💥5 Ideas For Your MV Blog Sidebar Area!💥

In this weeks podcast episode, I share with you some ideas and strategies around how to use the MV blog sidebar area! 5 ideas and a sneaky bonus.

Podcast, Transcript & Links are provided below.
Please leave comments & feedback at the bottom of the page.

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USEFUL LINKS

• How To Use The New MV Blog Feature
• How Can People Find Your Blog?
  
  

FULL TRANSCRIPT:

Remi Oduyemi  

Are you using the blog post sidebar area? No?
Well, I've got five ideas for you that you can use inside your blog post area.

Hi, everyone it's Remi here. I'm the user success Lead here at MemberVault.
And I love coming on these solo episodes where I can talk about strategies and fun things that you can be doing in side of MemberVault out to have an amazing experience for you. And of course, for your customers and clients as they come in, to learn from you buy from you and experience all the wonderful things you are sharing on this gorgeous platform of ours.

So if you, you know, unless you've been living under a rock, you probably will know that MemberVault now has a blog, all integrated into the system.

I tell you what, I've never blogged as much as I have with this MemberVault blog. And that's not blowing smoke, that's genuine.
Because it's so easy, like the page is simple. It's clutter free, there's no plugins, there's no distractions, I literally sit down and I write, and I put a picture on, and I add some SEO tags, and I post! Honestly, my my blog post game is hot right now because it's so easy.

So I'm loving, I'm loving, having blogs all in one place, not having to log into other places or pay other places to host my blog. So I'm all in on this, right.
And I have actually, I mean, I need to go look at this and update it a little bit. But I am using my blog post sidebar area. But I think I could jazz it up a bit and make it look a bit prettier.

But what I want to share with you is five ideas today of things that you could be using your blog post sidebar area for as well. And I am going to be recording a workshop, a whole workshop around how to set up your blog, how to use the blog, what the settings are, what goes into what boxes, all of that good stuff. And that will be live over at courses.vipmembervault.com Inside the Make your MV shine product, right. So that's where it will live. So I'll be recording that this week. And hopefully by next week or the week after, we should be able to get that up and into into the make your MV shine product for you.

So I wanted to give you some ideas that you should get on with now really, things that you could get going with right now... how to improve your sidebar area of your blog, and maybe some ideas about things that you may not have thought of yet. So if you... let's just do the technical bit quickly, right.

If you log into your MV account, and you're looking at your dashboard, on the left hand side, you have your navigation, your left hand navigation.
And if you want to get to your blog, you would click on content > And then you would click on posts. And that is where you could create your new blog post by clicking on Add post, right.


 

But the other area I want you to pay really close attention to is if you go further down that left hand navigation to where it says appearance.
And then underneath appearance is the word settings. If you click on settings, it kind of opens an expanding menu. And underneath settings, there's four, there's four sort of list items, and one of them is blog. If you tap on blog underneath settings, that will take you into the main settings area where you can set up all the details of your blog.



You can give it a title, you can name you know name it whatever naming structure you want. Mine is just you know... /blog.

But other people have, you know, fancy names. You can select how many posts per page do you want? Do you want? Do you want there to be 10 of your blog posts on a page or 50 of your blog posts on a page? Do you want comments on your comments off you can go in and set all of those things up that if you scroll down a bit further on the blog Settings page, there's also a sidebar setting area where you can add some direct call to action links to your other MV products so that people could literally buy from your blog, click on the link and go straight to get something out of your your member vault area.

And then there is a content area where you can add more. And so this is what I'm talking about today is really in this area, the content area of your sidebar.



I'm giving you five ideas today things that you could put into your call to action content area inside of your blog, sidebar settings.

1.  Create an About Me page and put the link in there, or you could create a short bio.

So the first thing that you could do, so number one is going to be that in your sidebar. You could use your sidebar as a really cool place to establish who you are so that the visitors know who you are. Do they understand, you know, your expertise, they understand what the blog is all about. And you can do this through the sidebar by either putting a short bio in there about yourself right? And little short bio is a nice thing that you can put into this sidebar area. I'm just looking at mine. That's exactly what's in mine, I just kind of introduce myself say who I am, what I do. And then I add a few little extra links in there to direct people to other things. So you could do a short bio like I have on mine. You could also pop in here and About Me page link. Now, if you also didn't know member volt also has pages now a bit like web pages. So you can create your own About Me page in member volt. And then in from your blog, you can link directly to that about me page, right. So if you're interested in knowing where the pages are, you would go back to your navigation your main menu, click on content again, and then click on pages and you could create a new page right there. So that that could be an About Me page that you might want to create so that that's all integrated on, you're all integrated on your MemberVault account as well. So that was number one, you can either create an About Me page and put the link in there, or you could create a short bio.

