Spice Up Your Blog - Choose From Thousands Of Gadgets

Image by ZedZap(Nick) via Flickr

Choose from thousands of gadgets

Watch this video on how to spice up your blog -
Choose from thousands of gadgets to add to your blog.

Top 12 Wordpress Plugins For Wordpress 2.7.x

---

Source: affiliate-minder.com

---

On July 6th 2008, these were my top 10 Wordpress plugins:
1. Google XML Sitemaps.Automatically build a sitemap and submit it to the search engines.
2. TinyMCE Advanced.
3. Lighter Menus.
4. All in One Adsense and YPN.
5. Akismet.
6. AddThis - Social Bookmarking plugin.
7. Ultimate Google Analytics
8. Wordpress automatic upgrade.
9. WP-DBManager.
10. HeadSpace2.

As Wordpress has evolved, so has my choice of plugins. Some in the list above no longer work in the current version of Wordpress, and a few others have become redundant or simply don’t work as well as they use to. I can’t actually reduce it to my top 10 anymore, so here is my top 12 Wordpress plugins that I install on every site I build:

1. Google XML Sitemaps

This is still the plugin of choice for automatically building a sitemap and submitting it to the search engines. The sitemap is highly configurable and I can easily exclude certain pages or posts (or even categories) from the sitemap. This plugin will rebuild and resubmit the sitemap after every post - it is a huge time-saver.

2. All In One SEO

I use to use the Headspace plugin but switched to this one because Headspace was causing a few conflicts with some of the plugins I was using. All In One SEO does everything I want and more. I can control meta tags plus lots more.

3. Include It

This plugin is very cool. When I use to build static HTML sites I used server side includes very heavily. This plugin replicates that functionality. I wrote an article on using this plugin called Using SSI with Wordpress.

4. All in One Adsense and YPN

A quick and easy way to add Adsense and Yahoo Publisher Network ads to your site. I must admit that this plugin is slipping down my list and may not be here next time I update my top Wordpress plugins. The reason is that I now prefer to use Include It for better placement of ads, or hard code the ads into the templates.

5. Akismet

Comes pre-installed with Wordpress. You need a Wordpress API key to get this working, but that is easy enough to obtain, and it’s free.

6. Similar Posts

This is a fantastic plugin that allows me to include a list of related posts at the end of my articles. I created this Similar Posts Tutorial for those who want to see how to use it.

7. Ultimate Google Analytics

This is a very easy way to integrate Google Analytics code into your web pages. Google Analytics is a free service that gives you detailed website stats for any type of site. You just have to include tracking code in the pages of your site, and this plugin handles that for you. Google analytics has a great feature called Site Overlay - you can read more about that in an article I wrote called Google Analytics - Find out what your visitors are clicking on.

8. Wordpress automatic upgrade

Although Wordpress 2.7 has an automatic upgrade feature built into it, I have never been able to get it to work on any of my sites, so I still rely on this plugin which the authors have graciously updated for 2.7. I guess there was a lot of other people who had problems with the built in upgrade feature ;) For those who prefer to upgrade Wordpress manually, here is a Manual Upgrade of Wordpress tutorial

9. WP-DBManager

This plugin helps maintain the health of the database that drives your Wordpress site. One of the coolest features is automatic backup of your Wordpress database. The plugin actually emails you a backup every week (or at the interval you define). Automatic backups of your Wordpress databases is a tutorial I created showing how to set this automatic backups up.

10. Sociable

A plugin that adds links to your favourite social network site at the end of posts. You can see what this plugin adds if you scroll to the bottom of this article. You can of course edit which sites show up, and the list to choose from is very large. I am not totally convinced how many people actually bookmark pages from this type of widget, but I don’t think it can hurt :)

11. WP-Sticky

Again, Wordpress 2.7 has a similar feature built into it, but it is not as powerful as the old WP-Sticky plugin, so this is a firm favourite. This plugin allows you to stick posts to the top of the pile. Why is this useful? Well it means that on category pages, you can make one post always appear at the top. You can see this working on my Diabetic site: Diabetes Diet. This page is a category page showing one post at the top, and then listing all other posts in the category. If I add more posts to this category, my chosen post remains at the top, and new posts are added to the list of related articles at the bottom.

12. wp-gbcf

also called Secure and Accessible PHP Contact Form v.2.0 – This is one of many contact form plugins, but its the one I currently use on a lot of my sites.

If you have any plugins that you see as a must use, please post a comment at the end of this article and let others know about it.

Blogging for Dollars

Blogging for Dollars
By [http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=S._Housley]: S. Housley

Blogging for dollars might sound like the latest game show or some new drinking game, but it's the latest craze to hit the Internet. Bloggers began blogging for a number of reasons, but as the blog movement has increased in popularity, they have found ways to monetize their blogs and are seeing their commitment pay off.

Whether a blogger's focus is to communicate with customers or just to have fun, they have begun looking at ways to earn revenue from their blogs. The most popular ways for bloggers to earn some added cash for their pet projects are:

1. ) Google Adsense in Blogs
Google AdSense allows webmasters to dynamically serve content-relevant advertisements in blogs. If the visitor clicks one of the AdSense ads served to the blog, the website owner is credited for the referral. Webmasters need only to insert a Google-generated java script into the blog or blog template. Google's spider parses the AdServing blog and serves ads that relate to the blog's content. Google uses a combination of keyword matching and context analysis to determine what ads should be served.

2. ) Affiliate Programs (Product Endorsements)
Affiliate Programs work when an affiliate web site receives income for generating sales, leads, or traffic to a merchant website. Generally, bloggers will mention or endorse specific products and if site visitors purchase the product, bloggers will receive a portion of the sale.

3. ) Product Promotion
Businesses use blogs to detail how specific features or product add-ons can increase functionality and save time. Content-rich product promotion will help with search engine placement.

4.) Banner Ads
While less popular than in the past, websites with high traffic levels can still earn decent revenue by selling banner space.

As the Internet evolves bloggers will continue to seek out ways to monetize their opinions and thoughts. Daily journals and online blogs have become more than just a communication means to many.

---

About the Author:
Sharon Housley manages marketing for the NotePage http://www.notepage.net and FeedForAll www.feedforall.com product lines.
Other sites by Sharon can be found at www.softwaremarketingresource.com and www.small-business-software.net

---

Article Source: S. Housley at ezinearticles.com
Blogging for Dollars

---

Entrepreneurs-Journey.com by Yaro Starak

Yesterday, 1 October 2008, in Entrepreneurs-Journey.com by Yaro Starak Yaro put up a podcast How Much Traffic Should A New Blog Have After 2 Months? which I highly recommend by the way.

The text entry associated with that is headed up Thousands Of Blog Readers Within Two Months and it is very interesting.

But the real gem I thought was the entry on September 30 as follows:
Entrepreneurs-Journey.com by Yaro Starak: How To Simplify The Niche Selection Process