WordPress’s developer community is the most innovative that I have come across on the web. And they make some fascinating plugins that power a WordPress blog beyond belief, so much so that WordPress can comfortable stake claim as a powerful CMS just because of these plugins.
There are thousands of super coders who come up with some amazing plugins to enhance WordPress’s features. Here are a few of those which can make visitors dig deeper into your blog and thereby create a more engaged community. Whether your un a corporate blog, a personal branding one or a blog to make money, an active, engaged community who spend a lot of time on your site is what every blogger aspires to have. These plguins will help get that done better:
Popularity Contest – Popularity Contest keeps a count of your post, category and archive views, comments, trackbacks, etc. and uses them to determine which of your posts are most popular. This tends to tingle visitors curiosity and drive traffic to older but more popular posts and thereby provide more value to visitors. So while on one hand you will have your recent posts, even older and must read posts get traction through this plugin. It is best to use it with a Sidebar widget plugin by the same name.
WP-Email – Allows people to send your WordPress blog’s post to a friend. This is the msot underrated of all WordPress plugin to my mind, and that’s because it is appalling to see so many bloggers simply ignore the power of email. Let’s be clear on this, no matter how many social networks or other platforms spring up Email is not going anywhere (even with Wave coming out soon). And users emailing a certain post to someone is perhaps the ultimate level of engagement.
Best Related Posts – A recent plguin amongst the scores of related posts plugins out there. What sets BRP apart from others are two factors. One it automatically pulls images and displays thumbnails along with the link to related posts. And secondly it is remarkably easy to customize and install and gels very well with the blogs CSS. All you need to do is isntall and paste a simple code in the Single.php file and you are done.
Random Posts/Random Redirect – Two separate plugins however does a similar sort of job. The random posts plugin lets you display a set of random posts on the sidebar from a specific category. The random redirect plugin on the other hand allows you to create a link to a random post on your blog. It basically lets readers browse in a StumbleUpon-like fashion.
Landing Sites – Is an ultimate plugin to impress visitors as well as blog owners if you manage someone else’s site. It essentially acts as related posts for search queries. In simpler but more elaborate terms, if you have a visitor comign to your site after searching a certain term, then this plugin shows them related posts to their search on your blog.
Notifixious – A lot of web surfing afficionados spend most of their time on IM, social networking hasn’t killed this habit just yet. There is a plugin to make the most of this as well. Notofixious – this plugin allows you to notify your readers on their Instant Messaging (AIM, MSN, GTalk, ICQ…), Email or SMS when you publish new posts! It also adds a widget to your blog to allow your users to choose on which channel they want to be notified!
Share Buttons – The ultimate engagement tools after email probably are the social sharing buttons to promote or share a blog post on social bookmarking sites, social networks or microblogging communities. They provide a high level of interaction and make it easy for your post to go viral on the web.
Said 6 and gave 7 instead, as they used to do back int he days of meta blogging wave, one bonus tip for you.
