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From internals to externals: five plugins to boost your blog readership, posting and appearance
Quick plugin update: I’ve come across five plugins that I thought might be worth downloading: to increase readership, reading times, and reader retention rates. Then you can improve your blogging speed by using templates, switching posts to pages, and making your first page look sophisticated!
#1. Unblockable Popup
MaxBlogPress Unblockable Popup is a plugin that allows your website to post a popup on your website that can’t be blocked. That, of course, raises questions about whether you should be using such a plugin, but I can imagine some circumstances where it can be used to advertise your mailing list or FeedBurner subscription! It could also be used for advertising purposes as well! I haven’t downloaded it yet, but some of the features used wisely could really bolster your readership numbers without unduly inconveniencing readers.
In MaxBlogPress Unblockable Popup 2.0, we have tried our best to fulfill all your earlier requests on how you wanted your popup window to be, and this is what we’ve got:
>> Choice of Popup Style- Simple Box or Default
>> Improved stylish Text Editor
>> Flexible placement of “Close” button
>> Easy to spot settings with collapsible blocks
>> Choice of showing the popup only in specified posts or pages
>> Advanced choice of plugin injecting modeGet more info on how and why MaxBlogPress Unblockable Popup 2.0 has accomplished to meet your expectations. Take a short tour of the improved version and see the screenshots that ellaborate the above-mentioned sleek features.
#2… Magazine Style
Magazine style drop caps and first paragraphs come courtesy of this plugin. Take a look:
It’s good for longer articles and feature articles, too. And can help keep reader’s attention on the page. Some visual variety in your post presentation will certainly retain viewers longer (did I say ‘viewers’?) and increase those important pageview times! This is an aspect that I’ve been working on for some time! Take a look at the plugin by clicking on the image to see the website!
#3. Featurific
… Another plugin that I have been using on my blog to increase pageview times is Featurific. This plugin allows you to have a slideshow presentation on your frontpage. It works on most themes, once uploaded and activated. It takes images from the post (or default images) and uses them as background for each slide.
The site says much more but here’s an excerpt: “Featurific for Wordpress:
* Requires no configuration (although you can tweak nearly any aspect of the plugin if you so desire)
* Provides an array of user-customizable templates
* Integrates with the Wordpress.com Stats Plugin to select most popular posts
* Allows extensive customization of options such as the number of posts to display, post selection type, screen duration, auto-excerpt length, etc.”
#4: P2P Converter
Page2Post (or Post2Page) Converter. It’s a simple plugin that converts your posts to pages or vice-versa. I know that I had a lot of pages that had built up over the years, and the original hierarchy had got lost. Not wanting to delete them, they were piling up in my ‘pages’ menu, simple answer: convert them to posts, they’re then archived! Alternatively, if you have a post that is a classic or a foundational type post: why not make it a page? You no longer have to copy and paste it. One click! Voila!
You can see the button on the far right. It also works well with blogging applications that don’t support page creation. So, simply create a post when you need. Don’t publish, then when you login, convert it!
#5: Template Plugin
Post Templates is a simple plugin that helps you to create a ’standard’ post template that you can then use to create a bunch of similar pages. This would be useful for regular report-type plugins or reviews all of which have similar structures or wording. I’m planning to use it on my BlogCarnivals, since there are two of them, but the wording of the beginning and end is ALWAYS the same. In fact, I’ve long suspected that John Chow uses a template for his regular blog income reports (by the way, where is July’s? … Did I miss it?)
There are also menus on post pages, manage post pages and elsewhere. The multiple hooks are quite effective!
Hope you find these plugins useful. There are dozens of plugins out there, the usual batch of popular ones, but these I thought would help improve your blog, both externally and internally.
Post edited for accuracy, errors, and keywords.
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5 Responses to “From internals to externals: five plugins to boost your blog readership, posting and appearance”
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Why not read this short series on blogging with Wordpress?
- Lesson 1: Get Started Blogging
- Lesson 2: Changing your theme!
- Lesson 3: setting up options (pt.1)
- Lesson 4: setting up options (pt.2)
- Lesson 5: setting up options (pt.3)
- Lesson 6: Writing That First Post
- Lesson 7: Editing That First Post
- Lesson 8: Managing Categories
- Lesson 9: Managing Comments
- Lesson 10: Managing Appearance
[...] blogging, we looked at five new plugins that you might want to try out on your blog. Then we looked at a new series called DEAD END BLOGGING or how to avoid the charlatans of the [...]
Although I find plug-ins do really add up to the readership targeting for any blog, I found an article that states that when you overdo or over populate your blog with plug-ins that add up to the compilation of stuff that delay the loading time of your blog, chances are, your visitors will be lost too,
With this information on hand, I’d like to add up that you be careful in choosing the plug in you install to your blog. Usually, you can see the file size of the plug in and if you see that it will be an additional loading burden, think twice in using it.
That’s a good point. Plugins come in various guises and uploaded singly can be a great addition. But now, though, the temptation would be to upload many plugins so many in fact that plugins will invariably slow down the site by making too many calls to the database or php. Worse, this may not be apparent until loads of people start visiting your site, then the server becomes slow and unresponsive. If you’re on shared hosting, you may even see ’server outages’ as a result.
Any idea of a sensible number of plugins?
Kenneth
I love reading about all the new things available. Not sure if any of these particular ones fit my needs but they are interesting nonetheless.
Thanks, Karen.
Yeah, I’ve tried out all of them, and found them particularly helpful. It’s amazing how often I start a post, and think wow! I would like that to be a page or vice versa.
Also, the template function works nicely, too.
Surprisingly, I use it on just one of my blogs, but I use it a lot. It works well.
Kenneth