Freelance writing is not just about writing content and publishing it on your blog or providing the same to your clients. Treat this work as a business. As a freelance writer, you have a brand to maintain, keep your clients happy, provide quality content to your readers. Writing is just small part of this whole business.
There are numerous plugins that help you proofread, check grammar, organize content, and many other things which would have been a difficult task otherwise. These plugins increases your productivity and helps reduce the work time of your monotonous task considerably. They are a must if you are a blogger and a freelance writer.
Here is a list of 10 top WordPressplugins essential for every writer:
1. Yoast SEO
Whenever we talk about the best plugins for any writer, Yoast SEO always comes first in our mind. If you want your write up to be visible on Google search results and have a high rank then this plugin is a must-have for you. It will analyze the SEO compatibility of your article with the Google’s search algorithm, including all the keywords, title, content and meta description.
It will advise you about the things that need to be fixed further before publishing. Yoast SEO also has a premium version which has features such as Multiple focus keywords to optimize your article for synonyms and related keywords. Expand Yoast SEO includes News SEO, Video SEO and WooCommerce SEO extensions.
2. MailChimp
MailChimp is one of the top plugins in the Email marketing domain. Best suited for freelancers, it helps you stay connected with your customers. You can generate and maintain a list of 2000 subscribers with its free plan. If your list exceeds 2000 customers then you have to take the premium plan but in the free plan you still have access to all the premium products.
It is very easy to use and it easily integrates with your blog in a single click. With MailChimp you can easily start your email marketing campaign and analyze your results. With its automation feature you can get rid of doing tasks manually and focus more on your marketing strategy.
3. ImageInject
You need images for any kind of blog post, writeup or basically anything if you want your work to be of top-notch quality and can amount to a considerable number of searches. It is very time taking and tiresome to search for images separately. ImageInject allows you to search for images right from your WordPress blog. After searching you can quickly insert them into your blog post.
The plugin even adds proper attribution links manually. At present, it supports Pixabay having 150,000 high quality public domain photos and Flickr which has over 200 million images. With ImageInject you can also upload multiple photos at once and create a gallery. Modify the templates to change how images get displayed on your posts.
4. Contact Form 7
It is one of the top plugins in the market to convert your leads at a high rate. As a freelance writer, you should make it easier for your clients to contact you. You can easily create a contact form mentioning all the necessary fields and embed them on your post. Its ease of use makes this plugin necessary for any freelance writer.
It comes with a number of features such as quizzes, captcha, file uploads and custom notification messages. Contact Form 7 supports AJAX-powered submitting, Captcha, Akismet spam filtering. It is relatively a new plugin in the market but one of the most popular contact forms plugin with more than 5 million active installations.
5. Editorial Calendar
Coping up with strict deadlines is a daily thing for anyone doing freelance writing. Editorial Calendar is the most popular plugin used by every freelancer to organize and to keep a record of their work. It is a plugin that will allow you to schedule your work on an hourly, daily, weekly or monthly basis.
It has an easy to use drag and drop interface. You can also edit your posting schedule and see a month of planned posts at a time. Editorial Calendar also lets you manage posts from multiple authors. You can view all of your posts when they will be posted. Also, you can quick edit your post titles, contents and times. Editorial Calendar basically organizes your work and make it orderly.
6. Copyright Proof
It is illegal to take credit by copying someone else’ work and at the same time, you need to be cautious so that other writers don’t claim your work as theirs. Copyright information is essential for all freelancers. This plugin gives you a digitally signed and time-stamped certificate of each content of your blog post.
This feature safeguards your content against content thieves gives you a proof of ownership of your blog content. You can also insert combined certification, copyright licensing, and attribution notice at end of post. It has optional anti theft feature to copy protect your content and will record ip address of attempted thieves.
7. Broken Link Checker
As the name depicts, this plugin checks the number of broken links in your blog. Broken links are bad for your website SEO. Some links are going to break and it is inevitable. Some sites go down and some change addresses. It scans and compiles a list of broken links. If the internal link is broken, you can fix it. If the external link to a page no longer exists, you can find a different source or change the copy to omit the need for the link.
Broken links can’t be completely prevented. You can just fix it time to time. Also, this plugin is not necessarily kept. Generally, one installs it, fixes the links and then uninstalls. We uninstall it later as it is not needed every day and to prevent our site from getting slow. Every once or twice a month run a broken link check scan.
8. Starbox
Better than an “about me” page, it is a must-have plugin for your blog. It is used to provide a little information about you, that is, the writer without exclusively going to a separate “About Me” page. An author box gets generated which appears along with your posts and pages. It gives you flexibility in posting your blog anywhere in the content, either before or after the content.
It is shortcode integrated and doesn’t require any coding to design and place your box. You can add up as much information about you. Also, it comes with a number of features like editing the template design to make it more appealing. It has an advantage as it doesn’t cover the entire page and hide the main content.
9. Speech To Text
This is by far the most innovative and one of the best plugins in the market. This is the best-suited plugin if you don’t want to sit and write for long hours. Along with Chrome and microphone, you just have to speak your text and it is automatically translated to the written word.
Once the whole article is written, you can review and proofread later. You just need a microphone for doing this and remember, this plugin only runs on Chrome. So make sure you have these two beforehand. It doesn’t work on web pages but only on blog posts.
10. Social Media Feather
Make yourself known in various social media channels with the help of this social sharing button. Create and add attractive social media buttons to your website. You can also change the icon style and design. The buttons are automatically added to all your posts and pages. Social share buttons and links to your pages are fast to set up with an automatic display.
It also has widgets for sharing and following buttons that you can place in any widgetized area in your website. The plugin has shortcodes which can create both, share and follow buttons. You can customize the titles and URLs for each provider. Also, you can easily create social bookmarks for your site. This is one of the top plugins used by many freelance writers.
Final Words
Each of the plugins mentioned above is useful in their own way. They all have different functions and usability and preferred by all. They help you organize and maintain your content in a better way, keeps track of your deadlines, ensure your work is copyrighted and overall increases your productivity.
Whether you are working in a company as a technical writer or you are an independent freelance writer, these are a few plugins that you must have it with you. It is a necessity to keep them always and not anything optional.
About the Author: Naveen is Digital Marketer by Profession, Blogger by Passion and kind by nature. He is working with JoomDev – A Leading Joomla Template and WordPress Themes development company in India. Apart from this, he loves to research and convert new ideas into reality.
