Adding a region to the Omega template
I finally found out from this post here drupal.stackexchange.com/questions/100102/… that I was overlooking the theme.info file in the themes root directory:

regions[sidebar_first]  = First sidebar
regions[sidebar_second] = Second sidebar
regions[sidebar_bottom] = Bottom sidebar
regions[footer]         = Footer


Works perfectly now. There are three steps to adding a region to the Omega template.