3 WordPress Plugins to Boost Visitor Interaction

Finding ways to increase user engagement and interaction on your site is a worthy investment of time if blogging is an integral part of your online marketing strategy. With the amount of content published online, providing social (and other) hooks coupled with great content will keep visitors on your site and returning on a regular basis.  This post reviews 3 WordPress plugins that are can be .

3 WordPress Plugins to Boost Visitor Interaction

It’s easy to setup a business blog in 5 minutes or less, yet for those who have made the move to host their WordPress blog on their own domain and hosting account, they gain the ownership and flexibility a self hosted blog provides (see bonus tip here for more details).  Now it is time to make the most of the site for visitors.  Here are 3 plugins currently recommended.

1 – A Plugin that Allows Bloggers to Create Content Specific Widgets

Imagine providing relevant sidebar content for a given post, page, category of posts, tags, or by author.  Consider how you could provide:

• More loyal readers with more targeted and relevant content to your readers
• Monetize with more relevant offers to visitors
• Lower bounce rate because users stay longer, making the search engines happier in the process.

There is much more to what this plugin does, it’s so good I decided to share it here with this video I uploaded to Youtube.  If for some reason you cannot see the video, go here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6-nnbaJITc

2- Disqus Commenting System WordPress Plugin

Disqus is a plugin that replaces the built in WordPress commenting system.  Don’t worry, it keeps a copy of all comments in the local database if you wish to revert back.

Here are a few ways this plugin increases visitor interaction:

• Connects otherwise disconnected conversations across 14 social networks (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and others) calculating references to your post as “reactions” on your blog.
• Multiple Logins: Once configured, it allows commentors to login with the service they are most comfortable with, Disqus, Twitter, Facebook, OpenID, or Yahoo.
• Disqus profiles currently integrate with: Facebook, Twitter, OpenID, Yahoo, Tumblr, WordPress, Moveable Type and TypePad.
• Allows commentors to share their comments with others in their social networks, expanding the reach of your blog’s content to potential readers you’d otherwise not have.  Example, there is a dropdown for Disqus users who have added social networks to their profile (and you should have a Disqus profile one, place it as a link on your Google profile while you are at it) prior to submitting their comment, they can also share the comment on Facebook, Twitter, etc.

Get your commentor profile here, and wordpress blog plugin and profile here.

3 – WordPress Plugin to Make Your Blog a Social Network

This is a pretty amazing plugin, and my friend Jack Humphrey did a good job describing it, so I will simply place his video below.  If you have problems seeing it, you can catch it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=esNWkqdbVNM

Experience? Feedback?  Suggestions? WordPress is an amazingly flexible platform, what are your experiences with these or similar plugins?  Likes, dislikes?  We want to hear from you. Chime in below.
Photo Credit: makelessnoise