i7o Media

This is a guest post from Joel Carl. If you’re interested in writing an article for this blog, feel free to use the contact form. You will be linked to appropriately.

1. Featured Content Gallery
This plugins allows you to create a fully automated content gallery. The gallery can be placed anywhere in your blog and is fully customizable. Looks awesome on the front page of your blog, giving your blog a modern interactive feel!

2. ShareThis
A social bookmarking plugin which allows your visitors to easily bookmark or email a post/page. Fully customizable with the ability to choose which sites appear in options, exclude from certain pages or put it in the side bar.

3. Smart YouTube
Easily insert youtube videos into your posts or sidebar widget. Smart youtube is awesome because it supports high quality video, works on the iphone and allows videos to be viewed in fullscreen. Highly customizable, low on external resources and very easy to use.

4. Twitter Tools
If your not twittering, you should be! Twitter tools connects your wordpress blog to twitter. This plugin will automatically update your twitter with your new blog post title bringing twitter traffic and often retweets which can go viral!! Makes twitter life easy!

5. Disqus
Disqus is a blog comment management system. You have the ability to show unique avatars for each commenter, comments can be sorted easily, you can also reply directly to certain comments. It looks great, easy to install and it makes it a breeze to regulate your comments. It connects directly to facebook out of the box and you can use it in the sidebar widgets to reward top commentators.

6. Popularity Contest
Displays your most popular posts based on certain criteria such as views, comments, pingbacks. You can adjust the weighting of each factor to customize your own popularity.

7. FlickrRSS
A popular plugin, lets you display your flickr photos easily on your blog. You can add this to the sidebar via the widget.

8. DropCap First Character Wordpress Plugin
This plugin makes the first character of each post big(magazine style). Depending on what type of blog you have, this can look very pimp!

9. Subscribe Remind
This plugin will remind your visitors at the bottom of each post to subscribe to your RSS feed. It’s not that cool, but reconnecting with your audience over and over again via RSS – now that is the goal!

10. Digg Digg
Plugin that adds digg, twitter, yahoo buzz and reddit butttons with counters so that your readers can vote directly on your page. Pretty cool way to get some viral content going.

11. WP Greet Box
Create custom welcome messages for your visitors depending on which URL they arrived from. For example, if your visitors arrived from digg, you can remind them to vote for your post. Fully customizable.

12. WP Since Last Visit
This plugin will show previous visitors a small “New” flag when they return to your blog and there is new material that they have not read yet. Test this one out first as it’s not compatible with all themes.

13. WP-PostRatings
Give your visitors the opportunity to rate your posts. You can then display the most popular posts in a sidebar widget. Be careful using in-tandem popularity contest as they do a similar job.

14. AnyFont
Allows you to use any type of font you would like anywhere on your blog. For example, if you would like a particular style for post titles, then this would be ideal. You can use this anywhere in your blog.

15. Thickbox
A good way to add style to your pictures. If you have galleries of pictures, this plugin will pimp them up.

Listen: Upload and activate 1 plugin at a time!! Get the plugin completely working and customized before you move onto the next one. Too often I see people get excited with plugins – they download 20 of them, do a massive upload, activate, activate, activate, activate…..before they know it, their blogs are outta control with plugins.

Do one at a time, once you are satisfied it works, move to the next. Sometimes plugins cause problems with certain themes and if you upload them all at once, you will not know which plugin is the problem.

This is a guest post from Joel Carl. If you’re interested in writing an article for this blog, feel free to use the contact form. You will be linked to appropriately.

1. All in One SEO Pack
In my opinion, this is the most useful plugin of all time. Helps you pick the post titles, keywords, tags and more. It also allows you to noindex the category, tag and archive pages which helps you avoid duplicate content issues.

2. Google Sitemap Generator
This great little plugin creates a sitemap file each time your blog is updated. Search engines love sitemaps. The name is misleading as yahoo, msn, ask and many others will read the sitemap. Very easy to install.

3. Google Analytics
Google analytics allows you to get detailed stats on your blog. How many visitors, where they came from, which pages they visited, where they exited. Possibilities are endless with google analytics, a great free tool

4. MBP Ping Optimizer
This little plugin will control your pinging. You don’t want to be pinging the search engines every 10 secs, this allows you to control the minimum time between pings as well as a ping log.

