WP Plugins for Writing & Promotion

Here’s a list of plugins I’ve found useful for my writing blogs.

I have five: Feral Intensity, the House of Craze, Shadow Connor, Night Has Fallen and Project Foxfire, which is shared with my writing buddies/fellow KKP authors. Some of these plugins are also in use on Katarr Kanticles Press.

Generally Useful:

• Flexi Pages – A page navigation widget for your sidebar, which drops down to show sub-pages once their parent page has been accessed.
• WP-Cumulus – This is the niftiest tag cloud widget out there, in my opinion. You can edit the size and colors to fit your site. I’ve spotted others’ remarking on how they can watch it with fascination; I know I like watching/playing with it.
• If You Liked That – Recommends related posts.
• Recently Updated Pages – Shows a list of pages you’ve edited.
• WP Super Cache – speed up your page loading quite a bit with this plugin.
• WP Widget Cache – If you’re going to use widgets, it’s probably a good idea to use this plugin. The more widgets you add, the slower your pages will load. This helps prevent that.

Promotion/Interactivity:

• All in One SEO pack – Set your keywords, post title and short description for each post for crawlers to archive.
• Vote the Post – Matter of taste on this one, but it allows readers to rate your posts and shows the rating for each wherever you set it to (top or bottom of post). In your admin area, you’ll be able to see a list of all posts and the voting stats.
• Subscribe to Comments – Exactly what it says. Allows readers to subscribe to the comments of posts they want to follow the discussion of.
• Cute Profiles – Check left to see this one in action. Good way to keep some information off your sidebars, Cute Profiles allows visitors to contact you via email, to find/follow/friend/subscribe to your YouTube channel, Twitter, Facebook and some other sites.
• Sociable – Make it easy for readers to share your posts via various social media sites, like Twitter, Facebook, Digg, FriendFeed, Reddit, etc.

Writing:

• If you’re posting web fiction or excerpts from your works in progress, Organize Series is very useful to make navigation between the parts simple. You can put a sidebar widget that shows what series you have, how many posts in each, that they can click on. Creates a page listing the series, and places a list of each chapter/part on each post of the pertinent series.
• Organize Series Publisher adds to the awesome by allowing you to schedule series posts in advance.

Some writers like to share their progress or be spurred by public accountability to keep working on them.

• ProgPress is one way to show your word or page counts. You can have multiple instances, place them in posts, on a page or in the sidebar by sticking them into a text widget.
• Dave’s Whizmatronic Widgulating Calibrational Scribometer is another choice. I’d use it just for the name! It’s a sidebar widget; the plugin author is currently working a new version to allow more than one instance of usage.

Both are great plugins which let you edit title, counts, what unit of measurement you’re counting by and your goal.

Next up, we have onsite promotional tools:

• Max Banner Ads – Place ads in your posts or in the sidebar. You can use Adsense, etc. or graphic ads. I use the sidebar widget on Project Foxfire to list our titles and link to their Smashwords listing pages. I’ve also installed it on this site, and can choose to place a banner advertising my books in posts (check out the end of this post for an example). Very easy to use.
• WP-125 – Create a graphical ad block of six 125×125 images that link to wherever you choose. I use this one on KKP for our Featured Title sidebar area.
• Create an on blog store with WP eCommerce. Easy PayPal integration, automatically creates the needed main pages for you and secure digital downloads. Customers can download from their account page & receive an email. Scratch this one. Guess the last update to it messed something up. Download links to customers no longer work. Haven’t found the solution yet.

Perhaps you’re looking to build a private or paid subscription site?

• Members Only will hide your blog pages completely until registration is completed. I’m using it on Shadow Connor to prevent revisions and drafts from being crawled by search engines and splashed all over the nets.
• For a paid subscription site, Memberwing Membership Site is the way to go. I’m using it for the House of Craze. The free version requires you to manually set up each new user’s account. Premium version automates that. Set up graduated membership levels/subscriptions and use PayPal easily.

The last plugin is one I’ve found recently, called Cube Points. A site that allows registration is needed. Members can earn points for logging in daily, commenting and posting. You can set the points earned amount for each, and reward ranks for earning a certain number of points.

Redeeming points for goodies is an obvious  draw, and the plugin authors are working on a ‘shopping cart’ for it. Members can also donate points to one another, or even buy points. It’s a fun, ’sticky’ draw.

Try them out to add a little ‘stickiness’ to your blog and make onsite promotion a snap. :)