In this lesson I'm going to show you how to customize your sidebar.
The sidebar appears on any page with this sidebar.
So it's an important thing to add and to make sure that it's doing the right thing for your web site.
Now let me show you a couple of different Web sites that I like.
Well one is mine and what is the side hustle nation.
So first site Housel nation.
Let's see what's going on on their side bar which appears on their blog posts.
Their podcast post and this is important because a lot of people might be coming directly to your Web
site to this page.
They're not going to be going to your home page.
So if there's things like your Facebook page there's specific articles or pages you want people to see
or go to if you have an opt in form where you want someone to sign up for your e-mail newsletter.
This is the place to put it with site Housel nation they have a search bar at the top which I think
is very important for people who want to be able to search on your site for specific topics.
They have a JOIN THE NATION opt in form at the very top.
So every time someone visits their blog or article they'll see this if they're not a member then Lossie
and potentially want to join the tribe join the newsletter of this Web site.
They have some Greatest Hits and favorite blog articles.
This looks like a plug in that he's using.
There's different plug ins that you can use to list out your most popular posts or maybe even some specific
post that you like.
These are things that we'll be learning how to do in terms of adding plug ins in a future lesson.
He has a YouTube video that is one of his favorites that he's put here.
He has different topics.
So these are probably the categories for his different blog posts.
And then also maybe perhaps some advertisements or some images that you want to add as well.
For me on my sidebar I keep it pretty simple with the search bar at top.
I have my big opt in form.
This is created with a convert kit.
So I use convert kit for my email marketing.
And so this is created in convert.
And then I added the code into my sidebar on wordpress.
So if you use convert kit you can get something like this or no matter what type of email service you're
using this probably some kind of opt in form you can add.
And we're going to be adding an e-mail opt in to our site in a future lesson.
I have my Facebook page here so people can like it.
And then some most popular post which is just actually a custom list of posts that I've created from
some of my best posts that I want people to potentially click on.
So how do you actually added this to your dashboard and go under appearance to widgets.
These are called widgets so you can see here we have our Sidebar right here.
And these are the widgets on our Sidebar.
There's different areas where we can add widgets and we'll go over the FOTR and other things later.
But this is just the sidebar.
So this is what's in our sidebar right now search.
Recent Posts recent comments et cetera.
Then on the left do you have all of your available widgets.
So if I want to just get rid of some of these widgets I can just select it and delete it.
Right now I don't have that much content so I'm not going to include the categories or an archives or
recent comments.
I don't really see a reason for including recent comments potentially recent posts which might be good.
So now if I go back to my blog post or any page that has the sidebar I see just the search and in the
recent posts if I want to change the text up here from recent posts to something else I can just type
in a new title it automatically uses the text.
Recent posts but maybe I want to say latest articles.
Or if it's just one specific type of podcast article that you write or something like that you can just
write that.
So if I saved that and then refreshed you can see that this changes to latest articles.
Now over on the left you have different options.
So if you want you can add a calendar you can add tag clouds that will show all of the tags that you've
used.
You can add pages or you can add custom text.
This is perhaps where you would add a little about section so you can add an About section so maybe
I'll say I'm a d i y woodworker etc. don't want to waste your time so I would just fill that out a little
bit more.
Save it and put it here.
Perhaps above recent posts that might be good for someone who's new to your website to quickly understand
who is the creator of this Web site.
This is also how you would add a custom optin form.
Typically you'll get DML code from your Opt-In form and you'll add it here using the text block.
So that's how you added it in the next couple of videos.
I'm going to show you how to add specific things such as an image and this space book like widget.
Thanks so much for watching and we'll see you then.