Build My Site for Free

The key to blog success is creating a community of loyal readers and subscribers who keep coming back to your website to exchange ideas, information and opinions.  Once they’re loyal to your site, they’ll quickly spread the word to their friends and help monetize your content with great success.  Professional website builders term this kind of traffic “quality” and they are the type of visitors every blog owner desires.

It’s true that writing great content is the first step to engaging your readers and creating a blog community.  This article on how to engage and grow your WordPress blog readership is packed with tips on producing engaging content.  But you can also make the process much easier by installing plug ins that aid community development and in turn create long term blog success. 

We’ve picked out the top 10 plug ins for establishing a community around your blog, all of which are available to download completely free from our resources page:

1. WP-Email:  it’s vital you make it easy for your visitors to share your great content with their friends.  This helps to encourage interest in your blog and is the first stage of community development.  Email is still one of the most preferred methods of sharing content and this plug in makes it extremely easy for your readers.  The WP-Email plug in allows your visitors to easily share a post or page from your site via email.  You could also use the ShareThis plug in which allows visitors to share by email and post your content to various social bookmarking sites.
2. I Love Social Bookmarking: this is a very popular plug in with website builders.  There are now so many social bookmarking sites that it’s difficult to add icons at the bottom of your posts for every social site.  This plug in gives a clutter free drop down menu of the major social bookmarking sites, allowing your visitors to share your content with their friends.  Building a strong social bookmarking presence is vital for engaging your readers, spreading the word about your site and creating a community of fans.
3. Best Of Comments:  if some of your readers are regularly sharing their views and opinions on your site give them a thank you.  This plug in allows you to feature great comments and display them in a prominent place for everyone to see.  This will encourage your best commentators to keep coming back and sharing their interesting insights. 
4. Intense Debate:  any blog with the goal of creating a community needs to support threaded comments so that people can discuss their ideas.  This plug in is ideal, encouraging reader engagement and allowing them to feel part of a live discussion.  Alongside comment threading, readers can reply by email, vote on comments and Tweet their comments. 
5. Community Submitted News: if you really want to give your readers some ownership of your site this is a perfect plug in to use.  It allows visitors to submit articles to your site, either their own or from other sites, which you can also moderate before publishing. 
6. Akismet:  if you want your regular readers to keep coming back you need some security to keep the spam comments out.  If you don’t your regular readers will quickly get frustrated with spam and look for another blog to enjoy elsewhere.  This plug in is an effective and popular spam filter.  It’s also a good idea to have a comments policy to prevent trollers from publishing negative or fake comments.
7. Subscribe to Comments: this is such a simple plug in that can have such a huge effect on your blog community.  Not all your readers will have the time to stay on your blog to see who is replying to their comments.  This plug in notifies your site visitors by email when someone has replied to their comment, prompting them to come back to join in the conversation again and again.
8. Popularity Contest: your readers can keep up to date on the hottest and most active content on your site with the help of this plug in.  It records the most popular posts and pages and directs users to this content. 
9. WordPress Mobile Pack: millions of people now access the internet via their mobile gadgets, so if you want to give your blog community the chance to keep in touch with your content wherever they are you need a website that’s mobile compatible.  There are so many mobile plug ins available, but this is an all in one mobile plug in and extremely popular with website builders.  Easy to use it reduces the load time for mobile users, configuring pages to suit their screen with images automatically rescaled. 
10. BuddyPress: this is one of the latest plug ins available and allows you to create your own social networking site using WordPress.  This is the ultimate plug in to develop a blog community and any website builder serious about giving readers a sense of community to share their opinions should consider building their own social bookmarking site.  For more information this article has everything you ever wanted to know about BuddyPress.  If you’re ready to start your own social bookmarking site, you can download BuddyPress completely free from our resources page.