Top 5 WordPress Must-Have Plugins

February 11, 2009 | Posted by Carma | Filed Under Learning Center, plugins

There are so many plugins available for WordPress, how do you know which ones to choose and which ones you need? Here are the five I believe are the most important ones.

Block Spam with Akismet

This plugin is so important that its actually part of the WordPress program you download form WordPress.org! Once activated, it will monitor all comments posted on your blog and hold those it thinks are spam. This has been a God send for me because of my blogs attracts blog spammers like moths to a street light.

Block Email Harvesters with Email Immunizer

It can be really annoying to do all the crazy things you have to do to protect your email from email harvesters. This handy little plugin saves you time by protecting your email without you having to do anything special.

Managed Syndication Better with FeedBurner FeedSmith

Integrating your RSS feed with FeedBurner just makes sense. This free service lets you monitor your RSS feed stats, give people the option to subscribe to your feed via email (a boon to those whose audience just don’t use RSS readers), and more.

Increase Traffic with MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer

This handy plugin not only empowers you to ping a plethora of directories and other blog listing services, but makes sure you don’t ping to often and get marked as a spammer! Very handy!

Streamline Your SEO with Headspace 2

There are several SEO related plugins for WordPress but this remains my favorite because it not only helps streamline your SEO activities, but can also take the place of several other plugins and gives you the power to make different pages on your blog look very different!


How to Leverage Social Media with WordPress … And Save Time!

February 11, 2009 | Posted by Carma | Filed Under Learning Center, plugins, social media

There are several plugins that you can use to save yourself time when it comes to blogging and social media. Here are a few of my favorites.

Connect Your Blog with Twitter

Twitter Tools
Developed by Alex King, Twitter tools allows you to have your tweets posted on your blog and your blog posts posted to Twitter. It even makes sure you can do both while not causing an endless repetition of cross posts.

Twitter for WordPress
Developed by Ricardo Gonzalez, this plugin will display your latest tweets on your website. It can be added to your theme code or as a sidebar widget.

Tweet My Blog
This plugin is similar to Twitter for WordPress with a few more perks, including an affiliate program on a one-time offer.

Connect Your Blog to Facebook

Facebook Photos plugin for WordPress
Got photos on your Facebook account that you’d like to use on your blog? This plugin does that! After you have linked the plugin to your Facebook account, photos you upload to Facebook will automatically show up in a convenient “Photos” tab in your WordPress powered blog.

Wordbook
This plugin, developed by Robert Tsai, allows you to cross-post your blog posts to your Facebook Wall. Yes, you can do this using the “Notes” feature on Facebook. But what if you have two blogs? You can put one in Notes and use this plugin with the other!

Facebook Comments
Do you get more comments on your blog posts at Facebook than you do your blog? This plugin, developed by James Low, takes care of that little issue for you! It imports comments from your Facebook notes back into your wordpress blog.

Connect Your Blog to MySpace

MySpace Crossposter
The WordPress to MySpace Auto Crossposter publishes all of your WordPress blog entries to your MySpace blog at the time of publication. Each time that a new WordPress post goes live it will automatically be sent to MySpace for publication. And, you have the option of just posting a notification, thus driving traffic to your blog from MySpace!


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