10 Ways to make your Sidebar a conversion monster.

One of the drawbacks to using WordPress is that it can often be a bit costly and/or time consuming to have different sidebar content for different areas of your website (by sidebar, I mean the slim content area to the right or left of your main page content on most of the pages on your website).

Sure, some themes are set up in advance to have additional sidebar functionality and it’s not terribly difficult to create new page templates with static sidebars, but this really limits the ease with which you can make easy sidebar edits.

For these reasons, it is often logical to have the same sidebar content for most of the pages on your blog and website… And this doesn’t have to be a bad thing.

1. Email Newsletter Signup – this is a conversion point that makes sense for every page on your website.  Here’s a tip… send each subscriber a personal email thanking them for their interest (unless you’re getting an unmanageable number of subscribers, which is a good problem to have).
2. Search Widget - Let’s face it, Google has spoiled us.  Most visitors don’t have time to hunt and peck all over your site to find what they are looking for.  If you don’t make searching easy, there’s a good chance visitors will abandon your site altogether.
3. Sign up for… – what do you have that people could sign up for that you could use to gather people’s information?  Do you do webinars?  Do you give free trials?
4. Download… - what could you allow people to download as a way to capture their information?  Whitepapers?  Brochures?  Samples?  This is a great way to generate qualified prospects with your website.
5. RSS Feed – Hopefully you have a blog that you update regularly.  It’s a good idea to post your most recent or most popular entries via RSS in the sidebar of the pages of your website.  It encourages visitors to interact with you on a personal level and shows that you care about the people visiting your site.
6. Facebook fan page widget – Facebook gives you an embedable widget that you can put anywhere on the web.  Your sidebar is a great place to put it.  Sure you can just spam all your friends to get more ‘fans’, but isn’t it better to gather them naturally?  People who are actually interested in what you do?
7. Video – Do you have a cool video that tells about your company and what you do?  If you put it in your sidebar, it’s almost guaranteed that people will watch it.  One word of caution… It’s a good idea to put up a new video every 1-2 months.
8. “follow me” widget – For my site I built a widget using simple html table code that links to my profile on several different social networks.  This is a good way to let people see what you’re up to and connect in a variety of ways.
9. Twitter Widget - if you have a company Twitter feed, it can be cool to post the last few ‘tweets’ in your sidebar.   It’s a good way to get twitter followers and to add a human element to your site.
10. Don’t press the BIG RED BUTTON – Never underestimate the power of a giant ‘call to action’ button that says ‘buy now!’  Not too subtle, but often very effective.

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