There are a ton of great and free wordpress plugins, but you know, there’s also some very excellent commercial, pay-for plugins that don’t have free alternatives. Sometimes the free alternatives just aren’t as good.
I’m going to dispel a myth right here and right now. It’s OK to charge for something! I’ve seen so many flame sessions for people who dare charge for good software. I’ll never figure that out. Enough said.
Just so you know, I do try to support good software when I find it. Regardless if it’s free or not. Ok, enough about me being on my soapbox. Let’s get on with this!
I’ve tried many commercially available plugins from several developers and I’ve found some real winners. Here’s my short list of time saving plugins that I think you’ll like!
Article Import
This plugin is provided by Val Petruchek on his website, http://webous.com/. I’ve tried several article importers to all me to import several articles at once quickly and easily and I believe that this is the winner of them all. It works, doesn’t need any cron jobs to be setup to time out the articles and I haven’t had any problems at all with it.
This is one plugin I’d recommend if you want to post multiple articles at one.
Auto Social Poster
This plugin is an expensive one, but worth every penny. The company, Mass Automation, is an innovative company that has put out and publish several wordpress plugins and website automation software.
The job behind Auto Social Poster, or ASP for short, is to post your new blog posts from wordpress automatically to 30-40 social networks. If you want to put your wordpress blog on steroids and get traffic to your blog and your blog indexed and ranked much, much faster, you need to use ASP.
I’ve ran several wordpress blogs and if you’ve done everything else right, then ASP will help. On some of my earlier blogs before ASP, even after 3 months or so, I was seeing less then 50 visitors per day.
On blogs that use ASP, after 1 months, I”m seeing anywhere from 25 – 150 visitors per day in comparison. To me, that’s the kind of time boost my blogs need. Well, using ASP is considered a ‘black hat’ method. But I call it a smart plus. Don’t over advertise your blog, but posting a couple selective ‘hey, I’m here’s’ is, in my opinion a perfectly acceptable practice.
Let your conscience be the guide.
WP VideoTube
This plugin put out by Wordpress Labs is a quick and dirty way to get some good videos from YouTube onto your wordpress blog in an automated fashion. Neil Harvey, the owner of Wordpress Lab, states some pretty impressive figures to traffic growth.
In my own experience, the growth is not as ‘good’, but this plugin excels in two areas:
- It runs automatically. Gotta love hands off.
- It creates nice looking posts complete with comments. Sometimes you’ll find comments will bring you great leads to keywords that you would have never guessed. To me, this is worth it.
In the end, the experience for the user is great! This is why I recommend this plugin.
FasterIM Opt-In
This is one of my favorites, right next to ASP. And to boot, the author, Seree Woradechjamroen, is probably the best internet marketer that I’ve met to date. Seree has been extremely helpful even when things go wrong.
From my experience, most don’t complaints, but Seree jumped right on top of my problems and help me to make them go away! Oh, back to the plugin…
Faster IM opt-in is a plugin that will bring up an opt-in box on your wordpress blog to get your prospective visitor to join your email list. You may think that pop-ups that ask you to join or sign up to be annoying, but from my experience, it works well. If you’d like to see a demo of this, just take a peek at www.besthondurasvacations.com. The opt-in form should pop up after about 10 seconds.
If you are trying to create a mailing list, (and if you aren’t I ask you why not), you need Seree’s plugin. It works very well.
Well, that my reader’s is the short list of commercially available wordpress plugins that I’d recommend. In the near future, I hope to share more great plugins, but these are the ones that I use the most.
If you have a wordpress plugin that you enjoy, please leave comments! I’d love to hear what you’ve found to be useful and useless.
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We just release a new WP Plugin that we think is pretty cool. It rebuilds WP entire widget area to provide a more user friendly environment and significantly more functionality. The plugin is called Total Widget Control, and can be found at http://totalwidgetcontrol.com.
Here are just a couple of the features you will find:
-Dynamic Sidebars apply widgets to any page, post, category, or custom listing type.
-Widget Themes Quickly change the design for any widget by selecting from a drop down list of your predesigned widget styles.
-Widget Positions use TWC to place and order widgets throughout your site
-Widget Notes add titles to widgets only which are only viewable in the admin panel.
-Default Widgets easily set default widgets to your sidebar.
-Privileges set which to be viewable by specific user groups including public, admin, or author.
-Search, Sort, Filter your widgets on demand.
-Future Publish Dates set a date in the future for your widget to automatically be published.
-Bulk actions update multiple widgets at once using bulk options.