Better Blogging, the Secret of the Sidebar

In my third Humberproof post, I'd like to elaborate on how flushing out your blog sidebar can add an entirely new dimension to your content portal.

In this 120 year old movie, The Sprinkler Sprinkled by Louis Lumiere (1895), a man steps on a garden hose and gets off when the Gardiner is peering into the nozzle. The next time it happens the prankster is off screen, and this leaves the audience pondering what's happening out of frame. And that, essentially, is the secret of the blog sidebar. The widgets in the margin show readers what's outside the story.

The secret of the sidebar is simply that you can use these content bytes to amplify readership around your content, and... The sidebar can create story loops, by which I mean you can use other media to funnel readers to and from your story bits all over the web. This can be a powerful branding exercise for readers.

In some ways the big social media networking websites are the human power stations of the internet, and your channel is a power line you can plug directly into your blog. Widgets are the energy sockets, and whenever you can import feeds directly into your blog through sidebar widgets you can amplify your readership.

For most business websites, the blog sidebar is the perfect place to showcase the firm's social media personalities. With Facebook,Twitter, Instgram, LinkedIN and YouTube sidebar feeds displayed in widgets, even a boring financial blog or tired sales blog can come alive with author's personalities and hook new readers who find and follow their channels back to the hub. 

How I put a Flickr Badge in my sidebar?

I navigated over to  http://www.flickrbadge.com/ and tweaked it until I got it just right. I deliberately choose a 300x sidebar so that I could accommodate wider and more compelling widgets. With Flickr, every picture is a story, and I use the description sections of each picture to link to other parts of the same story elsewhere on the web.  

Social Media Channels Add Context in Blog Sidebars

Any company that wants to be perceived as being innovative and competitive today has to have smart social media telling the world how innovative and competitive they are.. And it works best if they can do that without their 'followers' realizing they're being influenced.

Having a strong social presence can also help the website's SEO provided the authors are promoting interesting content and not simple blasting out the main website's sales pages. 

Professor Rob asks "Is your company’s social media diet all pop and chips, or steak and kidney pie?

I found an Instagram widget by searching for 'instagram blog widget' on Google where I found Websta, http://websta.me/tools which let me customize the dandy little widget you can see in my sidebar. My content is not very good on Instagram because I'm not very skilled with my phone.

I added a twitter widget and this serves as yet another reminder for me to tweet more often.

You should Make a Custom Favicon 

I also made a favicon for this blog, but I don't see it yet.. Do you see it? It should be in the top left corner of the address bar.  I used my face, but I might change it to big squishy H for Humberproof.

I used this exact picture you can see here to the left. The photo is exactly square and under 100kbs, which are the only parameters. To accomplish that I navigated to this free image cropping and image squaring service,
http://www.webresizer.com/resizer/

And frankly I'm a little surprised that Blogger doesn't make it easier to crop and shape squares this in the CMS.

In class on Monday night I will add a Pinterest widget to the sidebar.