Welcome. The image above is created with canva. On my website you can see this image is in a widget. My widgets in my sidebar are 300 pixels wide. The image widget links to a post (or a page) on my website.
Above is a tutorial made "on the fly" to show you how easy this process is to complete. I can actually complete this whole process in a mere 5 minutes when I'm doing it without recording and going carefully to explain the steps. You can do it in 5 minutes, too.
Why would you want to have widgets that link to your own posts on your website rather than linking to your affiliate product?
Well, the answer is SEO. When you have too many affiliate links littered within your site, it doesn't look good in the eyes of the big Google overlord.
The fewer affiliate links on your website, the better.
What if you linked your widgets to a page or a post that is a review of the product or service instead? Hmmm, fewer affiliate links in the sidebar, me thinks.....
So, in this tutorial, I'm using a custom image made live in Canva, then shrunk to the correct size for my sidebar which is 300 pixels wide. Then I insert my url of choice within the image widget.
Here are the tools I used.
1. Canva. - To Create My Custom Image - You can use any image editor of choice.
2. (Non essential) My colour picker browser extension to "copy" a colour used on my site.
3. TinyPng - To Reduce the Memory Size of my Image (Not the Dimensions, just the kb) because I want a nice 300 wide image that isn't 100kb in memory.
4. A Text widget for my sidebar. Don't be confused by the fact that it says it is a text widget, it simply means it can be "html text." The code we copy once we create a dummy post with the image in it, is going to be the html code.
5. The URL that I want the image to "link" to.
note: The post I created which contains the actual image is a "draft" post which can actually be delete once you've got the html code and pasted it into your text widget.
Hope you enjoyed today's video, please like and comment, it helps!
Until next time. stay sharp!
What do you think? Please go ahead and comment and Like...
Jimbo