WordPress can never be difficult. Even the newest of bloggers jumping onto the WordPress platform would agree with me. Everything is so user friendly that in a day or two, you would start to feel as if you have complete control over your blog or, your website. WordPress as a Content Management Solution is far superior and user friendly from any other CMS platforms.

I once wanted to check out the alternative solutions for my websites and decided to go about using Jhoomla. The installation itself was so painful that I felt I would abandon it midway. After installation came the pain with customization. I might be sounding a bit harsh here because these CMS platforms are “blessings” for a lot of developers and users and it is possible that since I am a novice in developing, it appears this difficult to me. But the only point that I wanted to make was that WordPress is a CMS platform for anyone and with any objective. The extendability of WordPress including the various themes like affiliate themes and stores themes help you set up a website in minutes. Add to it the thousands of plugins available and you have a “magical lamp” in your hand.

Plugins can be a confusion at times. There are thousands of plugins for the same purpose and at times choosing the most appropriate one can be difficult. But since installing and uninstalling plugins are not difficult, the easiest option of testing is to install one of these and evaluate its performance.

I am mentioning a few of the under-rated WordPress plugins, that are on the contrary very useful and required for your WordPress blogs.

1. Akismet – Comment and trackback spams are one of the biggest pain areas in blogging. Protecting your blog from these could be one of the difficult tasks and if you choose the option of not approving all comments before they appear in your blog, then your life would be a hell. Akismet protects you blog from such spams and come in very handy is all such situations. You require a WordPress API key to activate this plugin which can be obtained from WordPress.com, free of cost.
2. Post-teaser – Search engines love blogs and at the same time these search engines hate repeated contents. This is a reason for a lot of blogs not making it to the search engines. Blogs normally would have a mainpage with the latest posts. The same posts would then be there in your archives page, categories page, tags page and the search results page. So the content is repeated in 4-5 different places. Search engine spiders get irritated with these repeated contents and push your blogs to the bottom. This is why all major and successful blogs have only excerpts in their main page. Post teaser helps you do this nicely and neatly.
3. All in One Adsense and YPN - What is the primary objective of your blog? Is it, making money online? If yes then this plugin is for you. Google Adsense and the Yahoo performance network are two of the biggest ad-serving methods available to bloggers. If you are looking at monetization methods, then you would not want to ignore Google Adsense or, Yahoo ads. But generating codes and inserting then into your blogs sidebars and posts could be a herculean task. All in one Adsense relieves you of the pain involved in doing this.
4. GoCodes – Affiliate marketing is one the biggest ways of making money online. Every blog that claims to be earning a fortune promotes some or, the other products that they believe in, as an affiliate. But affiliate marketing can also be very difficult especially when there are vultures out these waiting to snatch your catch. New affiliate marketers never realize this until it is very late. The answer to this is “Link Cloaking”. And GoCodes can help you with link cloaking.
5. Tweetmeme – Twitter is turning out to the a traffic monster. The more tweets your posts receive the more traffic you get. I am not a huge promoter of my blog posts on twitter and I personally do not spend a lot of time at Twitter. But if you are just starting up, you might want to consider Twitter to build you traffic. Add the “tweetme” button to your blog posts the easy way using this plugin.
6. What would Seth Godin do – RSS subscriptions are what will increase your readership base. Offering subscription options to your visitors depending upon, if they are first time visitors or, returning visitors is what this plugin does and it actually improves your subscription rates to a great extent.

These plugins can come in very handy if you are dedicated towards building a business out of your blog. You may want to check out our blog start-up help options in case you are new to blogging and WordPress.

If you are serious about making money from your blog, then learn the art from the person who makes a living out of his blog. Check out Yaro Starak’s Blog Mastermind

The best thing about using WordPress for your blog is its extendability. Unlike Blogger where you have to hand-code the HTML in case you wished to make changes to a feature in the blog, WordPress has thousands of add-ons called as plug-ins which help you to add functionality and features to your blog. This feature of WordPress is what has made it the most desirable blogging platform ever.

So when you start your blog on WordPress, you would be awed at the huge scope of extendability that you get. Add to it the numerous self-styled preachers out there professing the usage of this and that and you have a real recipe for mess. After a coupdl of days you would be in a situation where you either don’t like your blog because something about it is not right or, you have messed up things to an extent of irrepairability.

So that you do not end of as one of these people I mentioned above, I thought I would be very precise when I tell you what is right for your blog. We are into blogging to make some money, right? Even if the blog is your portrait you are into it for money. If that is the case then the features that we include or, extend our blog on should be the onese that help us in our objective of making money online blogging.

These are the 6 most desirable plugins that you would need for your WordPress blog, in case your objective is similar to what I have mentioned above -

1. All-in-One SEO pack : SEO is something that just cannot be avoided. You want your blogs to be indexed in the search engines and SEO is what will help you do that. This plugin adds the options of inserting meta tags like keywords, description and title to all you posts individually and to the blog as a whole. A bit of careful research on the niche for the blog will get you the keywords that you would want to use for the blogs. After you blog is set-up research the keywords that you want to use for you blog-posts and you have everything in place. The rest of the work will be done by All-in-One SEO pack.
2. FasterIM Optin: If your blog has the objective of making money then you would want subscribers and subscribers means list. And a list is what will get you business. FaterIM Optin is an plugin for WordPress which will enable a pop-up optin form on you WordPress blog getting your subscribers to sign up, if you have something valuable to offer.
3. ShareThis: This is a plugin that adds the feature of book-marking on your blog. You would want your readers to be bookmarking you to the various social networking sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, Delicious, Reddit etc. This feature enables that on your blog this giving your readers the option to share your blog posts on all such networking sites.
4. WP Tags to Technorati : The name of the plugin itself would have given you an idea of what it means. Technorati has a unique syntax to the tags that it identifies and promotes. It is possible to manually code these tags into each of your blog posts. But would you want to do it? I will not, for sure because of the tediousness. This plugins makes this job easy for you. There is nothing that you have to do except activating the plugin.
5. WP Google analytics: If you are serious about blogging then you would want to see a report of your blog including the number of visitors, sources of traffic, bounce rates etc. All of this information can be provided by Google Analytics. But you have to insert a tracking code from Anaytics into you blog to track the statistics. Coding and messing with the code in my blog is the last thing that I want to do. This plugin helps you do away with all this messing around.
6. Google XML Sitemaps: Google provides a very useful service called as Webmaster tools that help you submit your websites to Google and also helps you get you site indexed. One pre-requisite for this tool is a sitemap in XML format. You have to submit this sitemap to Google in order for your to get indexed. Generating and submitting this sitemap is otherwise a pain, but this plugin does all of that you. It generates the sitemap and places it there in your blog folder. All that you have to do is create an account with Google Webmaster tools and enter the link to your sitemap there.

These plugins will help you in more than one ways in your objective to earn money from your blog.

How to install these plugins:-

WordPress 2.7 has quite a few handy features which make blog maintenance very easy. In case you wish to install any of these plugins, just enter the name of the plugin in the “Add New” options in Plugins and the plugins would be there. All you have to do is click on install.

(You can also choose from among the many blog installation and maintenance packages available with us. Check it out here)

You can write into me in case you are unable to find any of these plugins or, need help with resolving some problems with these. Just put in  comment and I will respond to you.

Happy blogging.

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