Popular Posts – Recent Posts – Most Commented Posts – Related Posts – Posts and Posts

Once you have visitors to your blog, the point is to keep them reading and keep them coming back. For that you need to keep your content in front of them. Give them easy access to posts they might be interested in.

This means you need to show listings of your most recent posts, popular posts, posts with comments on them and so on and so forth.

And as always Wordpress plugins help.

1. WP-PostViews

   This plugin displays the last X number of posts with the most views. In other words these are the most popular posts at your blog.

   This provides your visitor with social proof. After all if others are reading these posts, then they must contain good info.

   If you are the only registered user, you can set it to count views from guests only. However, if your blog has the option to register, then you may want to count views by both guests and registered users.

   Check out WP-PostViews

2. Most Commented Posts

   This plugin outputs a list of the Last X posts with the most comments. You can choose to display posts from the current month, current year or all posts.

   Again it serves as social proof not to mention that most people love a good discussion. People are more likely to check out posts which have a lively discussion going on.

   Check out this plugin

3. Yet Another Related Posts Plugin

   I had to go thru two other plugins to find one that worked the way I wanted.

   This plugin lets you add related posts at the end of each post automatically. You can set the criterion for matching and set the threshold from 1 to 5, 5 being the strictest. Posts are then chosen based on the criterion and threshold. Start off with a lower threshold if you have few posts. You can increase it as you get more posts on your blog and can afford to get picky.

   This makes for a very useful plugin. Once you have finished reading a post on a topic of interest, you are more likely to click links that lead to similar posts. A brilliant way of getting visitors to stick around and may be even subscribe to your RSS Feed.

   Get this plugin.

4. Recent Posts

   Wordpress 2.5.1 already comes with a recent posts widget. Activate this widget via your Design > Widgets section to get a listing of the most recent posts in your sidebar.

You can see an example of how these plugins work at the front end on this blog.

Recent Posts, Most Commented Posts and Most Viewed Posts can be found on the sidebar. Related Posts are at the bottom of every post on the single posts page.

Tags: Most Commented Posts, Popular Posts, Recent Posts, Related Posts, Widget, Wordpress Plugins