Now that you’ve got a brand-spanking-new blog, you’re set to start putting your thoughts down for the world to read. But who is going to read your blog? Your mom, certainly, but what about your friends or other visitors that stumble across it? How are you going to engage them and keep them coming back for more?
Besides writing good content, you have to provide your blog readers with connectivity to social networks and other information that will keep them clicking around your site, looking for more, and sharing it with their friends. And one of the best ways to do that is to include plugins on your blog. The WordPress platform has thousands of free plugins that you can post on your site to keep people interested.
Here are a few that might help you out:
- Add to Facebook: This plugin adds a little box to the top or bottom of each post with an invitation to share the post on Facebook. Since Facebook is the #1 social media site, this is probably the most important plugin you can add to your site to help readers share your thoughts with their friends.
- Facebook Profile Badge: Another great way to connect your blog to Facebook is through a Facebook badge that displays your Facebook profile picture along with other information like recent posts, friends, photos, and more. Putting this badge on your blog also makes it easier for your readers to friend you on Facebook without having to log on and do a search.
- Tweetmeme Retweet Button: Twitter is one of the fastest ways to spread your blog around the internet and get it in front of people who are interested in the same things you are. Putting this simple button in all your posts (via the plugin), gives your readers the ability to share your blog on Twitter at the click of a button.
- WP Google Buzz: Not as popular as Facebook and Twitter, Google Buzz is still a great way to help your readers share their favorite posts online.
- WP Flickr: Another way to keep your readers on your blog is to share pictures with them. If you have a Flickr account, you should embed the Flickr plugin on your site so that your readers can see all your recent pictures posted to Flickr and connect to you online.
- Social bookmarking: Besides connecting to Facebook and Twitter, you should provide your readers with a way to share your posts on social bookmarking sites like Delicious, Digg, Technorati, and more.
- Linkwithin: Once your readers have read one great post by you, you want them to read more, right? Putting the Linkwithin plugin on your site adds a section to the bottom of each post with thumbnails and suggestions and links to other stores on your blog that are similar to the one they just read—keeping them engaged longer on your site.
- Visitor maps: It’s nice to see where your blog traffic is coming from, but it’s also nice for your visitors to see where in the world people are reading your blog. A map like this plots and saves the location on each visitor based on their IP address.
- Clean Archives: Once you start adding regular content to your blog, your archives might get a little messy, especially if they are crammed over in a small column on the side of your blog. The Clean Archives plugin organizes your archives for you and places them on a separate page so visitors can easily brows through all your past posts.
- Audio Player: Do you want to share your favorite music with blog visitors? Try out a music player plugin that lets you upload playlists of music so your readers can connect with your music as well as your words.
This article is written by Gunter Jameson. He writes about several topics including travel, minimalism and online classes.
I too ve first used linkwithin in my wordpress blog, but it doesn't worked out well for me in wordpress, but the same works out well for blogger, so I moved from linkwithin to google releated posts, it also reduces bounce rate, but linkwithin shows them as new visitors
These are great plugins to make a blog more interesting. I am in fact is using some of them on my blog. Good sharing!
Linkwithin plugin will surely turn helpful for me 🙂
Thanks very much… 🙂
I am gonna make a new blog on wordpress.org platform and confused of plugins. It helped me a little..
Hi Did not know about the Clean Archives plugin and my blog needs it more than most. Grant
Can You Please update the lists of plugins with the current version of WP? Because some of the plugins are not supported in new version.
Used some of them . will check others to fit my blog .
Features are good. But I think using direct code is better than using plugins for these share buttons
Yes Direct Codes are always good but newbie cannot do manual editing so plugins are good. Direct codes are not always good.
Clean Archives plugin is really a new one for me.Surely I’ll try this plugin in my blog.Thanks for sharing.
plugins are the heart of wp . but it can kill you with an overdose …
that’s true too. I should have probably mentioned that. thanks!
Nice plugins Gunter. It will be definitely increase our online presence. thanks for sharing.
I don’t think that audio player plugin will help any blogger though it can slow down your blogs load up time, therefore it will effect hence cause less traffic.
definitely something to consider. although it’s is a fun little plugin; i mean, who doesn’t like music right? 😉
Clean archives plugin is for me …. will just try it out … Thanks buddy …
haven’t tried Linkwithin yet… Seems to do soon.. thanks for the post….
it really is a helpful plugin, and allows your readers to find relevant posts within a certain topic that they are most interested in. I believe this blog has that feature with the “most related stories” at the end of each post. 🙂
Digg Digg could manage all the Social Media plugins you’ve mentioned. Thanks for sharing this list.
Get a caching plugin like WP-Super-Cache or Total Cache. No one likes a slow website. 🙂
I think for new blogs it is not good.. It will only help if your website blog is getting 1000’s of visitors daily..
All Plugins are common but WP to Buzz is new for me. Thanks for sharing.. 🙂
Wow nice collections dude
Awesome post! i need to spice up my blog with some of this pluggins…. thanks a lot for sharing. have fun.
I’m glad you like it!
The link within plug-in may be something worth trying on my blog to increase the average time on site. Providing a relevant blog post at the end of the current blog would be fantastic. -Anthony at Swanson
Thanks Gunter. I'm going to pick up that clean archives plugin. It would be the most helpful to me at the moment. Thanks for sharing the list.
You’re welcome! I hope you find the Clean Archives plugin useful. Definitely helps keep the archives more organized. 🙂
Yeah ! I had used few of them. Really nice plugin but you missed some basic Plugin for SEO. SEO related plugin may spice up more 😉
For SEO Plugin, All in One SEO plugin is best and I have never seen better plugin that All in One SEO. You can use it.