Step 1: Define Your Niche

Before you create a blog, it is important to decide on the theme or subject area your blog will cover.1 Two main factors should be considered when picking a topic to blog about, your audience and what you are passionate about, be it work or pleasure.

Determine Your Audience

Who your audience is will determine which type of blog host you use, the content of your blog, whether or not you publicize your blog and what success means for you in respect to your blogging endeavors. To determine your audience, ask yourself these questions:

Are you creating a blog primarily to keep in touch with family and friends?

Do you want to create a blog for people in your profession or who share your interests?

Is your blog an extension of your business?

Decide on a Subject

If you want your blog to be more than an online diary or a means of staying connected with family and friends, you will need to decide what subject matter your blog will cover. How focused your blog is on a particular subject is entirely up to you. Your blog can simply cover the stuff that is interesting to you and need not be defined beyond that. If, however, you would like to target your blog to a particular niche or audience, here are some things you might consider:

What are you interested in?

What are you an expert in?

Would your occupation be an interesting subject?

What do you think is currently missing online?

Do you have a goal that you’re trying to achieve that could be documented online?

Will you be able to blog about the subject matter consistently over a long period of time?

How many other blogs exist on the subject matter you’ve chosen? Do you have a fresh take to stand out from the rest?

If you need some inspiration, check out some of the most popular blogs on the internet through Technorati’s Popular Blogs page or the Webby Awards’ list of blogging nominees.

PLEASE NOTE: Take heed if you choose to blog about your workplace. Unless you password protect your blog, it is a public document. Most employers are web savvy, and even the most well-intended comments could run afoul of your workplace’s rules and regulations. Time and time again bloggers have been disciplined and even fired for negative or improper comments about their job posted on their blog.

As a marketing tool, blogs are full of all kinds of potential. Blogs have some truly unique characteristics as a marketing tool. First of all, they are much easier than newsletters when it comes to getting your idea across. They can be added to, and they can be updated at any time and from virtually anywhere. Blogs also have long lasting shelf lives, as they exist on the internet until you decide to remove them. This contrasts well to newsletters which have extremely short shelf lives, because once you send it out, it’s sent, then trashed, and gone. Unless you are just posting marketing materials that are deglossed, most blogs offer a large amount of credibility. Whether your blog is a personal blog or a business blog, viewers come to blogs expecting to find frank and personal perspectives on a topic that you are passionate about.

If you maintain your viewers and you respect the idea that you should be passionate about the content of your blog, then your credibility will go up, and this is what blogging is truly all about. Blogs are easy to syndicate, meaning that you can get your information and opinions out there, and can allow them to spread like wildfire. If you have an opinion to share, a product to sell, a brand to market or something else to say on the internet, and you think that people are going to want to read what it is that you have to say, then blogging is an excellent option for you to consider.

If you do not already have a blog that is associated with your business or your website, then now may very well be an excellent time for you to start blogging. You should not think that blogging is unnecessary simply because you are employing other strategies for marketing or communicating online. There are completely different dynamics when it comes to e-mail communication and blogging. Nothing facilitates conversation, communication and community the way that blogging does. There is no confusion about blogging being spam the way e-mails can be looked at as spam. Blogs have a long shelf life, meaning they last longer than e-mail correspondence and blogs work very well in conjunction with other forms of communication and methods of marketing as well.

But it’s not. The truth is, there are only five different ways the Fortune 500 use social media. Seriously — just five. And once you know what they are, you can figure out which ones would be most useful for your business.

These five social approaches, though different in many respects, all have one thing in common: Each of the Fortune 500 use them to generate a profit. After all, they’re not using social media just to be social. They’re using it to make money.

In order to make money with social media, you have to set up your campaigns to be measured. And I’m not talking about simple metrics like number of followers or unique page views (although those are important). I’m talking about real metrics like leads generated, prospects converted and profits realized. Those are the kinds of metrics that enable you to track the success of your social media campaign on an ROI basis. And when you’re tracking your social media campaign on an ROI basis, you’re making your CFO happy (along with your CEO, your CMO and everyone else in your company).

Branding

Some companies use social media strictly as a branding tool. Typically, this means running a YouTube campaign that (hopefully) gets a lot of buzz around the water cooler. While using social media strictly as a branding tool might be considered “old-school” these days, it can still generate some positive sales growth.

