Widgets for focusing on advertising & video

Easy Media Gallery
Easy Media Gallery is a widget that allows your business’s website to embed over 17 different social media platforms onto your WordPress site. Easy Media Gallery PRO has additional options such as creating an unlimited number of media, no coding required, 24/7 technical support, and the ability to change your display theme. This widget was developed by Ghozy Lab. Use this widget to increase your website’s visibility and to further engage your target audience.

Rating Widget
Rating Widget is a widget that allows your business to create a customizable rating system. This widget can be used to rate posts, products, services and more. Multiple languages are supported. Advanced features are available with Pro and Premium Pro versions. This widget was developed by Vova Feldman. Use this widget to support your webpage’s visibility and to educate your audience.

Mail Subscribe List
Mail Subscribe List is a widget that allows your business to collect customer information, email addresses and subscription lists. The data entry form can be customized depending on the needs of your business and technical skills. This widget was developed by Richard Leishman. Use this widget to grow your audience.

CataBlog
CataBlog is a free widget that enables your business to display images, product materials and service descriptions in an easy-to-edit catalog. Use this widget to sell merchandise or to display photos and content. This widget was developed by Zachary Segal.

Widgets for focusing on comments & analytics

Google+ Comments for WordPress
Google+ Comments for WordPress is a free widget that allows customers and visitors to your WordPress site to post a comment using other social media platforms. This saves time and increases customer interaction with your business. This widget was developed by Brandon Holtsclaw. Use this widget to interact and engage your audience.

Testimonials Widget
Testimonials Widget is a free widget that allows businesses to display testimonials, in static or dynamic format, on their website. The Pro version supports further customization for content, features, compatibility, maintaining current content and preventing duplication, and allows modification of the original plugin. This widget was developed by Michael Cannon. Use this widget to enhance your public image and expertise.

Google Analyticator
Google Analyticator is a free widget that helps the website owner to utilize Google Analytics without requiring any complex steps. The widget displays an analytics dashboard for the administrator to review site visits, visitor characteristics, download links, top referrers, referring links and more. This widget was developed by Video User Manuals. Use this widget to gain a better understanding of how your website’s audience.

New Stat Press
New Stat Press is a free widget that can help your business track visits per day, location of the visitors, browsers used, preferred pages, spiders, feeds and keywords, and offers both an overview and detailed display of the statistics available. This widget was developed by Ice00. Use this widget to increase your website’s visibility as well as enhance its marketability.

Widgets for focusing on your website’s layout

Widget Manager Light
Widget Manager Light is a free widget that allows your business to customize where your website’s widgets are displayed. This widget requires no coding knowledge to use. The full version of Widget Manager supports increased customization for your business needs. This widget was developed by OTWthemes. Use this widget to increase customer engagement and to make your website easier to use.

Really Static
Really Static is a free widget that decreases the time it takes for your business’ website pages to upload. Really Static converts your entire WordPress website pages into static HTML pages, which reduces upload time and the storage space the page requires. This widget can also translate your webpages into nine different languages. The premium version auto-configures your pages to the HTML format, allows for customization of the “about information” listed for each area of content, removes the “donate” info for the plugin, and offers installation support. This widget was developed by Erik. Use this widget to increase customer engagement and make your website easier to use.

Widgets for focusing on purchases made on your website

WP Marketplace
WP Marketplace is a free, full-featured widget that can help your business with marketing, shipping & taxes, payments, invoice production, stock control, managing commissions and email marketing. This widget was developed by Shaon & Shaid. Use this widget to help decrease your focus on your business and increase focus on customer service.

Pricing Table
Pricing Table is a free widget for creating a pricing list. This widget supports different color schemes, customizable tables, and drag & drop features for re-ordering. This widget was developed by Shaon. Use this widget to make it easier for customers to buy your products or services.

Widgets for focusing on your website’s readability

Live Chat
Live Chat is a customer support widget that allows your business to chat and respond to email immediately using live chat, email and other social media platforms. This widget was developed by Casengo and the first month includes a free 30-day trial. Use this widget to make it easier to ask questions about your website.

Social Login
Social Login is a free widget that allows customers to post comments using other social media accounts. This widget is in both English and German and was developed by One All & Claude. Use this widget to increase your website’s readership and to increase customer interaction with your business.

Twitget
Twitget is a free widget that allows your business to post their tweets to their website . Post your Twitter feed to your website as a widget to generate dynamic information regarding your business’s area of expertise. This widget was developed by Bostjan Cijan. Use this widget to solicit comments and feedback from your audience about your website.

