Beyond your blog entries, your Blog Sidebar is another area that can be very helpful to you. Let’s look at what else you can do besides writing great blog posts to appeal to potential customers.
Advertisements
You can advertise in your blog’s sidebar and monetise your blog quite well. Use Adsense ads, affiliate links, banners to other products, and links to your own information products.
Be sure you don’t overdo the advertising and be sure your blog entries are valuable otherwise your blog will be seen as a “splog”, (spam blog) which won’t do much for you.
Link Love Widgets
A blog widget is essentially a block of code that can do several things for you. Add widgets that promote your other sites or that offer advertising opportunities.
You could put RSS feeds in your Blog Sidebar, add a Twitter badge, and there are other widgets that could provide value to your blog as well such as social bookmarking buttons.
The BlogRoll
A blogroll is a valuable piece of property on your blog. Use it well and it can help you increase your online success! Here are some things you can use it for:
• Link to other blogs and websites of yours. This is a great way to help people who visit your site learn more about you.
• Link to other blogs in your niche that are higher ranked than yours is. By pointing to a site that’s relevant to your niche and that’s seen as popular by the search engines, you can increase your site’s own SEO value.
• Link to mentors and to protégées. They might return the favour on their blog!
• Link to affiliate products directly. If they relate to your niche, your visitors might visit them and could even buy!
Subscription To Your Newsletter
Are you email marketing yet? Do you do a newsletter? Add a subscribe widget to your Blog Sidebar that will get people opting in to your list. You can do this with a promotion such as a free report or an e-course or you could simply give them an opportunity to subscribe to the blog.
A blog can do a whole lot for your internet marketing business and every inch of the screen can be utilised without making your blog look too crowded or too ad-driven.
Choose a great layout and put some thought into your blog design and it could be a very valuable piece of online real estate for you!
About Sean Rasmussen
I have been a bit wary of not monetizing too much. Probably where I need to update is by linking to other sites.
Is it advisable to put links to my other sites if they are not related?
Hi Sean,
Is it wise SEO to put a link in my sidebar to a site that is relevant to my niche but has not been updated in a long time and has no activity?
Hello Sean,
I am slowly going back to my blog with each information you are providing and changing my layout. I did not realise how important a blog looked until now. It makes sense to use the side bar more effective. Thanks for the timely direction, it was what I was needing.
Cheers
Lisa
Hi Sean,
Is it really advisable to put your competitors on your blogroll? Is this what you mean by linking to high PR sites in my niche? Or do you just mean link to complementary sites only?
More so complimentary high quality information sites Jazz (which are not always easy to find). You do not want to be sending potential sales to competitors.
I am also very careful with the blogroll, even so I like to give visitors access to other interesting sites. It’s hard to find a page that compliments my content without being too much competition at the same time. But i guess if I keep on looking I will find the good ones that will work for me and my niche.
The Sidebar definitely is a place that needs to be well managed.
Hi Sean
I still have work to do on my blog. There isn’t that much in my sidebar and I was wondering why. Now I know.
I have the RSS feed there but now have to get a Twitter badge. I am not sure what a blog roll is yet.
I will have my newsletter up and running soon after the competition is over.
I have taken note of this URL so I can reference this article while prettying up my side bar.
Thankyou Sean
Hi Elly,
A BlogRoll is simply a list of links of your favourite blogs that sits in your sidebar. You don’t have to have a blogroll though. It’s your choice what you put in your sidebar.
Your sidebar is a valuable piece of real estate though. So, when you add a link to a favourite blog in a blogroll; it’s kind of like a small piece of advertising for that site. Some of your traffic will click on that link and visit that site. So, choose carefully who you want to promote.
I hope this makes sense.
I’m pretty much the same as you Elly…actually my blog is slightly less than a work in progress so monetising, blogroll etc is a little way off…I will put this one in favourites too m/
I am glad I saw a reference to this article on Sean’s FB – I wanted to know about blogrolls. So have now started to add them to my UWC blogs.
I have included my own websites, plus Clint – whoops – Sean and will add some of my affiliate programs while I am at it.
It’s nice to live and learn while I learn and earn
Thanks Sean,
I like this blog for all the information on making your sidebar more effective!
I was just adding some widgets to the sidebar on one of my blog sites today because I thought it might add to the sites authenticity while throwing in a few affiliate links at the same time.