an explosion of rayt! (credits: Steve Jurvetson)

This is another excerpt from our application for the Global Young Social Entrepeneurs' Competition: (only 17 days left to find out if we're one of the winners!)

"We have designed Rayt to be perfectly compatible with an innovative viral marketing strategy that will recruit new users, build awareness, and ultimately bring in press and revenue-generating customers.

This viral marketing strategy is based on the conclusion that webmasters benefit when their website is rated favorably. Being rated favorably enables webmasters to quickly earn the trust of new users, as well as improve their order in search ranking.

We have devised a simple and powerful way to help webmasters be rated favorably. We will make our five-star scale into a widget (a portable piece of code) that could easily be placed directly onto any website. Webmasters could install this widget within their site and then invite their users to rate their site on 1-5 stars. For every website that has the Rayt widget, every user of that particular site will learn about Rayt and have the opportunity to join the Rayt community. Users who are exposed to the Rayt widget can also replicate it and add it to their own website, virally expanding Rayt's presence on the web.

Widget marketing has proven to be an extremely powerful marketing approach on the web and has been extremely successful for social bookmarking sites such as a Digg.com & Delicio.us. Widget marketing also gives positively-rated sites the motivation to publicize their high rating - and in so doing to publicize Rayt."