Wordpress Lets You Do That?

If you have a look at a lot of Wordpress blogs out there, especially the monetized ones, there are images in the side bar that are Call To Action buttons. If you click on the image then you will get taken to another page or website. This is very cool if you are an affiliate marketer and want to drive traffic from your blog to another site where your reader can be presented with an offer.

We put images in the sidebar of our blog through use of a Widget , or to be more specific, a Wordpress text widget. You get to your Widget toolbar by hitting Design, then select Widgets from the Nav bar. From the left hand side, you will want to select a new text widget and add it to your sidebar. That being done we can now add the image that you want to display there.

A couple of choices here, have a image that has no clickable properties, or one that does, and takes the reader to a new page. Which ever one you want, you still have to insert HTML code into the text edit. Do you have to know HTML to do this? Well it doesn’t hurt to know a little for tidying things up, but it is easier to use an HTML editor (Frontpage will do), so you can insert you image in design view , and then just copy and paste the source code into your text widget.

Your HTML should look something like this:

<p align=”center”><a href=”http://clintmaher.com/feed/atom/”><img src=”http://clintmaher.com/wp-admin/images/rss_logo.gif”></a></p>

This tells the browser how the image should sit on the page, and it also tells it where the image lives, which could be on your server (remember FTP uploading), or it could be on someone else’s server, and you are just borrowing their image (with permission of course).

Once you have done this, save your changes and check out your blog. If you have done everything OK then there should be your image in the sidebar for everyone to see. Try this with your blog. You’ll probably have to play around with the size of your images to make sure they fit in the sidebar and inside of any borders and the like.

With a bit of practice you’ll have a pretty funky site in next to no time.