Sidebars are the 2nd most important parts of your Blog after Posts, A sidebar can be used in various methods to help readers, search engines or yourself. So here we are sharing these * ideas for using Sidebars, you can then select according to your needs.
1. Recent Posts
Show about 5-10 Recent posts on your Blog’s Sidebar, that helps your reader to Navigate easily and find the latest content on your Blog and it also helps you to increase your Blog’s traffic and getting loyal readers.
2. Tags/Categories
Another important widget for your sidebar to help readers to easily get their wanted stuff by filtering posts under a Tag, Tags also play an important role in SEO, they increase your site’s visibility in Search Results.
3. Search Box
Having large number of posts and no search Box is not a good idea, Provide your users a search box, so that they can find your posts easy way, you can also use Google powered Search engine that can be used for earning extra cash from Google.
4. Subscription buttons
Another Box useful for Both Bloggers and Readers, Provide many methods to subscribe to your blog like Feedburner, ‘Add to Google/yahoo’ etc. or ‘subscribe by Email’ etc. This gives a good impression to your reader too.
5. Give your Readers a way to connect with you
Give you Reader a way to connect with you, so that they become your Daily visitor or you may also want to connect with other people to discover new content on the web for new blogging ideas, so write a short ‘Bio’ and add Social networking buttons like Twitter, Facebook Orkut etc.
6. Visitor counter or Current Visitors online
This can be also added to your blog’s sidebar, you can show your Visitor count to blog or show live visitors to the page with tools like Statcounter or WhosAmungUs.
7. Polls
Add more interactivity to your site with a Poll related to your Niche, Collect Poll results and this will also help you to get a new post idea from the results.
8. Advertisements
Spending much time on Blogging! What about earning few dollars too, Add a Adsense or any of your preferred Ad. network Ad box to your Sidebar, which can help you to maintain your Blog properly.
9. Feeds of Popular Blogs or News
You can also add Feeds of your Favorite blogs which can help your readers too or show News related to your Niche easily with Google news widgets.
10. Popular Posts
It is a very nice way to redirect your Visitors to other posts on your Blog, Show most commented or Your Favorite Posts on Sidebar which also helps readers, IF you are running your Blog on Wordpress, there are many add-ons which can do this work the easy way.
So here are these 10 ideas for your Blog’s sidebar, Liked these widget ideas or want to share more with us, Share your ideas through comments.
