There are many reasons why we love working with WordPress: first, it’s FREE, which is obviously awesome.  It’s also pretty easy to learn how to use, for even the most beginner-ish beginner. Once you have added a few innovative plugins, the tool also becomes very flexible and customizable, and, as many do not realize, can help your website in becoming an inbound marketing machine.

With a few key plugins, your WordPress site can be optimized to Attract, Convert, Close and Delight through targeted content, better SEO, landing pages and calls to action, lead management and social media. Here’s a checklist of WordPress tools and plugins that you should be using to amp up your inbound marketing.

Attract

Attract your buyer personas through targeted and keyword optimized content.  Here’s a list of some WordPress plugins that can help you get the job done.

WordPress SEO by Yoast: as mentioned in a recent post on SEO plugins, this is the most popular plugin for optimization and a must for inbound marketers. It’s easy to use, and directs you to select a focus keyword and use that keyword in your title, URL, meta description and content.

Squirrly SEO: the Squirrly plugin has a “search and suggest” feature which can help you write better and more targeted posts to help improve your inbound marketing efforts.

W3 Total Cache: Is your website slow to load? You can’t attract valuable visitors if your site won’t even load to show them what you’re offering. W3 is the only WordPress Performance Optimization (WPO) framework, designed to improve user experience and page speed.

Convert

Convert your site visitors into customers with great landing pages and enticing calls to action.

WordPress Landing Pages: Create landing pages for your WordPress site, monitor and improve conversion rates, run A/B split tests, and customize your own templates. Increase your incoming leads with landing pages that work!

MaxButtons: Create great-looking CSS3 call to action buttons that can be used on any post or page in your WordPress site. The easy to use button editor makes it a snap to generate awesome CSS3 buttons in very little time.

Swiftcloud: Create instant and easy drag-and-drop web forms and call to action lead capture buttons. The paid option of the plugin also includes options for CRM, task and project management, and autoresponders and file storage.

AirTightForm: Branded as “the World’s most powerful WordPress form plugin with email marketing”, AirTightForm allows you to create forms to capture leads, send mail to those leads, and create AutoResponders.

Close

If you’ve done a good job of attracting the right visitors and generating those visitors into leads, the next step is to close those leads into actual customers. You need to use the right tools to make sure you’re closing the right leads…at the right time.

WP CRM: This plugin is intended to significantly improve user management, easily create contact forms, and keep track of incoming shortcode form messages. WordPress already comes with some basic user management functions – WP-CRM expands on this functionality by allowing you to organize your users using custom attributes, find them using filters, and keep track of correspondence.

WordPress Leads: WordPress Leads works as a standalone plugin or hand in hand with WordPress Landing Pages & WordPress Calls to Action to create a powerful & free lead generation system for your business. WordPress leads gives you powerful visitor tracking where Google Analytics leaves off ( aka tie website activity directly to a specific individual) It allows you to track every activity that a visitor takes on your site, before converting on a web form.

Leadin: Leadin is a new free tool from HubSpot that was just launched last week; it integrates with WordPress and is super easy to setup.  When someone visits your site, it captures information about them: what pages they’ve visited, when they return, and what social networks they are on. It captures leads with a pop-up and then stores them in a contact database for future use.

Delight

Newsletter: Newsletter is a real newsletter system for your WordPress blog: perfect for list building, you can easily create, send and track e-mails, headache-free. Set up your first newsletter with just a few simple clicks.

SendPress: SendPress Newsletters is an easy to use WordPress newsletter plugin that has all the features you need. Create newsletter templates with your style and edit content just like you would a post in WordPress. Easily import post content from your site and schedule newsletters to be sent at the right time.

Slimstat Analytics: the leading analytics plugin for WordPress, Slimstat has great dashboards and offers a lot of other graphic ways to present your data.

These WordPress plugins & tools will help get your inbound marketing strategy off the ground and help you Attract, Convert, Close and Delight those visitors.  If there are any other plugins that you’ve come across that are helping with your inbound marketing, please let us know in the comments below.

To find out more about why you should be using WordPress to help build your inbound marketing machine, check out our free guide!