 4 Ways to Unlock the Traffic Driving Power of the Web Browser (kissmetrics.com)

Image via Wikipedia

A browser theme is more than a pretty picture, or it should be. That’s why we call ours “interactive browser themes” and we’ve seen browser themes deliver 6 – 12x more clicks than the average visits to our partner sites. You get this return traffic by utilizing the content you’ve already created for your web site. It’s a simple matter of exposing it and directing users back to your site through the browser theme.

Here are some tips to help you get started.

RSS Feeds in Your Browser Theme

If you have a web site, blog, audio/video content, or even photos, you can offer a feed of your content. You can see an example of almost all of these at work in our NASA browser theme. NASA generates news, videos and photos constantly and have feeds for virtually all their content. Explore the NASA Multimedia site, then compare how you can utilize the feeds differently in your browser theme.

The news feed in the toolbar ticker is a highly engaging element. That’s why in the early stages of our BT:Engage browser theme creator, it was one of the essential features to include for what is still a limited feature set product. You’ll find an option to add an RSS/Atom Feed under the Widgets tab when you’re building a theme.

The great news is, if you are using a popular blogging platform or publishing tool like TypePad, WordPress, or Blogger, you have a feed automatically. Even other non-blogging sites like social photo-sharing service Flickr offer feeds of your content. As an added bonus, you can use products like Feedburner to get additional analytics and reports about your feed usage. You can run your feed through their system before putting the link into your browser theme.

Hotlink Your Logo

The RSS feed delivers dynamic, breaking news to your audience and goes a long to deepening your relationship with your audience. That doesn’t diminish the fact that they have an affinity for your brand and many users simply want to start at the top of your site. Adding your web URL to your logo right in the BT:Engage browser theme creator turns a flat image into a clickable one, and that gets users back to your site a lot. It’s a simple addition and not one to forget if you’re looking to optimize your user engagement.

Browser Theme Toolbar Buttons

These are the work horses of your browser theme. They’re not pretty and not sexy, but they get the job done – just don’t get too much of a good thing.

You should include 3-5 buttons in your browser theme that link back to the key areas of your site where your community visits or interacts the most. These could point to your photo or video galleries, your community forums or your news page. If you have a commerce area, don’t ignore those. The people using your browser theme are your Super Fans, or soon will be. Help them support you.

The sports teams that use browser themes often have two commerce links in their browser themes. One button will point to the team store, the other to get tickets. The dual commerce connection isn’t limited to teams, though. What we see is more than a doubling of clicks to commerce when the two button approach is used. Just make sure your giving enough content around those commerce links to your audience knows it’s not all about the money.

These are the basics. They are core to every product Brand Thunder has built and why we made this the starting point for our BT:Engage browser theme creator. We’ll add more functionality over time and give you more options, but if you get the fundamentals right – the rest comes easy.

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

We’re all in sales. Whether you’re Coca-Cola or the GateWay College Gecko soccer teams, you’ve got an audience you’re trying to reach and some action you’re trying to inspire. These two groups may be miles apart in terms of scale, but they’re both actively engaged with their communities online. Coke has it’s MyCokeRewards.com and the GateWay Geckos use Facebook, Twitter. and their Browser Theme. They are strengthening their ties with their existing audience, and, in effect, selling more.

For many businesses, the sales strategy falls into two roles: Hunter and Farmer. Every company will have a mix of these two that fit best with its overall objectives. Coke and the Geckos will use advertising and outreach to bring in new people and give the Hunters prey, I mean, prospects. The rewards programs and social media these two groups are involved in… that’s all Farming and creating deeper engagement with existing “customers.”

I borrowed the descriptions below from Go-to-Market Strategies web site and their Two Sales Personalities: Hunters and Farmers.

• The Hunter is the person who gets their sales energy off of the “hunt” for the new opportunity.
• The Farmer is the sales person who builds and cultivates relationships and opportunities, typically within existing accounts.

Each sales type has its  value in an organization, and the tools in your marketing kit will help one of them more than the other. The browser theme excels at serving the Farmer because it brings about a level of hyper-engagement that few other channels offer.

