Making the web

Hey there! Welcome to Making the Web - my personal blog about website development. Feel free to subscribe to my RSS feed to keep up with the latest. Alternatively, subscribe by email. Hope you enjoy this article!

You may have noticed that I recently put an additional sidebar onto this website. But, you may not no the reason why. It's a very good reason, and you should think about how it applies to your website too.

Because I, like many bloggers, wanted to earn a decent amount of revenue from blogging, I placed advertisements (from Google AdSense) on to my blog. I placed these advertisements onto the sidebar, mainly because they would not interfere with the content (articles), and because they would be noticed.

But, to get a good click-through rate, I started moving the advertisements towards the top. The thing I did not think about then was how it affects the ability to navigate the site. And, it does affect it quite a lot. The whole navigation section is pushed down, and many important links pushed below the fold.

To overcome this problem, I was thinking about ways I could improve the ease of navigation, while, at the same time, getting a decent click-through rate from the adverts. My final solution was to add another sidebar…

…By adding another sidebar, I was able to place the most important navigational elements on to one of the sidebars, where they would not be broken up by adverts, were above the fold, and could be easily identified as a collection of navigational elements.

And, on the second sidebar, I put adverts and sponsored links, which also had the benefit of being higher on the page, which would probably increase the click-through rate.

So the two benefits are:

• The user can more easily navigate the site, because the navigational elements are collected together; and
• The advertisements are more noticeable, increasing the click-through rate, and increasing the advertising revenue.

If, on your site, you can not easily differentiate between the navigation section, the advertisements and sponsored links, and the other content, maybe you should consider implementing similar changes. I found this useful article on the internet which describes how to set up two sidebars in WordPress.

Now, I'm relatively new to blogging, and when I first started I didn't really understand how effective it was. But, as time progressed, I learnt of ways that I can increase traffic to my blog quite easily.

So, here's my list of top tips:

Submit some articles to StumbleUpon
Submitting my site to StumbleUpon was probably the best thing I've ever done. In the past month, StumbleUpon have sent my site 8,417 visits, and is by far my site's biggest refferer.

Write Useful and Relevant Articles
Now, this is the obvious one, but, some people forget that the more relevant and useful their articles are, the more people are likely to recommend it. In one 3 day period, I had one blog refer 136 visits to one of my articles.

__('Read the rest of this entry »')