Being a good blogger and producing high quality content is damn hard but luckily, there are some tools that can help make your job easier.
Two weeks ago, Neil Patel published a list of 11 tools and services every blogger should use to make their journey “a bit easier and more successsful.” In his post, Neil shares tools that will help you with your writing, building links, and getting better understanding on what works for your blog.
Today, I want to share with you 9 WordPress plugins and one tool that will help your blog posts, almost magically, get more clicks, more shares and higher conversion rates.
Plugin #1: Headlines (by King Sumo)
Kingsumo promotes their tool “Headlines” as the tool that helped grow Huffington Post and Buzzfeed by helping them create headlines people would want to click. Hard to argue with the success of the media giants, right?
What “Headlines” does is automatically optimize your headlines to get more traffic and clicks. What you basically need to do is simply add multiple titles to your blog posts, and Kingsumo’s algorithm will rotate the different options until it figures out the best ones (the one that will get you the most clicks) and leave it at that.
The plugin will do the rest and your click through rate will start climbing automatically. Give it a go.
Plugin #2: Digg Digg (by Buffer)
Hopefully, I don’t even have to tell you how important it is to add social share button to your content. But in case you weren’t sure, it’s the ABC’s of content creation.
Social shares, when used correctly, can be valuable to your blog both in terms of making it easier to share your content and as a social proof.
While there are many different plugins for adding social share buttons to your blogs, Digg Digg is definitely my favorite.
Owned by Buffer, Digg Digg lets you add all of the main social media network buttons and gives you multiple design options, so you can add the button at the beginning of your post, the end of your post, or simply let it hover on the right side of the screen and accompany your readers while they read
Plugin #3: Squirrly
Squirrly is a great SEO plugin that allows you to optimize content and gives you SEO advice while you’re writing your new post.
After installing Squirrly, you’ll notice there’s a new box under your “publish options” on WordPress. There, you can enter the keyword you are targeting for your post and get recommendations for long tail keywords and signal you what you should optimize in your text to get better SEO for you content, as well as giving you a better glimpse in on your competitor’s landscape for those keywords.
Basically, Squirrly provides you with all of the information you need in order to optimize your post for SEO while typing it. The best thing is, is that the recommendations for improvement are highly actionable and easy to understand, even if you’re not an SEO expert.
Plugin #4: Atomic Reach
Can you guess what’s working in favor of your blog posts and what is keeping them from getting more shares and eternal content glory? With Atomic Reach you don’t have to.
Atomic Reach grades your content as you write it and gives you tips on how to improve it.
To begin using Atomic Reach you need to connect it with your Google Analytics account, so that it can analyze your website. After they analyze your analytics, they score your content and give you suggestions to improve it based on the your past success.
It will also tell you if you need to fix your grammar, if your content is suited for a novice or pro audience, if your title is good enough, if you’re using enough emotional triggers, and so on.
Atomic Reach will help you create better content for your target audience and improve your wiring over time.
Plugin #5: Yoast SEO
While there are tons of useful SEO plugins for WordPress (all in one SEO is pretty good), Yoast really simplifies the optimization process for your WordPress site. From providing insights for page’s SEO to giving actionable tips to improve.
YOAST makes the page optimization process easy and practical to use, even if you’re not an SEO expert.
Plugin #6: SumoMe – Magnet / Pop-up
One of the key ingredients to building your blog’s audience and establishing a solid readership is growing your email list.
Basically, the best way to build your list is by offering a great piece of content in exchange for your reader’s email.
The best method for getting their emails is through a pop-up that asks for it (yes, you hate it, but it works, so get over it) and by providing content upgrades.
This is where Noah Keaghan Sumome’s plugins come into the picture. You can use “Magnet” for your content upgrade and “list builder” for your pop-up.
Simply install the free plugins, follow the instructions, and you’ll be set up for success in mere minutes!
Plugin #7: Revive Old Post
One of the best tactics to get more people to read your content is to post it to your social accounts more than once. If you feel this is spammy, you can read here on why it’s not only not spammy, but actually makes tons of sense.
The problem is that going up and scheduling old posts again and again is time consuming. Luckily, setting up Revive Old Post, on the other hand, isn’t.
Revive Old Post automatically sends out your old posts through your social accounts. You can choose the parameters (i.e., intervals between each post, exclude specific posts, etc.), and simply set it up and forget about it. It’ll take care of business without you having to think twice about it.
Great content is useful much after your published it, and sometimes can still be relevant years after your wrote it. Don’t let it go to waste! Go get more clicks, reads and shares.
Plugin #8: Click To Tweet
Here’s the thing, people love sharing quotes on Twitter. It’s a great content promotion technique and people tend to share it more often. By using Click To Tweet you can turn part of your content into tweetable quotes in a click of a button.
All you have to do is choose the quote that you want to make shareable and that’s basically it. Your content will be framed in beautiful format so people will know they can tweet it in a click of a button.
To get more shares you should use interesting insights and facts.
Plugin #9: Yet Another Related Posts Plugins
One of the parameters for a successful blog is the amount of posts people read per session and time spent on your blog.
In order to get people reading more articles you can do two things: Involve more inbound links and direct people to other posts they might enjoy from your blog. This is what Yet Another Related Posts Plugin does for you.
At the end of each blog posts, YARPP will showcase 3 posts from your blog that your reader might enjoy, encouraging them to explore your blog even further. It’s a great way to get people to read more content on your blog.
Bonus Tool: Hemingway App
Writing great content is based both on the content itself, but also on your writing style and readability.
Hemingway App (a stand alone app, not a WordPress plugin) will help you make your content more readable and easy to relate to.
The app (available for Mac and PC) will highlight long complex sentences and common errors writers make, or if a sentence is too dense and complicated to understand. It will also let you know when you should use more adverbs, use shorter words, or when to change a passive sentence into an active one.
Using the Hemingway app guarantees your readers will enjoy reading your content even more and be more likely to share it.
Are you ready to give your content a boost and make your blog more shareable? Now’s the time to do it.
Am I missing any tools? Leave your suggestions in the comments below.