It took me a while to understand this difference in selling focus. For the early years of Brand Thunder’s interactive browser themes, the early adopters of the product were – sports teams and large online communities. Both of these channels foster a participatory relationship with their audiences, and entertain  concepts that will create a new channel for interaction with that audience. That made sense.

I was surprised we never saw movies, like the Harry Potter series, or even Consumer Packaged Goods with a well-liked brand, like General Mills Cocoa Puffs and Sonny its spokesbird – large fan bases, longevity to the product line. The sales strategy of the people marketing those products, however, are mainly focused on ticket sales and product trials. They’re less concerned with maintaining the relationship once the movie is watched or the cereal eaten. It’s pure Hunter mode.

Maintaining and deepening the relationship with a user is the strength of the browser theme, and these marketers saw that. While they loved the concept and product, it didn’t help them meet the objectives they were measured against.

Where the browser theme does fit in is with the sales strategy around the web initiatives for any business, company or group. It drives up the frequency of visits, interactions and engagement between a brand and its user base. Assuming your web site is built to meet your businesses needs, the browser theme will get users back to your site on a more regular basis. They’re also more engaged with commerce. Our themes that integrate stores into the theme can see up to 10% of browser clicks going to their commerce site. That’s a great percentage in a world where content is supposedly king.

With the launch of BT:Engage, our free DIY browser theme creator, anyone can quickly build a browser theme and start sharing it with their audience. If you’re responsible for marketing to your online community, it’s worth a try.

Related articles

• BT:Engage How To: Make Money Online with Your Browser Theme (brandthunder.com)
• Hunters versus Farmers (customerthink.com)

Image via CrunchBase

Browser themes are great engagement tools and a strong reason they’re popular with online communities. Keeping in touch and driving up visits to your site deepens your relationship with your community. Plus, advertisers love an engaged audience, so you’re already doing yourself and your profitability a favor.

There’s even more opportunity and it’s easy to take advantage of. Engagement in the browser theme leads to commerce as well as increase visits to your site.

Does Commerce Work In a Theme?

Your browser theme can also help with direct sales by guiding your users into the commerce of your site. With clients using five toolbar buttons, we’ve seen better commerce with two browser theme buttons devoted to shopping. Typically, 4% of browser clicks will go to a single commerce button but 10% of browser clicks go to two commerce buttons. That’s a 25% lift by leveraging the two together. Wow!

I’m not advocating overdoing commerce. You never want to turn your audience away because you’re trying to make a buck, but there’s no harm in it either when its contextual and relevant.

Affiliate Tip for Small Business

For smaller businesses, its easier to work with Affiliate Programs and take advantage of the selling expertise of others while you just put the right product in front of your users at the right time. But a toolbar button is a little different than a web page. Most affiliate sites are set up to help you run ad banners or text links on your site. This will take a few steps on your part.

This method seems to work. I haven’t officially asked for comment, but the technique has been applied to links from Amazon’s Affiliate Program, Commission Junction, LinkShare and Pepperjam Network.

Using Amazon, as an example, if you’re logged into your affiliate account and enable their toolbar, you can quickly build a link to any product on their site. In this case, they have a sale on life-size skulls and as Halloween is approaching – this could be useful to have around. Just click the “Link to this page” in the top of the toolbar.

When you click that link, you’ll be taken to a window to get your affiliate tracking code. Click “Text Only” since you’re only after one bit of information – the URL with your affiliate code embedded.

Once you click Text Only, you’ll see a screen with a bunch of HTML code like that shown in the second image.

Finally, find the URL. It’s underlined in green in the third image for reference. You want everything between the quotation marks. Yes, it’s really long, but that’s how Amazon knows its you, plus other information I’m sure. Look for the <a href=” and then start copying. You’ll finish at “>. The URL is basically in the same kind of position across affiliate sites. You just need to find it, then copy and paste.

