Niche Site Saturday Widgets, Opt-ins and More
“I need expert advice. What are the best & essential sidebar widgets for blogs/niche websites?”
Well, we’ve got you covered. In this article I’ll talk about sidebars, widgets, opt-ins and other stuff you need as far as the technical side of building a niche website is concerned.
Data Driven Approach
Here’s the boring and necessary caveat section. Don’t take my word for any of this because I’m just a guy on the internet. The beautiful thing with niche websites and internet stuff in general is that you don’t have to take anyone’s word for anything. You can test these things cheaply and easily.
There are tools, both paid and free, for almost everything you can think of. For instance, SumoMe has a heat map plugin that’s free – that’ll tell you where people click on your website. Thrive Themes have a range of plugins where you can A/B test most components (such as your email opt-ins, headlines or widgets) and they’ll automatically pick a winner for you according to your settings.
There are tons of these tools out there which will help you with your specific site, niche and data.
Use them until you don’t need guides anymore.
Keep It Simple
All of the above – the data and testing – are useless if you don’t have any articles on your website or nobody is reading your articles. When you start a niche site, the first goal is to populate it and promote it enough that you get enough traffic to see what’s working and what isn’t.
Messing around with widgets, sidebars and opt-ins will not bring massive traffic to your site. Over time optimising your site will help. If you get 100 visitors and you manage to keep a couple on your site a while longer or grab their email, then that’s a potential sale further down the road.
But if you have no visitors then it’s a waste of time. Generally, optimising your on-site stuff will help retain visitors more than it will bring it in. As such, it’s not a priority until late on in your niche building project.
Bear that in mind, because people can spend thousands of dollars or hundreds of hours tweaking and seeing nothing for it. The major job you need to do is write and get visitors. Everything else is secondary.
That said, I’m not your mum. Let’s get on with the topic.
The Goal Of Niche Sites And How To Build Your Site Around It
If we take the Niche Site Challenge definition of a niche site, then we write sales letters and drive those visitors to affiliate links. We don’t try to make friends or build a hub of beautiful free information for everyone to digest and leave us penniless. Instead, every action and design choice we make is designed to take our reader towards the sale.
So a simple strategy for all your boxes and widgets is to take that approach; if you can clinch an extra sale from the jaws of your visitor leaving and never returning, then why not?
Sidebars
Sidebars get very little traffic. Mine is conspicuously absent at the moment, but when it was there. I’d get less than 1% of my opt-ins through the sidebar and 99% from elsewhere. That’s true across most of my sites.
Now, people do use the sidebar, but (and this is pseudo-scientific guesswork so take it with a pinch of salt,) everyone from Facebook through Twitter and Google and every lifestyle blogger on the planet all use their sidebar for money making and lead generation.
People are blind to it.
So don’t try hard.
Especially when a niche site isn’t concerned with lead generation.
Here’s what I’d do if I needed a sidebar on my niche sites:
- One image link to your biggest earner in banner form. Use Pretty Links and set up a specific link for that ad so you’ll know whether the banner is effective. You can swap affiliate offers too and see if that works.
- “Related Products” where you send to comparisons or other products. If the person isn’t interested in the sale, then maybe they’ll buy something else.
- Maybe you could wrap up a how-to post and use it for lead generation. I can’t imagine this would be fruitful and it’d probably distract from the sale.
I’ll leave it there because sidebars really don’t convert that much at the best of times. Those are a few ideas which you can test out.
Other Widgets
Can you put widgets elsewhere?
You can, but again, on a niche site your major goal is to have that reader get to the bottom of your page and hit that “Buy” button. So while that’s your major goal, your widgets have to work with it. Here are some ideas:
- Have a plugin that slips in a separate sale further up. You know how news sites have a “Timeout: You Might Also Like…” section in their articles? You can do this if you’re writing a review for a cheap product and want to upsell. So, if you are reviewing a hammer and have also reviewed a power tool set.
- Put an “after post” widget along the same lines as the rules in the point above. I’d caution to put this quite a long way below your post. Put it after the comments and right above the footer if you can. This will stop it from distracting your reader who is on the verge of hitting “Buy Now” in your article.
- Home page widgets should be a collection pointing towards your top selling items. Nothing more or less.
Again, those are some ideas but don’t overthink it. Try them out, because you’ll be surprised at the revelations you can have. E.g. if everyone clicks onto the hammer review but they then click to buy a different product, you know that your hammer review is well optimised or the keyword is popular but that the offer isn’t as good as other temptations.
Finally…
Opt-ins
I’ve written about email opt-ins for niche sites before. I’d essentially follow that article and the rules within it. Basically, those are:
- Don’t have them be obtrusive because people will leave and never come back
- Set any popups to trigger when a person is leaving, because you’ve lost them anyway so it can’t hurt
- Otherwise, soft-sell throughout your articles and preferably use an email collecting plugin that can grab your reader’s email without them leaving the page
- Offer an opt-in that’s basically a collection of your best posts and links right back to where you want them to buy from
That’s basically it.
Final Thoughts
Again, the key things here are;
- Don’t overthink because it doesn’t matter
- You can only optimise when you have traffic already
- The main goal is to get the reader to click “buy” on your articles therefore flashy gadgets are not acceptable and soft selling is the way forward
- You’re only really targeting the readers that probably aren’t buying anyway, so don’t worry too much
- I might be completely wrong because I’m just some guy; test yourself
With all of those things said, everything is pretty much covered so far as I’ve tried things above where niche sites are concerned. If you’ve got other ideas, let us all know in the comments, but otherwise happy experimenting!