Bloggers Journal

Whilst WordPress is a fantastic resource for creating and managing websites, there are many features that it lacks.  Enter the WordPress Plugin system.  No longer are limitations of WordPress a problem.  The open source nature of WordPress means that developers have been able to enhance the feature-set of WordPress by creating plugins.  Here I share with you the plugins that  I not only recommend, but strongly advise you use to improve your blogging experiences!

This post is massive, at some 1,700 words.  But the 12 plugins that I discuss are really superb, and super beneficial to your website.

If you’re need to WordPress, it is one of the most intuitive, easy to use, FREE software systems on the internet, capable of managing a website.  Designed for blogging, WordPress can be used as a content management system.  If you’re having trouble using WordPress, and getting started, or you would like to just learn more about it, be sure to sign up for my free ebook on how to use WordPress!

Often there are many plugins with different variations available.  However, I have found myself to be quite specific in my requirements for plugins.  As yet, I have not need to custom develop my own plugin – I’m keen for this to change!

In the mean time, I’d like to share with you the most useful plugins that I use daily to run my websites.  I’d like to present them as functional additions to your default WordPress installation.  Each plugin I use has a specific purpose, with a common goal of boosting my websites productivity, profitability and gaining search engine traffic.

Improving Website Productivity

In improving my websites productivity, I want to make performing day-to-day tasks much more straight forward for myself.  The daily grind required of any website is maintaining a social aspect.  This means that I must reply to emails received through my contact form, respond to comments from my readers, and engage with potential readers through social media, like Twitter.  To help me with this, I use the following plugins,

Akismet

Without doubt, the best anti-spam system for the WordPress platform, Akismet is an invisible shield between your commenters and your blog.  Often a popular blog will receive spam comments from a variety of sources.  Bloggers Journal is no different.

I use Akismet to assist me in managing spam, without frustrating my regular, legitimate readers.  Akismet works by scanning the comments you receive and comparing them to a database of information to determine how genuine the comment is.

I have it set that acceptable comments are placed on the queue for approval, unless the commenter has made a contribution before.  Comments which are identified as spam are placed in the spam folder.  I occasionally look through the spam folder for legitimate comments which have been wrongly marked as spam.

Easy Privacy Policy

One of the pages which the Google bots like to see is a privacy policy, and rather than spending hours researching a perfect policy for my site, I use the Easy Privacy Policy plugin to create the page for me.  Within a few clicks, I have a template policy which is quite general.  I can customise it if I need to.

Ezine Articles

When writing out posts to my blog, I always strive to make a contribution to some article directories to help get some backlinks to my site from high page rank domains.  Ezine Articles is probably one of the top article directories.  The plugin allows me to automatically submit my blog post to Ezine Articles for publication.  I simply categorise my post using the Ezine Articles system, and select which resource box I want to use.  One click on publish, and my article is queued for consideration.  I find this plugin particularly useful when I write really informative articles and don’t want to waste time copying and pasting it to Ezine Articles.

Improving Website Profitibility

When I started out blogging, I wanted to try out for myself just how “easy” it is to make money online.  I’ve found, and concluded that it’s not easy.  It’s straight forward, however requires effort and determination, and bucket loads of it!  As I monetise this website using affiliate marketing, I want to capitalise upon that, by presenting an affiliate link where I can.  I can get away with this, because I’m open, honest, and I don’t hide it from my readers.  On some of my other websites, I monetise using Google AdSense.

The following two plugins are two plugins that I use in tandem, rather than paying out for a premium plugin like Ninja Affiliate.  Whilst Ninja Affiliate has a few additional features, I find my approach to be more than adequate.

Pretty Links

Pretty links is a simple plugin that allows you to convert your horrible looking affiliate URLs to pretty URLs.  Take a typical affiliate link, which looks a little like this,

http://683d6dgjy0qh0mfpqmt2a5qeq9.hop.clickbank.net/

This link is actually the protected link that I use to recommend people SEO Revenge.  However, when people see this, they are always sceptical.  Instead, with Pretty Links, I can make this horrible URL appear as,

http://bloggersjournal.com/recommends/seorevenge

When readers click on the link, they are taken to the sales page for the SEO Revenge eBook.

