In today’s progressive society, we have the opportunity to speak on a variety of subjects and topics on a soapbox disguised as the web. Whether you’re interested in reaching the masses or tapping into a specific niche, creating a personal blog is a great way to market yourself, as well as share your ideas with the world.
Creating your own blog gives you control over the design, the aesthetics, the writing and the overall feel. This allows you to reach others in a unique way, so that readers remember your ideas over the countless other blogs and sites they visit on a daily basis. As our society relies more heavily on technology for our news and information, it is crucial that bloggers stay ahead of the curve. Doing so will allow you to market your ideas and share your thoughts in an innovative way, separating your approach from the millions of other writers that call the blogosphere home.
Because Thanksgiving is right around the corner, there is certainly a lot to be thankful for. Understanding that you may be new to the blogging scene, AmpliFound put together the top 5 WordPress plugins for bloggers to be thankful for, so that when the time comes for you to spruce up your digital soapbox, you have the arsenal to do it yourself!
Social media shows no signs of slowing down. Understanding this, it’s essential for bloggers to use social media and use is to their advantage. That is exactly what Digg Digg does. Displaying social share buttons on your blog articles will help readers easily share your content on their Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+ profiles. The cool thing about Digg Digg is that you have the flexibility to place the share buttons wherever you want. Whether they float to the left or right of the article, or you decide to place them near the final paragraph, Digg Digg gives you complete control over how your social share buttons play into the overall theme of your blog.
With millions of blogs across the web, you want to make sure yours indexable, crawlable and optimized from a search standpoint. In laymen’s terms, you want to make sure readers and internet users can find your exceptional content. The Yoast plugin from WordPress is the go-to for helping veteran and rookie bloggers handle almost every element of SEO you can think of. With this plugin, you have the ability to choose keywords for every post, create custom titles and descriptions to entice readers to click on your post in the search results, and much more. Many bloggers enjoy the features of Yoast for improving their overall content and keeping articles optimized with keyword focus in mind.
If you have a hard time keeping your blog organized, WordPress brings you this super helpful Editorial Calendar plugin to help you stay on track with your content creation. You may be ramping up your writing for the holiday season or planning out articles for the year ahead. Regardless of what your upcoming initiatives involve, Editorial Calendar gives you an overview of your blog and when each post will be published. You can easily alter your calendar by dragging and dropping posts, quickly edit article titles and scheduled times for posting, manage the status of each post, and neatly organize all of your upcoming content. If you’re working by yourself, this plugin is a great way to stay the course, but this plugin also works great if you have a team of writers contributing to your blog.
Although most of the plugins on our list are designed to make your life as a blogger just a little easier, this one will make you sleep easier at night. Knowing that your blog is secure from hackers and internet trolls is important for the overall well-being of your blog. This specific plugin will protect your blog from potentially damaging attacks by limiting user login attempts from others who may try to hack into your blog. Limit Login Attempts will also block an internet address from making further attempts after a specified limit or number of retries has been reached. Put your worries to sleep knowing that your blog is safe and secure.
No matter what the goal of your blog may be, it’s certainly important to capture the information of those who enter your site. The Hello Bar will allow you to do just that in a very convenient and customizable way, providing bloggers with a tool for a/b testing different calls-to-action, collecting email addresses, and more. Implementing a Hello Bar on your blog, in a variety of colors and styles, will let you amass email addresses to your database so you can leverage future content created on your blog. Remember to be creative with your calls-to-action and test out various power words to get users excited about signing up.
The blogging scene is filled with a variety of tools and plugins that can help improve the overall user experience, for both you and your readers. By understanding what’s on offer, you have the ability to make certain processes smoother and more enjoyable for you as the creator and for those who visit your blog.
