Playing With Plugins – Make Your Blog Work Harder

The plugin marketplace is my new favourite place to play. A seemingly endless space of innovative shortcuts to turbocharge your blog into the blogger sphere

Working in digital marketing I spend my time advising brands how to best maximise the reach of their content, getting their articles, videos and photos in front of the right people at the right time. The strategic principals of getting your brand and content seen remain the same whether you are a global powerhouse or a small self-starting the blog like IncatoInuit. The difference is in the budget and resources available to execute such strategy. This is where plugins come into play.

Writing and creating content is hard work and can be extremely time-consuming. As such I’ve been looking for Plugins that can help the posts that I create to work as hard as possible.

I’ve spent the past couple of weeks investigating the top plugins that can help bloggers to Curate, Create and Distribute content.

 

 

 

 

Plugins are in essence additional pieces of code that you can add to your website in order to carry out an action. The plugin marketplace is vastly varied with plugin’s designed for near enough every blogger’s need whether creative or practical.

WordPress has a rich and robust plugin library that all WordPress users can access free of charge. For more complex coding requirements, there are Plugin marketplaces such as Code Canyon which provide a greater variety of plugins but quite often at a cost.

I’ve picked a couple of plugin’s from each category which I believe to be a MUST for any travel blog

If you’re new to blogging this plugin is a must. This handy tool enables you to score each of your blog posts against your target audience to pressure test how suitable your post is.

Atomic Engager provides you with critical insights for every post you write that helps you to engage your target audience and amplify your content. Once you’ve completed the first draft of your post, Atomic Reach scores your post out of 100, analysing the quality of the linguistics, the title, the posts structure and how easy it is to read. The tool then gives you hints and tips as to the best way to improve your audience match score. If you’re new to blogging this tool is a must as it provides you with handy pointers to help you to supercharge your posts.

Next Gen Gallery | Free (premium versions available)

We all know the power of visual communication, therefore, it’s crucial that your site is equipped to not only store but show rich display-based posts. NextGen Gallery is one of the most feature-rich WordPress plugins for creating image galleries. This plugin offers a great deal of flexibility in creating gallery content, including the ability to watermark images, create slideshows, organise content into albums and use different themes for display of your images. You can choose from free and pro versions of the plugin.

Instagram Slider Widget |Free 

With 14m people using Instagram every month in the UK, Instagram is no longer a nice to have a social platform, it’s a necessity if you want to reach your audience. It’s now pretty common practice to find Instagram sliders built into the majority of pre-built ThemeForest site themes. If however you don’t currently have one built into your site the best I’ve found is the Instagram Slider Widget. It’s responsive and can show up to 24 of the latest images from any public Instagram account.

Interactive World Maps – £12.90

When I started building my blog one of the key features I wanted was an interactive map. Finding a plugin that enabled me to format the maps in a similar style to the rest of my site was near impossible. After weeks of trawling through the web, I stumbled upon Interactive World Maps. Although a premium plugin, this WordPress plugin enables you to create as many maps as you want, with interactive and coloured markers, continents, countries or regions. All maps are completely customizable and interactive as well as easy to edit. You can find our version here

WordPress SEO by Yoast – Free plugin

SEO is arguably the most important and essential way to increase the reach of your content. As few of us are SEO experts there are luckily a plethora of SEO plugin’s that can help you get the most organic reach. WordPress SEO is not just an SEO plugin, it is the complete website optimisation package. Apart from adding titles and descriptions to your articles, it also allows you to add open graph meta data, do page analysis, publish XML sitemap, and so much more. It is easy to install and setup and ensures every post you write is fully SEO optimised.

Hope this helps you to navigate the world of Plugin’s to help supercharge your blog. Would love to know how you get on.

Have fun!