Take Toyota as an example. Its YouTube mini-series featuring the Sienna Family has generated more than 8.3 million impressions. Those are not passive impressions fed to consumers during a TV commercial break, but engaged views attained through social sharing. When people share your commercial with their friends, they’re reinforcing your marketing for you, and it’s the best kind.

Of course, one of the most successful campaigns of this type is the Old Spice YouTube campaign that has more than 140 million impressions and, according to Nielsen, helped sales increase 55% in three months, and a whopping 107% during the month of July alone. Part of what made this campaign successful was that Old Spice set it up so it could quickly respond to viewers’ comments about the videos. By engaging the viewers in the videos, Old Spice improved the stickiness of the campaign and, best of all, enhanced the viral nature of it.

e-Commerce

If you can sell your product or service online, then you’ll want to drive people to a landing page on your website where they can buy your goods. How can you accomplish this? Just do what Dell does. It tweets about special promotions for its folloers on Twitter. Right now, the DellOutlet account has 1.5 million followers. If you crunch some hypothetical but fair numbers on the back of an envelope, Dell’s ROI might look something like this:

DellOutlet followers: 1.5 million

DellOutlet followers who actually see the promotional Tweet: 50,000

Followers who click on the link in the Tweet: 500

Prospects who purchase a computer based on the Tweet: 50

50 purchases x $500 computer = $25,000

That’s $25,000 in revenue just for sending out a tweet. Not bad for a day’s work. Of course you’ll have to put in the effort to build your Twitter community in the first place, but those are certainly resources well spent, given the potential return.

Research

Many companies are using social media as a tool to do simple, anecdotal research. Sometimes, this involves building a website that engages customers in a dialogue. Starbucks has done this famously with MyStarbucksIdea.com. When visitors land on the site, they’re asked to provide new ideas to Starbucks on ways to improve the brand. Visitors can share ideas, vote on which ideas they like the best, discuss the ideas that have been submitted, and even see the results of their suggestions in action.

But you don’t have to build an entire website to keep tabs on your customers’ needs. Got a blog? Great. Ask your visitors to leave suggestions in your comments section. Have an e-newsletter? Terrific. Use the tools from ConstantContact, ExactTarget or MailChimp to include polls and surveys in your e-newsletter. Active on Twitter? Wonderful. Then use Twtpoll, SurveyMonkey or SurveyGizmo to drive people to a survey page on these sites.

The bottom line is there are plenty of ways to keep your finger on the pulse of your community’s needs, using social media tools that are readily available to both you and the Fortune 500.

Customer Retention

A good rule to remember is that it costs three to five times as much to acquire a new customer as it does to keep an existing one. Given that, wouldn’t it be smart to use social media as a tool to keep customers loyal and engaged? That’s what Comcast and Southwest Airlines do. They communicate via Twitter, Facebook and other social media platforms to help solve customer service issues.

When Frank Eliason at Comcast first noticed that people were making comments about his company on Twitter, he probably wasn’t very happy. After all, if you’re going to Tweet about your cable company, it’s likely a complaint. So Frank took things into his own hands and started Tweeting back to the disgruntled customers. His tweets offered suggestions and tips on how to fix the problems people were having with their services.

Research has indicated that if you take a customer in a heightened state of anger and help them out, they’ll actually become brand advocates. In other words, they start promoting your brand to others because you reached out to them and helped them at a time of need.

That’s what happened with Frank and Comcast. Customers went from being disgruntled to being brand advocates — all because they were pleasantly surprised when Frank reached out to them via Twitter and helped solve their problems.

If you find yourself reading negative comments in the blogosphere about your brand, don’t shy away from them. Engage with them. You’ll be surprised how effective it can be.

Lead Generation

If you’re having difficulty selling your product or service online, you may want to invest in a social B2B lead generation strategy. At my company, we use social media to drive prospects to our online magazine for marketers. When prospects get to the website, they can read a blog post, watch a 60-second video or download a white paper. Once we gather their contact information, we (gently) re-market to them by reminding them of all the great results our partner generates for its clients.