Widgets for focusing on events & activities

Events Manager
Events Manager is a free registration management program that collects and tracks events, activities, programs and locations. Google Maps is integrated as a part of this widget. Data is displayed as a calendar and other customizable formats. The Pro version supports payment, use of coupon codes, and additional private forums. The widget was developed by Marcus & Nut Smuggler. Use this widget to market and coordinate your activities and events.

Event List
Event List is a free widget that allows your business to list activities by date, time and location. This widget allows your business to promote events, deals, presentations and courses, as well as virtually any other activity. This widget was developed by Mibuthu. Use this widget to market and coordinate your activities and events.

Widgets to present business contact info

Business Contact Widget
Business Contact Widget is a free widget that displays your business’ contact information in an easy to read and elegant way that does not unnecessarily co-opt space on your website that could be used to display other information. This widget was developed by Stress Free sites. Use this widget to display your contact information in a catchy and fun way that does not dominate the webpage.

Widgets to generate additional revenue with your website

Quick Adsense
Quick Adsense is an ad management program that embeds advertisements of your merchandise into participating websites for a low monthly or pay-per-click fee. You can decide where to have the advertisement posted on your website. As a business, you can also use Quick Adsense to post your merchandise on the Internet. This widget was developed by Toddynho & Philip Ze in coordination with Google Adsense. Use this widget to help market your website and increase its revenue.

Final Comments

There are a lot of great widgets available for your WordPress website. Analytics can provide you with a lot of great information regarding how your website is achieving its purpose. Identifying the design for your WordPress website requires that you first identify the purpose of the website ” is it to sell products or services, develop a reader following, increase your reputation in a specific area of expertise, or to showcase your business portfolio? The answer to these questions will determine your website’s widget needs.

Marketing

Fan Playr
Fan Playr is a plugin that seeks to monetize the social connections of your customers. Sign up is free, although additional features may come with a fee. The plugin helps you build an email referral list to increase your customer base. Analytics increase your business’s ability to evaluate current strategies and marketing efforts. The Fan Playr plugin also includes social games that help your business engage customers. This plugin was developed by Fan Playr.

Hello Modi
The Hello Modi Social Discount plugin supports businesses to increase their social media exposure by providing customers incentives to post comments on Facebook (for example) to gain access to a incentive. This plugin was developed by the Hello Modi Team.

Displaying Products

CataBlog
CataBlog is a free plugin that supports your business to display your products and services in an elegant catalog or gallery format. This plugin is translated into five different languages. In addition, this plugin supports expanded product descriptions, links to expanded product pages, photos to display your products, and searches. This plugin was developed by Zachary Segal.

Image Zoomer
Image Zoomer is a free plugin that allows customers to zoom in on images and product details on your business’s WP website. This plugin is customizable and was developed by the Dynamics WP Team.

Cartalog
Cartalog is a free plugin that enables your business to list its products and services on the website page of your choice. Upgrading to Cartalog Pro provides increased customization for more complex product lines. Cartalog is used with the Cart66 “add to the cart” button plugin. The developer of the Cartalog plugin is Bruce Findleton.

Chat, Communication, & Correspondence

Woo Commerce Multilingual
Woo Commerce Multilingual is a free plugin that enables your business to translate product descriptions, emails, and marketing materials in the customer’s preferred language. This plugin is compatible with other Woo Commerce plugins and was developed by Amir Helzer, Dominykas, David Garcia Watkins, and Aldeval.

Live Chat
Help on Click’s Live Chat is a plugin that enables your business to chat online with their customers while they are visiting the business’s WP website. This plugin service is charged based on the period. The three-month packages cost less per month than paying one month at a time. Prices are based on the number of lines. This plugin was developed by Neran.

Branded Email
Branded Email is a free plugin that supports your business by generating WP emails with your business’s logo. Your logo is attached to emails that are personally or automatically generated in WP. This plugin was developed by Vega Bumming.

Multilingual Feedback Tag
Multilingual Feedback Tag is a free plugin that supports your business to gather feedback and convert site visitors into current and ongoing customers. This plugin can be customized with additional tabs, questions and colors to suit the needs of your business. This plugin has the ability to translate the feedback tag’s information to suit any user. The feedback can be translated back into English by using Google Translator, or by the plugin’s developer for a small fee. This plugin was developed by One Hour Translation.

Orders & Inventory

Smart Manager for Ecommerce
Smart Manager for Ecommerce is a free plugin that works with Woo Commerce and WP Ecommerce 3.7. This plugin helps your business to manage orders and track inventory. The Pro version allows for more customization for increased product variation and differences. This plugin was developed by Nirav Mehta, Ratnakar, Rupali and Tarun.