2. Add a picture.

Number two is a picture. Now, the sidebar settings of your blog does actually allow you to upload a picture and an image of yourself. But you could also use your sidebar, your blog posts sidebar area to add another picture into this area, right. So I'm thinking here, you could add, you can add a picture here, for example of a product or a new product that you're pre selling or a new product that you've just brought out, you could put a one time offer image in here, right. So as people are reading your blogs, they go, they can see an offer, it might not be one time actually, but it would just be a offer. They could see anything that you have on sale, any bundles that you have, you know, maybe you do a Black Friday offer, right? You could put those type of offers all into the sidebar using a picture and the sidebar of your blog. Right. So that's the type of thing I'm thinking about when we're talking about adding an additional picture here. And the picture really does also help to kind of personalize your blog. So you could use you know, if you were doing a family blog, maybe the main pictures of you there maybe the sidebar pictures of your family or of your pet dog right or, or whatever it is that's kind of on brand for what it is that you do. But using a picture speaks 1000 words as the old phrase and quote goes right use the picture. Can you know tell us? I don't know. I've just jumbled up that that quite. But you know what I mean? Right? A picture tells tells a story. So using your picture was number two as an idea of what you could be included into your blog posts. Sidebar.

3. Share some contact information

Number three, you can use the sidebar area of your blog to share some contact information, right. So if if you haven't got a Contact Me page, on your member vault, perhaps you could create a page like I've described above, already of how to create a page remember when it's, you know, it's a Contact Me page. And from your sidebar of your blog, you could either send people to your member vault Contact Me page, you could send them perhaps to a form to fill in, right. So if you wanted somebody to contact you or ask you questions, you could send them to a form, you could send them to a Calendly link if you wanted them to read your blog and take action and you know book themselves into your diary for a free call or, or to actually book a one to one session with you. You could put all of those links into the sidebar. So using your contact information from the sidebar is a great way if you are thinking about using your blog almost as an additional kind of sales tool to drive traffic or to drive sales or to drive leads to get in contact with you then putting some sort of contact information into the sidebar is a great idea to get people to reach out and to contact you.

4. Drive traffic to your other MemberVault products

Number four, number four before is always my favorite. And you can use your blog post sidebar to drive traffic to your other MemberVault products right from the sidebar. So as I said earlier, I do this with mine actually I'm just gonna get mine up whilst I'm talking to you on the mobile device. So when you log into the settings area and then you click on blog and you get into the blog page settings as As you go down to the sidebar Settings, scroll down, I do have my first link that I have the call to action link, which is sort of built into the settings is a link. And that takes people to my my online business Tech Club, right. So anyone who wants to come and join Tech Club, that is my main link that is always there on the page. But when I go down into the call to action content area of the sidebar that this is where this is the bit that looks exactly like you're when you're creating your products, your product page, when you're creating your lessons and your modules, and you go into that editor area, this is the exact same editor where you can edit the content that's going into your sidebar. So it's in this area, I've actually added some additional links, I've written my text out in there. And then I've highlighted those links and turned them into Remi Oduyemi it interlinked and they're driving people to my other MV offers. So one of my offers is that I will build your MemberVault site for you for four days, four days, I will build your members MemberVault site for you within four hours, right. So there is a direct link from my blog sidebar to anyone who's stumbled across my blog or has family in a Google search, they instantly have a link that will take them back into my member vault to go make a purchase if they wanted me to build that envy site. I also have put an offer here again, I wrote out the text, I turned it into a hyperlink. And it's a direct link to anyone who is reading my blog, and their eyes, sort of scroll over to the other side and they go oh, Remy does one to one coaching, there's a direct link for them to go into my MemberVault and Book One to one session with me three MemberVault directly from my blog. So think about some of the offers that you have, you know, upsell down, sell, cross, sell whatever you want, right. But think about some of the offers that you already have. And think about if you could put those into your blog, signpost, signpost sidebar, I need to my teeth needs to be put back in today, you could drive more traffic from the sidebar, back into your env and make yourself some more sales. So that was my number four suggestion around driving traffic to other MemberVault products right? From the beauty of your blog, sidebar. Love, love, love that one.

