The Best WordPress plugins for Writers

Gaining a loyal reading-ship is not an easy task, but it is totally worthy, if you want to make money online as a writer. If you own a self-hosted WordPress blog, you have access to a huge database of plugins that will allow you to customize your website and to upgrade it as much as possible.

Before choosing a plugin that will help you promote your writer work make sure  it does the complete job: it pushes readers to share your content, it helps you moderate feedback and engage with your readership and has advanced solutions for book sales or other writing related products like free content samples, tutorials, giveaways and others. With all this in mind, we prepared an exhaustive list which contains the best plugins for writers. Do you have a favorite already?

Install the plugin

First of all, make sure you are familiar with installing a plugin. Login into your WordPress website’s dashboard. Click the Plugins tab on the left and click the Add New option. The field that appears can help you identify the name of the plugin. Type the name of the plugin you are searching for. Then Click Install and the follow-up confirmation button, in order to resume installation. The final option is Activate Plugin, which will help you complete the plugin. But before starting to install a plugin, read the details from the plugin’s page. Now, let’s go through the list of the best WordPress plugins for writers.

• Sell books online: My Book Table

A WordPress Bookstore Plugin to help authors boost book sales on sites like Amazon and Apple iBooks with great-looking book pages. My Book Table allows you to have your own bookstore that links to online bookstores where visitors can buy the book. The plugin can incorporate images, descriptions, reviews and purchase links for the books your need to sale. For book sale automatization, you can include a Paypal or eJunkie button. In this way you can sell the books without a third party.

• Manage comments: Disqus Comment System

The Disqus comment system can replace your WordPress comment system with your comments hosted and powered by Disqus – a service and tool for web comments and discussions. This plugin makes commenting easier and more interactive, while connecting websites and commenters across a thriving discussion community. The Disqus for WordPress plugin seamlessly integrates using the Disqus API and by syncing with WordPress comments. You can benefit of its indexable comments, aggregated comments and social mentions and increased exposure and readership.

• Insert photos and images into your WordPress: ImageInject

Easily insert images and photos into your blog posts with ImageInject. This plugin searches the huge Flickr database for creative commons photos related to any topic.  In addition, this might be the best plugin for writers looking image content to support their content, as it can provide free photos and you never need to open Flickr to find images. Search among many thousands of free creative commons images for any keywords of your choice, then pick the best of them for the article you are working on and insert them into your post or set them as featured image! Best of all it is super fast: Injecting an image only takes 3 clicks in total.

• Fix your WordPress website broken links: Broken Link Checker

This plugin will check your posts, comments and other content for broken links and missing images, and notify you if any are found. In order to have a high quality SEO, you have to clean your website from any broken links, at least 2 times per month. This plugin will monitor your blog looking for broken links and let you know if any are found.

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• Get a sleek author box: Starbox – the Author Box for Humans

Starbox is the Author Box for Humans and it offers professional themes to choose from, HTML5, Social Media Profiles, Google Authorship. With this plugin you can get a sleek author box, you can tell people about yourself, push them to follow your social accounts and give credit to people that guest posts on your WordPress website.

While search engines and other software that read your site care about files like robots.txt, you need Human readers to actually engage with your content and fall in love with it. Humans look at beauty more than anything else (as you most probably already know, men and women alike). That’s why you’ll get an Author Box that’s gorgeous to look at and it makes your readers click all the way through to see more about the Authors.

• Schedule your ideas and your post within your WordPress dashboard: Editorial Calendar

The Editorial Calendar makes it possible to see all your posts and drag and drop them to manage your blog. You can create blog ideas posts and schedule them within your WordPress dashboard. You can manage the activity of multiple writers in the same time. In addition, the WordPress editorial calendar facilitates the posting planning and it is easier that having a Google Calendar open at the same time. Did you remember to write a post for next Tuesday? What about the Tuesday after that? WordPress doesn’t make it easy to see when your posts are scheduled. The editorial calendar gives you an overview of your blog and when each post will be published. You can drag and drop to move posts, edit posts right in the calendar, and manage your entire blog.

• Track visitors and manage traffic: Google Analytics by Yoast

Track your WordPress site easily with the latest tracking codes and lots added data for search result pages and error pages. The Google Analytics by Yoast plugin for WordPress allows you to track your blog easily and always stays up to date with the newest features in Google Analytics.

• Increase your functionality and general effectiveness: Jetpack by WordPress

Jetpack adds powerful features previously only available to WordPress.com users including customization, traffic, mobile, content, and performance tools. Benefits of its Gravatar integration and other helpful features.