Stanford Smith has a point: most bloggers do have a secret love affair with their sidebar. After some research and testing, though, it's pretty clear that they're the only ones. Blog readers aren't looking to be sold to, whether you're selling your blog archives, a subscription, other people's content, or an old fashioned advertisement. As humans in the 21st century, we've trained ourselves to ignore these types of things without even having to think about it.

Take a peek at the image above: the highlighted areas are the ones where readers spent their time, and the green outlined areas are where extra sidebar-esque content lived on the site tested.

When providing content to your readers, just get down to business. Provide quality and exceed their expectations - spend more of your time on that and less of your time on the sidebar and other parts of the page you're including mostly to please yourself.

This post also includes some interesting alternative actions you can take to achieve some of the things you might have been attempting with your sidebar content.

Leveraging your customers and the great stories they can provide for you is a great way to keep your content strategy lean. Telling the story of how your clients found success with your product, as well as letting your current customers help our your new ones will give you a leg up over the competiton by having a nearly endless supply of content as well as time saved - the content creates itself!

Some examples of client storytelling include:

-Case Studies

-Success Stories

-Tips and tricks (SaaS, I'm lookin' at you.)

-Use Cases

Saving time by leveraging your customers comes in many forms as well, such as:

-Creating Support communities to offset the amount of queries that can be easily answered by other users.

-Gathering product/service feedback from those who have made it a part of their everyday life and using this information to improve (your focus group is right in front of your face!)