This is the URL you put as a button. In this example, I’d go into the theme in BT:Engage and Modify my Halloween theme. I can go to the Widgets tab, add another button to my toolbar, call it Skulls! and link to the URL. Clicking Finish makes this change live. The next time anyone using that theme launches their browser, the new button will appear in the themes toolbar. When I want to remove it, I Modify the theme again, delete the button and Finish. Voila, no more button!

Give it a try and let us know what you think.

Related articles

• BT:Engage – Example of Fansite Browser Theme Using Delta Daily (brandthunder.com)

Image via Wikipedia

I talk a lot about using BT:Engage for helping sites and communities deepen their engagement with their online audience. It’s also extremely easy (and fun!) to create browser themes for your own use and pleasure.

In the following post and accompanying video tutorial, I’m going to show you how to spin a browser theme that includes news from your favorite news site.This occurred to me recently as I looked at the Huffington Post browser theme my wife’s been using for years. She would not part with the news ticker in the browser theme’s toolbar. I’m just happy she’s using a Brand Thunder theme. But, I realized I could give her a fresh look grabbing the RSS feed link from the HuffPo site and inserting it into the RSS/Atom reader under the Widgets tab.

This 90 second video tutorial will show you how I did it. The typed out steps follow.

Here are the quick steps to take to build your own news browser theme:

• Go to Brand Thunder’s web site and click the Try it Now button for the Design, Build and Share your own browser themes promotion. When you’re in BT:Engage, click Get Started.
• Design the theme any way you want, using the background and logo library of images or upload your own under My Images.
• To add the news feed, click the Widgets tab. Then drag the RSS/Atom reader button up to the toolbar.
• The properties box will have a place to type or paste an RSS Feed URL. Click Validate, and then Save.
• Click Finish to publish your browser theme and go to your sharing page Preview, where you can download your new theme.

How to find the news feed for a site:

• Most of your main stream news sites like CNN, Fox News, The Huffington Post, MSNBC or NPR offer RSS feeds. You’ll usually find the link in the footer, or near the very bottom, of their web page.
• Otherwise look for the RSS icon, pictured at the top of the blog. This is the universal identifier of RSS feeds and you can often find it in the left or right hand sides of web sites.

I hope this helps and I hope you discover a new way to enjoy your browser theme.

And, just so you know, when I write these – they are also used on the product side of what to fix so these How Tos become unnecessary.

Share the URL:

First, find the Public URL to share with your audience.

Once you click Finish in the theme creator, you are immediately taken to a Preview of the Download Page. Do not grab the URL in the browser’s address bar, this is for your personal and authenticated account – no one else can get to it. You need the URL in the box next to Sharing Your Theme. This is the public URL for your download page.

Share Everywhere:

First, make sure you start with the usual suspects. Facebook, Twitter and whatever social networks your community frequents. It’s easy enough to share the URL to these services and your friends and followers that find you there. Just Copy and Paste the link, write a brief description of your awesome theme and Share.

Building Banners:

This is an area we will automate, but for now you’ll need to create your own banners to promote your browser theme. If you have your own blog or web site, you know the available inventory that you can utilize on your site. If you need some ideas, check out Brand Thunder’s own Affiliate Program. If you register (which gives you a chance to earn points and prizes), you’ll land in an area which allows you to easily create banners in a range of sizes.

The thing to pay attention to is the styling and the messaging in the ads. Borrow those and create your own. If you don’t have your own graphics software, I find myself using the open source GIMP for much of my work. In the future, we’ll give you your own banner ad generator like we have in our Affiliate Program.

Help Yourself:

Make sure you do little things like Like your own theme, and add it to Google+. The little Facebook widget shown pulls images into the Download Page of others who like the theme. This helps visitors see those who also like the theme, builds a level of trust and a sense of belonging.

And happy, smiley people are always a plus to efforts like these. Especially when they’re the faces of your own community.

More to Come:

You’ve heard me say this product is in its early stages and there’s lots more to come. It’s true. Right now, it’s a bare bones product. Which means, until we can simplify, automate and deliver everything you need – the pieces are there if you’re willing to take on some of the work yourself. Sorry to put that burden on you for now, but we’ll remedy it in the future.