Love Your Blog: 4 Essential WordPress Plugins For Content Marketing

Bloggers and WordPress. You guys go together like chocolate and peanut butter (yum!).

So let’s talk about some ways to make the most of your beautiful partnership. We rounded up four of our favorite plugins to help take your content marketing to new heights.


scribe

Scribe

Scribe is a plugin developed by the people at Copyblogger, so you know it’s good for you and your content.

Scribe analyzes your blog posts to make sure the content aligns with the rest of your content marketing strategy. It’s an easy way to keep your voice and your topics consistent, especially if you have more than one writer for your blog.

The plugin also includes easy tools to boost your blog post’s SEO with custom title tags and meta descriptions. We use that feature ourselves here at AWeber!

Install Scribe

Optimizely

Would a different headline bring more traffic to this blog post? If I change the call-to-action, will I get more sales? Will more images get me more Facebook shares?

If you want to know the answer, you have to test. Specifically, split test.

Optimizely, a web site split testing tool, offers a WordPress plugin to make split testing your blog super simple. If your content’s not as effective as possible, what’s the point? Optimize it by testing for the best result!

Install Optimizely

Editorial Calendar

Quick! Do you have a blog post written for three Tuesdays from now? It’s important to be able to see when your posts are scheduled and where you have gaps in your calendar. And keeping a separate calendar in Google Drive or a calendar app can get cumbersome.

Editorial Calendar displays all your scheduled posts in a handy calendar inside your WordPress dashboard so you don’t need to keep referencing an outside app to make sure you have enough posts to keep your audience engaged with your content.

Install Editorial Calendar

WordPress Web Form Widget

(A little bit of shameless self-promotion?) If you’re still relying on people to keep up with your blog by visiting it every day or through an RSS feed, you’re missing out. These aren’t reliable methods to keep readers coming back.

What is reliable: An email newsletter, auto-generated with posts from your blog (AWeber can do that for you, and it’s easy to set up). People are bound to check their email at some time during the day. And when they do, they’ll see your blog posts there. And probably click through to read them, too.

But you’ve got to build a list of readers, first. The WordPress Web Form Widget makes that easy. With a few clicks, you’ll have an email sign up form installed in your blog’s sidebar that adds people directly to your AWeber list.

But wait, there’s more! The WordPress Web Form Widget also lets you add a checkbox to your comments section so people can opt to get your newsletter just by clicking the box when they leave a comment. Plus, you can track your subscriber stats right inside WordPress without having to leave and log into your AWeber account.

Install the Web Form Widget

What’s Your Best Blogging Companion?

Do you use any of these plugins? Do you have a different favorite we missed? Share them in the comments!

17 Comments

  1. Rishi

    2/13/2014 2:14 pm

    Mine is Skitch! Great for adding annotated screen shots on my blog 🙂

    I highly recommend the free old version (not the one branded by Evernote). You can download it here:
    http://www.oldapps.com/mac/skitch_for_mac.php

  2. Summer

    2/14/2014 10:20 am

    Hey Rebekah, would love to add another one to your list!

    Try the Atomic Reach platform + its plugin, Audience Engager!

    Atomic Reach’s content optimization platform contains everything you need to engage your audience every time. Our platform analyzes your historical articles to find your ideal performance score and unlocks detailed insights about your audience, so that you can perfect your content in real-time using one of our many CMS plug-ins.

    The Atomic Audience Engager? is a diagnostic tool for your CMS to help you take the guesswork out of perfecting your content for your target audience.

    If you need help or have any questions, reach out to me any time!

  3. Ryan Law

    2/16/2014 6:57 am

    Stick a dedicated SEO plugin like Yoast SEO into the mix, and you’ve got an impressive blogging platform set up! Implementing an editorial calender is also one of the best things I ever did to improve the functionality of my WP blog.

    These 5 plugins included in this article…
    http://contendercontent.com/5-free-essential-wordpress-plugins-small-businesses/
    …also make a great addition to any WP arsenal. Whilst they aren’t going to outperform a HubSpot platform any time soon, they can come pretty close for marketers on a budget.

    Thanks for the post, I’ll be checking out Optimizely as a direct result!

  4. Kenneth von Rauch

    2/16/2014 7:29 am

    Thanks for the roundup. I’ve heard about all the plugins and used most of them 🙂 I personally love the Editorial Calendar plugin because it allows me to learn at a glance which exactly post goes live on which exactly date. Also, I’m thinking to check out Scribe because it sounds really great.

  5. Shannon

    2/17/2014 11:11 am

    Yoast’s SEO plugin is a definite must have for me. WP Smush.it and WP-Optimize are another 2 I highly recommend.

    I also love the Editorial Calendar plugin. I have yet to actually school myself to post on regular days, but I’m working on it!

  6. Greg

    2/17/2014 1:21 pm

    I agree with Ryan – add one of the SEO plugins such as Yoast. Yoast is nice because it helps you learn SEO by analyzing the content as you go. Also, another popular plugin is NextGen; gallery of photos. Content always works better with a few photos to help the reader understand the content at a glance, etc.

  7. Brad

    2/17/2014 1:42 pm

    Don’t forget about Akismet so you don’t have to deal with that dreaded comment spam!

  8. Amy Hagerup

    2/17/2014 2:32 pm

    I love my plugin SEO pressor. Great for being sure my blog posts are optimized for helping me be found.

  9. Fred

    2/17/2014 6:40 pm

    Hi,

    I would ad this ones :

    – WordPress SEO by Yoast
    – Add Sig : pour ajouter un code HTML (banni?re de pub, auto-r?pondeur?) ? la fin des articles.
    – Login LockDown : pour ?viter le piratage de votre blog.
    – Subscribe To Comments : pour permettre ? vos visiteurs de s?inscrire ? vos commentaires
    – Tweet old post : pour poster vos vieux articles automatiquement sur Twitter
    – Ultimate Google Analytics : pour analyser vos statistiques analytics de mani?re simple
    – WPtouch : pour visualiser votre blog sur iPad & Mobile
    – Nrelated post

  10. Robb Gorringe

    2/18/2014 12:18 am

    Hi Rebekah,

    I started using the Editorial Calendar. And it’s a huge help, and it keeps me on my toes.

  11. Martin

    2/20/2014 2:06 am

    Ya WordPress SEO is pretty good. Sometimes you need a PhD to understand it though. When it comes to content management, I am always open to new ideas. :o)

  12. Martin

    2/20/2014 2:09 am

    I also wrote about the best plugins for photographers (although these WordPress plugins will fit anyone, anywhere, as long as you have enthusiasm):
    http://www.martinhurley.com/best-wordpress-plugins-for-photographers/
    Thanks – Martin

  13. A. Halvarson

    2/20/2014 8:57 am

    I desperately needed this! I am in a seriously blog rut and planning to get out soon and trying to come up with new ideas for posting so I’m not bored!

  14. Ivan Widjaya

    2/20/2014 8:32 pm

    Amazing plugins. Reading these makes me think that I am lagging way behind when it comes to WordPress technology. I’ll check these out as I know that they can be really useful for my site.

  15. Sara Ashraf

    2/22/2014 6:55 am

    A comprehensive list of all that is important. I am agree with with author is pushing their affiliates and not really helping the new WordPress author.

  16. deen

    4/22/2014 7:39 am

    Yoast’s SEO plugin is useful.

  17. Jason

    4/25/2014 2:45 am

    I agree with deen, yoast plugin is a must have for all wordpress sites. I also use optimizely for split testing, so easy to use.