Headers and Footers and Sidebars, Oh my!


Lately, I have been experimenting with some ways to make money off this blog without turning it into an endless collection of advertising posts. Certainly, any blogger that desires to make some money off their blog will have to confront this dilemma. As a result, I have been experimenting by using pages (instead of posts) as my vehicle to advertise a product. For example, I created a page about Free Baby Formula using an ad from Logical Media. Every time someone clicks on the ad an prints the coupon, I get an easy 80 cents. That’s right, all one has to do is print that coupon and I get 80 cents :)

free baby formula

But just making these silly pages was not enough to get any visitors via search engine traffic. Purely by accident (one of my pages ended up on my most popular posts widget since I used that page to test on browsershots.org), I discovered that putting links to these pages on my sidebar dramatically increased my results. For instance, if one were to type in Terminix Discount in a Google search, my page is currently the second result–powered only by a single sidebar link.

terminix

Of course, any link on your sidebar, header, or footer is not a single link. It is a link on every post and page in your entire blog. In my case, I have 112 posts, 33 pages, 38 categories, and 331 tags. Consequently, there are 514 links on my blog that now lead to my Free Baby Formula Page and every other page I created. Pretty powerful stuff, don’t you think. No, this is not the same as getting 514 different blogs to link to your site using the same keyword, but it’s still extremely useful.  I’m not sure if this little experiment is going to actually make me some money, but I will be sure to keep you updated.

clutter

I would urge you all to take a look at your blogs to see if you are taking advantage of this technique of internal linking.  Do you have a blogroll on your sidebar? Do you realize how many links you are giving to other bloggers (unless you made the links no follow)? Some people don’t like cluttering their sidebars, headers, and footers with a bunch of links, but I would argue that losing a little aesthetic beauty to your blog will be worth unleashing the power of this type of internal linking.

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7 Responses to Headers and Footers and Sidebars, Oh my!

  1. I believe internal linking can be valuable. But really I think it is also very important to have your site have a good design. And normally I think that means very limited footer and sidebar items.

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  2. SoLinkable says:

    The choice to monetize your site is an important decision in the life of every blog. I recently made this same decision, so I know what you’re going through. It can be hard to come to terms with, I was afraid my readership would drop to zero and people would run screaming from my blog. Thankfully I have found that its had no effect. Oh, and I’ll go print out a baby formula coupon just for you – enjoy your 80 cents ;)

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  3. Ipod Cahrger says:

    Link is given on the sidebar, header or on a footer can not be single but it belongs to the entire blog , That will be certainly useful one.

  4. Men says:

    That’s an interesting ideea of making some money off the adds. Keep up the god work and good luck getting some extra money! ;)

  5. Roger Moore says:

    thanks for the tip. Is Terminix Discount the only term you rank well for, or is this just one of many? I can’t imagine that a lot of people use that search term..

  6. rutgerskevin says:

    @roger You are right, that search term is not that lucrative. But I do get some hits from it and it took less than 20 seconds to add that page. Many of my pages yield much better search results.

  7. Efusjon says:

    I think too much on sidebars results in less clicks not more. When I see that many ads, my eyes glaze right past it (or I just close the browser window).

    Social media will change the affiliate marketing industry forever. It will be a 5 year revolution and once Facebook figures out how to monetize the relationships between users (much different than just page views, no matter how context relevant), then the game will change and Facebook will be bigger than Google.

    P.S. You actually might have made money if you get paid based on clicks. I clicked on an ad by accident there were so many.

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