5. Automatic SEO Links
Allows you to choose a keyword/keyphrase and turn that into a link each time it is mentioned in the blog. You also have the ability to choose nofollow. This will only work for the keyphrase once per post, so you don’t have to worry about having spammy looking links in your posts.

6. Nofollow Case by Case
Gives you the ability to choose which comments don’t deserve follow tags and which do. This helps with comment spammers and allows you to look after the genuine commenters.

7. SEO Friendly Images
It’s important to SEO your images with alt tags – you can actually get lots of traffic from images. This plugin will ensure that your images are SEO optimized. If you forget to add alt tags, this plugin will add them for you.

8. SEO Post Link
When you set a post slug, sometimes they are too long and search engines don’t like that. This plugin will shorten the post slugs i.e http://www.bizboink.com/short-post-slug. The plugin will cut out unnecessary words, you can set it to a maximum number of words or characters

9. SEO Smart Links
Use this plugin for internal linking. By linking from one post to another, you can keep readers on your blog for longer. It can take a while to manually add those links, so use this plugin which will create a link to a certain page when you use a certain word/phrase.

10. SEO Title Tag
This allows you to make your post titles different to your title tags. By default wordpress will use your post titles as the title tag. The post title should be something catchy, but the title tag should be full of related phrases and synonyms which can help capture more visitors in a wider net.

11. Redirection
Whenever you need to move a page to another address(which happens somtimes), you can use this plugin to ensure a smooth redirection without losing your position in the search results.

12. Google Positioner
This plugins allows you to follow which keywords are bringing you visitors from the search engines. This helps monitor your search engine rankings.

13. Related Entries
This plugin allows you to output a series of related posts based on the keywords used in the post. This helps your readers move onto the next most relevant post.

14. WP Backlinks
This plugin allows you to manage reciprocal links with other websites. Whilst reciprocal links are not the best quality links you can get, they are still an important part of the overall SEO in Google’s eyes. They make your links look natural. Be sure to only trade links with related sites with good page rank.

15. Wordpress Global Translator Plugin
Make your blog available in over 41 different languages. Gives you a much bigger audience.

Next time we will be revealing 15 Wordpress plugins to pimp your blog

This is a guest post from Joel Carl. If you’re interested in writing an article for this blog, feel free to use the contact form. You will be linked to appropriately.

Many bloggers, especially beginners are faced with the dilemma of whether to get a free hosted blog or to fork out the money and get your own hosting and domain.

Free blogs such as wordpress.com, blogspot and typepad offer free hosted blogs which can be suitable as they reduce the technical overheads. This is especially appealing to those with little to invest and even less in tecnhical knowledge.

Whilst it may be free now, if you put considerable work into your blog and build up a following, you will soon realise that getting a free hosted blog was the worst decision you ever made.

Here’s why:

• You have serious lack of control over hosted blogs.

• What happens when you want to get a custom design and actually control what your visitors see? Having the ability to customize your blog is especially important when it comes to monetizing your blogs. Customization allows you to smoothly integrate your products, affiliate pages and other money making pages into your blog design. You can make your blog aesthetically pleasing aswell as highly functional.

• What happens if the hosting provider gets shut down? What happens to your blog posts from the last 2 years? What happens to all that page rank, authority and organic traffic you built up? It could all be gone in a heart beat. Go back to square 1 and start again?

• If your blog becomes popular, suddenly you are getting an influx of visitors and the number of simultaneous connections allowed may be limited by your host. Now your visitors get annoyed because they can’t view your blog, this will certainly test their love for your blog.

• With a self hosted domain, the possibilites of customisation are endless with thousands of themes, designs and plugins. If you plan to build a name/brand, then this will provide a much greater level of trust and credibility.

• You will be taken more seriously. I know some people will say “Hey I’ll follow a blog regardless of whether it is self hosted or not”. I understand that, but the harsh reality is – many people hate hosted blogs. If you choose a hosted blog – you better be packing some damn high quality in those posts, because content is going to be extremely crucial for you.

If you are still floundering around on a hosted blog, it is time to learn the ropes of hosting and domain registration, trust me, it really isn’t as daunting as you think and the rewards are endless.