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!
