Blogging Tools
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Always use free image resources with caution.
Tools and Software
Comment Management
Recommended: Akismet Anti-Spam
Price: FREE
This popular comment moderation tool helps to prevent your blog from being overwhelmed by spam or fake comments.
Social Sharing
Recommended: Easy Social Sharing
Price: $27 one-time
This highly-customizable social sharing plugin allows you to place social share icons in just about any location you can imagine. It includes fan counters to display your followers on various social media platforms that can easily be displayed in in a widget on your sidebar. You can also view which post has the most social shares via an integrated dashboard.
Search Engine Optimization
Recommended: Yoast SEO
Price: FREE (Premium available)
This popular plugin helps guide you to create content that will easily rank in search engines to get more organic traffic from Google. It works by ensuring that your focus keyword is included in the correct locations in content as well as checking for SEO functions on images, titles, and the slug (URL) of the post. You can also enable Google Analytics and Webmaster tools using this plugin. However, Google Tag Manager (discussed below), is recommended for integrating Google products.
List Building
Recommended: Thrive Leads
Price: $59 (Or recurring if bundled)
This plugin allows the ability to build beautiful, custom opt-in forms that can be placed in a variety of places on your blog. This can be a bar at the top of the page, or a box with a free-offer at the end of your post. One great feature is you can customize which opt-in forms appear based on the post category or tag(s).
Integration of Google Tools
Recommended: Google Tag Manager
Price: FREE
Google Tag Manager allows you to easily store the code for Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Google AdSense, and other non-Google scripts in an external location that can be called upon by your host to generate related code upon a page load. This can simplify the need to manually add codes to areas within WordPress. It is also usually better for the overall health of your site as it lessens the strain of having an individual plugin for each of these functions, or separates lines of code for each of these actions.
Note: You must sign up and create appropriate tags in Google Tag Manager.
- Magazine Pro built on the Genesis Framework by StudioPress
- Divi by Elegant Themes