Cool Tools Can Help Communicate More Clearly

In the circular world of internet communication, I received a daily SmartBrief email that had a link to an article by John Jantsch, Founder of Duct Tape Marketing, which was posted on the American Express OPEN Forum for small businesses. The headline “10 Ways to Make WordPress More Useful” was a strong hook, as I use WordPress for my own blog as well as for some clients, and who doesn’t want to make anything they do more useful?

The “ways” were really a list of “plugins”, along with descriptions of what value they might add. Since there are hundreds of plugins available, I always appreciate reading user reviews to find out which ones are – you guessed it – more useful.

Since I use a few of the suggested plugins in the list already, the two that caught my eye were Apture and Contextual Related Posts.

As described, Apture was a breeze to install. Minutes. And I’m using it with the greatest of ease as I write. The options offered for links or embedded content are accurate, interesting and varied. A real timesaver for giving readers access to interesting links.

Contextual Related Posts was a little more difficult to find at first, because the list calls it ‘Related Content’. It was relatively easy to install and setup. It worked immediately, adding links to related posts on all previous ones. Another nice time saver and way to pull readers into the blog.

While  Searching for ‘related content’ actually led me to a different plugin which I also found to be interesting and probably useful: Headup. This nifty add-on does something slightly different than the other two useful tools: it finds related content elsewhere on the internet, highlights the word or concept, and gives additional information in a pop-up format which is both slick and good for keeping readers engaged on your blog. I’m using it now, so let me know what you think about this new way of sharing information.

So, reading my email this morning was a good use of time. And now I’m passing along some of the useful things I uncovered.

Like Thomas the Tank Engine – we all want to be a ‘useful engine’, right?

–Donna