The Best Widgets and Plugins for Personal and Business Blogs

There are a lot of great blog services out there that can help you start and run a successful blog, whether you want it for personal use to share with your friends or if you are starting a blog for your business that will be open to the public.

However, most blog services offer a basic set of features in their templates that may not have enough functionality to suit your purposes. Even if you only need the simplest kind of blog interface, adding some more features can vastly improve your blog.

Fortunately, the blog services and many other third party software developers have created widgets and plugins that can a host of new features to your blog, regardless of what audience your blog is intended for. The widgets and plugins can be very advantageous too because they allow you to pick and choose which features you want to add based on the purpose of your blog.

We’ve compiled a short list of blog widgets and blog plugins that are the most useful for people wanting to start a personal blog other those who are creating a blog for their business or industry. Some are useful for both, but to help you find what you want we’ve divided up the categories.

Widgets and Plugins for Business Blogs

The key to a business blog is helping new people find it and making it easier for those people to navigate your site. With that in mind, much of the useful widgets and plugins for business blogs revolve around increasing the performance of your blog in search engines and helping viewers find other content that interests them.

Add Meta Tags – It’s important to make it easy for search engines to categorize your content and viewers to find articles that interest them. A good meta tag plugin on your blog will help you define what each article is about, thus making it easier for people to find the topics that interest them.

Next/Previous Post – While many blog services have a standard interface that allows people to jump to the next or previous post from the one they’re currently viewing, some services require you to install a widget that creates that functionality on each page. Regardless of how your blog service does it, make sure this functionality is there because it makes it much easier for readers to read other posts, and therefore more likely that they will.

Related Entries – This plugin also helps viewers find more content that interests them (and thereby increases pageviews and viewer retention). This plugin puts links at the end of each blog post to other posts you have previously written so that readers can quickly jump to other posts without needing to go back to the home page.

Share This – An important part of getting your blog noticed is using social networking and social media sites, where millions of people recommend sites they have found to each other. By adding the Share This plugin, you are placing icons for major social sites under each post making it fast and easy for readers to submit your blog posts to these sites. Share This plugins can be a great way to get your blog out into the blogosphere faster.

Translation Tool – Some services have a widget that allows readers to translate your blog posts into several different languages at the click of a button. Obviously, this opens up your blog content to readers from outside of your country, but it’s especially useful if you plan to cater to an international audience.

Show Top Commenters – This widget keeps track of the people who comment most on your blog post and acts as an incentive for people to post more. This helps encourage more participation from viewers.

Widgets and Plugins for Personal Blogs

Usually personal blogs aren’t meant for the wide audience business blogs aim for, so you probably don’t need most of the widgets and plugins discussed above, although it might be worth a look just in case one suits your needs. Instead, widgets and plugins for personal blogs are more desingned toward customizing and personalizing your blog to fit your interests, as well as make your blog more inviting and interactive for visitors.

Music Players – Many services are offering music player widgets that can be embedded on your main blog page and can be configured with a playlist of your favorite songs. It plays these songs for anyone that visits your blog so that they can see what music you enjoy. Some music services even make music player widgets for major blog services. Usually, you don’t need to own the songs you want to play, you can just select them from the list of available songs.

Photo Albums – Some blog services have the photo album widget built-in and others require you to add it yourself. Either way, it’s a great way to display multiple pictures for readers without needing to post them one-by-one in a blog post. Plus, the album widget makes it easy to add or remove pictures in the album.

Polls – While poll widgets can actually be useful for business blogs, they are most frequently seen in personal blogs. Often they are used to ask readers (friends and family mostly) how they react to news in a post or what their opinions are of something discussed in a post. They are a fun way to elicit audience participation.

Blogroll – The blogroll widget creates a space (usually on the sidebar) where you list the blogs of friends and family so that readers can discover who you know and what kind of things they are interested in. It’s a great way for people to network through other personal blogs. If you want to alert people to a commercial business blog that you really enjoy, those can certainly be added to the blogroll too.

Podcasts – Some services allow you to install a plugin that integrates podcasts into your blog. This is a great way to share your interests with readers and let them experience your favorite podcasts.

Ratings – This widget is fairly similar to the polling widget above except it encourages readers to rate on a scale how much they like something. It can be something in a blog post or a topic of discussion, or it could be completely unrelated. It allows people to interact and voice their opinions.

These are only a few of the widgets and plugins offered by all the blog services and third party developers out there. When you set up your blog, make sure to look at the available widgets and plugins to see if there are any others that would work well for you.

If you need help finding a good blog service, head on over to our review of the best blog services. There are side-by-side comparisons of the top blog services as well as full reviews and recommendations.