When it comes to writing content, it's so easy to write, promote, then forget. Even more so with seasonal content. That amazing cookie recipe or great shopping tip gets pushed further into your archives, only to resurface on Pinterest from time to time. Well, here's an easy way to change that.
Challenge: Add 1-3 seasonal posts to your sidebar
Why: Unless you just wrote it yesterday, seasonal posts get lost in your archive sea. ESPECIALLY those posts you may have written years ago. By making new and repeat visitors aware you have some relevant content for the current season, you'll see a bump in pageviews.
How to Do It
1. Figure out if you HAVE any seasonal posts.
Most of us have something for bigger holidays like Christmas or Hannukah, but when it comes to a more elusive holiday, you might not. That might mean you need to write some, but that's a whole other post.
In addition to holidays, don't forget about seasonal events (like the “Big Game” or awards season), and, well, ACTUAL seasons.
Think:
- Recipes (comfort food for fall, cookies for the holidays)
- Tips (organizing your home in January or Spring, finding a good vacation deal right before summer)
- Crafts or other DIY (staining a deck before spring, printables for holidays)
- Personal stories (a post about last year's summer vacation gone wrong, a Christmas tradition)
2. Narrow down to just 3-5 of your best posts.
Some of you write gazillions of great posts and might have 20 or 30 posts around a season. Do not – I repeat DO NOT – put like 20 things in your sidebar. Your readers will end up cursing you as they scroll and scroll and scroll. Not to mention, more choices typically means people just will get overwhelmed and not click ANYTHING.
If you really, really have more you want to feature you can rotate them out.
3. Add them to your sidebar.
I'm sure there are lots of ways you can do this, including designing some new snazzy graphics, but I'm all about easy.
You can see I added three seasonal posts onto my sidebar: one about holiday fonts, holiday post ideas, and a gift guide. All I did was add a new Text Widget to my sidebar and grabbed the blog post permalink and the image URL. Instead of resizing the image, I just used HTML to dictate the width at 200 pixels. My sidebar is 300 pixels but the longer images were too big so I centered them and made them a bit smaller.
If you don't specify a height, it'll automatically size it proportionally. The code looks like this:
<a href=”https://blogclarity.com/12-free-holiday-fonts” target=”_blank”><img src=”https://blogclarity.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Holiday-Fonts.png” width=”200″></a>
Ta-da!
Your Turn
Do you already have some seasonal posts on your sidebar? What did you add?
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Hey- I'm Melissa! I'm a mom, side hustler, online course instructor, and brand marketer. I run a 6-figure blog helping online biz owners find their a-ha moments with can-do tips, tutorials, and online courses. I also work at Burt's Bees as the Social Media Strategist (yep, it's as cool as it sounds). Jump start your biz productivity with my free worksheet!
Ooh this is kind of genius! My first thought was ‘I need to make some more seasonal recipe round-ups so I can do this.’ Then I realized – I just made two gift guides that I posted in the last couple weeks!! Brilliant, as always. 🙂
Would there be a reason that my url’s for the content uploads don’t pull the picture in my sidebar? I’ve never been able to do this – I’ve always had to upload it to photobucket.
Yes, it dawned on me that I should include my gift guides! Super timely!
About your issue, that’s strange! Are you going to the image and right-clicking and “copy image URL” and using that? If so, it should work. Also make sure the quotation marks in the code aren’t curly ones. If those things don’t help, paste the code into a new comment and I’ll see if i can figure it out!
Thanks for the tip! The right clicking and copy image URL seems to be working! I was getting the URL from the media library – I think? In any case, it worked!
I Luhuv this idea! It’s like one of those “Why didn’t I think of that?!”
Yup! I just did this! Such a great idea!
What a great idea!! I just added a Holiday Favorites to my sidebar with a christmas checklist, running workout, and a recipe. 🙂
I was jus thinking about doing this the other day! Thanks for the nudge to actually do it!
I was noticing others adding season widgets to their sidebars, too. So I added two to mine. But, I love your idea for using the HTML. So much faster than having to go to PicMonkey to resize. Thanks Melissa!
This is an awesome idea! I’ve been re-sharing my seasonal posts on social media but never thought to create a section on the sidebar to feature a few. Thank you!!!
I have my most popular posts on my sidebar, but I DO put seasonal stuff from the archives in my newsletter. I figure they’re relevant this time of the year even though it was written years ago!
This is a FABULOUS idea! I’ve just added some Valentine’s Day posts to my sidebar and will make a note to my blog planner of other seasonal sidebar ideas I can do throughout the year. This was a very informative and easy-to-follow post. Thanks for sharing the HTML code!
thnx,, nice post,.
I’m definitely trying the sidebar idea. Some of my most popular posts have been seasonal.