As promised a few weeks ago, here's a little write-up on blog sidebars. I am NOT the best, but I do feel I am far ahead of the masses. It's primarily designed for newer WMs, but also serves to inspire discussion from more experienced WMs as well. It's NOT intended to be spam for my ref links, there are non-ref links for every sponsor listed.
First, let me say this is ONLY my personal opinion and YMMV (Your Mileage May Vary). There are definitely different schools of thought out there and I am only presenting what works for me. I know several succesful blogmasters on BOTH sides of the fence. Are the ones with "emptier" sidebars leaving money on the table? Hard to say. Everyone has their own style of doing things, and if what they do works for them that's great- it's one of the things I love about this business! Ask 10 different WMs what works for them, and you will likely get 11 different answers...
Also, ALL the sponsors listed have referral and non-referral links. If the mod(s) feel it's inappropriate to have them, feel free to remove them. If as a WM you don't wanna sign up using a ref link, feel free not to!
My own thoughts on full sidebars are this: first- I think empty sidebars are ugly, second- you have the "real estate" so use it! And keep EVERYTHING related to the niche, with a few exceptions.
I am using MOST of these techniques on
Extreme Anal Sex Videos, so take a peek if you aren't clear on something, or shoot me a PM.
I suppose a case could be made for keeping them "emptier" to either give the surfer less options to click on, or not to overload them and cause a "paralysis by analysis" situation. There is also a school of thought that surfers become "banner-blind". My personal take is that once I get a surfer on my blog I want to keep them in my network OR clicking on MY affiliate links, and I want to give them as many opportunities to find what they are looking for. All that empty space in the sidebars is a lost opportunity to achieve those goals.
So what to put there?
I like a mix of things. Obviously things like your blogroll/link trades, categories and/or tag cloud, a search box (although I personally don't use it), maybe a "welcome" widget/"about the blog" with a few lines of good keyword-filled text and a Recent Posts widget are good places to start. The categories/tags & recent posts will help with internal linking structure, as will a widget with other Pages, if you choose to use pages as well as posts.
Now the "stuff" in the above paragraph is not gonna fill up much space, so what else can you add? Of course, you will want to use sponsor banners- but add a few lines of text underneath them to combat banner-blindness AND up your keyword density. Make them clickable! Although I don't always do this, it has been said surfers are more likely to click text links. Assume you are using a big sponsor like
MovieProfits (ref link) --
MovieProfits (NON-ref link).... they have more than one "niche" that may appeal to a surfer, so if you have a butt/ass blog, a banner for both Big Butt Movie Club AND Anal Movie Club would be appropriate. In the text, write something about the fact that you can join 1 and get access to the other. It's also a good spot to run a banner for a "mega-site" (like X-Movies and the rest from MovieProfits). Also, if you have other sponsors in the same niche as the blog, throw up a banner.
POTDs (Picture of the Day) are another thing you can easily add. Some sponsors have them, some don't. If your sponsor doesn't you can easily make your own. There is a
tutorial at netpond that is so easy to follow even I was able to figure it out. It's also pretty easy to change the code to make the picture link go to the gallery it was taken from, rather than the big picture. That may or may not be appropriate, but the coding is simple enough (like I said, even I figured it out) to mess with, so have fun with it.
RSS Feeds. Whether sponsor-provided OR from other blogs of yours in the niche, these make good additions to the sidebar. Plus, when used on a "build and forget" blog, they will do a little updating for you. Whether or not it's enough to be noticed by google I don't know. Using JUST an RSS feed provided by a sponsor HAS made sales for me. No pictures, just the feed link showing 5 posts.
Webcams. There are a lot of sponsors out there, the one I use is
Webcams (ref link) --
Webcams (NON-ref link) because there tools are pretty easy to use, and they cover a lot of niches. Again, keep it niche-related! If you have a tranny blog, use the tranny stuff, NOT the lesbian stuff!
Dating. Again, plenty of sponsors to choose from, personally I use
LustDollars (ref link) --
LustDollars (NON-ref link). They also have a good variety of promo tools, as well as the chat pop-up thingys you can add. I think it helps to delay the "pop" a few seconds. Plus, with the i f r a m e s you can edit the colors to match your blog's color scheme. They also have a lot of choices for the "niche", so if you have a big boobs blog, you can have a banner/popup with pictures of chicks with big boobs, etc....
Mobile/Cell Phone Porn. For that, I use
HandHeld Porn Sites (ref link) --
HandHeld Porn Sites (NON-ref link), again because of the large variety of niches available. It's very easy to set up links into specific niche landing pages and/or videos.
There are MANY more things that can be done with sidebars, this is just a brief intro. A gallery lising, a translator, a banner pushing a new sponsor OR a sponsor with a special promo, links and/or pictures from other blog posts that have converted in the past, toplists/top referrer lists, recent comments, most-viewed posts- all those things are also easily do-able.
Doing this stuff can really help to make a blog stand out, look more attended-to than it really is, and most importantly give surfers more exposure to YOUR links, which is ultimately what it takes to make money! 10K hits/day is pretty damned useless if you don't have them clicking to sponsors.
