Optimize Your Blog’s Sidebar
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The entire purpose of a sidebar in a blog is to have a small showcase for quick information about you, your brand and the services. It provides your site visitors additional functionality and easy access to your content within one pane (or two, based on your chosen blog layout) without having to move out of the current page in your blog their browsers are pointing to.
Explore the blogosphere and you’ll find a variety of elements most bloggers have cast upon their sidebars. Many are standard components needed to guide their followers around their blogs or beyond; other ones are even irrelevant and merely included for their twee factor.
If you’re using a blog publishing service like Blogger, WordPress or LiveJournal, most of these components are ingrained by default within the templates. However, if you plan not to avail of any of these tools’ services and code your blog from scratch, here are some of the important elements you should have on your blog’s sidebar.
The Bio
At the top of the sidebar should be the bio to establish for your readers what your blog is about or who you are. All you need is two or three sentences that give a gist about your brand’s identity and something like “view complete profile” at the bottom that links to a much expanded or detailed About Us page.
Contacts
To engage with your readers on a more personal level, always include a contact list to give them ways to reach you. If you’re a small Web-based business or a personality, you can simply have an e-mail address that either directs to a Contact Us page or you can apply a mailto link to it like this. If your brand ships out actual products or does personalized services, it’s best to include a physical business address or maybe even a phone number.
Social Profiles
As an online marketer, it’s imperative that you provide your demographic a way to follow or connect with your brand across your social network profiles. Customarily, you can line up the icons of the social networks you’ve signed up with and link each one to their respective profiles. While some social networks provide ready-made icon for this very purpose (like Twitter buttons, for instance), you can make your own set of icons if you’re pretty handy with graphics editing apps like Adobe Photoshop or Corel Photo Paint.
Subscription Details
Outside social networks, you can give your readers a way to keep track of your blog content by including an RSS subscription link as well as e-mail text fields for when you decide to send out online newsletters, for instance. Always keep an eye out for subscribers and always deliver on the promised updates or newsletters by regularly coming out with content. This area will generate for you a good list of contacts for better demographic targeting and other possible marketing strategies.
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RSpears @ May 31, 2010
