This post is part of the blog improvement series, which is designed to help you as well as your readers get the most out of your blog.

This tip is an oldie, but a goodie nonetheless. Plus, it’s that time of year when every blogger should take a step back from the blog and make some difficult decisions when it comes to the sidebar.

What tends to happen over the course of a year is that bloggers come across new and interesting projects, promotions, and widgets. Each one of them just gets jammed in the sidebar without too much thought and months later, the sidebar has grown out of control.

I’ve been seeing this more and more as I surf through the blogosphere and this post is simply a reminder that it’s time to de-clutter that sidebar.

  • Outdated materials? Double check the promotions, contests, or advertisements in your sidebar to ensure they are all still valid.
  • Outdated links? It’s commonplace to see gigantic blogrolls in sidebars (we’ll discuss that next) and since those links have likely been accumulating over months, and sometimes years, it’s likely that one or two blogs have gone the way of the dodo.
  • Too many links? If you notice that your blogroll is gigantic, then it’s time to either move it or limit and rotate the links that are shown*. You can easily create a page specifically for listing your links. For instance, this site has a helpful links page, rather than listing them all in the sidebar.

* If you are a WordPress user, this can easily be accomplished by tweaking your WordPress theme. Replace your regular links display code with wp_list_bookmarks('orderby=rand&limit=10'). This tells WordPress to randomly show the links and show only ten at a time. For additional information on this function, refer to the WordPress Codex.

Please note that if you are using widgets with your theme, then you’ll need to download and activate a link management widget to accomplish something similar.

Next, organize your sidebar by priority. Place the items you wish to draw the most attention to up top and near to the content (if you have two or more sidebars). All the important items, especially time sensitive items should be placed up there.

Something else to consider when looking at your sidebar is whether the information found in it will be helpful to your readers or whether you just put it there because you thought it was cute. Nothing against cutesy, but remember that it may just be taking up valuable screen real estate.

Essentially, whatever is found in your sidebar should serve some purpose to you and your readers. Whether or not it’s to greet your new and returning visitors and offer them a quick bit of advice on where to go or tell them a bit about yourself or whether or not it’s to point out something that might be useful in the future, you should always ask yourself what purpose to me and my blog readers would this serve before adding something to your sidebar.