The longer that I’ve used inbound marketing at my school, the more I’ve become convinced that blogging will become the center of your inbound marketing strategy. The benefits of blogging are numerous and can not be ignored.
From the beginning, we’ve used WordPress as our blogging platform of choice – especially because of it’s plugin architecture. In January I wrote 11 plugins for your school’s blog and after I recently reviewed the post I realized that I no longer use 3 of the plugins: fbLikeButton, FindMeOn, and ShareBar. I also realized that after I moved SchneiderB.com to a new webhost, InMotion, I updated the plugins that I’m currently using and wanted to share them with you.
1. Easy Mashable Social Bar
Description: Is a social share plugin inspired by Mashable.com for Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and email subscription function.
Why I Use It: Great looking and subtle social sharing box for my website. This plugin is also very customizable.
2. LinkWithin
Description: Is a blog widget that appears under each post, linking to related stories from your blog archive.
Why I Use It: Creates attractive thumbnails and descriptions below each post highlighting similar content on your website. I like this plugin because it helps keep readers engaged with material on my site.
3. Really simple Facebook Twitter share buttons
Description: This plugin shows Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google “+1″ and other popular share buttons above or below your posts. Easy customization of active buttons and position in the Settings menu.
Why I Use It: I’ve tried a number of different plugins to add social sharing buttons on my blogs. This is my favorite – by far!
4. Tweet Old Post
Description: Tweet Old Posts randomly picks your older post based on the interval specified by you. The primary function of this plugin is to promote older blog posts by tweeting about them and getting more traffic.
Why I Use It: Very customizable and a great way to get more traffic from twitter by automatically tweeting my older blog posts.
5. Contact Form 7
Description: Contact Form 7 can manage multiple contact forms, plus you can customize the form and the mail contents flexibly with simple markup. The form supports Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
Why I Use It: Very easy way to add a form to your website. I use this plugin on my Contact page.
6. Clicky For WordPress
Description: Real time web analytics
Why I Use It: Google Analytics is great but I find it confusing and over-whelming at times. Clicky gives me a quick overview of my web traffic.
I hope you’ll consider using these plugins to help extend your school’s blog. If you’ve found any other plugins that you value please add them by posting in the comments section below.
About Brendan Schneider
Installing the linkwithin plugin today. The link for the mashable plugin seems to be broken.
- spam
- offensive
- disagree
- off topic
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