Once you have a WordPress site ready for launch, there is a lot you can do to help get it off the ground and then continue to grow. I get asked about marketing plug-ins a lot and here are my recommendations that will help you with marketing your WordPress site.
Plug-ins for: Pushing and Pulling Content From Social Networks
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When you publish content on your WordPress site, you may want to send out notifications about this content to various social networks. Ideally, you might send out a custom message for each post so it doesn’t look like spam. If you write your blog posts in advance and schedule them for publication, you can use a plug-in to do this for you.
For example, JetPack by using its Publicize feature, SharePress, and WP to Twitter, which also has a great Pro version. If you use tools like Hootsuite, they often have WordPress integration features too.
In some cases, you may want to pull content in from social networks and publish it either as native WordPress content or display using widgets and shortcodes. Check out some of the plug-ins like Twitter to Blog, Dibbble Portfolio, Instagram Importer, VineMaster and Pinterest Widgets.
Regardless of how you push and pull content to and from social networks, you may want to give your visitors the opportunity to share your content too. A number of social plug-ins exist for the front-end of your WordPress site, including floating sidebars from the Digg Digg plugin and sharing buttons from services like ShareThis and Add to Any.
Plug-ins for: Integration with Email Marketing Campaigns
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Most of the major email marketing services offer WordPress plugins like MailChimp, aWebber, and Constant Contact. If you’re running an e-commerce site you can also search for a plugin for your specific e-commerce software to see if you can integrate email signup during the checkout process.
Certain plug-ins also enable you to send emails out and track your campaigns directly from within WordPress. SendPress, Newsletter Manager, and MyMail let you do things like build signup forms, design emails, send emails and then track them all from within your WordPress admin area. If you take this approach you will have to check with your hosting provider to see how many emails you can send out per hour.
You can also take an extra step to collect email addresses on your site and use interactive plug-ins like PopupAlly, which display a popup email collection form after the user has been on your site for a certain amount of time (you can set this manually).
Plug-ins for: Running A/B Tests
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A number of plug-in developers have come up with solutions for running A/B tests in WordPress. Testing different marketing campaigns, microcopy, designs and content can help you improve the overall conversion of your site. Look through some of the options below for different plug-ins that can help you with your A/B testing.
Some of the A/B testing plug-ins like Nelio integrate with 3rd party, hosted solutions, while others like Simple Page Tester let you run everything entirely from within WordPress. Some of the plug-ins like Marketing Optimizer offer additional features like creating an A/B testing custom landing pages. If you’re working with Google Analytics for your A/B testing you may want to look at the Google Content Experiments plug-in.
Share Your Marketing Success
For each of the plug-ins mentioned above, alternatives exist, so it’s worth taking the time to search through the different WordPress plug-ins that may meet your marketing needs.
What marketing plug-ins do you use, and which ones do you find the most successful?
- thanks to Teo for the main image.
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