It’s time to get your blog ready for business by installing Plugins for Profit!
In a recent blog we talked about the plugins that would be important for the security of your blog…your main business asset. Today we want to talk about plugins that will increase traffic to your blog, monitor the traffic, fix issues that cause you to lose sales, make your site look better to keep readers on the site longer, etc… Thus they are plugins for profit! After all, you are in business to help people and get paid for the products and/or services you offer.
The plugins you decide to use will depend a lot on what your goal is for your blog. Pick and choose those which fit your needs best. You can use the list below or login to your admin panel of your site and go to the tab marked plugins and select add new. You will have a choice of thousands listed as… Featured…Popular…Recommended…Favorites. Of course you can go directly to WordPress.com or do a simple google search and come up with even more choices!
We would recommend you look at the star rating, the number of installs and if the plugin is compatible with your version of WordPress. If the plugin is not compatible with your version of WordPress it may really slow down your site. If you click the link for more details you will find out more about the plugin, including going to the developer’s site, where you can get reviews and FAQ’s. Installing, activating and deactivating is usually one click. Some plugins will have additional settings–just read the instructions included.
Here’s a great video from YouTube with general instructions for installing plugins in various ways…
Add plugins as you need them. Always update when you receive a notice to update. One final caution, back up your site before adding a lot of new plugins…just in case something goes crazy!
Ok…here’s a few of my recommendations with a brief description. You can type in the name of the plugin in the search bar under add new plugin and read more about it.
Yoast SEO – This plugin is the easiest all-in-one SEO solution for your blog. It has an on-page content analysis, guides you through tags, keywords and meta description plus it gives you a little red-yellow-green light indicator of how good the SEO is on your site.
Google Analytics (by Yoast) – This plugin makes it simple to add Google Analytics to your WordPress site. Analytics are important for tracking on your site. The plugin adds lots of features to help with the tracking, e.g. error page, search result and automatic outgoing links and download tracking.
Jetpack by wordpress – The Jetpack plugin enables you to connect your blog to a WordPress.com account giving you use of powerful features normally only available to WordPress.com users.
Simple Share buttons adder / Shareaholic – either of these plugins make it easy to add share buttons to all of your posts and/or pages of your blog.
CommentLuv – This plugin encourages more comments and builds a community by rewarding your readers by automatically placing a link to their last blog post at the end of their comment.
Customer Facebook Feed – This plugin allows you to display completely customizable Facebook feeds of any public Facebook page or group on your website.
Mojo Marketplace – This plugin adds shortcodes, widgets and themes to your WordPress site.
Contact Form 7/ Form Maker – These plugins create contact forms and other forms for your site. A contact form is essential for your site so potential customers and customers can reach you.
Pretty Link Light – With pretty link you can shrink, beautify, track, manage and share any URL on or off of your WordPress website. Create links that look how you want using your own domain name.
Broken Link Checker – This is especially good for blogs as often broken links pop up in comments left by your readers. Google is not happy when your site has broken links!
W3 Total Cache – Easy Web Performance Optimization (WPO) using caching: browser, page, object, database, minify and content delivery network support. Designed to improve user experience and page speed.
Compress jpeg & PNG images – Speed up your website. Optimize your JPEG and PNG images automatically with TinyPNG.
ShortPixel Image Optimizer – Fast, easy-to-use and lightweight plugin that optimizes images & PDFs. Preserve a high visual quality of images and make your website load faster.
Those should be enough to get you started! If you have a plugin you like, please comment below and let us know about it! Like this post? Feel free to share and also join our list so you never miss an update!