30 “Must Have” Plugins For Your WordPress Blog
Filed under: Facebook, Google, Marketing Strategies, Plugins, Productivity, seo, Traffic, twitter, Videos, WordPress
There are 14,865 (and counting) plugins available for you to download and use. But how do you know which ones pack the most punch, which ones are updated often and most of all, which ones will be worth your time.
Below are 30 “Must Have” Plugins for your WordPress blog.
Membership & Engagement
Having a blog just isn’t enough. You need a way to get those readers engaged and these plugins will help you do just that.
- WordPress eMember – this neat little plugin let’s you turn your existing WordPress site into a membership site.
- FeedBurner FeedSmith – this plugin will detect all of the ways to access your original WordPress feeds and redirect them to your FeedBurner feed so that you can track every last subscriber.
- Add to Any: Subscribe Button – Helps your readers subscribe to your blog using any feed reader they’d like.
- MailChip Widget - This lets your users sign up to your MailChimp mailing list.
Social Networking
We all need ways to engage people on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and the like. These plugins will help you do just that.
- Simple Twitter Connect – this plugin makes it easy for your site to use Twitter in a very modular way.
- Facebook Comments for WordPress – let’s your visitors comment on posts using their Facebook profile. (I’m sure you’ve seen this widely used across the web). This also supports custom styles, notifications, combined comment counts and recent comments.
- Simple Facebook Connect - this makes it easy to use Facebook Connect on your site.
- Share This – a very useful and popular plugin that let’s your site visitors share a post or a page with others. This also supports email and posting to social bookmarking sites.
- Sociable – automatically add links to your favorite social bookmarking sites on your posts, pages and in your RSS feed.
Monetization
We all would like to have the ability to make money from our blog right? These plugins help you do just that.
- AdSense Now! – Simply puts your AdSense code in up to three spots in your posts and pages. Even those that don’t exist yet!
- WP e-Commerce – this is an application that let’s you use a fully featured shopping cart application.
- Awesome Google AdSense – This plugin will automatically insert Google AdSense ads into your posts, pages and sidebar. No more copying and pasting!
- WordPress Simple PayPal Shopping Cart – This lets you add an “Add to Cart” button on any post or page. You can also display the shopping cart within the sidebar easily. It shows the user what they have in their cart and lets them remove items if they want to.
Media – Videos, Images and Audio
Many people like to have all kinds of content on their sites; not just text but images, videos and even audio files. These plugins will help you do just that.
- NextGen Gallery - A fully integrated Image Gallery plugin for WordPress with a slideshow option.
- FancyBox for WordPress – Integrates FancyBox into your blog and allows you to upload, activate and done. But…you can customize it if you want to.
- All in One Video Pack – Touted as “not just another video embed tool”. Includes all kinds of functionality you may need.
- WordPress Video Plugin – A filter for WordPress that allows for easy embedding of supported sites. (Currently 65 different video sites).
- Degradable HTML5 audio and video – Use this plugin to embed video and audio on your site using shortcodes. It enables HTML5 native playback for those users who have compatible browsers.
Security
If you run a WordPress blog currently, you know that WordPress updates constantly; usually for security measures. That said, sometimes you can’t get to it quick enough to upgrade so these plugins should help you out.
- LoginLockdown – If someone tries to login to your blog and guess your password, this neat little plugin will detect how many times someone has tried from an IP address and locks it down after a certain number of failed attempts. It even logs the IP address and timestamp of when these attempts occured.
- Akismet – This plugin catches all of those spam comments you receive on a constant basis. Now, that said, it used to be 100% free; and it still is for personal, non-business accounts. But if you have a blog that would be classified as a business site, it’ll now cost you $5 a month. A small price to pay for saving time deleting spammy comments.
- WordPress Database Backup – Creates a backup of your core WordPress database tables as well as any other tables of your choice.
Search Engine Optimization
We all need SEO on our sites, whether that be a blog or not. But, WordPress makes it easy to optimize your posts and pages with a few plugins.
- WordPress SEO by Yoast - “The most complete all in one SEO solution for your WordPress blog.” With a huge list of features that are far too numerous to mention here.
- Google XML Sitemaps – Creates an XML Sitemap that’s compliant and supported by Ask.com, Google, Yahoo!, and Bing.
- SEO Smart Links – Automatically links keywords and phrases in your posts and comments with their corresponding posts, pages, categories and tags.
- Google Analytics for WordPress – There’s a complete video introduction about this plugin if you visit the link on the left but essentially it does so much more for you than a simple “plug the analytics code into your blog”. See the site for more information.
Speed
In case you missed it, Google is now taking into account site speed when it looks at a site. No one wants to visit a website and have to wait 15 seconds for it to load. These plugins will help you with this issue.
- W3 Total Cache – Used by some well known names such as MattCutts.com, Mashable, and LockerGnome.com, as well as recommended by HostGator, MediaTemple and more, it improves the user experience by improving your server performance, caching every aspect of your site.
- WP Super Cache – Generates HTML files that are served directly by Apache without processing heavy PHP scripts.
Functionality
Sometimes you just want your blog to do certain things…
- Redirection – Manages 301 redirects, and essentially ties up all those loose ends you may have on your site.
- Exclude Pages – Adds a checkbox, “include this page in menus”, which is checked by default. If unchecked, the page will not appear in any listings of pages.