This hub-and-spoke system works like a charm. Why? Because B2B and professional service firms are often sold based on a relationship. Much of the decision process is based on a vendor’s reputation and trustworthiness. What better way to build trust than by providing helpful, useful information to the client prospect via social media?

Remember, when you’re using this hub and spoke system, you don’t want to limit yourself to just the big five (LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and MySpace). You’ll also want to use e-mail marketing, speeches, e-books, webinars, blogs, videos and other social media tools to build trust and awareness.

Jamie Turner is the chief content officer of the 60 Second Marketer, the online magazine for BKV Digital and Direct Response. He is also the co-author of How to Make Money with Social Media, now available at fine bookstores (and a few not-so-fine bookstores) everywhere.

This is the name of your blog (www.YourBlogName.com). You can check on availability at GoDaddy.com . You can also purchase your domain name there. That is where I get my domains.

GoDaddy.com is a low cost provider with excellent service ($10/year). When you do purchase, it’s important to know that Google search engines give more favor to sites who have bought their domain for longer than 1 year.

When choosing a name think about how you want to brand your blog. You can choose a name related to your blog’s theme, you could choose to brand with your own name, or you can make up a name that sounds cool. Or you could do some combination of those. Usually “.com” is preferable to other extensions such as “.net” or because it makes it easier for people to remember. Everyone thinks “.com” but if you can only get “.net” with your favorite name that should be fine. Just keep an eye out for when the .com will become available, some individual fail to renew there domains causing them to loss they domains and making domain become available for purchase.

When it comes to picking a domain name I suggest brainstorming on paper first. Get feedback from some people about the names you’ve picked. Then click over to GoDaddy.com to check availability. You may need to modify some of the names you thought of. Godaddy.com will also make suggestions for you too.

The reason I recommend godaddy is simply. GREAT SERVICES AFFORDABLE PRICING!

Review and Compare:

Deleting a Friend… You have to stop accepting quantity and start gathering quality. Just because you have 3880 friends on facebook doesn’t mean that you should. Half of those people are just spamming your wall 1/3 is are asking you to play farmville and the little bit that are left over well you probably know them.

Friend Request- Stalking

Friend Request “Chat Windows?

There are no surprises in that first piece of research: we all know we’ll probably attract more people if we have something interesting and intelligent to say, but — let’s face it — few of us regularly have anything that’s particularly interesting and intelligent to say about ourselves.

People want to listen when you’re saying something they could learn from — something that exposes them to new possibilities or expands their perceptions. Thinking of this every time you send a message out may be one way to attract more followers.

Of course, the second piece of research would suggest that more followers isn’t the aim of the game after all. The quality of followers is key, whether you’re angling for a new job, a new project, or looking to build your profile within a given industry. How can we make better-quality, better-connected followers and contacts through social networks?

This question really has two parts. One is about getting people we want to follow us on board — convincing them to add us to their list of contacts. The answers to that question lie in interaction and participation — responding intelligently to their updates, answering questions they ask, making valuable comment on their articles or blog posts, following their activities on other sites and in other media, and so on.

But before you can do any of this, you need to identify opinion leaders. You might have some good ideas about who’s an opinion leader in your field … but then again, you might not. After all, the web is a big place and few of us restrict ourselves to our local area, or people who we have already heard of or interacted with.

Using search to find and follow trends is an essential first step. Find out who’s talking about the topics associated with your field, and what they’re saying. Identify those who provide new information or are pushing the envelope somehow. Obviously you’ll follow those people who have something interesting to offer, but after that?

From the Bottom Up

What we’re looking for is the best-connected people, with the best connections. If you’re working to build your reputation among high-end Apple users, you might have trouble getting Steve Jobs’s attention, let alone convincing him to follow you. A more useful approach may be to target the people Steve Jobs follows or listens to, or the people they follow or listen to. They might not have as many contacts, but they may more “strategically” placed for spreading news to the right people.

To identify these individuals, you might want to start by looking at the people who say what you believe are the most interesting things in your field. Find out who they are, what they do, and who they follow and are followed by. On Twitter, see how many retweets and referential or direct tweets they receive, and look at who’s retweeting and referencing them.

Looking more closely at the people who are following or talking about the individuals you’ve identified, or who work with them or at the same level in the industry, might provide further clues about who the influencers are. You’ll might also be able to identify media outlets or other information sources that the influencers use, and depending on what you offer, these sources may provide another means by which you can get in front of your target contacts.

