A plug in for your WordPress blog is like a little tweak to make your blog perform better (in some cases) or do something an ordinary blog can’t do. As an entrepreneur, you’ll have different needs for plug ins than someone blogging for pure entertainment reasons.
Before we talk about which plug ins you should consider, you should be aware that plug ins have the ability to mess up your blog, too. One that’s not maintained well can have bugs that wreak havoc on your blog.
Luckily, all you have to do is delete or make the plug in inactive, but you first have to know 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 plug in called HeadSpace2 SEO. You may want to split test these two plug ins 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 plug in.
If you want to manage your ads, images or other media items on your blog, then you may want to get a plug in 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 plug in and host auctions right on your blog, without having to fork over fees to a third party site.
Contact Form 7 is a plug in that lets your blog visitors get in touch with you. It’s one of the most popular plug ins 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 plug in. 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 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 plug ins out there available to you. Virtually anything you want your blog to do, you can find a plug in that does it – but you have to search!