Welcoming the new Lijit Welcome Wijit

Lijit quietly released a very cool new widget for users of their service (that’s you, right?). The new Lijit Welcome Wijit greets site visitors who come to your site via a search term and gives them a relevant roadmap of your site as it relates to the search query that brought them there. It’s great for your site visitors who now have additional context for their interest in your content. It’s also great for publishers who can now create a more sticky experience for their users and expand the cross pollination of their content. From Greg Keller’s post on the Lijit blog, the Welcom Wijit is about:

• Welcoming new readers to your site when they’ve linked in from somewhere else…e.g. a search engine, blogroll that includes your site, etc. They land on your property and they get a true ‘greeting’ to say thanks for stopping by!
• Better content discovery: Readers landing on your site for the first time will have an initial experience right off the bat of mining your content. What is old to you is all new to your new readers! Welcome Wijit will help them find it easily.
• Tools tools tools for your readers: The Welcome Wijit by design is about improved loyalty and return visits. The Wijit offers features to quickly add your feed to RSS readers, My Yahoo and iGoogle home pages to ensure they have you earmarked for return visits.
• Pre-selected search results: When a reader is searching the web for something and they stumble upon your site, Welcome Wijit knows that search term and will provide a pre-selected list of the top 3 relevant items fitting that search on your blog, within your content and throughout your network…given them a true ‘feel’ of the Lijit search experience.
• Advertising opportunities: We’re committed to doing what we can to make you more money! Similar to your Search Engine Results Page advertising, Welcome Wijit provides Google Ads to ensure more relevant ads are seen and clicked through by your readers.

Below is an example from VC Adventure, which shows what you might see if you come to my blog after searching about how to get a job in venture capital:

You can see the Welcome Wijit under the main nav bar – set up with a welcome message, easy way to subscribe and a search box set to expand the search term the user arrived on to the entire blog. Readers can easily see my Lijit Network, view my RSS feed and search my site. The reader also has the option to expand the wijit view for even more information (the search is then populated with results from my blog and tabs to expand that to additional content I’ve generated elsewhere and my expanded network).

Installation is a breeze (it took me about 2 minutes) and can be done from your Lijit account (if you’re already using Lijit search there’s no new code to insert into your blog. Check out the Welcome Wijit page at Lijit for more info.