There are approximately 152 million blogs on the internet. In 2019, it’s getting harder and harder to compete for attention. Readers expect quite a bit when they come to your blog. Unless your post or blog page is visually appealing, engaging, and well organized, it’s unlikely they will stay for long. Another goal for bloggers should be to optimize their content to drive traffic and make social sharing easy for engaged readers. Luckily improving these areas is super easy with plugins for blogging.
Here are the top 10 plugins for a successful blog for 2019:
Beamer.
Beamer is the best way to engage and notify readers from any page on your site. Beamer is a newsfeed that sits within your site where you can share updates on new content. Anyone who comes to your site can open up the newsfeed by clicking a “What’s New” tab in your navigation or an icon in your interface. A feed opens up in a sidebar with all of your new post updates. It keeps your pages simple and creates one central place for all your new updates any reader can access from any page. You can also enable push notifications so that users who have opted in can get updates on your new content even when they’re not on your site. It’s a great way to get readers back to your site and anticipating your new content.
Yoast SEO.
Blogging is as much technical as it is creative if you’re trying to drive relevant traffic. Yoast SEO helps you make sure that your content is SEO optimized and structured in a way that is beneficial. Yoast helps you identify keywords, make sure you have the right density, improve your readability, and gives you actionable tips on how to improve structure for SEO. It’s helpful section sits right within the blog post editor to help you while you post and gives you a red or green notification on the top to immediately show you how your posts stack up SEO wise.
AddThis.
There’s nothing more important than getting your content out there and in front of the right eyes for blogging and allowing your interested readers to do that for you makes it easy. AddThis adds social share buttons to your posts to make it easy for readers who love your content to share your posts with their networks. AddThis also has the option to add a “Follow Me” button to posts so you can promote your other pages as a blogger. You can also add link promotions to posts: a box pops up at the top with a CTA to whatever you want at a certain point on a post. AddThis makes your posts actionable and inspires engagement and sharing.
Title Experiments.
Top blogging sites like Buzzfeed test almost fifty headlines per post to see what drives the most traffic and engagement. That’s a bit of an overkill for any other blog, but you can also test headlines using Title Experiments. Title Experiments sits within your post editing interface and allows you to add and A/B test multiple headlines per post. You can check data to see which ones perform the best to determine your best titles.
SumoMe.
SumoMe is a not really just one plugin it’s a collection of marketing and content tools in one plugin you can pick and choose to use with one install. In the SumoMe dashboard, you have the option to use a list builder which collects emails from readers at the optimal time, a “welcome mat” which opens up when someone first enters to offer them something in exchange for email, image sharing buttons to help promote your posts, and a text highlighter that allows readers to highlight and share parts of your text on their social accounts easily. All of these tools are great for helping drive traffic and engagement with your content more easily.
Click to Tweet by Coschedule.
Coschedule has a tool that helps you get interested readers to quote you and share the link to your post with one click. Click to Tweet puts a box in your post with a quote and CTA for readers to share it on Twitter. It’s an easy way to inspire social sharing through your readers and drive traffic back to your posts.
upPrev.
Instead of just suggesting related posts at the bottom of the page or in the sidebar, this plugin creates a strategically timed popup with a CTA on the bottom and side of the post with a recommended post to read next. It’s a lot more engaging than a sidebar and looks more personalized so readers are more likely to click through and explore other posts on your site. Without a distracting sidebar or footer, your post page can look more clean and focused.
Lazy Load.
Page speed for blogging is really important. The vast majority of traffic will bounce if your page does not load fast enough. Lazy Load helps you avoid this by putting off loading images completely until they are visible by your reader. This helps the page and content come up quicker and the images come up when they need to, to save you on a few loading seconds here and there which speeds up your page overall by quite a bit. It’s an easy way to improve your page loading speeds specifically for blogging without other heavy plugins.
I Recommend This.
Readers are really used to social media feeds and respond well to likes and recommends thanks to blogging platforms like Medium, Reddit, and Quora. It’s easier to add some social proof to your own posts by adding the option for readers to like or recommend posts.The count is displayed by the posts where they appear through your site so readers can see how people respond to your content up front. It drives engagement and grabs attention from new readers and shows that your content is interactive.
Envira Gallery.
Adding images and other media to your posts can make them more engaging and get you more views. It’s helpful to breakup text with images and Envira Gallery allows you to add responsive image and video galleries to your posts and pages. It’s lightweight so it won’t severely kill your page speed. There are multiple ways to organize and design your galleries so they blend in and enhance your posts. You can add slideshow and fullscreen options as well.
Adding just a few elements to enhance your blog more visually appealing and engaging can help you drive traffic and keep them coming back. Try these few plugins to easily and quickly improve your blog. Try adding Beamer today and increase engagement 10x with one plugin install.
