5 Blogging Plugins You Must Use

Plugins for the WordPress platform are tons of fun and incredibly useful. You’ll find everything you need to turn your blog into something amazing that is every bit as great as you would have imagined. While there are many plugins out there that are worth your while, the five that follow are the cream of the crop.

Akismet

This plugin actually comes standard with your WordPress installation. You will have to get a WordPress.com API key to make it work, but after you do it’s pure bliss. This will help keep spam comments away automatically! Akismet is smart enough to put suspected spam into a separate folder, and it even learns from you as you go. You should always activate this plugin for the best results with your blog. It saves you a ton of time too!

Related Posts

Linking to different pages in your blog from every page is a great search engine optimization tactic. The problem with blogs is that it can be so hard to dig through old posts that are related and manually link them in your new post. Related posts solves that problem! This will automatically insert some relevant posts for your blog. It’s very hands-off and very effective. Both visitors and search engines love this plugin.

All in One SEO Pack

Once again, optimizing your site for the search engines is going to be one of the best ways you can make money with your blog. The higher you rank, the more traffic you recieve. The more traffic you receive, the more money you make! The All In One SEO pack makes your life easier because it allows you to specify the title, description (that will show up in the search engines), and keywords.

WordPress Database Backup

Backing up your blog is crucial if you value your business. You never know what could happen to your server, and it would be awfully devastating to lose everything. You can easily back everything up by pressing a few simple buttons with this effective and very useful plugin.

Top Commentators

This plugin is greatly effective and it encourages a lot of interaction on your blog. It lists the people who have the most comments within your blog. They love this because they get the extra exposure. You love it because people really get into posting to try and be at the top. It also gives social proof. When people visit a blog for the first time they are more likely to stick around if there are clearly other people there who value your content. The fact that they can see others participating is a great thing.

There are an incredible number of different plugins out there that are ready for you to use. Install these essentials and you’ll be well-prepared to become the great blogger you’re going to become.

Who are you? No, really, who are you? If I Google your name what will I find out about you?  Will the search results pull up your professionally designed blog that will tell me all about you or will it pull up those embarrassing photos you took at that party? Worse, will nothing come up at all?

The internet has integrated itself deeply into the fabric of life. So much so that people are turning to search engines and social media outlets to find out information about businesses and individuals. If the wrong information comes up or, worse, no information at all, then your prospective clients may hesitate to do business with you. This hesitation can cause you to lose business to a competitor who has put in the time and effort into their business and personal brand.

It is a common misconception amongst small and independent business owners that personal and business branding is only for the “big guys”. Maybe at one point in time that was true but I can safely say that is no longer the case. The internet has leveled the playing field and provided anyone with a dream and the willingness to work a way to build a successful business. As a consequence the marketplace is chock full of people trying to get the attention of prospects and the only way to be heard above the noise is to brand yourself so that your prospective clients remember you when they think about your particular industry.

For example, a real estate agent who takes the time to cultivate a personal brand as an expert in the real estate industry will sell more homes than a person who doesn’t. This is because when people need help buying or selling a home, they will go to the person who has demonstrated that they have the knowledge, skills, and solutions they are seeking. Think about it. When you need help with a problem, who are you going to turn to? Someone who has proven to you that they know what they are talking about or someone who says they do but you have no way of knowing for certain.

Business and personal branding is not as difficult as it may first seem and anyone who has a business should have a strategy in place for doing it. The easiest way is to start a blog and to begin writing articles about the industry topics that are important to your clients. Not only should these articles provide information that your prospects can use to make good decisions, they should also position you as a knowledgeable expert in your field.

Business owners aren’t the only ones who need to have a personal and business branding strategy in place. Even if you are employed, you need to take steps to build a personal brand for yourself outside of your job. The world is gradually switching over to a freelance mentality which means rather than being “employed” by a company you will be “hiring yourself out” to the business that offers the most benefits in exchange for your skill set.

Read the rest of this entry from guest author Debbie Russell»

You can’t go anywhere on the internet, these days, without running into an advertisement offering to show you a fool proof way to make money blogging. These ads wildly claim that you can make hundreds of thousands of dollars by simply writing and publishing articles on a blog. Is this true? Is it really possible to make money blogging?

Money by any other name spends just as sweet.

As a marketing tool, blogging is an excellent way to attract customers to your home based business. However, this not what the ads are talking about. The truth is these ads are trying to sell you a system where you make money blogging for advertising revenue.

While this does include direct ad sales, more often than not these systems are based on you signing up for a Google Adsense account and placing the Adsense code on your blog. You earn a commission each time a person clicks on one of the displayed ads. The amount you earn is dependent on the amount the advertiser paid for the privilege of advertising on Google’s network.

When the Adsense program first started, it was possible to make money blogging this way. In fact, many people did earn hundreds of thousands of dollars with this business model. But internet surfers have since become savvy to these ads and have trained themselves to ignore them. So trying to make money blogging for advertising dollars is not as easy or as profitable as it used to be.

In fact, it takes a lot of time and a lot of effort to make money with any business model that depends on generating advertising revenue. In order to make money blogging, you have to build a popular blog that produces enough web traffic (thousands of visitors a day) to attract a well paying advertiser in the first place. Second, the ad space market is so saturated right now that even the major websites have had to cut their rates just to keep their existing ad clients.

This is not to say that you can’t make money blogging. You can. You just have to approach it from a different angle. Instead of trying to make your blog the source of income, use your blog as part of a marketing strategy to attract customers to a product or service you are selling. For example, if you are a crafter, use your blog to draw potential buyers to your online store.

If you visit many of the top bloggers on the internet today, you’ll find that the majority of them make the bulk of their income selling supplemental products and services such as ebooks and consulting packages. They learned a long time ago that solely depending on advertising revenue was like flying towards the sun with wax wings. Fun for awhile but destined to eventually fail.

Make money blogging by using your blog as a marketing tool to build a sustainable business selling valuable products and services. You’ll end up with a steady flow of income and a business that will be around for years to come.

(image credit: photos8)