A Top-down Approach

Another approach could be to work backwards, finding your industry’s biggest names and thought leaders, looking at their interactions on social networks, and identifying the people they respect. If you can target those individuals and engage with them, or target the people they follow, you might have a better chance of getting the attention of your industry’s biggest opinion leaders.

From here, you start to follow those contacts you feel will be most useful, work out what information is most interesting to them, and engage with them  intelligently through the media they use. Straight-up compliments on the work of someone you respect are less likely to be as effective in convincing them that you’re worth following than are comments that indicate they’d have something to gain — to learn or enjoy — by following you.

Simply following the biggest names, or the people with the greatest number of followers, is unlikely to be your social media salvation. If you’re the type to think strategically about the way you use social media, and the roles it can play in boosting your professional profile or garnering the right sort of attention, these may be some useful starting points.

What tactics do you use to try to build an influential network of followers on social networks?

Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about the state of social media, and I’m reminded of where we were in the mid-90s with the advent of the web. I lived and worked through Web 1.0, and am feeling a sense of déjà vu as we play out the same routines with Web 2.0 and beyond: social media is getting the same basic adoption patterns, the same reactions and overreactions. It’s just different tools and terminology. We have a long way to go before everyone and their cousin uses social networks more than they email, or tweets more than they call, but nobody can deny the way we communicate has once again been changed forever.

Here’s how I’d illustrate where we are in terms of social media tool adoption and integration into the fabric of our work and lives, as compared to early web adoption:

When I listen to people get all excited about social media as if it were some newfangled discovery, I keep wanting to say “It’s just online community. We’ve had that for over 20 years now. We’re just getting it via new applications with more integrated features. But it’s community!” Friends, fans and followers? We used to call them community members or our online friends.

Despite having been in this same place before, I have to admit I’m still excited about the possibilities. My concern is where things could be headed if we’re not smart about how we use the new tools at our disposal — we could end up repeating many of the mistakes made during the Web 1.0 years. With that in mind, here are my ten things to avoid in social media:

• Avoid the fishbowl syndrome. Those of us “in the know” are starting to like the sound of our own voices, but we’re really just preaching to the converted (yes, just like I’m probably doing now). Just because we know about social media doesn’t mean everyone does, or even cares about it. We need to jump out of our fishbowls and smell the air of reality. Get out into the world beyond your tweeps. It will do you good.
• Avoid glut and overload. Just because it’s there, it doesn’t mean you have to be on it. It’s our own fault that we are overloaded by every new social network or social tool out there, because we keep joining them. We don’t need them all and neither do our clients. A few strategically and thoughtfully selected networks, applications or tools can go much further than dozens of them. You don’t have to be everywhere.
• Avoid knee-jerk reactions. Don’t be so fast to say “yes” to social media, but don’t be so fast to say “no” either. Like with any good business — or life — decision, take your time, weigh the aspects and options, do your homework, turn to trusted friends and advisers, then make a deliberate decision. Don’t get a Facebook Page just because everyone else has one. Understand what you are trying to achieve, research if your audience is not only on Facebook but actually paying attention to anything other than their virtual farm crops, then plan your approach. Planning takes time.
• Avoid overreaching and overstating. Just because we feel social media is important doesn’t mean it is to everyone else. Those of us using the tools are doing so for a myriad of reasons, so we can’t lump everyone on a social network or with a blog into one box. Good communications and good customer service are still where it’s at. The delivery methods have changed rapidly, but it still boils down to the Golden Rule: the “Please” and “Thank You,” and the smile.
• Avoid the shingle phenomenon. Don’t join the people who add “Social Media” next to their title or company name and suddenly, they’re an expert. Or worse, they shell out a few thousand to someone else who claims to offer Social Media Certification, then they sucker in a bunch of unsuspecting clients and bring them on a reckless ride after only 40 hours of “intensive training.” Just don’t do it.
• Avoid the big plunge. I’ve always advised my clients to dip a toe into the water first to see if it’s warm. Don’t just pull out all the stops with social media. Use a phased approach to adopt new tools, technologies and tactics. You need to warm up, work out the kinks. Jumping into the deep end before you can swim only means you’re likely to drown.
• Avoid the quick hit. Social media is not a campaign; it’s a commitment. Plan for the long term. Take your time, and be deliberate about your actions. Measure. Evaluate. Improve what you are doing. Listen. Respond. Interact. Connect. Be there for the long haul. Learn and grow with your audience, your customers, your constituents. You now have unprecedented access to your customers. Use wisely.
• Avoid the numbers game. Sure you can use automated following tools and maybe get a slew of people following you back. But they’re not listening. They don’t care. I’ve always said that I’d rather have 100 friends, fans or followers who care than 1000 who ignore me.  Social media is not about the big numbers but what you do with the numbers you have — and what they do in return. Devoted actions of a few can have an exponential impact, far greater than inaction by many.
• Avoid the silos. Do not relegate social media to an afterthought. Do not get your communications or marketing team together, and then give the social media team the notes. Someone with social media savvy needs to be at the table from the start. Their knowledge and experience can better inform your brainstorming, can open new doors, can enhance old tactics or eliminate them all together.
• Avoid one-size-fits-all thinking. What’s good for your neighbor may not be good for you. What is good for one of your clients isn’t necessarily the right thing for all the rest. While it is tempting to squeeze social media into a formula or to make a template and mass produce campaigns, each company or organization or individual deserves a plan customized to their needs, tailored for their distinct audiences, and made to fit their capabilities. Greed drives automation, and automation drives mediocrity at best, expensive failures at worst.

