There are at least two elements that make WordPress become the most popular content management system: themes and plugins. With the vast selection of available themes to install, you can build your WordPress website almost instantly with professional outlooks. Once your WordPress website is set up, you can further enhance the functionality of your website by installing different plugins. You can turn your WordPress website to a personal blog, e-commerce online store, online portfolio, etc by installing different plugins.
Many online individuals use WordPress to create their blogs and make considerable profits. For example, there are many “mommy bloggers” who share their tips on babysitting and frugal living styles, technology savvy putting up their products reviews on the latest gadgets, and travel bloggers posting their memorable pictures for their trips. These kinds of blogs often record massive traffic records. Hence, many related businesses (e.g. supermarkets, tech companies, travel agencies, etc.) approach them to place advertisements or promotion campaigns through their websites. With different plugins, WordPress owners can easily customize their website for different functions.
Although you have a wide selection of plugins to choose from, choosing the right ones is definitely a difficult task. That’s why we would like to highlight 10 plugins can help WordPress bloggers to turn their websites into a “profit-seeking” blog.
Security
CAPTCHA – this plugin significantly reduce the chances of spammers attacking your website by asking a math question when submitting a request to your website (e.g. visitors are asked “what’s the answer for 2+3” when leaving comment). The plugin can work on comment section as well as the login page.
WP-CopyProtect – this plugin protects your blog posts by preventing others copy your content. What that means is if your visitor tries to select the texts on your website, right click the mouse button, and try to copy the words, the plugin will block the “right-click-copy” function.
Traffic and Website Performances
Google Analytics – this plugin is pretty much self-explanatory. Google Analytics is a website traffic statistic tool that tells you where your visitors come from and how they interact with your website. To track your website traffic, all you need to do is to sign up at account on Google Analytics, install this plugin, enter your Google Analytics ID on your WordPress dashboard. Without the plugin, you would have to copy and paste the Google Analytics tracking code into each of your website pages.
WassUp Real Time Stat – this plugin is an alternative of Google Analytics. With this plugin you can see a full stats traffic report on the WordPress dashboard and even the real-time visitor activity.
WP-Optimize – this plugin helps you optimize your WordPress databases by reducing the overhead of spams, drafts, tablet, etc. An optimized WordPress website gives you a faster load time, which is benefitial to SEO performance as well as enhancing user experiences.
Facebook/Promotion
FB share – this plugin lets readers easily share your blog post on their Facebook timeline. The more your reader shares your posts, the faster your blog can be spread out on Facebook. This plugin eventually helps you attract more new visitors.
Facebook open graph – this plugin automatically adds meta tags on the head section of your posts. If you share your blog post (with images) on your Facebook timeline, the Facebook post you made will display a thumbnail of the image shown on your blog post. Moreover, if your blog post contains a video link from YouTube or Vimeo, by sharing the blog post on your Facebook wall, this plugin enhances your wall posts by adding clickable videos embed for these two video sharing websites. You can see the sample by reading the “Description” section of this plugin on WordPress.org
Contact us Form – A good contact us form can let your potential advertising clients easily contact you. Among the various contact form plugins in WordPress platform, “Contact Form 7” is one of the most popular one due to its flexibility and easy-to-customize feature.
Revenue
Before we go into the details of the plugins, we would like to introduce Google AdSense to you first. Google Adsense enables you to earn revenue by showing relevant and engaging ads alongside your website content. All you need to do is to sign up an account and copy and paste the ad codes on your website. Then ad banners will start displaying on your website. You earn revenue by clicks from your visitor. For bloggers who do have a full time job and treat blogging as their “leisure-part-time job”, Google Adsense is a convenient tool for you and helps you save the time to search and call new advertisers.
Once you sign up a Google AdSense account and have the ad codes ready, you can go to the “Widget” section in your WordPress dashboard. Add “Text” widget to your sidebar. Simply copy and paste the Google AdSense codes onto the Text widget and the ad banners will start displaying your sidebar.
There are a few guidelines that you need to follow in order to participate in the Google Adsense Program. One of the most important policies you need to know is that you can only display 3 image ads on one web page. For more details, check out this Google AdSense Page.
Since the space for placing ad banenr is quite limited on a WordPress website, we would like to recommend the following plugin for you.
Ad codes widget – this plugin lets clients install multiple ad banners in the same spot and supports shuffle-rotations. What that means is you can place more than one ad code into a single widget box. For example, you have two ads: a Google AdSense banner and an advertising banner from a local grocery store featuring their on-sale items. You can put both codes in the same widget box. What will happen is that the two ad banners will rotate automatically. So, your visitors may see the Google AdSense banner (or the grocery banner) when they read your blog post. By hitting “refresh” or going to a different page, they will see the ad banner for the grocery store (or, the Google AdSense banner). This plugin can maximize the ad spacing usage of your website.
Simple Custom Content Adder – this plugin lets you add some custom content to all of your posts. With this plugin, you can easily insert a Google AdSense text ad to the end of each post.
Have fun blogging and start earning more revenue with these 10 plugins!
Posted in: Plugins