In praise of the Sticky Sidebar Widget - 25 increase in income for free
Published on February 4, 2016
Published on Wealthy Affiliate — a platform for building real online businesses with modern training and AI.
Just thought I'd share something that has made me an extra few thousand dollars with no effort in the past 3 months.
Three months ago I redesigned my travel site. One of the main sources of income from this site is transfers - by private car or minibus. I arrange these for tourists to the island where I live & get commission from doing that.
The new theme I switched to had an option to use a 'sticky widget' in the sidebar.
This works by keeping a widget in view as the reader scrolls down the page. It sticks in the same place, as opposed to the usual thing which is for sidebar widgets scroll with the page and disappear from view as you move through the page.
The theme I am using - the excellent 'Voice' them from Meks, ( http://mekshq.com/theme/voice/ ) has a built in sticky sidebar widget. So I used this to put an obvious banner ad for the transfers that remains in view when users read more than halfway down a page.
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The result has been about 30% increase in income over the same period compared to last year. ( Around $7-8,000 / month compared to $5-6,000 / month last year. )
Some can be attributed to more visitors to the site etc. But the increase in visitors isn't huge. Just the usual few % increase it has most years.
So I guesstimate around 20 - 25% of the extra money is simply due to having this fixed sidebar widget.
There's no magic, all you're doing is keeping something in view for far longer than a visitor would usually see it. That's bound to have an effect on some people.
It makes life easier if your theme has this built in. But many premium themes and most free themes won't.
But that's not a problem as there's good plugin, Q2W3, that does the same thing: https://wordpress.org/plugins/q2w3-fixed-widget/ So no need to rush out and buy a bells & whistles paid theme.
If you are getting traffic to your site and want to increase income from a particular page - WA referrals or an affiliate page etc. Give it a try. Test a sticky sidebar widget for a month.
There's nothing to lose and everything to gain.
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