How to Show the Most Popular Authors on Your Blog

There is never an appropriate situation to leave out the names of your blog contributors. Even if it’s a really small team behind the blog, the readers will feel more close to you and your “brand” if you give them a name and a face of the person behind the texts they are reading. The writers, on the other hand, will approach their work more responsibly if you give them credits instead of just leaving them to be ghostwriters.

Roughly, these are the main reasons to make sure that texts on your blog are always paired up with their authors. But let’s quickly go through a reminder of all nuances and delicate connections between your kindness and your blog’s success. Then, we’ll proceed to answer how you can show the most popular authors on your blog.

The Benefits of Featuring Author Info on Your Blog

It all comes down to your blog’s popularity. Whether you want to maintain it or improve it, including versatile content and numerous contributors can only do you good. But, let’s take a closer look at how this strategy affects your image.

Writer Dedication

Featuring the author’s info is above all a sign of respect and appreciation of their work. Still, there’s much more to it.

Firstly, if you credit them on your blog, they will be able not only to add their articles to their portfolio but also to promote them on social media. This means more credibility to them, and more attention to your blog.

But above all, knowing that their name will be attached to everything they write, they will put more effort into every text, and thus contribute to the overall positive impression your blog leaves. So, quality content – check!

Building Credibility

It’s simple – the more people stand behind a blog, the more it is perceived as a reliable source of information. If those people are prolific writers and educated professionals, your blog will leave a good overall impression.

On top of this, there is the matter of diversity. Each author will bring their own style and point of view, so your content will seem more organic, and thus more credible and engaging, which brings us to another point.

Engaging the Readers

What’s a better way to engage the readers than to enable them to interact with their favorite bloggers? There is hardly any since a live discussion is among the most favorite parts of the reading process for a modern avid reader of the short form.

Additionally, some of the more popular authors might bring their “fan base” to your website, thus improving the traffic and click-through rate of your posts.

How to List Your Top Authors

So, let’s see what your options are when it comes to listing the most popular authors on your blog.

Automatic Listing

There aren’t many ways to make a list of your most popular contributors if you don’t want to meddle in code. In this case, the most obvious way to do it is through an author box plugin.

We have found the one which besides listing the top authors offers lots of other useful and beginner-friendly tools. The plugin in question is Simple Author Box, a frequently updated WordPress author box plugin which has over 40,000 active users.

General Features

This plugin includes the usual features, such as the author’s gravatar, name, and a short bio. It also gives you room to list their website in case they have it, as well as around 45 social media icons.

The visual appearance of the author boxes can easily be additionally manipulated by changing the style of the typography, its size, as well as the color.

Top Authors Widget

The most important feature for us right now is the top authors widget which is a part of the Pro version. Namely, this plugin offers an option to list the most popular authors on your blog on an easy-to-access widget.

It automatically compiles the list not according to the number of posts an author has but based on the comments each post gets.

This truly seems like the most appropriate and accurate criteria to follow when ranking the authors on your blog. The attention the posts attract is, after all, one of the most reliable ways to measure an author’s popularity.

Pro Features

The rest of the options that Simple Author Box Pro provides are also nothing short of awesome:

• Co-authors – Making sure everyone is given credit for their work is tricky if you can’t feature co-authors on blog posts. The team behind this plugin took care of this;
• Guest Authors – They are also proud of their easy-to-use guest author feature which enables you to present guest authors without creating a new account for them;
• Colour Scheme – You can alter the color scheme of the author boxes to match your theme or the author’s desires. It’s easy to make it uniform or use various styles.

Manually Set Listing

There is another way to create a list of popular blog authors without having to write code. Again, plugins come to the rescue, but this time, the process isn’t as quick as enabling one of the plugin’s features, since it involves some manual settings.

Namely, you can use one of the team showcase plugins to create a page with your contributors. Some of the most convenient plugins for what we are trying to do here are Author List and another one named also…Author List.

Both enable you to pick the site members you want to list depending on their role. Once you tick the roles you want to feature, in our case authors, they will also offer you a checklist of the types of info you want to include on your best authors page. This means you get to pick among short bios, names, the number of posts, and so on.

Next, you will come across an option to list the ID of the certain authors you want to exclude from the page. This is where you have the freedom to decide which of the authors will be included in the top list and which won’t.

Setting your criteria, making your list of the most popular authors, and entering their IDs one by one is somewhat tiring and slow. Additionally, it’s a bit ungrateful to intentionally exclude some of your contributors. However, although this step involves a lot of work, it also gives you an opportunity to manage every detail the way you had envisioned.

Conclusion

So, there you have it. We have shown you a couple of ways you could list your blog’s most popular authors. Depending on what you find the most convenient, you can make your choice.

Also, we hope we have helped you gain a deeper understanding of why crediting the content to its author matters and how it’s beneficial to all parties included. You can take a credited author at her word.