Now that you own a blog with a beautiful theme, let’s give it all the functions you need. Sky is the limit for what you can do with wordpress with the help of plugins.

This part 04 of “Create a blog and make money blogging series” is not written for established bloggers and I am writing these for absolute beginners in this industry.

There are thousands of plugins available for various functions. You do not need all of them when you first start out. I am giving you the list of most essential wordpress plugins and later in this post I will tell you how to install them on your blog.

Most Essential Wordpress Plugins

01. All in one SEO

This is the most used SEO plugin and some call it the The Ultimate SEO WordPress plugin. This helps us to set the home page Meta description and automatically generate or manually set meta information for all individual posts.

You do not have to spend lot of time optimizing your pages for search engines. You do not have to learn coding if you do not know how to. You do not have to become a SEO expert when you can actually control everything from the Options panel of your WordPress dashboard.

Download and instructions

02. Advertising Manager

Earlier they call this “adsense manger”. This is not just for adsense. You can manage all your affiliate network advertising campaigns through this plugin. That is why they have changed the name now. Once you set up your banners in the admin panel you just have to select the ad name from a drop down menu.

Download and instructions

03. Contact form

I do not know why word press does not have a contact form by default. To me it is very important to have a contact form when running a web site. Thanks to the plugins developed for this purpose, we can set up a contact form in less than a minute.

I am using WP-ContactForm: Akismet Edition
And I read that this plugin is also good. You can go with any plugin you prefer.

04. Track your visitors.

You can always do this with Google analytics but I prefer to analyze my visitor’s without leaving my wordpress dash board. I use a plugin called “statpress reloaded” for this purpose. This plugin shows you real time statistics about your blog. It collects information about visitors, spiders, search keywords, feeds, browsers, OS etc.

Using StatPress Reloaded you can see your visitors actions while they are surfing your blog or check which are the preferred pages, posts and categories. Checking these statistics is the first thing I do every morning.

Download and Instructions

05. Interact with social media.

Social media will play a major role in your blogging career. Especially in the first 3 months where your search engine traffic is negligible. Do not underestimate what Digg, Reddit and stumbleupon can do for your blog.

There are many other social bookmarking services but above 3 is the most important when it comes to sending you traffic. You cannot do this alone and you will need the help your readers. To make their job easier, use this plugin called “share this“.

You can see it under every post and page of this blog and it helps my readers to bookmark all important posts in social networks. It brings me more traffic and gives me good exposure.

Download and Instructions.

06. Show similar posts to your readers.

One thing you have to remember in blogging is you have to keep your visitor as long as possible in your blog. If he/she reads one post and leaving your blog, your job as a blogger is not done correctly. Give them reasons and opportunities to navigate through your site as much as possible.

One way to do this is by showing similar posts at the end of every blog post. Most people use a plugin called “similar posts” for this purpose. I do it manually in this blog and use a plugin called “yet another related posts plugin” in my other blogs.

Download and Instructions.

07. Create an Archives page.

I put a big effort when writing a blog post. I do not like the fact if a post has to hide behind new posts after few weeks. That is why I created an Archives page to showcase all my posts. My Archives page is named “School of money making.”

I use a complicated system to create it due to a design clash but you can get the job done easily via a plugin called “Clean Archives Reloaded”.

Download and Instructions.

08. Adding a video to your blog post.

You might have to add a video or two to your blog once in a while. Or you can create a video blog and let videos be your major content. No matter how you choose to do it, you can do it very easily via following plugins.

If the video is in your server you can use FLV embed plugin.
They support Video sitemap generation so this is highly recommended.

If you are adding videos from other web sites like youtube or metacafe, use wpvideo plugin which helps you add videos in a super quick time.

09. Tweet this.

With the kind of popularity twitter is getting these days, it is essential to add an “Tweet this” button to each of your posts. It will help your readers to tweet about your posts easily.

You may have read about the digg effect. But do not underestimate the power of the twitter effect. I saw few glimpses of what it can do to your traffic levels recently.

Download and Instructions.

10.Manage your pings.

In my previous post I gave you a list if ping services other than the wordpress default list. There is a small problem with wordpress ping service. They notify the ping list every time you update or edit a existing post.

This will result pinging the same post again again. Most will consider this as spamming and I read many cases where Technorati block certain sites due to this issue.

MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer comes to your rescue here. They correct and optimize your pings so that you will never get penalize for this default problem with wordpress.

Downlaod and Instructions.

If you are following my “create a blog and make money blogging” series I have already discussed the use of “Google XML Sitemaps generator” so I have not added it to the list again. “Akismet comment spam protection plugin” is coming with default wordpress so do not forget to activate it from your plugins panel.

How to install a wordpress plugin

I have given download and instruction links to all plugins introduced here. When you download the zip file you will find a “Read Me” text file which contains set up instructions.

But things are much easier with the latest wordpress update. No download or manual set up is necessary.

Go to,
Plugins -> Add new

You just have to enter the plugin name in the search section.

Select “install” from the next window.

Select “Activate plugin” from the next window and you are done.

This post is written with the purpose of introducing you to the most essential wordpress plugins when you first start out. There are over 100 useful plugins I identified but you do not need them all in this initial stage.

However if you would like to know about a plugin which can perform a certain action for you, feel free to ask. I will try my best to find the best plugin for you.

The following plugins are not essential but I do like them a lot and worth a mention.

1. What Would Seth Godin Do
2. The Welcome Plugin
3. WP-PostViews
4. WP-EMail
5. WP-Note
6. WP-Cumulus
7. WP-Polls
8. DoFollow
9. NextGEN Gallery

Add more to the list by commenting on this post. Your feedback is highly appreciated and I would love to know the plugins you are using other than the ones mentioned here.

Where are we now? And where to go from here in the “How to create a blog – make money blogging” series?

This series is absolutely free of charge and you will gain all the information you need to create your own blog. Make use of this opportunity and start your blog today.

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