There are many blogging platforms to choose from these days but I use Wordpress. The simplicity of the interface and the sheer number of plugins and themes available made it a no-brainer for me.

Plugins are an essential part of running a wordpress blog and can be the difference between your blog being a hobby and becoming a business. Blogging, even part time can be time consuming and you want plugins to be simple but effective. I’m going to list the plugins this blog uses and discuss the importance of one in particular that I didn’t know about until recently.

First, the list.

All of the following plugins are active and being used on this blog.

• Add Post Footer – Automatically add the ad code, related post, optional custom paragraph or technorati tags to the end of every post.
• Akismet – Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not.
• All in One SEO Pack – Out-of-the-box SEO for your Wordpress blog. This is a must if you want any kind of organic traffic.
• Digg This – Adds Digg story link on detection on digg referer. In case your article get Dugg for some reason.
• Dofollow – Disables the rel=nofollow attribute in comments. Link juice for comments
• Exclude Pages from Navigation – Provides a checkbox on the editing page which you can check to exclude pages from the primary navigation.
• FeedBurner FeedSmith – this plugin detects all ways to access your original WordPress feeds and redirects them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber. (I’ll discuss this)
• Feed Footer – Add custom footers (copyright, notices, advertisements) to the bottom of your posts in your RSS feed.
• Increase Sociability – This is a call to action to increase to get your StumbleUpon & Digg visitors to vote for your site.
• JAW Popular Posts Widget – Adds a sidebar widget that shows the most popular posts.
• MaxBlogPress Stripe Ad – A new non-obtrusive way of displaying a single line of advertising message, a special note or other information right at the top of your blog.
• OIO Publisher Direct – Take control of your advertising and keep all the profit by cutting out the middle man.
• Popularity Contest – This will enable ranking of your posts by popularity; using the behavior of your visitors to determine each post’s popularity.
• runPHP – Allows you to put PHP code into a post and have it eval()’d.
• Search Hilite – When someone is referred from a search engine like Google, Yahoo, or WordPress’ own, the terms they search for are highlighted with this plugin.
• Social Bookmark Creator – Add social bookmark links to your blog.
• Subscribe To Comments – Allows readers to receive notifications of new comments that are posted to an entry.
• Text Link Ads – Adds a widget to showcase the links advertisers have bought.
• TTZ Media Product Showcase – Insert ads from TTZ Media that are specific to the product you are blogging about.
• WordPress Database Backup – On-demand backup of your WordPress database.
• Wordpress Duplicate Content Cure – Duplicate content cure is a very simple, yet effective SEO plugin that prevents search engines from indexing wordpress pages that contain duplicate content, like archives and category pages.
• WP-Amazon – WP-Amazon adds the ability to search and include items from Amazon to your entries.
• WP-ContactForm – WP Contact Form is a drop in form for users to contact you.

As you can see, I am using a ton of plugins but maybe not even as many as other people are using. For me, these are all mandatory as they provide the functionality and more importantly the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) I need for maximum traffic.

Now, I wanted to talk about one really important plugin and that’s the FeedBurner FeedSmith plugin. What this baby does is ensure that all RSS subscribed clients report to feedburner so you can accurately track the number of RSS subscribers. Why is this important? Read my post about the importance of RSS feeds.

RSS readership is the cornerstone of your success. Without readers, your blog is just a place for you to brainstorm to yourself. It’s readers that make it work. RSS readership determines how much you can charge for advertising, how successful your contests are going to be and how quickly your blog is likely to grow.

John Chow (the undisputed evil blogging mastermind) doesn’t even recommend showing your RSS count until it is over 100. The reasoning behind this is simple as he states it. Nobody likes to be early to a party, so theoretically by not displaying your FeedBurner chicklet (the counter) until there are more than 100 RSS subscribers, you are more likely to grow that subscriber base. I don’t really agree with this, but I understand the logic.

Regardless, there are many ways people can subscribe to your blog’s feed and if you are using FeedBurner to serve up that feed (I recommend you do) you can use the FeedSmith plugin to track all those different kinds of subscribers. It’s definitely a must have. A day after adding that plugin, my RSS count nearly doubled. I didn’t realize I wasn’t tracking all those other subscribers!

So, although I recommend you use each and every one of these plugins, and yes one of them does cost a little money but it won’t break your bank (OIO Publisher Direct), you might have others that you use or you might not need all of these, they are simply the ones that are important to what I do. See any not listed here? I’d like to know what you are using and why.

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