These plugins that will upgrade your business blog to a professional experience overnight.
For your business blog to succeed, you must meet the basic expectations of your audience. Among these expectations are not just that your content is great, but also that you have all of the technical aspects covered. This may sound simple, but many business blogs miss the boat on basic sharing and blog functionality that readers have come to expect. All of the plugins that are listed below are free and able to be installed in just a few clicks.
Here are a few can't-miss blog plugins that every organization needs to meet the expectations of your visitors.
1. Article Performance Measurement (ex: Social Metrics)
Constantly publishing articles and not measuring performance is like flying blind - not a great use of your time! Business bloggers need to constantly take the pulse of visitors and understand what topics work and what doesn't. This can be easily viewed in one page by using a social share tracking plugin. All of the social shares for your articles will be available in one view and sortable by social network. This free feedback allows you to easily see which of your articles generate shares and which ones are duds!
2. Active Spam Filters (ex: Akismet)
Unfortunately, spam bots have polluted blogs so much that most organizations require comment approval prior to posting comments, and this process stifles user engagement. A comment approval process turns a potential live conversation into a snail-mail type experience. Using an active spam filter like Akismet is crucial to facilitating live commenting and conversations on your blog while also actively filtering comment spam bots. Active spam filters are a must for live commenting and a more interactive blog experience for your visitors.
3. One-click Social Sharing (ex: Digg Digg)
The point of business blogging is to introduce target audience members to your organization. One of the best ways to facilitate audience growth is to allow your visitors to easily share your articles on the social network of their choice. Luckily, many free plugins exist that will allow one-click social sharing on every blog article on all of the top social networks.
One thing to watch out for is choosing which pages to allow this functionality. I learned the hard way that when this plugin is installed, it immediately shows up on every page on your website (including my home page, contact page, etc). Just make sure to go into the settings and only allow to display on 'Post' pages. Also be sure to include your organization's Twitter username so that it will be included by default if users click to tweet.
4. PubSubHubub
If your organization uses WordPress or Blogger, then this functionality is already built-in. For everyone else, PubSubHubub will solve a couple problems. Before PubSubHubub, blog/RSS aggregators & search engines had to constantly ping websites to check for new content. This resulted in billions of unnecessary website calls. Today, services that use PubSubHubub will be notified automatically the moment that your content is published. You want everyone to know about your content the moment it is published, and PubSubHubub gets the job done.
Secondly, this plugin will establish your blog as the original source of the content that you create. Before PubSubHubub, it was common for other blog aggregators and scraper websites to out-rank your website for your own content and confuse search engines about who was the original source. PubSubHubub solves this issue by instantly establishing your website as the original source for your content.
5. Home Page Recent Articles (ex: TW Recent Posts Widget)
It is great practice to include at least the three most recent blog posts on your home page. This will help promote your articles to your home page visitors that may not know about your blog. Also, many past blog visitors might only search your brand name and end up on your home page when trying to find or source a previously read blog article. In short, you want to make it as easy as possible for your general website visitors to find your blog, and including the top-three articles on your home page is one of the best ways to do so.
6. Authorship (ex: Fanciest Author Box)
Taking advantage of Google Authorship will help your search engine rankings and establish credibility with your authors. In a nutshell, Authorship will clearly communicate with search engines by connecting authors with their articles. Building authorship over time will raise the credibility and value of your blog in the eyes of search engine algorithms. This functionality is especially important when allowing guest posts from established authors on your blog. Google and other search engines will understand immediately that a well-known author is posting on your blog, which will raise the credibility of your organization as a publisher. Authorship plugins automatically populate Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and Google profiles by taking the information directly from the author's WordPress or Blogger profile.
Aren't those Link previews on Twitter so nice and professional when you see a photo and description in your Twitter feed? Also known as 'Twitter Cards', these previews are enhanced advertisements that are automatically generated anytime your blog articles are shared on Twitter. Be sure to use the validator tool to make sure that your URLs work properly through the Twitter developer support area. You will most likely need to submit your URL for approval. This process took three weeks for my website, so get started now!
8. Internal Search (ex: Search Everything)
A blog search tool is also crucial for allowing frequent visitors to easily find content to source or read again. A website search feature also provides a professional look and experience. Add this functionality on every page of your website so that non-blog visitors that search will also discover blog articles.
9. Previous Post CTA (ex: UpPrev)
First made popular by the New York Times, this feature keeps users engaged in your blog by automatically sliding-out a link to the previous blog article once a user scrolls down to the bottom of your blog articles. This is particularly useful as a call-to-action to keep visitors engaged with your content.
10. Image Lightbox (ex: jQuery Lightbox)
One of the worst default features of popular blog platforms is opening blog images in a new window. This confuses users and pulls your visitors off your web page. This will sink your conversion rates and contribute to higher bounce rates. An image lightbox plugin will add a nice overlay if users click to open larger versions of images that are included in your blog posts. However, avoid the practice of linking to larger versions of blog images as much as possible. Only allow images to open larger if absolutely necessary! But if your image does need to be linked to a larger version, then doing this through a lightbox overlay is an absolute must. Click on the image below to see it in action!
Make sure that your blog has these basic features to meet your visitor's expectations and help grow your community.