The 4 Best WordPress Plugins for Content Marketers

If you're looking to build your brand online, no doubt you're already familiar with the benefits of content marketing.Of course, deciding you want to start content marketing is one thing; implementing it successfully is quite another.Thankfully, the WordPress CMS makes a content marketer's life that little bit easier: There are a number of great content marketing WordPress plugins out there, many of them completely free of charge.Today, we take a look at a number of plugins to help you tackle some of the more important elements of content marketing.Let's get started.

For Scheduling Content: Editorial Calendar

If you want to succeed with content marketing, you're going to need, well, content! As your site grows, managing this content is only going to get harder -- not to mention more stressful.Editorial Calendar is a free plugin for this very purpose: Helping content marketers stay on top of which posts get published, and when.The calendar allows you to visualise everything you've scheduled, making it easy to spot any gaps; if you want to make changes, all you have to do is drag and drop an article to a different date.It also shows you all your unscheduled and unpublished pieces next to the calendar -- perfect for preventing any articles from getting stuck in unpublished purgatory.

For Fresh Content: MyCurator

Consistently coming up with fresh ideas for content is perhaps the hardest task for content marketers. After all, the more you publish, the more ideas you've exhausted -- it's bound to get trickier.If you struggle with this, MyCurator will quickly become your new best friend.It's a free plugin that works in the background, searching the net on your behalf to find content you'll find useful. You can use the results as the foundation for new post ideas, or for quotes, facts and figures to add an extra layer of credibility to your articles.It also comes with a notebook feature which allows you to jot down ideas or extracts to use at a later date -- like a version of Evernote within WordPress.The best thing about this plugin is that the algorithm "learns" what material you like, making it more useful over time. By bookmarking good content yourself, and manually up/down voting the articles it brings back, MyCurator becomes more proficient at finding the stuff you really want to be talking about.

For Social Shares: Flare

As you're trying to promote your business through content marketing, naturally you'll only publish high-quality posts.We all know that producing high-quality content is the key to getting lots of social shares; even so, you still want to make this process as easy as possible.There are many social sharing plugins out there, but our recommendation is Flare.With Flare, you can position your social media share buttons at the top or bottom of your post, as well as in a floating sidebar on either side.It's compatible with all the major social media platforms, and you can configure which ones you want your content to be shared on. You can also order your icons, allowing you to position your most important platforms more prominently. There are several different icon sets to choose from, so you can select one which matches the tone of your website.A nice touch is the summing together of all your social media shares, which it calls (unimaginatively) "Flares". This makes it easy for you to see how your content is performing, and the larger combined share figure will encourage more visitors to share, giving your blog even more exposure.

For Related Content: YARPP

If your content is engaging and informative, naturally your audience will want to check out the other stuff you've produced -- for a content marketer, this is the desired outcome.Don't expect your audience to do all the hard work, though: install a related posts plugin that points them the similar material they might find useful.The best plugin for the job is YARPP -- Yet Another Related Post Plugin.At the end of each post, or in the sidebar, YARPP displays closely related content that might be of interest to the visitor.For a free plugin, the algorithm is quite sophisticated; it takes into account your titles, content, categories and tags before pulling up the best-fitting content from across your site. If you're unhappy with the results, you can add your own inputs to the algorithm until you're satisfied.And, if you want to supplement your income, you can even show related sponsored articles on external websites; you get paid for each click.

Wrapping Up

To quickly bolster your content marketing efforts, look no further than the four WordPress plugins featured today -- each helps with something different, so grab all four for an all-round performance boost.Of course, there are many more useful content marketing plugins out there. Which ones couldn't you live without? Let us know by leaving us a comment!Featured image courtesy of Takamorry