SEO Smart Links

I use this plugin alongside Pretty Links.  What SEO Smart Links does is convert keywords throughout your website to affiliate links.  In other words, what I do is I create my new and improved affiliate links using the Pretty Links plugin.  I write these down on a piece of paper, then I choose keywords that I wish to target with affiliate links.

For example, the affiliate link for the SEO Revenge eBook has been made above.  I would then link the following keywords with that URL,

• SEO tips
• SEO revenge
• learn seo

The list can go on.  However, the real work of this little plugin is done when your pages load for visitors.  Automatically, the keywords that I specified are converted from text to hyperlinks to my affiliate products.  This is an excellent method, as it saves me manually having to populate each individual post with affiliate links.

Easy AdSense

There are many plugins available that allow you to integrate Google AdSense with your website.  I have opted for Easy AdSense as it is the most straight forward to use.  To use this plugin, simply paste the AdSense code into the administration area, and activate your adverts as required.

I recently abandoned AdSense on this website, as I feel it sometimes draws away from the authority I strive to achieve.  I have however used AdSense with some success on some niche websites I am working on.

Improving Website Traffic

I’ve saved this to last, and quite deliberately.  Without traffic, informative, or product oriented websites are a loss.  I use a number of plugins to try and improve my website traffic.  The best methods that I’ve found, which can be partly automated, are developing social media traffic, and developing search engine traffic.

Social media traffic is ideal, because I can tweet, or digg a post, and share it with my followers.  The principle is that if they enjoy it, they share it with their followers.  It’s much like dominos.  To generate social media traffic I use a few plugins,

Tweet Old Post

The first is a classic plugin that does exactly as it says on the tin!  Tweet old post does just that – it tweets my old posts to Twitter.  It works by sending a tweet linking the reader to a random article from my blog at a periodic interval.  The selection of posts that it can publish are customisable, as is the tweet interval.  This autopilot method is perfect as I cannot tend to my article marketing 24-7!

Digg Digg

We’ve all seen the popular share buttons that allow you to post an article to your favourite social media hang outs – the Twitters, Diggs and Facebooks of the internet world.  Digg Digg is a little different in that it shares with the reader how often the article has been shared/tweeted/dugg etc.  There is a lot of play with this plugin which is great as it lets you integrate it to your blog with relative ease.

Thank Me Later

When I get a visitor to my website, and they make a comment to any of my posts, I like to send of an email thanking them for taking the time out of their day to share something with the community here.  I send this email only once – to first time commenters.  As I cannot be online 24-7, I use Thank Me Later to send a customised email to the reader thanking them.

The theory behind this practise is that it builds a rapport with my readers, which hopefully entices them to visit back again.

To generate search engine traffic, there are a few plugins which I use – most free, one premium.

All In One SEO

The first plugin is the All In One SEO plugin which manages my on-page search engine optimisation.  This plugin allows me to customise the keywords, description and title for each page/post’s meta tags.  Whilst Google does not use these as dominantly for ranking your site, other search engines do.  One thing that is common between all search engines is that your title and description are used as summaries of your page’s content.

Simple Sitemap

Simple Sitemap creates a sitemap for search engine robots.  This makes your site immediately easier to index because a full breakdown of page/post URLs are presented in one location.

Keyword Winner

This is the premium plugin that I mentioned briefly.  Whilst it is expensive (it used to be much cheaper!), this plugin has helped me gain higher search engine rankings by helping me select low competition keywords.  I then use these keywords in my post title, and then scatter them throughout the post.  If you’d like to learn a little more about Keyword Winner, check out my review of Keyword Winner.

I’ve only just glanced at the word count for this post, and I seriously hope you’ve made it to here – even if you just scanned over the heading text.  I hope that you have found this list of plugins to not only be useful, but informative with respect to how each of these plugins can benefit your website.

If there are any more plugins that you have used, I’d be thrilled to hear from you.  Do feel free to leave a comment below, and I’ll be sure to get back in touch!

Image Credit – yum9me