I’m a huge fan of widgets. I’ve had a lot of discussions with some others within the office regarding the new age of content consumption and Web 2.0. Widgets are a big part of this. There are few key reasons why you should be using widgets and things they can accomplish for your business and website.

New to widgets? Basically, they are portable applications that can either sit on a user’s desktop or a web page and perform a function. There are desktop (Yahoo and Vista) and webtop widgets (webblog, Netvibes, Pageflakes, Myspace, Google, etc.) made available via Springwidgets.com, Clearspring.com, among other platforms, with many different functions that they can perform.

So what can a widget do for you?

• Drive Traffic
  • As I mentioned, the way people consume content has changed. Why visit 200 websites every morning to get the latest articles when you can load it up in your favorite RSS reader?  You need to have a push and pull relationship with your users and the way you serve content to them.  Ideally we would be able to pull all of our users into our site as it is best situation for monetization, but this is not always possible.  Widgets, and RSS based widgets specifically, are a good tool for pushing content to users.  Well built widgets will drive traffic to your website through value to the user.  You can serve them a Tip of the Day, or Photo of the Day, or latest Blog post, or a Sale of the Day for widget users with a hook to lead them back to your site.  Construct your widget in the right way and you’ll have a repeat visitor to your site once a day or once a week that was previously not there.  If your widget catches on and spreads virally it may results in thousands of extra users, visits, and page views.
• User Connection & Engagement
  • Part of building a business is connecting with your users on a personal level.  How can you do that with millions of people out there?  I was on a call recently with a widget development company and they were describing their opinion why desktop widgets were better than webtop widgets and how we should be using them.  They said that desktop widgets allow for a deeper connection with the consumer because they’re letting you into their private, personal world: their desktop.  Due to this you need to show them an immediate value in the form of personalization or convenience.  They showed me some well-performing desktop widgets.  An interesting thing about a few of them was that their value to the user had very little to do with their brand.  For example, a nationally known pet products brand offered a desktop widget that allows users to get updated local weather and have a photo of their pet as a background.  They know that pet owners love to look at pictures of their pet, especially when they are away from them at work, and then adding in some updated weather features make the widget functional.
• Push the Brand
  • This ties in closely with the aforementioned point.  Some marketers might be out for pure traffic and sales, but companies in it for the long haul need to worry about branding.  You want your name in front of the consumer as much as possible.  If you could tattoo your name on the inside of their eyelids, you would.  They may visit your site once a week, but they see their desktop about 100 times a day and might visit their Myspace page 10 times a day.  Earlier I mentioned someone’s opinion regarding a desktop widget’s ability to connect with the users on a level that webtop widgets can not.  This may be true, but the webtop widgets have a clear leg up on the competition in the ability to be spread virally.  Most widgets are displayed with a “Grab it” or “Get this widget” icon so any user that sees it can get and embed the widget into their own personal space in a matter of two or three clicks.  If you build the right widget that satisfies a need or desire that has to be filled it has the chance to spread like wildfire.
• Build links
  • If you build your widget correctly, and for the right audience, it can get you some great links.  There are two ways to go about this:
    • 1) Custom Webtop Widgets - Most of the widgets via Clearspring.com, Springwidgets.com, etc, won’t get you any links.  Your widget may be on 500,000 webtops and profile pages but the widget is build in Flash and thus will not credit your site with any inbounds.  But, if you build the widget in-house using a different platform like JS or you build it in Flash but embed a static link at the bottom of the code you’ll get a link from every site that embeds the widget.  We built a widget in-house earlier this year and when I check right now Yahoo shows 47,000 pages displaying the widget.  This means 47,000 additional links to our site.  And a lot of them are high quality links from authoritative sites like major media networks and news stations.  We identified a need and a gap in the market and we attacked it.
    • 2) PR Blitz - If you decide to build your widget via one of the larger widget development platforms like Springwidgets.com or Clearspring.com you can still build some quality links using a PR blitz.  Create a dedicate page on your site to host your widgets and when the time comes to launch your product have a PR firm send out press releases to all of the major networks announcing your new, free widget that gives the consumers ____.   Send out emails to the big bloggers in your industry letting them know about it and offering them a trial run before it publicly launches.  Send out emails to the big bloggers in the tech and web 2.0 industry doing the same.  Creating a buzz about the product can result in some great links from authoritative sites that wouldn’t be discussing your site under normal circumstances.