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Making the most of your existing website content and getting it in front of the eyes that you need to see it has always been the job of a marketer. With the explosion of websites built on the WordPress platform, marketing has never been simpler with the use of plugins. Whether you work for a small company or need to market your own work, consider installing and testing these plugins.
1. Live Chat Plugin ($15)
What if you could talk directly to customers when they were unsure if they wanted to purchase your product or service? With a live chat plugin, you can. This plugin can take your conversion rate to the next level and many experienced marketers know this. Similar chat tools started popping up years ago but they required complicated custom code and a large investment. For just $15, you can download and install the Live Chat Plugin on your website. You can set it up so anyone on your team can chat with customers and answer their questions.
2. Amazon Auto Links (Free)
Whether you are an affiliate marketer or you just sell your own products on Amazon, you can’t afford to not have a link localizer. This plugin detects what country your visitor is from and only shows Amazon links in that country’s store. The alternative to a plugin like this is to include four or five different links to all the biggest countries (United States, UK, Canada, Germany), which isn’t user friendly and still means you miss out on some sales. With this plugin, visitors always get the right links and they will see your products when they want to, instead of being directed to a store they can’t buy from.
3. Shareaholics (Free)
Getting your users to share your content has always been a chore. The Shareaholics plugin makes it a lot easier, though. This plugin is essentially three plugins in one that all work together to help you maximize the amount of social shares your content attracts. There are custom options included to improve both desktop and mobile sharing. Users using their Samsung tablet on Wi-Fi to those on an HTC-One on T-Mobile networks will be able to easily share your content.
It starts with attractive sharing buttons that are fully customizable. You choose which ones you want displayed, where they show up, and if they should float along on the screen or not. Also included is a great related content module that is specifically designed to keep your visitors reading content on your site. This presents another opportunity for visitors to share content. Finally, there are detailed analytics so you can learn what content is shared on what platform and make tweaks to optimize your sharing rate.
4. WordPress SEO by Yoast (Free)
Search engine traffic is some of the most valuable traffic you can get to your website, not to mention free. In order to rank your website’s content better on the big search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing, it’s important to include keywords in your content and optimize your pages in other ways. WordPress SEO has an in-depth page evaluator to help you improve your content’s search engine visibility. You can easily edit meta tags as well as specify which parts of your site should or shouldn’t be indexed. There is also an optionable sitemap component that you can use to help improve “crawlability.”
5. Thank Me Later (Free)
This is a simple plugin that can pay big dividends. When someone shows an interest in your content and leaves a comment, Thank Me Later will automatically email them a few days later with a thank you message. Most commenters leave their message and forget to return to see responses, but not with this plugin. It’s a great way to build brand loyalty and get return visitors.
There are millions of WordPress plugins designed to help your website. Spend some time trying these five plugins and test how much they can improve your marketing efforts.