Where do you think social media is right now? And what are you definitely trying to avoid?

Social marketing, a new-ish Internet marketing tool, can be a great asset if used properly. The beneficial effects of social marketing for a business can be tremendous, but one must remember that it must be used in the most efficient way possible. Social marketing allows businesses and websites to gain popularity over the Internet by using the different types of social media available, such as blogs, video and photo sharing sites, social networking sites and social bookmarking websites.

Why harness social networking?

There are five distinct advantages to social marketing make it a vital tool to any marketing campaign. Here they are:

1. Better Targeting

If carried out properly, social marketing can draw a highly targeted segment of Internet users to visit your business or Website. This can be done by using the various parameters elements and tools on social media websites, enabling you to increase visibility of your content on both a local and global level. Many small business can not only benefit from this global audience, but increase their brand by bringing in a more select local audience.

2. High Return on Investment

ROI (Return on Investment) is one of the most important criteria of most marketing campaigns. For small businesses with low budgets, the marketing ROI needs to be good for it to work. Social marketing is one of the cheapest ways of marketing currently available. And practically all the social media you can use to market your business either costs nothing or costs a very small amount. This low investment means low risk to even the smallest business. Considering that most businesses gain a big pop in visibility after using social networking tools, the advantage is ultimately getting good publicity for free.

3. Does not require specialization or vast technical skills

One of the best advantages of social marketing is that anyone can take advantage of it, even from their own home. Also, it does not require you to learn a coded language or anything of that sort. Most social networking sites are visually oriented and pretty straightforward, which means that practically anyone who understands how to use the Internet can use social networking tools.

4. Works better than online ad campaigns

Because most Internet users are bombarded with ads every day, as a whole society has become so used to them people generally do not click on them. Banners and even link ads are losing their charm because many people do not trust an online advertising campaign backed by money. With social marketing, you can provide a more human touch to attract potential customers.

5. Increased visibility

Social marketing, like blogging, can help to spread information. This information can then be correlated to your site, increasing your site’s popularity. Create new content that people really need and you’ll have no problem drawing people to your site.

Conclusion

All businesses aim to increase their audience. Before the Internet, many spread the word through word of mouth. Social marketing has now taken over as the online version of word of mouth. Harnessing it in the right way results in more customers, more sales, and a higher level of visibility online than ever before.

Apple finally unveiled its tablet computer, the iPad. Thus concludes Phase 1 of the standard Apple new-category roll-out: months of feverish speculation and hype online, without any official indication by Apple that the product even exists.

Now Phase 2 can begin: the bashing by the bloggers who’ve never even tried it: “No physical keyboard!” “No removable battery!” “Way too expensive!” “Doesn’t multitask!” “No memory-card slot!”

