How to be a good blogger? Well, every good blogger should think the answer to this question:
“How can I attract my blog readers, so that they will become an avid reader of my posts and continuously visit my blog?”
The answer is very essential, since more than thousands of new posts that are published every day and makes the competition fiercer for each and every author.
However, creating attractive articles that make your readers want to come back is not very hard. Providing amazing content is obviously the answer. However, through this post we will share the latest WordPress Plugins that can greatly improve the number of shares and the awesomeness of your blog. Here are the top 10 list of WordPress plugins to increase social media sharing of your articles and blog performance:
1. Digg Digg
Social proof of sharing is one of the most important things in the blog post. From BrightEdge’s research, it has proven to increase Social sharing by up to 7 times if included.
Digg Digg makes it super easy to add a floating share bar to your blog post, just like Mashable for example. You can also choose to add buttons either before or after your posts with the plugin.
Unique feature: Digg Digg also features the latest sharing button options such as Pinterest and Buffer.
2. Hello Bar
It adds a simple line above your articles that you can fill with any message you wish. The plugin is used and trusted by some of the biggest bloggers out there, plus it also offers some great customization options, to be either displayed at the top of your page or at the bottom.
Unique feature: What is most impressive about Hello Bar is the analytics options, allowing you to track exactly how many clicks you are getting on your promotions.
3. WP Touch
WP Touch is a nice plugin to have your blog optimized for the millions of iPhone, Android and other Smartphone users. Within a split second of installing this plugin, anyone arriving at your blog from a mobile phone will have a beautifully formatted site in front of them. It gives you some great customization options so you can truncate titles, hide excerpts and other things that are a pain to get working on your mobile normally.
Unique feature: WP Touch has advertising options built in right into the plugin, so you can capitalize more on mobile traffic.
4. Sexy Bookmarks
An awesome plugin solution to add a ton of different social bookmarking buttons to your blog is Sexy Bookmarks by Shareaholic. Especially if you are looking for a plugin that covers some not so well known buttons, this one will be providing them for you.
The plugin also comes with the option to be installed for a great number of other blogging platforms such as Tumblr or as a stand-alone for any website. It is overall a more solid solution for your blog.
Unique feature: The plugin enables a customization option to add a small line of text, that adds that extra amount of personalization to your blog.
5. W3 Total Cache
With W3 Total Cache, you have one of the most powerful caching plugins out there, that will increase the loading time of your blog up to 10 times. It will cache each and every element of your site and readers will be able to read your posts in a split second.
Unique feature: The ability to individually turn on or off object caching, database caching and other options so performance is absolutely optimized.
6. The Slide
There have been many attempts of products that aim to keep readers on your site after they have read one of your articles. The Slide is a simple plugin that slides into your page, halfway through an article, just like the New York Times has for example. The article suggested is not just a random article. The Slide uses a sophisticated algorithm to pick the most relevant and related content for your readers.
Unique feature: An amazing part is that the Slide also allows you to place sharing buttons right on the widget and get more social traffic for your blog.
7. Twitter Follow Button and Facebook Subscribe Buttons
Of course, strictly no WordPress plugins, the Twitter follow button and Facebook subscribe button are two of the most indispensable things for bloggers. Although mentioning the two buttons is quite an obvious tip for many, as they are quite well known, there are still a lot of blogs, who don’t make use of them. Both can easily be implemented by copy and pasting the code snippet into a sidebar text widget on your blog.
Unique feature: The process of following or subscribing is so seamless and doesn’t cause the reader to leave the page.
8. All in One SEO Pack
Although there exists a ton of great SEO solution out there, one of the most reliable and well maintained plugins is the “All in one SEO Pack”. Especially if you aren’t too familiar with any SEO tactics, this plugin makes it dead simple to understand the most important ones.
The plugin automatically generates Meta tags, optimizes your post titles for search engines and helps you to detect and avoid duplicate content. Even if you have very little SEO knowledge, this plugin will be of great help for you.
Unique feature: A goodie to mention of this plugin is that it enables you to manually include meta tags (title, description and keywords) for each page and post on your site.
9. Social Metrics
Another handy solution every blogger should know about is a plugin called Social Metrics. It gives you a slick dashboard inside your WordPress interface, and allows you to track and compare how well each of your post performances on Social Media. By being able to track each of your posts in comparison to each other, you could focus on improving your content’s quality. It is also interesting to see that some posts perform better on different social networks.
Unique feature: There is no setup involved for you. You can start tracking seconds after you install the plugin.
10. Social Media Widget
A lot of the times, you might want to display larger amounts of your different Social Media profiles, especially as Pinterest and others are being added to the mix and official buttons aren’t available yet. With the super easy to handle Social Media widget, you will be able to do exactly that and display any Social Networking profile you can think of.
Unique feature: What is super handy with this plugin, is that you are even able to create your own icons of Social Media accounts and personalize the look and feel much more.