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?
About Sean Rasmussen
Hi Sean,
I love using widgets on my blog. There are so many beautiful icons to choose from and they really help the look of my blog. But, better than that, they make it easy for my readers to follow me on Twitter and Facebook and share my content through the social bookmarking sites and subscribe to my RSS feed.
The choices are endless. There are cool icons for every purpose and you can change them very easily whenever you want. Awesome!
Widgets are great to offer functionality and to personalize your blog as well. It’s great that they help me keep information current and show what else I am doing. Love it
Sean
I have a few widgets but I could probably look at having others. The wink widget looks interesting. I’ll have to check that one out.
One query.
With the Ezinearticles widget does that feed my articles on their site to my blog? Isn’t this linking back to my site when I already have a link in the article? Or is the link to who ever picks up the feed?
I love widgets but there are so many available from different sources how do you decide on the ones you want to use and then do you have enough real estate to display them effectively?
Even though you can benefit from using widgets, don’t overdo the widget on your pages. Widgets can be over-ultilised to the point that they detract from the content, and remember, “Content is King”. So approach your use of widgets with caution.
Widgets are great for dressing things up. There is so many choices don’t they just make you want to start up another blog just so you can have more ‘real estate’ to fit them all in!
You sound like a kid in a lolly shop Helen
Thank you Don. I will take your advice on that and make sure that I have a well balanced blog site that will enhance people to call in and look around.
Off a widgeting I will go! Must admit I have under-utilised these functions – because I under-appreciated them. I have though put up the Digg and Twitter ones on some sites.
This article has good tips that I should have been aware of – I publish in Ezine, yet haven’t even thought of their widget. I have just joine MyBlogLog, so haven’t checked it out thoroughly yet, but it’s good to know about their widgets.
Hi Sean
I have been using the basic widgets on my blog and been finding that is ok. After reading this article, I am wanting to investigate a bit more to see if I am missing something really important here.
Is there an actual limit to how many widgets you can use? If they make life easier then it would be worth investigating using more.
Thankyou Sean
Benefits of Using Widgets are obvious, but you mention “Ezinearticles.com has a widget that feeds your articles to your site which can be great for your marketing efforts.” But does anyone know the exact URL where you can get the widget?
I am not too sure if they still have this particular widget, but if you have an ezinearticles account, that’s where you will find the widgets
Hi Sean,
I asked myself the same question as Angus did, I know that some of these widgets are not for free, plus do not quite understand if the Ezinearticles widget feeds your blog with quality relevant articles to your topic !??
Does it work like an Article auto poster?
So many there to choose from , how do you know which ones you really need?
“Widget” is short for “window gadget”. In computer programming, a widget (or control) is an element of a graphical user interface (GUI) that displays an information arrangement changeable by the user, such as a window or a text box. The defining characteristic of a widget is to provide a single interaction point for the direct manipulation of a given kind of data. In other words, widgets are basic visual building blocks which, combined in an application, hold all the data processed by the application and the available interactions on this data.
I wasn’t sure how to dfine a widget so I found this at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GUI_widget hope you found it helpful too m/
Hi Jody
thanks for the link and the explanation of the origin of widget – I found it really interesting!
I have got a couple of widgets going. Different sites have different widgets so have seen you can get a bit of a variety.
I haven’t been to MyBlogLog yet but it sounds like a great place to check out.
I must admit I am not a great widget junkie like Sean – perhaps I need to get hooked more!
I just Googled for PLURK and then decided , no, I have enough to follow up on!
But as I do write for Ezine, I will must their widget!
I am a self confessed widget junkie!
I’ve started rebuilding some sites as blogs and I have been really careful not to go overboard in WordPress this time round and they can be very time consuming to configure. I love looking at other people’s blogs/sites to see what they have to find new ideas or smile when I see the same one as mine.