Psst. See that stuff over on the right? That’s where all the action is on this site.

My sidebar is where visitors go to join my mailing list, buy my products, sign up for my free offers, and read more of what I’ve written.

Sidebars are action centers: they’re designed to convert visitors into prospects, and prospects into customers.

But if your sidebar isn’t well planned and strategically designed, your site visitors won’t interact with it the way you want. They won’t sign up, they won’t buy, and they won’t take you up on your offers.

Worse still, they may purposely ignore it since it’s so cluttered. They’ll consider it a distraction, and simply won’t go there.

Your goal: A sidebar that converts

If you have a website, you must pay careful attention to your sidebar area. In many cases, the sidebar appears on multiple pages of your site, so it’s important to get it right.

Once people set up their sidebar, they tend to move on to other things and don’t pay much attention to it.

If you have a website, it’s worth it to spend your time and energy getting your sidebar set up right. This post will get your started, and next week’s free webinar will help you even more (see below to sign up).

Put that sidebar to work for you

Let’s think about your sidebar like a 24-hours-a-day, 7-days-a-week, needs-no-sleep salesperson for your business. What does a salesperson do?

They catch the interest of the right prospects

Your sidebar can attract the right prospects to your business by clearly stating what you have to offer. In my case, it’s marketing and design information for small business owners who want to learn to market their businesses themselves. That’s pretty clear when you look at the offerings on my sidebar.

They develop relationships and build trust with prospects

If you have a free Ebook, recording, video or email course, your sidebar is the perfect place offer it. It’s a true win-win-win: your prospects win by getting free information about a topic they want to know more about; you win because you build a trusting relationship and establish that your business is an authority in your area of expertise; and — in order to get your free information — your prospects share their email address, which is a major win for you.

They show them how your business can help

A good salesperson spends time demonstrating solutions. If you have a blog, your sidebar is the perfect place to feature your most helpful posts. Even if your site doesn’t have a blog, you can list information pages, or “start here” pages in your sidebar.

They convert them to buyers

Your sidebar can feature ads for your solutions, whether they’re a product or service. These ads can lead to a landing page with targeted information about your services or products.

Rock your sidebar: Free Brown Bag Webinar

Wendy Cholbi, my Site Setup Kit co-creator, joined me for a Brown Bag Webinar about how to make your website’s sidebar work.

The replay serves up 30 minutes of fast-paced tips about this essential part of your website. We’ll cover:

• The simple system for using visual hierarchy to create an effective sidebar
• How to get your visitors to take action with easy tweaks you can make right away
• The custom sidebar creator that’s hidden inside every WordPress website: we’ll show you where it is, and how to use it

Sign up here to access this and all other Brown Bag Webinars.