Engaging with your readers is crucial to the success of your blog and it’s also one of the key ingredients I lacked when I first began this blog. WordPress provides us with countless Plugins to enhance our blogs and solve this problem, but there are so many, which ones do we choose? I love installing and trying out Plugins and I have lost track of the number of WordPress Plugins that I’ve given a shot, but typically end up deleting 90% to 95% of those I install. The Plugins I’ll be covering below are some of my favorites and in my opinion, the best of the best in the category of reader engagement and sharing with social networks. Enjoy.
WP Greetbox still amazes me how very useful and functionable it really is. It’s a plugin that shows different customizable greeting messages based on the referral site. If accessed from Twitter, they’ll receive a message that asks them to remember to Tweet the post and follow you on Twitter. I definitely attribute an increase in subscribers to this plugin. It’s interactive, engaging and makes it easy for readers to subscribe, share, etc. It has 31 total greetings you can use and you can add to the list. I’ve added the settings page below, to give you an idea of the various messages you can modify and display.
Sexy Bookmarks is another great way to provide readers with the ability to share your content by displaying the social network icons of your choice below or above your content. There are a total of 27 social networking icons you can display. The icons pop up as readers scroll over them. It’s a clean and attractive way to let readers pass your content on to their networks.
About Me 3000 is a very flexible and useful Plugin to have on your WordPress Blog. I replaced my About Me page with this widget since it provided so much flexibility and functionality. What About Me 3000 gives you is the ability to use a Gravatar, an overview of you or your site, as well as several social networking and e-mail icons linked to your profiles such as; your e-mail, Facebook, Friendfeed, Feedburner, Delicious, Myspace, LinkedIn, Stumbled Upon, Technorati, Twitter and YouTube. Another cool thing they added is a Reader Count, taken directly from Feedburner. It’s quite customizable and you can pick and choose what you want to be displayed.
Top 10 is a very cool way to both display some of your best work and to get additional link clicking love from your readers. Top 10 simply counts each post by number of page views and tracks them on a daily and overall basis. You can view the page views in your WordPress Dashboard and display them as a Widget. Since I don’t spend much time tracking my statistics on Google Analytics anymore, this widget helps me keep an eye on which posts are becoming popular and which aren’t. It also gives your readers a chance to check out your best or most popular past work. You can specify the number of links you want to display, whether you want overall or daily stats and several other display options.
Subscription Options is a Plugin that gives your readers three different subscription options to keep up with your blog and content updates. I replaced two other widgets with this one. You simply configure it by plugging in the URLs for your RSS feed, Feedburner E-mail Service e-mail and Twitter Profile. You can also size the icons to your liking.
Any great WordPress Plugins that you believe deserves mentioning? What do you think about the ones mentioned in this list?
