5 WordPress Plugins That Every Blogger Needs

When I started my very first few blog sites, I caught hell maintaining them and retaining those 1,000 monthly viewers that I had. I ran a DJ blog, a Sandwich recipe Blog (That I’m currently considering revamping Now) and The very first attempt at this blog and I originally did them all on Blogger’s platform and without plugins.

I literally had to do everything the hard way. When I didn’t know what to do, I used google to search every aspect of getting those mere 1000 viewers each month and I worked my tail off trying to push it out to the world. This is how I learned basic and intermediate coding, color scheme, SEO and more.

Back then, There was no plug-in that automated posts, helped with my SEO, or an easy coding app built in. It was just all hard work. Everything that’s in plug-ins now were either expensive or took time to learn back then.

Most successful bloggers will tell you that running a successful blog is a lot of fun but requires lots of work on the backend. Today we are lucky to have help that’s pretty much at our fingertips. Here’s a few plugins that has helped me with my site and will hopefully help you get ahead with running a successful blog.

WordPress SEO by Yoast

Yoast in my opinion should come built into the box when you’re setting up a site with WordPress. It’s a life saver, time saver and a piggy bank saver all in one. Yoast will save you hundreds, if not thousands by helping you get expensive SEO tactics that many SEO marketers use, practically free.

The Yoast plugin providea:

Page Analysis
The WordPress SEO plugins Page Analysis functionality checks simple things you’re bound to forget. It checks, for instance, if you have images in your post and whether they have an alt tag containing the focus keyword for that post. It also checks whether your posts are long enough, if you’ve written a meta description and if that meta description contains your focus keyword, if you’ve used any subheadings within your post, etc..

Technical WordPress Search Engine Optimization
While out of the box WordPress is pretty good for SEO, it needs some tweaks here and there. This WordPress SEO plugin guides you through some of the settings needed, for instance by reminding you to enable pretty permalinks.

Meta & Link Elements

With the WordPress SEO plugin, you can control which pages Google shows in its search results and which pages it doesn’t show. By default, it will tell search engines to index all of your pages, including category and tag archives, but only show the first pages in the search results. It’s not very useful for a user to end up on the third page of your “personal” category, right?

What’s Not to love about this plugin. Find it Here.

Jetpack For WordPress

Jetpack is one of those plugin that works directly hand in hand with WordPress. It’s another one of those plugins that offers many tools in one. Jetpack for WordPress offers:

- Single Account Log On

- Website Stats (If you’re not a tech savvy nerd like me, this helps you from having to use external sources such as Google Analytics, Which I Love!)

- Extra SideBar Widgets For Extra Customization

- Contact forms

- VaultPress For automatic backups

- and many other features, Check out More Here.

Since It’s already a part of WordPress core, It doesn’t even take up much space on your hosting account.

Editorial Calendar

Editorial Calendar is one that’s fairly new to me, personally.I actually found out about editorial Calendar after checking out a few plugins that a few other bloggers use. I was actually doing it the hard way before. I would print or buy an external calendar and use it just for blog dates and etc.

The editorial calendar gives you an overview of your blog and when each post will be published. You can drag and drop to move posts, edit posts right in the calendar, and manage your entire blog’s post.

Use the editorial calendar plugin to get a better overview of when your blog posts will be posted on a calendar format. If you’re not comfortable with the time or date, just drag it to the another date through the plugin.

Google Analytics

One of my all time favorites. Google has always been one of my all time favorites but the google analytics for WordPress plugin and the fact that Yoast made it has made me a huge lover of them.

Google analytics when used right will defiantly help you get your blog going by keeping track of keywords that users are using to find you. It shows detailed data that shows you what and who are checking out your site. This should help you understand your market a little better and give you an insight on how to continue marketing better.
. Check Out More Here

Revive Old Post

One of the tools that has helped me and will probably continue to help me find new and retain old readers. Review old post keeps your old content that get lost with time circulating. It’s also a simple plugin. You simply setup basic account info, link your social media accounts and choose the occurrence time frame. I set mines up once and haven’t had to change any settings since and it keeps my followers and fans on edge by keeping the content that they would’ve never have found through my site.

WooCommerce

As of October 1st, I decided to add a plugin that I use often now instead of starting a new post. One of my new favorite plugins is woocommerce. Woocommerce is a wordpresss plugin that integrates with your current wordpress website or blog almost effortless.

As a brand consultant and coach, I often sell physical products as well as downloadable products such as my Ultimate brand building workbook. Ive use woocommerce on numerous client’s websites as a web developer, also. There are many settings to fine tune it to host your products for sale. Woocomerce also has many settings for the different level of sellers. It’s easy to use and complex enough to host an entire storefront. If you want to learn more about woocommerce, click here

Here are the 6 plugins that i use for my blogs. What do you use?

About the author

Greg D. Jones