Writing, publishing, and promoting content can be very time-consuming. But you can be more efficient and productive in your content marketing by automating content creation to a large extent. There are dozens of content automation plugins available for WordPress sites that can help you to publish more content and better content, faster. Here’s a quick list of some of our favorites.
1. Thrive Headline Optimizer
Optimizing your headlines is an important aspect of creating successful content. Your headline could make the difference between someone clicking through and reading your content or just skimming past and ignoring it.
Posts with great headlines also get shared more on social media. In fact, studies have shown that up to 80 percent of users will read your headline, but only 20 percent go on to read the whole post.
Good headlines can even improve your article conversion rate. Marketer Neil Patel improved his conversion rate by 40 percent, just by changing his headlines.
So, it’s well worth investing some time and effort into optimizing your headlines. The problem is that it can be very time-consuming to test different versions of headlines.
Enter Thrive Headline Optimizer to save the day!
This plugin uses split A/B testing to test different versions of your headline and will automatically show the best headline to more readers over time.
Price: $67 for a single site license, including one year of support and unlimited free updates
2. Content Audit by Stephanie Leary
With so much content being produced by companies these days, content governance has become a beast of its own. For us at DivvyHQ, we’re publishing 3-4 blog posts per week, which adds up quickly year over year. So it’s nice to have a content automation plugin for WordPress that reminds us, at a specified interval, to take a look at older posts and check to see if the content is still accurate and relevant.
For example, you know those end-of-the-year posts that many companies publish to help customers prep for the new year ahead, i.e. “The Biggest Challenges Content Marketers Face in 2017”?
Yeah, that probably needs to be archived. Or perhaps there are still some nuggets of goodness in there. Perhaps it can be updated for 2021?
A good audit plugin can be a gold mine for repurposing past content that may only need a fresh coat of paint.
Price: FREE
3. Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP)
Internal linking should be an important part of your overall content strategy. If you can send people to other content on your site that they may be interested in when they get to the end of an article, you can keep them on your site for longer and improve your overall conversion rate.
Of course, you can manually link to other posts within your content, but it can be time-consuming to find relevant content.
YARRP automates the process of internal linking with an advanced algorithm that uses post titles, content, tags, categories, and custom taxonomies to automatically find the most relevant related posts from across your site.
It then displays these posts attractively with thumbnails to encourage a higher click-through rate.
Price: FREE
4. Revive Old Posts
This is probably one of our favorites on this list of content automation plugins for WordPress because it’s a truly automated social publishing engine that, once set up, is basically “set it and forget it”.
The setup does require a bit of technical prowess in the form of establishing Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn “apps”, app approval and then cron job setup, which is basically a little bot that runs in the background, checking for new social posts periodically. Like I said, some technical prowess might be needed.
Once all that is set, the plugin can be configured with a variety of settings:
- Post schedules can be established for posting on certain days/times
- Post content can be set to include just titles or meta descriptions, shortened URLs, hashtags, featured images, etc.
- The bank of blog posts that should be shared can be adjusted by category, date range (post age), author, etc.
- Non-evergreen posts can be removed from the sharing queue
The result is an endless stream of past, evergreen blog posts shared on your social channels effortlessly.
Price: Starts at $75/year for setup on 1 website/blog
5. WordPress Automatic Plugin
WordPress Automatic Plugin enables you to pull in content from a wide variety of sources, including Amazon and Ebay products, Craigslist listings, posts from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest, Flickr images, Youtube videos, Ezine articles, and more.
Importantly, this plugin doesn’t need an RSS feed to work so it can scrape content from any webpage and import the content. (Of course, you must be careful to use this feature responsibly!)
There’s a wide range of filters and customization options for each kind of content, so you can extract specific parts of the content and exclude posts without images, for example.
Price: $30 for a single site license, including 6 months of support and unlimited updates
6. Yoast SEO
SEO is critical to ensure your content is easy to find and helps your site to appear nearer the top in search engine results pages. But it can be very time-consuming to spend time on each piece of content, making sure it’s fully optimized.
The Yoast SEO plugin takes a lot of the hard work out of this task by scanning your WordPress posts and making automatic suggestions for how you can improve your SEO by editing your headings, content, images, meta tags, and more.
Yoast will also automatically add structured data to your website pages and posts, redirect deleted posts and pages, and add SEO title and meta description templates to your new posts. This means you can greatly speed up your content publication, safe in the knowledge that your SEO is already taken care of.
Price: $89 for a single site license
7. TranslatePress
If you only publish content in English on your site, there’s a good chance you’re limiting your audience. But it would be very expensive and time-consuming to translate all your content into multiple languages.
TranslatePress will convert your WordPress site into a multilingual site, and it integrates with Google Translate to make the process fully automatic.
Price: €79 per year for a single site
Need a More Integrated Solution?
What if you don’t have a WordPress site? Or you’re looking for an integrated content automation solution that integrates with other online services?
DivvyHQ is a full content marketing platform designed for high-volume content production and teams. As well as a fully integrated content calendar and tools for collaboration, management, and analytics, it can help you to automate publishing of your content to WordPress via our own WordPress plugin. Why not try it for free for 14 days?