- WP Contact Form – A drop in form for users to contact you. Can be placed on any page or post.
This information was originally posted at ineedhits but I’ve expanded the explanations a little bit to give you a better overview.
Are there any other plugins that you use and recommend? What are they?
No More “dofollow”
After a little bit of internal debate, I’ve decided to make this blog a “nofollow” blog – or in otherwords, put it back the way that it was.
For many, many months, perhaps even a year or two I’ve used a plugin which disabled the default “nofollow” on WordPress blogs to help folks out; give real people who are trying to build a real business online a little bit of help by providing them a real, honest-to-goodness link to their site.
But…alas, no more.
The amount of spam that I get has quite honestly gotten way out of hand. And I’m tired of performing maintenance on comments.
The last straw was when I received a comment that still had the spin tags contained within it! How’s that for professional?
It’s just taking up far too much of my time and I feel bad for those who are truly trying to build a business online and really need decent “dofollow” links.
So, hopefully, this will help reduce the amount of spam I get on a daily basis.
Just for the record, I’ve received over 400 spam comments in the last 30 days.
I ALWAYS check out the site that’s being promoted and while this used to be a way of dealing with spammy comments, I obviously can no longer take the time to deal with them.
Maybe at some time in the future, when things settle down a bit and I’ve been taken off whatever “dofollow” blog directories I’m on, I’ll re-implement it but for now, it’s all “nofollow”.
- Kristine
How to Design and Make Your Own WordPress Theme
Filed under: Affiliate Marketing, Affiliate Marketing Products, WordPress
What follows is a video transcript (sorry, the video is not working for some reason) on a software called Artisteer which allows you to nearly instantly make your own WordPress themes. You can create your own WordPress themes very easily using a software called Artisteer.
Click here to visit Artisteer (sponsored)
Transcript:
Hi there! This is Kristine Wirth from KristineWirth.com and today what I wanted to do is create a video that tells you how to design and make your very own WordPress theme using an awesome new software that I’ve just learned about.
The reason I decided to create this is because lately I’ve noticed that a lot of free wordpress themes on the market have begun to embed their own linking code within the footer that is encrypted which means is that if you try and remove those links you’re entire blog will stop working.
Typically what the provider of the free WordPress theme will do is add links to other sites that they own in the footer, or in other words at the very bottom of the website. Some of these links are harmless while others can lead out to websites that will hurt your blogs reputation.
For the record, I’m not referring to a link to the author’s website here. Because I strongly believe that you should continue to attribute the author of the WordPress theme. They did after all, create a free theme for you, put it on their hosting platform and allow anyone at all to download them for free.
What I’m referring to are those links that could hurt your search engine positions and those links that are encrypted so that if you try and disable them or remove them, your blog stops working all together. Why this matters is because WHO you link to DOES matter when it comes to the search engines.
For example, if you created a blog about “cute little puppies” but a search engine noticed that the footer of your blog linked out to gambling sites, loan sites and the like, you’re not going to gain much credibility in the search engines eyes.
Now, this is not a video / blog post on the legalities of these actions or the moral issues of these actions but rather just a way to show you how you can simply forget having to worry whether or not a free WordPress theme is linking out to undesirable websites and instead just create your own.
So, all that said, I was really excited when I learned about this new software which allows you to create your very own WordPress or Blogger theme, or an HTML page and not have to worry about those external links; plus it’s relatively cheap.
Additionally, you can use this software to create a theme exactly the way you want it. No more hunting around for the “perfect” theme.
So, let’s take a look shall we?
The software is called Artisteer and you can download a free copy to play around with all you want. It’s a fully functional copy of the software. However, if you haven’t purchased a license and attempt to download the themes you create there will be “trial” text over the entire site; and I’ll show you what that looks like here in a moment.
But first, let’s take a look at the software itself.
You can download a trial version in its entirety here.
When you first open the trial software, you’ll be provided with a few buttons. The first two, “try standard edition” and “try home edition” are what will get you into the software.
The difference between the two is this:
First the price – there’s about $70 difference between the two types. If you want to export the themes you create as Drupal, DotNetNuke and so on, you’ll need the standard edition but the home edition will allow you to download as WordPress and even as a blogger theme.
So we’ll head into the home edition.
Notice I’ve got three choices here. To either work on a Blogger template, a WordPress Template or even a straight HTML page.
We’ll choose WordPress.
A default theme will appear that you can then start to modify.
If you don’t want to do it piece by piece, you can simply click the button that says “suggest design” at the top of the page.
If you find a theme that you like while using “suggest design” but don’t like the colors, just click “suggest colors” and it will run you through a wide array of different color styles.
The same goes for fonts, layouts, backgrounds, buttons, blocks, article design, headers and more.
When you’re ready, just click “export” at the top of the page.
You can also click the artisteer logo on the top left to preview the template in a browser first.
If you decide to do a blogger template you can also upload the template directly to your blogger account.
Like I said, I was very impressed with this software. You don’t need to be a techie or have any kind of programming skills whatsoever.
Plus, if the software wasn’t already good enough, you can also redistribute or even sell the templates you create. The only caveat is that you cannot include the header-> foreground photos from the software. On their FAQ page, they offer a more detailed explanation.
So if you’ve always wanted to design and make your own wordpress themes without having to learn a bunch of coding language, this software is exactly what you need.
We’ll talk soon!