That will last until the iPad actually goes on sale in April. Then, if history is any guide, Phase 3 will begin: positive reviews, people lining up to buy the thing, and the mysterious disappearance of the basher-bloggers.

The iPad is, as predicted, essentially a giant iPod Touch: aluminum-backed, half-inch thin, with a 10-inch screen surrounded by a shiny black border. At the bottom, there’s the standard iPod/iPhone connector and a single Home button. It will be available in models ranging from $499 (16 gigs of memory, Wi-Fi) to $830 (64 gigs of memory, Wi-Fi and 3G cellular).

The cellular signal will be provided by AT&T for $15 a month (250 megabytes of data transferred — think e-mail only) or $30 a month, unlimited. Amazingly, those AT&T deals involve no contract. You can cancel whenever you like. And since this thing isn’t a phone, you don’t have to worry about dropped calls; you’re paying exclusively for Internet service.

There’s no reason you couldn’t use it to make calls using Skype, of course — Apple says that virtually all of the existing 140,000 iPhone apps run fine on the iPad. (You can run them either at regular tiny size, or blown up double with some loss of clarity.)

Then again, you might look a little bizarre walking through the airport holding this giant clipboard up to your ear.

Until I saw the demo, I wondered why you’d want an iPad instead of a laptop. After all, the price is about the same. And once you add a carrying case to the iPad — wouldn’t you worry about that glass screen bouncing around in your briefcase or backpack naked? — it’s about the same bulk and weight as a laptop.

Now, though, it looks like Apple really has created something new. Criticisms of “Like a laptop” and “a big iPod Touch” don’t really do justice to the possibilities.

The iPad as an e-book reader is a no-brainer. It’s just infinitely better-looking and more responsive than the Kindle, not to mention it has color and doesn’t require external illumination. (Book fans should note, however, that the iPad e-bookstore won’t offer bestsellers at $10 each, like Amazon and Barnes & Noble do. And although Apple says the iPad has a 10-hour battery life, it hasn’t yet said “doing what.” Playing video eats up battery a lot faster than reading e-books.)

Web browsing, painting programs, TV and movies, newspapers and magazines all seem like naturals on this 1.5-pound machine, too. The New York Times app is especially appealing to me — and yes, this is my completely independent opinion — because it seems to work like the much-adored Times Reader app for computers.

Overall, the iPad seems like a dream screen for reading and watching—at some loss of convenience in creating. True, there’s an on-screen keyboard, big enough to type on with both hands in the usual way. And Apple will offer a specialized multitouch word processor, spreadsheet and presentation app for $10 each. But I’m guessing that, with no mouse and no physical keys to feel, writing and editing will be more effort than on a laptop. (Apple will also sell an external keyboard that holds the iPad upright as you type. Then again, if you need to carry all that around, maybe a laptop would make more sense.)

But these are just the wild speculations of a guy who’s never even tried the thing. (Believe me, I’ll review it when I get one.)

My main message to fanboys is this: it’s too early to draw any conclusions. Apple hasn’t given the thing to any reviewers yet, there are no iPad-only apps yet (there will be), the e-bookstore hasn’t gone online yet, and so on. So hyperventilating is not yet the appropriate reaction.

At the same time, the bashers should be careful, too. As we enter Phase 2, remember how silly you all looked when you all predicted the iPhone’s demise in that period before it went on sale.

Like the iPhone, the iPad is really a vessel, a tool, a 1.5-pound sack of potential. It may become many things. It may change an industry or two, or it may not. It may introduce a new category — something between phone and laptop — or it may not. And anyone who claims to know what will happen will wind up looking like a fool.

Widgets are a handy, easy and simple way to add some flare to your blog. Whether you’d like to display the number of currently online visitors to your site or simply the weather report for Los Angeles, you can do it with widgets. We’ve assembled a list of 50 useful or simply cool widgets for your pleasure. And remember, the first rule of widgetizing your blog is – don’t overdo it!

MyBlogLog’s Recent Readers – this widget can easily be called a hit amongst blog owners; its popularity even managed to convince Yahoo into buying MyBlogLog. The widget lets you see the avatars of recent visitors to your blog, provided they’re also members of MyBlogLog.

Mashable – get the latest social networking news from this very site.

