If you run your own business blog, keeping up with the constant workload of payroll, scheduling, and comment management can be nothing short of dizzying. One of the best things about WordPress is the ease with which you can install a veritable galaxy of free WordPress plugins for business blogs. For anyone running a professional blog, plugins are indispensible tools that allow a single admin to consolidate loads of managerial, quality control, and payment tasks, saving you countless hours of time and effort.
In recent years, developers have specifically created a multitude of WordPress plugins for business blogs that can drastically streamline your administrative efforts and make your blog the efficient, content-generating beast it was destined to be. We’re going to go over four in particular that will make your blogging life infinitely easier.
EDITORIAL CALENDAR
It’s not uncommon for many business blogs to work with a deep ever-changing roster of various freelance content creators. And it goes without saying that the more freelancers you hire, the more scheduling you’ll have to do in order to manage the flow of content on your blog. Even if your blog is primarily a solo effort, you’ll have to stay on top of your own schedule to make sure you’re posting entries as planned. After all, nothing drags down a blog faster than infrequent posts. So, how can you possibly manage your blog’s posting schedule without getting bogged down or overwhelmed?
Enter the Editorial Calendar. This professional WordPress plugin for business blogs offers a fast and user-friendly way to keep track of your upcoming posts, who they’ve been delegated to, and when the projected publication date will be. When you assign a new post, all you have to do is enter it into the calendar – that way, you won’t have to dig through emails or other digital calendars to figure out what lies ahead.
Editorial Calendar has a few other helpful features, such as the drafts drawer, where you can store drafts from all your contributors, and edit or publish them with a few clicks. You can also subdivide your calendars into different types of blog posts, allowing for a more streamlined organization of upcoming posts.
EBYLINE PAYMENTS
So you’ve sorted out your roster of contributors and set up an efficient scheduling workflow. Now comes the thorny task of actually paying your contributors for their work. Managing payments in a case-by-case, ad hoc fashion can quickly become a maddening exercise. You have to make sure that each of your contributors gets their 1099 documents, and you’re also required by law to report all your payments to the IRS. Needless to say, you probably have better things to do than moonlight as your own CPA.
Ebyline Payments is one of the most essential WordPress plugins for business blogs available today. The plugin allows you to consolidate all of your payment and tax-related responsibilities into one easy, automated platform.
Once you install the plugin and register with the free service, you can submit all your payments to contributors through Ebyline’s system within WordPress. Employers can make a payment via credit card, which is then deposited into the contributor’s PayPal account. There is an 8% transaction fee for all payments, but that covers all tax related reporting costs. Instead of keeping up with the tax paperwork for each new contributor you work with, Ebyline will automatically generate 1099 forms and submit all of your tax paperwork for you. You can also track the status and easily browse payment history for any post.
So instead of relying on a mix of e-mail, job posting services, and PayPal to manage your blog’s contributors, you can roll all of these tools into one convenient application. Best of all, you won’t have any anxieties or surprises come tax season.
YOAST
As meticulous as the internal workflow is on your blog, none of it matters much if people can’t find it on a basic web search. To make sure your blog gets the visibility it needs, you’ll need to engage in some SEO (Search Engine Optimization). That means tagging your site and posts with metadata that Google uses to sort and rank the results of web searches. The better your SEO, the more likely it is that interested readers will stumble upon your site.
Yoast is an excellent WordPress marketing plugin that will help you optimize your site in search results. Yoast gives you a variety of tools to tag your posts with metadata that will boost your site’s visibility. You’ll have the option to tag individual posts, categories of posts, or customized categories that you can define yourself. You can also set up title and description templates that can be easily reused when needed.
Yoast has an excellent preview feature that allows you to preview how your page will appear on Google before you post, allowing you to tweak the meta description and focus keywords for maximum exposure. You can also purchase several premium modules for video and local (Google Map-based) SEO, though you can download the WordPress SEO module for free.
CAPTCHA
Despite its exponential growth over the past two decades, the internet is still home to its fair share of scammers, spammers, and malware. For bloggers, spambots can often feel like the digital equivalent of bedbugs, particularly in comments sections. Nothing sullies the interactive experience of your site quite like some random posts about how somebody’s cousin started earning $282 a day on the internet, and you can too if you click on this link!
Blocking spam is even more crucial if you’re selling any kind of products directly on your website, be it a premium subscription or a physical product. You always want to take steps to ensure that you have the proper security measures in place for your customers.
The Captcha WordPress plugin is a reliable and easy way to safeguard your site from automated spammers and junk comments. Captcha’s clean, simple, and professional interface has made it one of the most popular professional WordPress plugins for business blogs since its initial release in 2011.
This is because Captcha uses basic arithmetic, rather than the classic Salvador Dali-esque grab bag of letters and numbers, to verify the authenticity of the user. We’ve all dealt with the older verification plug-ins, and it’s no secret that they can easily frustrate visitors and degrade the overall user experience. With Captcha, the user is asked to solve a simple, clean equation (such as four x 3) that will fake out the spambots without inconveniencing users. This will keep your customers’ information safe and your comments sections tidy.