Shopping Cart

Market Press
Market Press boasts an all in one shopping cart plugin that helps your business with orders, payment, international currency, coupons, analytics, inventory and pricing. This plugin was developed by WPMU Dev.

The Cart Press
The Cart Press boasts an all-in-one shopping cart plugin that helps your business with international currency, pricing, international taxes, payment, shipping and catalog. This plugin was developed by The Cart Press.

ArtPal
ArtPal is a free plugin that supports your business to sell one-of-a-kind products. This plugin uses PayPal for payment. One of the features of this particular plugin is that it is designed to remove a product posting once sold. This plugin may then be inappropriate for businesses with duplicate product offerings. This plugin was developed by Free Robby.

WP Ecommerce Extra Shipping Options
This is a free plugin that enables your business to calculate shipping rates for the UK, Europe and the rest of the world. This plugin can also be customized by the user. The developers of this plugin are Dijutul and DJB31st.

PayPal Short Codes
This free plugin enables your business to use PayPal for payments. It is customizable for different currencies. This plugin was developed by Swer Group and Pixline.

Currency Converter

World Currency
World Currency is a free plugin that recognizes the IP address of the customer vising your business’s website. Prices are then converted based on the local currency of the visiting customer. This plugin was developed by Daniel Tienghi.

Shipping & Postage

Shipping Easy
Shipping Easy for WP Ecommerce is a free plugin that enables you to compare different costs for shipping packages. Shipping prices are updated regularly and automatically. Prices for the service are based on how many packages your business ships per month. If you only have one business, and one store, and ship less than 50 packages a month, this service is free.

Downloads

Easy Digital Downloads
This is a plugin that enables businesses to sell digital media. This plugin helps your business with payment, tracking payment history, issuing receipts and profit statements. It also supports multiple downloads simultaneously, is translated into 14 languages, and provides a promotional code system to market special deals and sales. This plugin was developed by Pippin.

Music Store
Music Store is a plugin that enables businesses to sell digital music. This plugin also supports businesses with online store setup, playing music online, using PayPal for payments and sharing with social networks, and has a widget for analytics. This plugin was developed by Code People.

Easy Files Shop
Easy Files Shop is another free plugin that helps your business to sell digital media. This plugin creates a secured file system that stores your files until the customer has paid. An email with an individualized link is then sent to the customer so that they can then download the purchased file. This plugin was developed by Felix Koch.

WP Vibe Deck
WP Vibe Deck is a free plugin that enables your business to sell digital media. This plugin supports a media player on your WP website. Customers can view the album while simultaneously listening to your music on the media player. Purchases are securely processed using the plugin. This plugin was developed by Ecurtain.

All-in-One

Shopp Plugin
Shopp Plugin is a full-service plugin for ecommerce. For $55, this plugin provides assistance with payment and shipping, catalogs and customer service, security, website development, and comprehensive product support. This plugin was developed by Ingenesis Limited.

WP Marketplace
WP Marketplace is a free, full-service plugin for online businesses. This plugin supports orders, inventory management, shipping, calculating taxes, digital downloads, pricing, coupons, security, commissions, social marketing and membership management. This plugin was developed by Shaon and Shaid.

WP Ecommerce
WP Ecommerce is another free, full-service ecommerce plugin. This plugin supports some functionality in payment, marketing, shipping, calculating taxes, translation, checkout, managing orders, catalog management and inventory, as well as catalog browsing and product displays. This plugin was developed by Mufasa, Gary Cao, Justin Sainton and Mychelle.

Social Media

WP Ecommerce Facebook Like Button
This is a free plugin that allows customers to share information regarding their purchases on their Facebook pages. This plugin uses these relationships to increase sales. The developer of this plugin is Visser Labs.

Pinterest for The Cart Press
Pinterest for The Cart Press is a free plugin that allows your business to engage social media platforms to expand your customer base. The customer can share your products or services with everyone on the web on the Pinterest website. This plugin is compatible with The Cart Press plugin and was developed by Inigo.

WordPress plugins are available to help your business to be more effective in all of these functional areas identified in this article. Whether it involves improving your business’s marketing, shipping, currency exchange, orders and inventory or communications, plugins help make life easier. We hope you enjoyed this list and please comment with any plugins we should add.

Image credit.

And then WordPress burst onto the scene as a free, open-source platform designed with blogging in mind, allowing bloggers to utilize templates, tools and widgets without slowing down our creative juices. It was the perfect marriage of the art of writing and the art of presentation. Even while many “real” journalists still considered blogs a passing fad, we bloggers knew that we had found our niche.

