Are you using widgets on your blog? Remember the plain old WordPress themes like Kubrick? Today blogs can be much fancier.  WordPress is the industry standard in blogs and can be great for monetization and SEO and it’s quite widget-friendly.

What do widgets do?

Widgets can simply dress up your blog or they can provide function as well. They’re simple to insert and generally you can just paste the code into a text widget and place it where you like.  Many sites offer widgets for you to grab and use.  They can help you put advertising on the site as well as direct your traffic elsewhere. Here are some examples of blog widgets you might consider using:

Twitter or Plurk

These widgets can sit on your site and tell people what you’re doing. You can get the widget from your user settings and it’ll allow your website visitors to read your statuses, click to subscribe or follow your updates as well as let them see others on your friends list.

EzineArticles

Ezinearticles.com has a widget that feeds your articles to your site which can be great for your marketing efforts.

My Favourite Widgets

I’m a bit of a self-professed widget junkie.MyBlogLog has one of my favourite widgets. There are a few to choose from that look great and can show people your various blogs or your activities in social marketing so people can see the sites you Digg or Stumble as well as links for new posts in cyberspace. Wink offers my other favourite options as it also lets people check out a lot of different aspects of your online activity and is customisable so it’ll blend well into just about any template.

Social profile sites often have widgets you can use that can help you with social bookmarking and networking as well as dress your blog for success. There are also functional ones that feed internet marketing ads and other blogs for advertising and link exchanges. What widgets do you use and why?