Top 15 WordPress Plugins For Viewer Engagement And Sharing 2011

You want to make sure your visitors are always kept engaged and be given the ability to share with their friends with a click of a button.

The User experience is a critical part to your website’s success.

Just because im giving these 15 plugins doesn’t mean go and install them all. Make sure you keep a balanced amount of plugins, the last thing you want to do is overwhelm your visitors and have a crappy loading time (which I’m guilty of at the moment). Make sure to take a few steps back and consider the purpose of your site and focus.

It is imporatant to note, to keep experimenting and altering your plugins to find the right balance to increase your Opt-in rate (or to achieve any other goal). One more thing Never Stop Experimenting!

Lets get to it!

1.Digg Digg- This Is one of my favorite plugin to help my viewers share. It’s easy,simple,and slick. I personally like the floating option, where it is able to follow the user, it floats on the side of the post with  the viewer as they scroll up and down the post.

 2.Gravity Forms- A great contact form, if not the best. Your also able to make Surveys in just a couple of minutes, and all you have to do is just copy and paste the html code connected to the form that was just made.

3.Billboard- Another great plugin, (of course if they are in this post they’re bound to be great). You can play a lot with this one,it has a photo gallery feature, and you can create social sharing icons and bookmarks. Choose an icon, insert the url wanted, choose size, and wha la!

4.GD LinkedIN Badge-  A great plugin for building your linkedin community. It creates a small badge which can be place in the widget section.

5.Social Slider- It will float on the side of the post, it supports most social media platforms.

6.share this- it supports more than 50 social platforms, great plugin and has been around for a while.

7.tweet meme retweet button- Great plugin, makes it easy for your viewers to share your content with a retweet.

8.lifestream- It leverages your RSS/Atom feeds to stream your social platforms to your site. Neat.

9.facebook livestream- A Great way to show your visitors that you’re in facebook, and a chance for them to see whats going on in your FB “community” and join it!

10.Socialable- One of the most popular sharing plugins for a reason… because it works

11.facebook like box- Another plugin that allows you to like your fan page and see others who have joined your page. Unlike the Facebook livestream plugin, it will not show a live stream on your page.

12.twittercounter- This is a neat little plugin that shows the amount of followers you currently have. Got to be honest it gave me a little trouble at first, maybe it was something i did?, i have a friend who is using it and works just fine.

13.sexybookmarks- You can place this plugin above or below your post and pages. It’s easy to place 40 icons in your posts, but it can get overwhelming. This is the one plugin you can give 20 choices with, its a clean look and doesn’t overwhelm the viewer (unless you got a ton of other plugins floating around)

14.Disqus Comment System- Easy and has a clean look to it, I have been using this commenting system for about a year now and it has never failed me.

15.Thank Me Later- I think people forget, no actually, I know people forget that they are in the relationship business, without a real relationship with your viewers, your certain to fail. So when I found this plugin I knew I had to share it with everyone. It sends a thank you message to the commenters email, which you can customize. This message will build a relationship with your viewer and it will remind them of your blog, increasing the chances of building a loyal and returning viewer.

*Bonus Plugin*

nrelate Flyout- I had to share this one as well, great to help your site’s stick rate. It places 5 related posts at the bottom of your post

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I hope you found value on today’s post and if you did please share this with your  Twitter and Facebook friends. I would also love to hear what you think, everyone’s input is valuable to me as this is for you and your success. If you have any concerns or questions please message me at Rudyovasquez@gmail.com. Have an awesome Week  everybody!

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To your ~Success and Freedom!~