Flickr Flash Photo Stream Badge – display images from your Flickr profile with a handy Flash photo stream.

Preview Anywhere – see a live preview of outgoing links in a small popup which activates on mouseover. Some find this annoying, while others might find it useful.

Twitter Badge – if your life is so interesting that everyone must know what you’re up to all the time, then aTwitter badge is the ideal counterpart to your blog. It’ll proudly displays your recent tweets.

Digg News – display the latest Digg links on your blog. Themeable and fully customizable.

FEEDJIT – real time traffic data directly in your blog’s sidebar.

LineBuzz – inline comments for your blog. Very handy for blogs with frequent lively discussions.

Flixn – display a stream directly from your webcam, so your blog visitors can always see what you’re up to.

3Jam – lets your visitors send messages to your mobile phone, without them knowing your phone number.

Jaxtr – with Jaxtr, your visitors can actually call you to your mobile phone; again, your number stays private.

LinkedInABox – show off your LinkedIn profile. Perfect for personal blogs.

Box Widget – enable visitors to use box.net’s online storage directly on your web site.

Price of gas – displaying gas prices on your blog might seem unnecessary to some, but it’s cool if you have a traffic/travel related blog.

iBegin Weather Widget – Display weather information in your sidebar. Just like with Price of Gas, works great with travel-related blogs.

ClockLink – display time in various time zones with these nifty Flash clocks.

Film Loops – display the latest loops from your FilmLoops account.

Daily Painters – display paintings from famous painters on your blog.

WhoLinked – show your visitors which sites have recently linked to your web site. Works with all major blog platforms.

Criteo AutoRoll – displays links to blogs similar to your blog.

Bitty Browser – embed a cute, fully functional mini web browser to your blog.

Leafletter – create a mini website and embed it into your blog.

WikiSeek – search Wikipedia with this simple widget.

FeedCount – show off the number of visitors to your blog with this handy little button.

Technorati Link Count – display the number of links your website has from one of the biggest blog authorities – Technorati.

MyPageRank – another good way to show how “big” your blog is is to show off your Google PageRank.

CheckPageRank – in addition to showing your PageRank, this widget also shows your Alexa ranking.

BlinkxIt – embed a link to related videos directly into your website.

Skype button – display your Skype online/offline status on your blog.

RockYou Horoscope – not something I would personally use, but some people are into horoscope. Hell, most people are into horoscope. Anyway, this widget shows horoscope (doh!) and does it in a nicely designed colorful box.

del.icio.us Tagometer – display how many times have del.icio.us users saved your page.

del.icio.us Linkrolls – this badge shows your latest bookmarks from del.icio.us.

Timelines – need to create a timeline? Seek no further. This widget makes it really easy.

PollDaddy – PollDaddy lets you create beautiful polls in no time, and display them at your blog.

Vizu – another poll-making widget, compatible with all major blog platforms.

AnswerTips – display definitions from Answers.com for various terms on your blog. The definitions are shown in bubbles which are activated on doubleclick.

AnswerBoxes – give your visitors a chance to enter a term themselves, and get a definition from Answers.com

Now Playing – if you got to share your current playlist contents with the world, Sigamp will do the trick. Works with most popular music players, including Foobar, Winamp, iTunes and others.

BuzzBoost – display headlines from your RSS feed on any website.

LibraryThing – show off the latest books you’ve been reading.

Plaxo Address Book – let your most faithful visitors access their address books direclty from your site.

AuctionAds – a widget that displays auctioned items on eBay, and gives you a percentage of the price paid when sometimes buys an item.

aStore – similar to AuctionAds, only for Amazon. Create a mini-store on your site and receive profit when someone buys an item through your store.

Plazes – show your current location on a Plazes map.

Stockalicious – track your portfolio with this widget, and share it with others. Let everyone know how much money you’ve lost.

Yahoo! For Good – create a charity badge and ask for donations for a worthy cause.

Giftspace – your friends never know what to buy you for birthday? Let them know what you really want with this nifty widget.

MixMap – see where are the visitors to your MySpace profile from on a map.

Google Map Widget – display a searchable Google Map on your website.

Google Video Search – add a video search form and selected videos to your web site.

Odeo player – display an Odeo player for and podcast right there in your sidebar.