WordPress Plugins, the 6 Best for Content Marketers

If you have decided to create a blog linked to your company site for content marketing (i.e. content marketing), you will probably use the WordPress platform for the backend. In this case, here are the best WordPress plugins that will support your business. You don't do it yourself, but have you hired a freelance expert? This article will also be useful for him / her. Find out here all the useful information you need.

WordPress plugins, what they are and why they are needed

If you are in the trade, this small paragraph will not serve you, but if you are a beginner or a client who wants to read up before starting the content marketing activity via WordPress, it will be very useful.

WordPress is an open source and free content management system (CMS) platform. Through this software you can manage the back-end of your site and create content for your blog, landing page and anything else that is useful for content marketing.

The content marketing is opposed all ‘interruption marketing. While the second interrupts the use of content to make "advertising" trying to grab contacts, the first focuses on "content" to create added value and be found by its target. So green light to:

• Blog posts that inform and educate (within your niche)
• Infographics that explain
• Articles of how-to
• Webinar
• Video
• Storytelling

To do these activities in a current way, WordPress makes some specific plugins available to the content specialist.

What are plugins? We have already talked about it in other posts on this blog, but in a nutshell, a plugin is an add-on, free or paid, that is installed on your WordPress by increasing some specific features. Here is the list of the best WordPress plugins to do content marketing well and be found by customers.

1) WordPress plugin to be found: focus on SEO
The acronym SEO stands for search engine optimization. If you do not optimize your content for search engines, it is unlikely that your potential customers will be able to find you in the mare magnum of the web. So, before composing an article for your blog or even a landing page study the keywords to focus on and optimize all the content on this / those words that you have identified and that is / are characteristic / that of your market niche. An experienced content specialist already knows how to optimize an article, but you know that there is a WordPress plugin that can guide this procedure. It's called WordPress SEO by Yoast. With this plugin you can take care of every aspect of SEO, such as inserting the sitemap, updating Meta tags, etc.

2) WordPress plugin to turn readers into (happy) customers

For this delicate operation, to be entrusted preferably to a professional marketer, you will need to build landing pages, or landing pages. These LPs will be linked to your corporate website like Wikipedia Page creation Services or your professional blog. The plugin that we recommend, in this case, is called WordPress Landing Page and will allow you to create LPs to acquire contacts, sell a product or service, and authorize the download of free content that you make available to your users.

3) WordPress plugin to create a content network

You will surely have divided your blog into a series of categories based on the study of certain keywords related to your core business. Or, if you didn't do it in person, the professional you hired surely did. Well, these categories can be interconnected with each other, creating a network of free educational / information content available to your target. This operation will allow the user a full immersion in topics of his interest. To you, more links. There is a WordPress plugin to facilitate this task and it is called Manual Related Post: you will therefore be the one to manually choose which contents to include in the list available to the user. If you don't use this plugin, WordPress inserts related posts at the end of each article following a standard association mechanism. Customizing, however, can be a winning move in many cases.

4) WordPress plugin to customize each content

The plugin in question is called Custom Sidebar and allows you to create a custom sidebar for each content viewed by the user who directs the same towards the resources you have chosen (usually, towards related landing pages ). The sidebar, for those who do not know it yet, is a sidebar marked graphically, within which the user can view certain content or resources relevant to what he is reading in the central part of the screen. By default (therefore without customization) in the sidebar you can find: the list of the most read blog articles, banners, or the tag cloud (cloud of the most clicked keywords on your blog). Here too, personalizing is worthwhile because it allows you to exercise a much more targeted and relevant content marketing action.

5) WordPress plugin to create newsletters (and contacts)

If newsletters are part of your marketing plan and you also have a WordPress site / blog, know that you can install a plugin that prevents you from relying on external services such as MailChimp or Aweber for sending newsletters. The plugin is called MailPoet Newsletters, so you can directly integrate the sending of this (still very valuable) marketing tool to your users directly into your blog. Do you want to boost your "list" of email addresses? Great, go ahead and install Hello Bar. It will allow you to configure a horizontal bar to collect email addresses directly from your site. Consult with your freelance content specialist firston the advisability of its use. As an alternative to Hello Bar you could (and actually, should) install a plugin that allows users to send you messages and you to collect contacts. The most used of all is ContactForm7. Flexible and easy to use, it allows you to create forms with a clean design in a few steps and being integrated with Akismet, it allows you to minimize spam messages, to the advantage of valid contacts.

6) WordPress plugin for "sharing" on social networks

Every self-respecting content marketing strategy involves integration with social media. It is not exactly social media marketing (since this is a further specialization that involves the creation of ad hoc content for social networks ), but you must provide for the possibility of sharing the contents of your blog, infographics and guest posts also on company social profiles / or professional . Again, WordPress plugins come in handy. There are several suitable for this purpose. One of the most used is undoubtedly Shareaholic, or the two alternatives of “autoposting”Targeted: WP to Twitter (to automatically share your every blog post on your Twitter profile) and Facebook AutoPulish (which does the same thing on Facebook). While the latter two (automatically) share your blog posts on your social networks, Shareaholic installs social buttons at the end of each article and therefore any reader can share the article on their profiles. A great content marketing tool.