How much attention do you pay to your sidebars and the content you’ve added to them?
Do you ever check the links or banners you’ve placed there to ensure the sites are still up and running?
I read a post by Adrienne Smith recently in which she mentioned some of the mistakes that bloggers make. One of which was Two columned sidebars and the content of them being overloaded.
So I’ve been checking some sidebars and the content that people have in them and guess what…. Adrienne’s absolutely right… not that I ever doubted her!
Some of the blogs I’ve looked at have all manor of CRAP on their sidebars and seem to have placed everything but the kitchen sink in them. I’ve seen no end of “My Favourite Blogs” linked to that have been taken off line.
It’s unbelievable honestly, on one blog I saw 40 links to “my favourite blogs” and of those:
17 were dead ends with the blogs no longer available.
11 hadn’t been updated for many months, in some cases years.
3 had just single posts on them, one was “Hello World” with no content.
2 lead to 404 error messages
7 were current.
Yep just 7 out of 40…. Shocking doesn’t cover it. That wasn’t the only blog like it but it was one of the worst.
How can people refer to a blog as one of their favourites when there is just one post? Or link to 17 dead blogs and refer to them as their favourites?
Linking to dead blogs is doing you more harm than good. Not only does it make you look unprofessional when people try to visit these dead sites but your loading time is increased due to your blog trying to find broken links.
Have you checked your blogs for broken links lately?
Google Adsense is another one. Yes, we want to monetize our blogs but do you really want to place Google Adsense on your sidebars then work really hard driving traffic to your blogs for people to click a link on Adsense only to be taken away again, for as little as 0.01 cent sometimes…. Really? Isn’t your intention to bring people to your blogs to read your content and click your links?
Many of the blogs I looked at have the exact same Affiliate banners over and over, streams of them running the length of the sidebars. I guess these people are either really busy checking these products and services or are just slapping things up in the hope of making some money.
Yes, we all add affiliate banners to our blogs but we should only be recommending products and services that we’ve used and liked.
Less is more when it comes to affiliate banners.
Whilst we’re on this subject one of my readers asked me how I added the 2 x 2 affiliate banners to my sidebar so I’ve shot him a video which you’ll find lower in the post. 2 x 2 = 4, and that’s the number of affiliate banners I have on my blog. In fact I only have three as one of the products is my own 
Now I have to confess that when I first started blogging I was exactly the same. I placed all manor of CRAP in my sidebars in the belief that I would make money as I had monetized my site, and you know what…. I didn’t earn a brass farthing from them!
If you want to add all the products and services that you’re using for your blogs why not create a Resources Page and add the items to that with a brief description of each one.
Since changing themes last year I cleaned my sidebar up and stopped adding so many things to it. Even some of those I have added have now been removed due to another post I read recently.
Tim Bonner wrote about our Blog’s Loading Speed. After reading Tim’s post I followed his lead and tested my loading time, which was pretty good but there were areas that could be improved, namely some of the images I’ve used and… the content in my sidebar.
What, my sidebar…. but I’ve cleaned it up already!!
Even though I’d removed the CRAP from my sidebar I’ve added a couple of things that were slowing my loading time so I’ve removed them as well now.
These things we add, like a Free Gift of the day, Live feeds from Twitter, Google Plus, Facebook and Pinterest all slow our loading time down… and what happens when your blog’s to slow… People tend to move on to another blog unless they know you and like your content.
Yes we want people to know about our Social Media accounts and many of us have added the graphics and links to our sidebars but do we really need to add further widgets to display our last Ten tweets or last Ten Facebook or Google plus comments?
All of those tweets and comments need to be streamed to our blogs and this can really slow things down for you. Sure add your Facebook Fan Pages, how else are you going to let people know about them but ask yourself: Do you really need all the widgets and banners you have in your sidebars?
Are they really working for you? If they are then obviously keep them but if not then why not remove the widgets and change your banners, reducing the number along the way.
I know that they’re your blogs and obviously your rules apply, but if the sidebars aren’t working for you maybe it’s time to change them around a bit.
Here’s the video I mentioned above that shows you how I arranged my 2 x 2 banners.
The HTML editor I used in the video is Kompozer, which is free to download.
Using the method demonstrated in the video you can also create your links to your social media accounts and add graphics to them. Add more rows or columns to the table and then just swap the image URL’s to the images you wish to use and then swap the affiliate links for your social media accounts.
I hope that you’ve found the post and video helpful. If you have please use the tools available to let your friends and followers know about them, especially if they’re also cluttering up their sidebars.
Have you been guilty of overloading your sidebars? If so what was it that made you clean them up?
If you have any pet hates about sidebars and the way people use them please share them in the comments so others can get a general opinion.
If you can add to the post in any way then please do so in the comments below.
Until next time, clean out the clutter 
