Plugins for your WordPress blog are like little tweaks to make your blog perform better (in some cases) or do something an ordinary blog can’t do. As an entrepreneur, your reasons for using plugins will differ from someone who blogs purely for entertainment purposes.
Although WordPress plugins, which are pieces of software designed to enhance and add functionality to the WordPress blogging platform, are great for enabling it to do pretty much anything you can think of, you should be aware that certain plugins that aren’t maintained well also have the ability to wreak havoc with your blog.
When you have a problem with a plugin, thankfully all you have to do is delete or make it inactive, but first you must figure out which one is causing the problems. Make sure you stay on top of your blog’s performance so that you’re aware whenever a problem arises.
Marketers are torn between All in One SEO and another similar SEO plugin called HeadSpace2 SEO. You may want to split test these two plugins on a couple of blogs to see which one you prefer, but both should make your blog rank better in Google than it would without it.
For marketers, you may want to invest in the MaxBlogPress Ninja Affiliate, which not only organizes your affiliate links for you in the dashboard, but it also allows you to cloak links and track clicks from this WordPress plugin.
If you want to manage your ads, images or other media items on your blog, then you may want to get a plugin like Billboard or Rotating Images, either of which do the job for you.
If you’re flipping sites or Squidoo lenses or auctioning off any other items, then you can get the WP Auctions plugin and host auctions right on your blog without having to fork over fees to a third party site.
Contact Form 7 is a plugin that lets your blog visitors get in touch with you. It’s one of the most popular plugins being downloaded right now to bloggers around the world wide web.
If you have visitors from around the globe, then you might want to install the G8 Translate plugin. It translates your blog into 58 languages so that anyone can visit it – not just English speakers.
Make sure you have a sitemap creator such as Google XML Sitemaps. This plugin helps the Googlebots find their way around your blog, which means they index more pages and posts and you ultimately get more traffic!
There are hundreds of WordPress plugins out there, most of them free. Virtually anything you want your blog to do, you can find a plug in that can make it happen – but you have to search!
