A pretty clued in idea here - something I'm trying to work with for a few sites as well:
http://www.seoish.com/3-ways-to-get-...oogle-gadgets/
Bottom line - provide something useful that other people will want to put on their own site.
My big job this week is to start coding different ways people can simply and easily add news headlines from my news sites onto their sites. It's not even for the links, as I'll provide a Javascript version - though live liks are always nice.
Point is, I was talking to an independent US publisher, who uses widgets in this manner entirely to create traffic - and what's more, it's
defensible traffic, not dependent on any single search engine or similar.