Top Wordpress Plugins Every Internet Marketer Should Have

[BenK]

If you are using wordpress for your niche blogs, there are some essential wordpress plugins you need to have. Most of them are free and I use every single one of them on a daily basis. If you have more recomendations (plugins you personally use), feel free to mention them here. It would be nice to compile a list on this thread of all the best wordpress plugins for internet marketing.

Wordpress Database Backup

• This is a must. Anyone who has lost all the content on their blog because their database fails knows how important backing up your content is. This plugin will email backup your wordpress database each day and email it to you. This plugin is a must. It's free.

Google XML Sitemap

• It's important to have a sitemap for your blog. This easy set it and forget it plugin will automatically create a sitemap for your blog and keep it updated each time you add something new. This plugin also pings all the search engines each time the sitemap is updated. Having a sitemap can help your SEO. It's free.

Akismet

• Comes with wordpress by default. Be surprised how many people don't bother using this. Use it! You kill most spam. It's annoying whne you have dozens or more wordpress blogs and each contains 1000's of spams -- a nice way to eat into your monthly hosting space quota.

All in One SEO Pack

• If you want to niche blog with wordpress, this is your bread and butter plugin. Make sure, if nothing else, you install and use this plugin. Wordpress itself is not SEO friendly. This plugin makes it so and can make a difference in your ranking because it takes care of a lot of the onpage seo for your blogs. It's free.

StatCounter

• If you are an IM, chances are you are going to have a lot of blogs. I myself have over 100 wordpress blogs at least and I'm looking to bring it up to 500 this year. Analytics is the best stats tracking program, but you can only have 25 sites per account. It's also not a good idea to give the G man ready access to all your sites. G can spot an IM'er a mile a way if you put all your blogs on analytics. And if you happen to use multiple analytics accounts all tied to 1 adsense account, you've given google the keys to your kingdom. Even if you don't have an adsense account tied to different analytics accounts, they can still track you by IP etc. I suggest using statcounter to track your blogs -- you can put up to 200 blogs per account and have multiple accounts. Only use analytics with blogs that have adsense and do well. Use statcounter for the rest. It's free.

Google Analytics

• If you have blog killing it with adsense, you will want to add analytics to it so you can track all the click information in more detail. You can install a plugin like this to enable analytics on your wordpress blog without any sort of fiddling around. It's free.

phpBAY

• This is one of the best ebay plugins for wordpress blogs. It's not free, but I've found with a couple of these set up in the right niche, you can more than pay the $70. This plugin is great because you can set up a niche blog and easily create a quality ebay store based around your posts. PhpBay Pro ebay stores are much better than BAN's in terms of options. The foot print is reduced (and can be eliminated if you want to hack around) and you can create a quaily store with lots of content and ebay links (with pictures embedded). I use this for all my real ebay stores and I have paid for it many tiems over. It's actually not hard making money with ebay -- just find a niche, set up a PhpBay store and repeat. I have a handful of these stores right now, but i'm going to be doing an experiement where I fling out several hundred. Based on what I've seen, you can expect, based on trickle traffic alone, between 10-100 bucks a month a site if you do it right. I think there are some free alternatives out there -- but I'm pretty happy with this plugin, it's probably the best ebay store plugin for wordpress.

Thesis Open Hooks

• If you happen to use the premium thesis theme (a great theme by the way that I just started using for niche blogs -- with modification of course), you know how customizing it can be a bit of a pain (well a big pain). These free plugin makes it a breeze to customize the theme for your niche blogging. And folks, you WANT to customize themes. You do not want a the same theme accross all your blogs -- that's a massive footprint. If you are serious about niche blogging for money, I suggest you get a customizable theme like thesis and customize it for every 5 blogs you have. You can of course use the usual SEO themes floating around, but you are going to need to remove the footers, change the colors, and try and hide the footprint.

These plugins should be more than enough for your niche blogging. There are more plugins -- like say plugins that add an amazon store to your site, etc, but these are the core ones that I use on a daily basis.

Ben K

[djnuttall]

I would also recommend WP Super Cache

WP Super Cache is a static caching plugin for WordPress. It generates html files that are served directly by Apache without processing comparatively heavy PHP scripts. By using this plugin you will speed up your WordPress blog significantly.

Many hosts like Hostgator recommend this plugin.

[joshuamd3]

I would also recommend WP Super Cache

WP Super Cache is a static caching plugin for WordPress. It generates html files that are served directly by Apache without processing comparatively heavy PHP scripts. By using this plugin you will speed up your WordPress blog significantly.

Many hosts like Hostgator recommend this plugin.

