My List Of Must Have Plug-In’s For All Blog Owners

Alot of people email me asking which plugins I use on my blog. I thought it would be nice to let you all know in one single post what plugins I am using to keep my blog running. I try to keep it down to the bare minimum because some plugins do slow your blog’s load time down. Thats one of the main reasons that I have never used MyBlogLog, it is sooooo slow!

Adsense Deluxe Wordpress Plugin:

Probably the most useful plugin ever if you are planning on monetizing your blog with either adsense or the yahoo publisher network. Very simple to install, and once its on your system you just feed it your adsense code once and it will give you a code like “<–.adsense–>”, you just plug that into your blog post where you want the ad to be and whammo bammo your set. It also works so that your ads are not shown more than 3 times on a single page this is to make sure that you stay within the adsense TOS. It’s great because this way you can keep the code installed, and if someone clicks on a link to a specific post from a search engine or a link back your ads will still be shown even if the ad is not on the front page. This is a great way to make sure that your older posts are still being monetized.

Askismet:

Best. Spam. Blocker. Ever. You need to have this installed on your blog to protect from all the spammers out there that will try to fill your blog with everything from car insurance ads to viagra pills. You need to have the wordpress API to activate this plugin, and you can get that by setting up a wordpress account and getting your API. After that Askismet will take care of everythinf for you. I can’t imagine what I would do If I did not have this handy little plugin installed.

Feedburner Feed Replacement:

This was a plugin that was actually “adopted” by the people at feedburner. That means that they must have seen some potential in this nifty little tool. And hey if a company that can sell for $100 Million think its worth it, I can definitly promote it. In the original author’s own words:

Using some WordPress plugin magic, and user-agent detection, this plugin simply forwards all your feed traffic to FeedBurner. The plugin will detect all ways to access your feed (e.g. http://www.yoursite.com/feed/ or http://www.yoursite.com/wp-rss2.php, etc.), and redirect them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber. It will forward for your main posts feed, and optionally your main comments feed as well.

And the statistics that they provide over at feedburner are friggin awesome! If you have a blog with a reasonable sized audience you should install this plugin now!

Optimal Title:

I use this to make sure that the post title comes before the blog title. This is for the search engines. Before having this installed search engines would see the blog like:

Make Money Online with MubinAhmed.com>>Must Have Plug-In’s For all Blog Owners

Now with this plugin installed it will look like this to the search engines:

Must Have Plug-In’s For All Blog Owners>>Make Money Online with MubinAhmed.com

It helps to keep your site out of the supplementals (which no longer exist by the way), it will also help bring search engine traffic your way.

Subscribe Remind:

AS you can see at the end of all new posts there is a reminder for the readers to subscribe to the blog feed. Since implementing it I have seen the RSS subscribers jump by 20. I have only had it installed for 3 days, but will give more of an update as things move along.

Wordpress Database Backup:

This nice little plug-in automatically takes a backup of your blog whenever you want. You can set it to daily, weekly, monthly or whenever you update. Its good if you have alot of posts and dont want your posts lost if anything goes wrong. I learned my lesson when this blog got hacked. And my server lost 3 days of posts. Luckily enough some nice readers were able to provide me with backups of the posts.

Do you have a plugin that I have not mentioned here and you think I should add? Let me know!