Blogging for business is all about capturing the attention of your target audience and building relationships after adding them to your multi-channel (email, phone, an off-line) list. But you’ll never have a chance even get that far if your business blog is clunky, hard to navigate, or a pain to print content from.

There are hundreds of WordPress plugins available to help improve your marketing and list building, but all are not created equal. To help you filter those down to a reasonable list and get you started, here are the best ones to help you make your blog more user friendly and make viral word of mouth marketing easy.

IMPROVING WORD OF MOUTH and VIRAL MARKETING ON YOUR BUSINESS BLOG

E-mail to Friend

Let’s say a first-time visitor, regular subscriber, or client likes an article, podcast, or video you have on your business blog. And let’s also say that as they’re reading, watching, or listening; they think of at least one person they think would benefit from that post. If that visitor now has to find the permalink, copy it, open their email program to paste it, and then finally send it to their friend — forget it! That will rarely (if ever) happen!

Enter the ‘Email to a friend‘ plugin for WordPress. This plugin eliminates all those hastles and makes it easy for someone to impulsively share your content with others. This is just one simple step that stacks together with other strategies to boost your word of mouth marketing.

Since installing this plugin on several of our blogs we’ve had a noticable increase in subscribers (to our update lists and/or download pages) — and we’ve been able to directly link that back those new subscribers to the Email to a friend option.

To download this WordPress plugin, go to http://www.lesterchan.net/portfolio/programming.php and look for ‘WP-Email‘ in the list

Print This Page

This plugin makes it easy for visitors to print a clean version of articles/posts from your blog. This is particularly helpful if you will be using special series or reports with offline calls to action for clients or prospects.

If you’re producing great content, and it’s in the form of longer articles or transcripts for podcasts — this plugin is a must. You’re shortchanging yourself an your target audience if you don’t make it easy for them to print out clean copies of your materials.

To download this WordPress plugin, go to http://www.lesterchan.net/portfolio/programming.php and look for ‘WP-Print‘ in the list

ENHANCING USER EXPERIENCE and NAVIGATION

Static Home Page

WordPress 2.0 or higher makes it downright simple for virtually any business owner to take complete internal control of their web presence with static pages. But what about creating what most people would consider a “normal” home page? That’s where this Static Home Page plugin comes to the rescue.

Want a more ‘conventional’ home page for your business blog? Looking to create a landing page for list building?

No matter what reason you want to use a static landing page on your blog for, this plugin makes it easy for you. Just activate the plugin, create a page with the slug of “home”, and you’re done!

Here’s the page for downloads and updated information on this WordPress plugin.
http://www.semiologic.com/software/static-front/

Adhesive

If you don’t want to create a static home page, but you’d like to keep a welcome message, subscription offer, or other marketing message at the top of your index page (or any internal category archive) — then Adhesive is the answer. It literally ’sticks’ whatever post you tag with Adhesive right where you want it. It’s just like an electronic Post-It note for your business blog.

Here’s the page for downloads and updated information on this WordPress plugin.
http://wp-plugins.net/plugin/Adhesive/

Enhanced Navigation with Pages

If you’re going to be using WordPress to run your entire web site and you’ll be using quite a few static pages, then you’ll want this plugin. It adds an enhanced page navigation structure with additional paging elements to your WordPress blog. When you team this up with the ‘Category Organizer’ plugin reviewed in the first part of this series, you’ll be able to create a clean professional navigation panel for both your static pages and blog posts.

To download this WordPress plugin, go to http://www.lesterchan.net/portfolio/programming.php and look for ‘WP-PageNavi’ in the list

Contextual Related Posts

This is a terrific plugin that’s practical for both visitors and search engine optimization. It will show the last 5 related posts from your blog. The display of related posts will show the links right after the comment form.

The matching is done with the post title of the post being viewed. If you’ve been business blogging for a while, this WordPress plugin will give new life to old posts with a complete relevance.

Here’s the page for downloads and updated information on this WordPress plugin.
Contextual related posts

Integrated Survey Creator

In some instances it’ll be much more efficient to survey your prospects and clients rather that asking for input through comments on your blog. When you’re blogging for business it’s critical you gather as much information as possible straight from your target audience — and surveys can be a great tool to add to your marketing toolbox. WP Survey Creator makes it easy.

(Note: this plugin will take some backend configuration, but is pretty straight forward. If you’re comfortable creating pages on your WordPress blog, then you should be fine.)

Here’s the page for downloads and updated information on this WordPress plugin.
http://www.3g.co.nz/2/?p=11

If you’ve used any additional plugins for improving visitor experiences or enhancing viral marketing that would be helpful for business owners blogging with WordPress — please share them below in the comments sections. Anything that can help busy business owners save time is a BIG plus!

Copyright © RPM Success Group Inc. 2002-2006. Other bloggers and journalists are allowed to excerpt and link to posts (as is common with bloggers,) as full credit/attribution is given to AdvancedBusinessBlogging.com and RPM Success Group Inc.

Learn how to unleash the maximum marketing power of business blogs, podcasts, and RSS (in any industry, profession, or niche) with Marketing With Business Blogs™.

John-Paul Micek is known as the “Communication Commando.” He and his partner Deborah have developed a simple scientific code for maximizing your persuasion, power, and influence in business. John-Paul is a published author and weekly columnist for the Honolulu Star Bulletin. As a Click-and-Mortar Business Coach he helps small business owners integrate offline and online marketing strategies for rapid, reliable business growth. You can reach J.P. directly via [communicationcommando@gmail.com].