5. And the final one, number five is to advertise something, you can use this blog post a sidebar area to just advertise something right? You know, let's say you are a podcaster, perhaps every week you change, you change that image or you add an image into your sidebar area of your very latest podcasts and that you're driving traffic to people to come in and listen to your podcast so they can read your blog, see you got a podcast, they can come and subscribe, they can come and listen to the latest episode, you can use that area to advertise that as well. Or if you were running, let's say a five day challenge, you know, you could do really strong image and a strong call to action, you know, asking people to come and sign up for your challenge to come and take part. It's right there and nice big image you can again you could use animated GIF, to catch people's attentions in this area. But you could create a real nice almost like a billboard. And it's quite a nice big size. It's a nice size of real estate that you can be using to drive people who are finding your blog to whatever it is you're advertising at that current time. And the other thing is on the Remi Oduyemi on the blog settings page. So again, you'd go down on your navigation to settings, you would click on that and then you'd click on onto blog underneath. When you're on the Settings page, the blog settings page. If you scroll all the way down to the very bottom, there are two SEO fields that you can fill in and I I really encourage you to fill in these SEO fields you know with your name with the name of your product or the name of your blog, and put some information into there because everything you put on your blog and on your envy site is public is searchable.

The Bots and the crawlers are crawling the web and they will find you you will show up in the search engines you will be discoverable on different search engines. If you are filling in these boxes using key words and making sure that you don't just leave these blank because what you want to do is to be discovered, you want your blogs to be picked up, you want people to find you. And always, then know that your sidebar, if it has links in it, you're then also driving people deeper into your, I'm going to call it a funnel. It's not really a funnel. But you know what I mean? If somebody finds you from a search engine, they find your blog, they click on your blog, they read your blog, and then they stumbled to your sidebar, and then there's links, they click on that link, they're getting more and more and more involved into your business, and finding out more about you and what it is you do, which is why I think these ideas today are really important that we think about, where can we share our links, I mean, obviously, inside of each of your blogs that you are writing, use, use links in the actual blog copy. So as people are reading, they can take action straight away and click and come back into your MemberVault and see what it is you are offering.

You know, at the bottom of your blog posts, you could have a what I like to call a footer or a signature at the bottom of each of your blogs that you can copy and paste from a Google doc each week, or every day, whenever it is you're blogging, and drive people into your free resource area, reminding people from your blog, people who might find you for the first time, hey, I've got this free resource area over here. And here's the link come and check it out. And, you know, I'm giving you, you know, this free business playbook, I'm giving you this free cooking recipe, you know, whatever it is that you are doing, incorporate that everywhere you can around your blog, because it is searchable, it is discoverable. And as new people find you, you want them to be able to click and buy from you in as quick and as easy way as possible. So make sure you are using your sidebar, the blog sidebar, you can put as many links as you want in there within reason, let's not overload people. But you can add as many links as you want not just the one link that sort of built into the blog settings page. But actually in the content area of the sidebar, you can add more links there, you can add links into your copy of your blog. And you should be because we want to, we want to help our customers, they might be reading a blog, and it might be transformational, it might be making a massive difference to their life, and they might want to connect with you. But if you put no links, and no real way for them to contact you, they're gonna have to hunt around and click around to come and find you. And they may lose interest.

So let's make it easy for our people to find us to contact us to speak to us to buy from us by sharing our MV links in as many places as we can.
So I hope you found today very, very useful.

6. Oh, I've got one more bonus one to throw at you. It's not it's not really a full idea. It's just a miniature art. It's a miniature idea, we'll Remi Oduyemi call it that in your sidebar area, you can add some social media links in there as well. So, you know, in Canva, you could use some social media graphic images, if you want to pop those into your sidebar and then link, link those out as well. If you want to, for example, drive somebody to your Facebook group from your, your blog sidebar, or you wanted to grab to drive them to your LinkedIn, your LinkedIn group or something like that, or your LinkedIn profile. And then you can put those social media links into the sidebar area as well. And why not, you know, rather than somebody reading your blog, and then just leaving and never finding you again, let's give them as much good stuff about us as we can. And the MemberVault blog sidebar is a fantastic piece of real estate that we want you to use, go off, fill it up with as much good stuff as you can, and really help your customers to take action. I'm going to drop all five of these suggestions into a blog as well.

And you, you can you can read them on the blog. So check out the show notes, click on the blog, and you can get all of these sort of mapped out for you in the blog as well. And do take a look at the bottom of the blog and you will see what I'm talking about. There's a footer, I've got a little footer at the bottom of each of my blogs that I do. And there's a picture of me, there's links to my personal member vault site, a little bit of information about me.

And I want you to be creating that for your own blogs, right so that people can really connect and get to know who you are and want to be in your world more and want to buy from you. I want nothing but the best for you. So anyway, I hope this has been magical and helpful. And I can't wait to see you next week for another blog, another blog, another podcast. Thank you for listening and see you soon guys take care bye.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

Hey, hey! 👋 I’m Remi Oduyemi, the User Success Lead here at MemberVault.
You’ll hear me over on the Vault podcast, see me in the Collaborative, and also hosting special user success workshops.

Outside of MV, I work with established entrepreneurs and ambitious business owners who are ready to scale their business using simple systems and cool automations.

You can find my MV site here: https://www.onlinebusinesstemple.com