In praise of the Sticky Sidebar Widget - 25 increase in income for free
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.
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.
Recent Comments
26
What is about the "keep it under 6" rule for plugins because the speed? How many plugins you have? And how it affects your WS?
Ignore that. It's rare to find any site with six or less plugins. And if you make one of them a caching plugin, then that speeds up your site anyway. You need to differentiate between plugins that only run once or when required & those that run all the time.
For example if you have a plugin that only runs when you upload & image & it reduces the size of that image, then it's not slowing down your site at all when people are visiting it.
Or a redirection plugin that sends people from an old page to a newer one, that's not using any server resources when it runs.
Or a plugin that optimises your databases. That's idle until you decide to run it.
So it's meaningless to say you should have under 6 plugins. Unless you mean plugins that are running continuously.
Thanks for your answer. A member here wrote it's better to deinstall a plugin, if you use it only once a month, because of speed too. What do you think about that?
I guess you can if you want. I've never bothered doing that. You can use a plugin to monitor which plugins are using resources. Then you know which are most likely to be slowing your site down & see if you can find alternatives or do without them.
See more comments
Much appreciated Ian - thanks for the share!
Dennis