Plugins I Treasure

Week 2: Plug-ins are more than priceless as they make WordPress extremely flexible.

By creating the model my goal is to help you master the power of WordPress and make your
blogging more profitable and less time consuming.

Plug-ins create functionality and I am weighing the options for you presenting a list of plug-ins which can help earning revenue from Blogs. From over 9,000 plug-ins, it is impossible to list all valuable ones, so I will do my best to show plug-ins I consider useful.  The list will remain open for future additions.

The plug-ins, which fall into two distinct categories,  can produce:

• direct sell monetizing: plug-ins for Amazon, Zazzle, Adsense
• indirect monetizing, or long term: creating RSS feeds, subscribeing people to your list and so on

If we treat the Blog as a business, we definitely need both categories of plug-ins.

Note: As I stated many times, my way is not the only way and Internet marketing is not an isolated niche. Therefore, so on a list with over 9,000 plug-ins, it is normal to find  many plug-ins which perform the same function.
I’ll present what I know, use, and trust. If you know a different plug-in for the same functionality, I encourage you to use the one you trust and like.

At this point, the most important is to cover a huge quantity of functionality for the model. Which tools we use to do, it comes as secondary.
Each of you know many of those plug-ins but if you find just 2-3 new ones, I consider that my work to present the list is useful.

Having said that, this is my list of plug-ins which I consider important to have on each blog to facilitate production of some desired revenue for the owner.

What Would Seth Godin Do?

It was Seth Godin’s idea to use cookies to distinguish between new and returning visitors “In the Middle, Starting” and Richart Miller implemented Seth’s idea, creating this Plug-in.
By default, new visitors to your blog will see a small box above each post containing the words “If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!” After 3 visits the message disappears.
You can customize the message, its lifespan, and its location. This is your chance to offer visitors a special welcome and invite them to become permanent subscribers!  I think this plug-ins is an overlooked, so look it over, and try it!

Sociable

Your visitors will be able to save your post’s link into their favorite social Bookmarking sites. Automatically, add links on your posts, pages and RSS feed to your favorite social bookmarking sites. ( It looks like this plug-in wasn’t tested yet with WP v 3, so take it with a grain of salt!)

Darren’s Related Posts

It helps to organize the content very well inside your blog. The plug-in allows you to define which posts are related to a specific post and their links. Consider this part of branding of your blog – you show more articles that are related with your topic. (By the way, it is Darren Chamberlain, not Rowse)   I think the value of this plug-in is overlooked as well, I personally always search “related posts” feature which gives me the big picture about a topic.

Ultimate Tag Warrior

It will help you set up tags for each and every one of your blog posts, help you organize content on tags, and help you achieve better traffic from RSS and Blogging Search Engine.  This is where you can download the plug-in.

WordPress Exit (Bill McRea)

It allows you to automatically redirect your Blogs’ visitors to any web page affiliate offer or squeeze page you want. Very friendly, the redirect occurs only when visitors are already looking at your post.

Subscribe2

It allows you to subscribe people to your blog, and whenever you add a new article, your subscribers will get the message. It is a comprehensive subscription, management and email notification system. The plug-in was tested for WP v 3.

I am not using this one, I use HTML code from aweber for opt-in list, but is good to know that exist as well, as a lot of marketers are using the plug-in. But I’ll choose one of the 4 test sites and I will work with this one in that site.

Opt-in Comment

This plug-in is very important, it helps to capture and engage readers on your blog. If a visitor makes a comment on your blog, he will receive a thank you e-mail from you with an offer of a free Digital Product, and that free offer can have a back end with a paid OTO.

Feed Footer

This is another overlooked plug-in that helps to send a message about one of your products at the end posts in your blog RSS feed.  In addition, to get your visitors to subscribe, you can use the plug-in to sell RSS text ads and run RSS only promotions. This is a free plug-in.

Ninja Affiliate

This is plug-in which helps tracking the click rate and sign up performance. It is awesome as it adds an extra level of branding because it shows your domain name instead the domain name of the service you are using.

Google XML Sitemaps

This is a well known plug-in but I just want to be sure we don’t miss it! It helps to generate a XML-Sitemap  compliant sitemap of your WordPress  blog. This format is supported by Ask.com, Google, YAHOO and MSN Search.

FD  Feedburner

This, too, is a well known plug-in. It will redirect all feeds to a feed burner feed which has a lot of personalize features.

All in One SEO Pack

This, as well, is a well known plug-in. Automatic Search Engine Optimization (SEO) out of the box for your wordpress blog …
Here is a list of the most important on-page ranking factors and how they are addressed by this WordPress SEO plug-in. You may  want to find out how to tweak the default options:

• Title – Make sure your titles are getting rewritten
• Descriptions – Once your pages rank in search engines your description allows a visitor to click through, or not
• Keywords – All in One SEO Pack can generate them from your categories or from Ultimate Tag Warrior
• Duplicate Content – You can have “noindex” and the like generated for archive – category – and tag pages

Note: I didn’t include in the table the classic plug-ins for direct sell like Amazon, Zazzle, Adsense and so on, and actually my focus wave on indirect monetizing plug-ins which are not so well known.

The plan for next week:

• Implement those plug-ins in two of the four test blogs
• Design the 4th test side
  

All I have covered, so far: detailed planning, decided and packaging the list with freebies, decided plug-ins to use, and prepared test Blogs for testing; I am ready to start building the model.

Until next week be well