Your choice of blogging platform can help you get the most out of your writing. WordPress is popular with many writers as it’s so adaptable. If you want to customise the platform, these 15 tools and plugins will help you get the most out of it.
Yoast SEO:
This tool is designed to make it easy to track and monitor your SEO. It sits in your dashboard and helps you see how good your SEO is as you write. It will show you how strong your keywords are, how good your readability is, and more.
Floating Social Bar:
Social share bars are a must, but a lot can slow your site down. This plugin is designed to give you those tools without affecting your blog’s speed. Now your readers can share your blog on any social media site that they choose.
Easy Word Count:
Keeping your blogs short is one of the best ways to keep readers interested. This tool will help you keep them to the correct length.
Academized:
Plagiarism is a real problem online, and sites will be penalised by Google if they’re found to be using another writer’s work. This can happen if you don’t mean it to. Use this site to check your work before posting it.
CoSchedule Headline Analyzer:
A good headline is crucial to getting readers to click through to your blog. This tool will give you data on your headline, and give suggestions on how to improve it.
WPData Tables:
This plugin helps you create responsive tables for your blog. It’s easy to use and helps you create visual interest in your posts.
The Noun Project:
This plugin gives you icons for almost anything you can think of. You can use them as identifiers, or as images in their own right. They can bring a lot of interest to your blog without the effort.
Buy essay:
Proofreading is an essential part of blog writing. This tool helps you find an expert to check your blogs for you before publication.
Playbuzz:
This plugin is designed to help you create interactive elements, such as quizzes and polls. It’s a tool that you can use to increase engagement. You can also use it to gauge what your readers want from you.
Australian Help:
If you need an editor to polish up your blog ready for publication, you’ll find one here easily. They’ll edit it according to your notes, and send it back to you ready to be used.
Cool Timeline:
As the name implies, this tool enables you to create embeddable timelines in your blogs, good if you need more visual interest.
Link Patrol:
Links are important, as they will show readers that you’re a well-researched blog. This checks that all the blogs you’re using are legit.
Big Assignments:
This writing service is capable of putting out different types of writing, including blogs. Give your writer the topic and any info they need, and they’ll get it written. It can save you time when you’re looking to hit deadlines.
Followerwonk:
This tool helps you find new trending topics to include in your blog. This is helpful when you’re out of ideas, or want to use a trend to launch a blog.
YARPP:
This tool will help you retain readers after they finish, by sending them to a related post.
These tools will help you get the most out of your WordPress blog. Give them a try, and you’ll see just how much your readership and engagement can grow.
Brenda Berg is a professional with over 15 years of experience in business management, marketing and entrepreneurship. Consultant and tutor for college students and entrepreneurs at Resumention and UK top writers. She believes that constant learning is the only way to success. Besides, she regularly writes for her blog Letsgoandlearn.
It’s easy for WordPress users to increase site traffic and reduce bounce rate by adding related posts thumbnails to the bottom of posts. Visitors will spend more time on your site to browse these related posts, and may even click on a sponsored post (a paid related post or ad), which can make you money. WordPress offers many related post plugins to generate related posts for you automatically, and some plugins help you choose related posts manually. Here’s our rundown of the ten best similar post plugins for WordPress.
10- Yet Another Related Posted Plugin (YARPP), with more than 3.4 million downloads, offers a built-in algorithm to find and support text and thumbnail related posts. It supports RSS feed display and shows an excerpt from each post.
On the downside, you can’t use YARPP on WPEngine-managed WordPress Hosting sites. YARPP uses up a lot of resources, so if you have a large site, choose the Pro version, which is stored on YARPP’s servers.
9- Editorial Assistant by Zemanta Link to similar content from other Zemanta network members as well as your content with its free plugin, Editorial Assistant. Other network members may return the favor, sending more traffic your way.
Related posts include thumbnails, and you can add related images with a click. Edit related posts or display in a widget. Editorial Assistant offers six layouts, which you can customize with CSS. There’s no shortcode option, so you’ll have to take the long way around if you want to embed certain files or objects.
8- Considered one of the fastest WordPress plugins, Yuzo Related Posts offers easy installation and a minimalist design. Customize text, control categories where thumbnails appear, or show related posts only in a specific post or page. If you want to use similar posts to monetize your site, you’re out of luck. Yuzo doesn’t provide revenue sharing or monetization.
7- Contextual Related Posts creates a list of related articles based on title and post content, which improves the likelihood of readers clicking on them. These plugin features include caching, thumbnail support, widgets, and a built-in stylesheet. Drawbacks – It shows thumbnails in a bulleted list, and slows down larger sites.
6- JetPack by Automatic contains several modules. If you don’t need the other modules, you can keep them deactivated and preserve your resources.
All the content processing takes place in the cloud, so it won’t tax your server. Free and easy to install, JetPack will work for users who don’t need to customize their related posts layout. You’ll need to recode it to make changes.
5- WordPress Related Posts adds related content to the end of your posts automatically, increasing user engagement. The customizable WRP widget supports thumbnails, caching and multiple styles.
Like Editorial Assistant, WRP can share your content with other users in the Zemanta network. There’s no way to know which articles the plugin will recommend to the network, so you’ll need to read content yourself to make sure it’s something you want to share with a much wider audience.
4- Instead of showing related content posts at the bottom of your article, Inline Related Posts features related posts in the boy of the article. When similar post text or thumbnails appear in the middle of an article, readers are more engaged and more likely to click. Used by Entrepreneur, Financial Times and other business websites, Inline Related Posts may boost page views on low traffic sites.
Inline Related Posts offers easy set-up, and you can position your related content anywhere in the post. You’ll need to use another plugin if you want to show related posts at the bottom of your article and within the text.
3- Shareaholic, a comprehensive plugin for sharing posts, displaying related content and generating revenue, bills itself as an “all-in-one content application platform.” Easy to install and configure, Shareaholic supports bitly and other URL shorteners. Other features include social media follow buttons, share buttons (with a choice of “floating” buttons), and built-in social analytics. The plugin may be prone to occasional bugs, and there’s not a lot of leeway regarding monetization features.
2- If you want more control of the similar posts appearing on your site, the Manual Related Posts plugin may work for you. It lets you choose which related posts will appear under your content. You can also select custom post types and pages. Additional features include filtering and shortcode support.
1-Related Posts for WordPress supports fast text and thumbnail display of related posts. Offers a quick install, and you can use shortcode or a widget anywhere on the page to display related posts. The paid premium version of this plugin provides layout control, multisite support and overwritable templates.
Which Similar Post Plugin Offers the Best Features?
Although all of these similar posts plugins will help ramp up your page views, Shareaholic offers features that work in tandem with related posts, and won’t drain resources like some of the others. The free Related Posts for WordPress plugin is also an excellent choice if you’re on a budget and don’t want to use a lot of resources.
Tim Brown is a designer and developer doing WordPress web design and focused on the disciplines of driving traffic and conversion. You can tweet him at @timbdesignmpls.