How to Grow Your Blog: Part 2 - Popular Plugins

As many bloggers are probably aware, there are hundreds of different options for plugins available that help to grow your blog. Choosing which plugins to implement depends on what areas you will be focusing on. There are various components to blogging that all need a little love.

I’m going to go over three specific parts of blogging that should have your attention, as well as the plugins to help ensure you’re connecting with your audience and growing your blog in the right direction!

1. Comments

wpDiscuz

Commenting is a big part of blogging. When you are first starting out, it’s important to comment on other blogs in your niche to start community building. It’s also important to interact with the people who are commenting on your blog. Show your readers appreciation that they stopped by your blog and took some time to read your content. Respond to their questions, tell similar short stories, or simply thank them. This is another aspect to blogging that allows you to gain credibility in the community.

wpDiscuz is a plugin that allows you to customize your comments section to allow for voting on comments, sharing comments on social media, subscribing to comment replies and more. It also gives you the ability to change the colors, backgrounds, messages, functions, buttons and more! Improving your comments section can lead to overall better engagement. This plugin enables you to keep the comments in the WordPress database and don’t worry, it is compatible with all themes.

Screenshot of wpDiscuz

2. Social Media

GetSocial.io

Managing your blog and its social channels can be time consuming; however, having a good presence on social media channels can really set your blog up for success. Many bloggers are starting to develop key relationships with their followers on social media. This is why it’s so important to bring your social channels to your blog.

GetSocial.io’s social media plugin is not only free, but it also gives you curated social share buttons to boost your reach and increase your traffic. It allows for pop-ups to engage with your readers and subscriber floating bars for each social channel to capture more followers. Using GetSocial.io can especially help with your special promotions and popular articles.

It’s more than just a typical share button, GetSocial also allows you to track the number of followers you have on each channel for your website! You can place your social media icons at the top of your website, but be sure to take advantage of the follow floating bars as well! Never let your social media channels out of your visitors’ sights!

GetSocial.io

3. SEO

Yoast SEO

We all know that SEO is a very important component for bloggers to get their blogs seen. One of your goals should be to get to the top of the search rankings, so you can continually obtain new visitors. There are a few techniques that help to optimize SEO, such as back-links to your own content, providing original content, labeling your photos, guest blogging, and fixing your permalink structure.

You should also use an SEO plugin, like Yoast SEO, to catch the things you may not always remember. Yoast SEO is very easy to navigate and incorporates a lot of what you need to enhance your content. Through Yoast, you can set a focus keyword, optimize your page title, keep certain taxonomies out of your sitemap and more. This plugin even does a readability friendliness check! At the end of your post, you get a green, orange or red marker for SEO and readability. You will always want to strive for a green marker, but don’t worry, they’ll tell you what to fix if you’re in the orange or red!

Yoast SEO Plugin

While these plugins are the ones that I recommend, I encourage you to do your own research and find the plugin that works best for you. Just be sure to focus on plugins that will assist you in the areas of comments, social media and SEO because each of these will help you take your blog to the next level. Not only can they each help increase your page views, but they can also bring you valuable traffic from all kinds of different sources.

Stay tuned for the final part of this series, Resources on Monetizing!

Catch up on Abby’s Previous Series!