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?
Talk is Cheap & Free Here
Filed under: Internet Marketing, Marketing, Marketing Strategies, Online Marketing
You know what really burns me up? All of the “no-follow” tags everywhere. No one seems open to sharing any of their link love with anyone else.
First things first though. If you aren’t familiar with what a “no-follow” tag is, let me explain. When you visit someone’s website, like this one and want to comment on that person’s blog you generally need to enter in your name, email address and your website before they’ll allow you to place a comment.
This little tiny act of placing the link to your website when posting a comment typically will give you a one-way link from the that blog but by posting a link to your site, you can also get lots and lots of new site visitors.
HOWEVER, it has become wildly popular to not follow those links that are posted on blogs, in forums, and so on. This means that even if you do take time out of your busy schedule to post on someone else’s site, that site is not passing along “link love” which is a non-fancy way of saying that when the search engines visit that site you just posted on, that site is telling the search engines, “Hey, don’t follow these links back to their respective sites.” Which means you don’t get any credit in the search engines eyes for having a link on that page.
IF you use WordPress as your blog source, the no-follow tag is on by default. So unless you’re using a “do follow” tag like the one found here -> http://randaclay.com/blog/i-follow/, you aren’t passing any love to other sites.
That’s why I’m pleased to announce that not only do I follow links, I also have another great plugin installed called “Comment Luv” which you can also download here -> http://www.fiddyp.co.uk/commentluv-wordpress-plugin/ that means if the plugin can pull the title of your latest blog comment from YOUR blog, it will and it will show up in the comments.
Note that these plugins will only work if you are using a WordPress blog.
I know I appreciate when people pay it forward so I’m doing the same for you. This does not apply to spammers 
- Kristine
Testing out a new free add-on to blogs…
mage by jim270 via Flickr
I’m currently testing out a new free add on to this blog which is called “Zemanta“. It’s not really so much as an add-on to this blog as it is an add-on to my firefox browser. It doesn’t matter which blogging platfrom you use, Blogger, WordPress, TypePad, etc, it will still work.
Here’s what intrigued me about it:
As I write, Zemanta picks up different keywords and phrases that I’m using in my post. As it does, it will then update information for me to my right (which you can’t see because I’m in the admin area) but Zemanta not only picks up photos that may be of interest to me but posts and news stories that others have made that might be of interest to me.
You see that image there on the right? All I did was click on it when it came up in my Zemanta gallery and it was added to my post in nothing flat.
Another nice part? Whenever you write a blog post, (and have the Zemanta extension installed), this blog post will now get recommended to others to potentially use on their web site.
Also, you see that little icon down below on the right that says “reblog”? If I click on that, I can write a brand new post, select a quote from this post, add my thoughts, comments, etc., and these will show in Zemanta’s “popular page”.
I’ve just started playing around with Zemanta and I’ll keep you updated as to how our relationship works out.
- K
