Five Plugins To Give Your Blog Content A Boost

Posted by Sharon Hurley Hall on April 14th, 2009

This post has been submitted by Sharon Hurley Hall from Get Paid To Write Online.com.

Once you have been blogging for a while, it becomes harder for readers to find the gems that are buried in your archives. One way to address this is by using plugins to bring some of those older posts to people’s notice. Here are five plugins that I use to do just that.

Aizatto’s Related Posts

I started using Aizatto’s Related Posts when I had a problem with my original related post plugin. There are now several to choose from, but since this version still works fine with WP 2.7, I see no need to change. This plugin works immediately, generating a list of posts related to the post you have just published. You can customize the list by choosing how many related posts you want to show, whether there is an excerpt and what text should appear before the list of posts. I know that people have visited older posts when they have found them at the end of a current one.

Most Commented

Most Commented retrieves a list of your posts with the most comments. Let’s face it, we’re always more interested in something that other people have been talking about, so creating a list of posts that have generated discussion appeals to a human impulse. I usually include this in my sidebar, but some themes have the functionality built in so that the list appears in a tabbed menu at the top, for example.

Organize Series

Another way to bring your content to people’s notice is to link it together in series, a strategy I first read about years ago on the Problogger blog and have been using ever since. At the time, my favorite series plugin was In-Series, but since upgrading to WP 2.7 I have had to change to Organize Series. To use this plugin you can create a number of series in the admin panel, then you can add posts to them through the compose window. It can be time consuming, but you can then add a widget to your blog which highlights the series you have created.

Popularity Contest

Popularity Contest was written by Alex King. It keeps track of post, category and archive views to keep track of your most popular content. You can view this over different time periods, such as most popular this month, this year or all time. It’s easy to add the code you need to the sidebar to display a list of popular posts, but many themes come pre-coded for this plugin so that the output looks pretty and fits in with the rest of the theme.

CommentLuv

CommentLuv may seem like a strange choice for this list, but bear with me. The plugin started as a way to reward people who commented on your site by including a link to their latest post. That’s still there, but it works for you too. If you sign up for a CommentLuv account, then when you go to a site which uses the plugin, you can choose which of your recent posts will accompany your comment - there’s no need to use the latest one. So if you are trying to give an older post some legs, this could be a good way to do it.

Sharon Hurley Hall
Get Paid To Write Online.com

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4 Responses to “Five Plugins To Give Your Blog Content A Boost”

Keyword Research Service Says:
April 14th, 2009 at 8:27 pm
Thanks for the list of plugins Sharon. Some people don’t think of adding any plugins that are not already included with their blogging software. You’ve listed some that would be very useful for nearly any blog. Of course you have to be careful that you don’t clutter things with too many links everywhere.
Sharon Says:
April 15th, 2009 at 5:15 pm
True - you don’t want to clutter your blog, but with a well organised theme, you can use all of these without causing readers too much hassle.
Charles Says:
April 16th, 2009 at 8:39 am
Hi Sharon - there are some really good plugins there. I may actually add the Most Commented plugin to PiggyBankPie sometime over the next couple of weeks.
Sharon Says:
April 16th, 2009 at 8:43 am
These really give some life to older content, Charles. The series plugin is a good one too as installing it makes you think more about ways of organising your content.