However, unlike “real” journalists, we were somewhat hampered in our ability to promote our favorite products, our favorite blogs or even ourselves, lest our blog be viewed as spam. Likewise, as the captivated audiences of successful bloggers grew, advertisers were hampered in their ability to capitalize on this highly informed and engaged audience.

Listening to the needs of its bloggers, WordPress developed a number of plugin applications that allow bloggers to enrich our content and monetize our blogs without compromising our integrity. The following programs are some of my personal favorites (both free and paid).

Easy AdSense

Easy AdSense makes sense of the wide world of advertising. It limits the number of ads to no more than three per page. After all, your blog is the feature, not the advertisements. With Easy AdSense, you can choose where and how often ads appear in your blog. Personally, I prefer to have no advertisements on my home page. I want my readers to be able to read enough of my blog to capture their interest before bombarding them with advertisements.

Yepty

Yepty allows a blogger to integrate pay-per-click advertising into his or her blog. The pay-per-click function is easily inserted into text or images, monetizing every aspect of your blog. For bloggers with a loyal fan base, Yepty is an ideal solution as the income directly correlates to the number of visitors that return to your blog. Additionally, all of the ads directly relate to your content.

WP-Insert

WP-Insert combines many of the mundane functions of utilizing advertisements on your blog. It allows you to run up to three different ad networks at one time. Insert ads anywhere on the page  -  top, middle or bottom of the post, left or right side banners. WP-Insert is also geographically sensitive, allowing you to support the local businesses that support your blog. With WP-Insert, it is simple to add a privacy policy, terms and conditions, and disclaimers, as well as tracking codes to determine the ads that most interest your readers.

AdRotate

This amazing plugin allows a blogger to use multiple banners for separate pages on his or her blog. The banners can be generated randomly or tied to a certain topic. AdRotate lets you manage ads or groups of ads in the same manner. With its internal statistical analysis, AdRotate sends you an email when your banners or ads are about to expire. It even tailors ads to your loyal readers’ preferences based on their previous clicks. You can disable an ad or banner after a pre-selected number of clicks to ensure that your advertising content never becomes stale.

Billboard

Billboard provides a professional, seamless appearance to articles, items and other materials mentioned in your blog. In a recent blog post about the skills shortage in advanced manufacturing (I know, not the most scintillating topic for everyone, but it has my attention), a certain report regarding the statistics that supported the post appeared as the report’s cover. I simply clicked on the report cover to download the full report so that I could form my own opinion and comment on the original post. And yes, I did read the entire report.

Ad Injection

This crafty little plugin automatically connects any other advertisement platform (Google, Amazon, etc.) to your WordPress blogs and pages. Several ingenious features make this a must-have for bloggers interested in monetizing their site. Ad Injection allows you to position the advertisements wherever you please on your site. As a blogger, you can also tailor the ads according to the length of your post, your visitor’s profile or even by the age of the visitor. Ad Injection also provides A/B testing so that you can determine the best placement for your ads. Automatic injection helps to reduce “ad blindness”, a condition wherein the reader simply ignores an advertisement based on its location within a blog.  You can restrict the ads to appear only on older posts, allowing you to attract visitors with your well-informed blog before subjecting them to advertisements. One interesting feature of this plugin is that it can be used for options other than advertisements. You can use Ad Injection to provide your readers with a place to sign up for your email list or as a coupon for your products or your advertisers’ products.

Author Advertising

This plugin accommodates a blog for which many authors contribute materials. It interfaces with many of the traditional advertising platforms such as Yahoo, Google AdSense, Amazon and others. The blog administrator retains control over which advertisements appear for each author. This feature allows the administrator to calculate revenue generated by author with complete accuracy. The administrator controls the type of advertising and its placement to optimize the blog’s monetization.

Max Banner

Max Banner takes the guess-work out of using banner advertisements. Generally speaking, banner advertisements pay more than smaller, block advertisements. However, creating banner ads can create quite a headache. This plugin contains a tracking mechanism so that you can track your most profitable ads. It also allows for banner rotation and placement in various positions throughout the blog.

Traditionally, “real” journalists are supported by advertising, whether directly through companies that want to advertise in their columns, or indirectly through the advertisements attracted by the publication itself.

The plugins offered in conjunction with WordPress recognize the unique perspectives and advertising needs of today’s bloggers while respecting the integrity of the blogger’s words. Advertisers can trust that the bloggers they support will generate interest in their products, and bloggers can trust that the advertisers will enhance their blog rather than detract from the subject at hand.