I know that you love accessories and a lot of people are so accessory freak that they would simply add on anything to show themselves as “the in thing”.

Do you follow the same rule with your blog? I mean do you add as many widgets as you get to your blog?

If your answer is positive, you got some problems or you are far from being a pro-blogger.

There are some primary widgets or add-ons that you must have to run the blog smoothly. For example, if you are blogging in WordPress platform, widgets like Blog Archive, Pages, Tags, Categories, Recent Comments, Blogroll, Feed, Direct Contact Form, Related Posts plugin and All in One SEO Pack are good enough for you as a start up blog. Do you really need anything else to run your blog smoothly?

If you look closely, you will see that, I did not even include Akismet, which is considered almost inevitable for any WordPress blog. However, do you really need Akismet to filter comments right from the beginning? Do you really have enough comments to get an automated system to moderate?

Another common thing is showing off visitor counts from day one. Do you really have enough visitors to show off? Would it gain more trust from existing visitors?

I am not saying that, you should always take a minimalistic approach while adding widgets in your blog. But if you start using widgets hoping that your visitors may like to use it or if you add a widget to show off that you have a good collection of widgets, you are loosing your focus – your blog posts.

There is no doubt that widgets have the potential to divert your visitors from the focal point. Personally, I consider widgets to be exit points of any blog. Thus before adding any widget, I ask myself a thousand times if it would really help my visitors to interact with my blog. Can I do without that? Will it really add some value? Moreover, that’s not all – I watch its performance closely (Google Analytics) over a certain period of time before taking any final decision.

This is true for any industry or topic – even if you are blogging about widgets.

BTW, how do you decide on the respective position of a widget?