This plugin is the balls, especially with high traffic sites.

[janetra]

Here's some I use

• Related Posts adds links to related posts at the end of your posts. Good for linking within your site.
  
• Dagon Design Sitemap Generator easy to use site map generator for people (rather than search engines)
  
• KB Linker set it up to make any keywords into links within your posts and pages.
  
• Wordpress Automatic Upgrade I know Wordpress now has built in upgrades but there are some problems with it. It gave me errors related to permissions when I used it. This plugin has worked flawlessly for all my upgrades.
  
• Category Posts I use this on all my sites. Allows you to display the most recent posts from a certain category.
  
• Theme Test Drive Want to change your theme but need to do some customising first? Use this plugin to safely play with the theme while visitors still see the old one.

I also use a plugin to automatically generate an adsense compliant privacy policy but it seems to have been removed from the authors blog and I can't find any working download links. I'm not sure if it's OK to attach it here for you to download. What do you think Ben?

[Phillip]

Here's some I use

• Related Posts adds links to related posts at the end of your posts. Good for linking within your site.
  
• Dagon Design Sitemap Generator easy to use site map generator for people (rather than search engines)
  
• KB Linker set it up to make any keywords into links within your posts and pages.
  
• Wordpress Automatic Upgrade I know Wordpress now has built in upgrades but there are some problems with it. It gave me errors related to permissions when I used it. This plugin has worked flawlessly for all my upgrades.
  
• Category Posts I use this on all my sites. Allows you to display the most recent posts from a certain category.
  
• Theme Test Drive Want to change your theme but need to do some customising first? Use this plugin to safely play with the theme while visitors still see the old one.

I also use a plugin to automatically generate an adsense compliant privacy policy but it seems to have been removed from the authors blog and I can't find any working download links. I'm not sure if it's OK to attach it here for you to download. What do you think Ben?

serprank.com offers generated privacy policies if you don't want to use a plugin for it.

[The Ice Cream Bunny]

I'd like to add a few to this list if you don't mind...

Content Creation:

Caffeinated Content

• If you missed out on your chance to purchase Niche Devil, this is the next best thing. You can get an attractive full-fledged blog with dozens of posts that looks completely legit with this thing in less than a minute with just a click of a button - it finds content related to your keywords from Yahoo Answers, article directories, Youtube, image sites and more. It's a little pricy at nearly $80, but worth every penny as far as I'm concerned.

Yahoo Answers Autoposter

• For the cheapskates not willing to pay for Caffeinated Content, Yahoo Answers Autoposter is a decent alternative. It finds relevant content from Yahoo Answers based on keywords of your choice and posts them on a scheduled basis. Nothing fancy, but it gets the job done if you're looking to create some thin affiliate sites and don't want to waste your time with things like writing.

Yahoo Shortcuts

• Automatically finds window dressing like images and maps for posts while you write them which you can add to make them look beeyootiful. Nothing too useful, but it can make your blog look more professional and appealing with little work on your part.

Tubepress

• A PHP plugin that finds and posts Youtube videos related to your content.

Feedwordpress

• Just a run of the mill automatic RSS-feed poster to make your auto-blogging life a little easier.

[lissie]

If you have just bought a pre-owned which still has indexed pages in G's index:

Simple 301 redirects

Google XML sitemap I was never convinced taht this was needed but I am noticing faster indexing with it turned on - and it looks so legit ...

[Phillip]

If you have just bought a pre-owned which still has indexed pages in G's index:

Simple 301 redirects

Google XML sitemap I was never convinced taht this was needed but I am noticing faster indexing with it turned on - and it looks so legit ...

I just bought a preowned which still has over 300 pages on googles index. Using that plugin would I have to manually insert every redrect?

[lissie]

I just bought a preowned which still has over 300 pages on googles index. Using that plugin would I have to manually insert every redrect?

Nice one - with that particular plugin yes - you can do it shorter if you know how to do regular patterns in Unix/Linux and a bit of php - but you really don't want to learn if you are trying to save 300 indexed pages - just put a good program on TV while you do it LOL - its quicker than writing the pages !

[bgmacaw]

I prefer Platinum SEO over All-In-One SEO these days because of the redirect feature and the NoIndex, NoFollow feature.

Yet Another Related Posts is great for doing related post with no database or other tweaking required as was the case with some older plugins.

Old Post Promoter allows you to rotate posts on your blog, creating simulated activity.

Advanced Excerpt allows you to add HTML code to excerpts, very handy with magazine style themes.

Insights - great for pulling in authority links and content.

Yet Another Autoblogger, good for pulling in automated content from feeds.