You probably already know that adding images, videos, and relevant links to your blog posts and website articles is something you should be doing. If you didn’t know this or the reasons why, stay tuned here. If you’re already doing this, you may be adding these links, video and images in an inefficient way. In this tutorial, I’m going to highlight one of my favorite plugins for finding images that are legal to use on your site, and it also allows you to easily search several other sources in order to find relevant videos and links for your content including:
- Youtube videos
- Wikipedia
- Google News
- Google Blog Search
- Google Book Search
- Google Maps
This is a truly powerful and full featured plugin and is named Insights.
Insights Plugin by Vladimir Prevolac
Insights Settings
After activation, this plugin makes additions to two areas of your WordPress backend. The first addition creates a new Insights link under the Settings menu.
Insights Settings Menu
I’m not going to go into detail for the settings above. They’re pretty self-explanatory. However as you can see, the Google Maps module needs to be activated in order to search addresses and insert a Google Map into your content. For this to be enabled, you’ll need to have a Google Maps API key and there’s a handy link to go get one.
If you have no idea what this is or how to go about getting an API, leave a comment on this post and let me know. The process may warrant a tutorial of it’s own.
Insights Meta Box
The second addition will be a new Insights meta box on your post/page editing screens.
Insights Meta Box
This is where the real power and convenience of this plugin will present itself. From this area you can search a variety of sources to find and automatically add content, links, and images to your posts. Notice the radio buttons under the search box (click image to enlarge).
Simply enter your search terms and choose the source you’d like to search and you’ll have the option to insert whatever content you’ve searched right into your post. There are couple specific tips I’d like to share about the different options so I created a video to show how to use the plugin’s options.
Adam, This is one of my favorite parts of posting…..finding a great and relevant image to add to my content.
It has made a huge difference in getting the attention of readers. I owe so much of my success, so far, to you!
Awesome post! Thanks for the insight on the Insight plugin. This makes inserting images and links so much more efficient and automated. It’ll save a bunch of time!
Good Work!
Mikel
Hi Adam,
Thank you for your insights on WP. I’m a newbie but learning quickly…maybe drinking thru a fire hose at this point. I really like the tutorial for Insights but am using 3.3.2 WP. The plugin indicates it’s only compatible to 3.2.1. I sent an email to the developer and also let him know that I learned of this plugin through you. I was hoping to get a quick answer since I’m still developing my site and this is really a critical component for me. Thank you!
Hi Linda,
Thanks for the kind words. I suspect that the version compatibility is probably just an oversight by Vladimir, the plugin author. I have it installed on the latest bleeding edge development version (the soon to be released 3.4) and it’s working as expected.
p.s. You may also want to subscribe to my main business site at http://wpprobusiness.com for more WordPress-specific online business and marketing tutorials.