Posts Tagged ‘blogging’

The Top 12 WordPress Plugins for Comments

Comments to a blog post increase the popularity of the blog, at the same time they help the blog in earning better page rank with the search engines. It is because of this bloggers from any blogging platform will always have comments fields below each post. WordPress users will always have an edge above any other bloggers using different blogging platforms because of the fact that there are a number of WordPress plugins for comments which turn out to be extremely handy and useful.

The top 10 WordPress plugins for comments are mentioned below:

SPAM:

Akismet: This plugin makes use of a central spam comments database for flagging spam. This plugin requires WordPress.com’s free API key for functioning.

Did You Pass Math: To make sure that the comments are posted by humans, this plugin asks simple math questions to those who post comments!

Bad Behavior: This plugin analyzes the HTTP requests and prevents the spambots from accessing the site.

COMMENT ENCOURAGEMENT:

Show Top Commentators: This plugin makes a list of the most frequent commentators in your blog and displays the same on the sidebar along with the links to their blogs.

DoFollow: The job of this plugin is to remove the nofollow attributes from the links posted in comments area so that the search engines can follow them.

DoFollow Trackbacks: This plugin removes all the nofollow attributes from the trackbacks so that the search engines can follow them.

RICH COMMENTS:

Live Comment Preview: The job of this plugin is to allow the users to preview the comments before they actually post the same.

Custom Smileys: People often want to add emoticons to their comments. This plugin helps the users to do so by adding clickable smileys.

COMMENTS SHOW OFF:

WP-Most Commented Posts: This small and simple plugin helps in displaying the posts with the maximum number of comments on the sidebar of the blog.

BETTER CONVERSATION:

Comment Karma: This WordPress plugin allows voting on comments in the style of Digg.

Simple CoComments: This plugin is capable of tracking a conversation across different blogs. This helps the bloggers to stay informed about all the conversations taking place across the Web for a specific blog post.

Quoter: This simple WordPress plugin allows the users to quote any previous comment in their comments for easy reference during a discussion.

The Top 5 WordPress Plugins for Email List

For bloggers who are geared up with the motive of making money must have mailing lists. This is one of the best sales mechanisms which can be used by the bloggers. However, it is necessary to set up a mailing list and make necessary arrangements. Here are the 5 most popular WordPress plugins for mailing lists that can be used by the bloggers.

WP Autoresponder and Newsletter Plugin: This is a free plugin which sets up a mailing list from within a blog. There are a number of features which are pretty helpful. The plugin allows the inclusion of custom subscription form, schedule emails and more. This plugin works independently and hence, it never uses any third party plugins like Aweber or Mailchimp. If you have a blog, you can use your own mail server to send out emails. However, you need to remember that you should refrain yourself from spamming.

Sendit: This plugin comes in two versions – the basic and the pro. The basic version is free and allows the bloggers to send newsletters in XHTML format. To use all the features of the plugin, bloggers will have to purchase this plugin.

ALO EasyMail Newsletter: This plugin is similar to WP Autoresponder and Newsletter Plugin but has some additional features. This plugin is capable of pulling out blog posts to be sent as newsletters or you can easily customize the same with the text of your choice. It is always better to use some different and unique text (and not the blog posts) so that the readers can have a reason to not only read the newsletter but also visit the blog.

MailChimp Widget: This plugin will allow you to integrate your blog with Mailchimp Email List system which is a paid service. Mailchimp has free versions as well which can be used by bloggers who deal with very light mailing lists. These free versions have limited functionalities and in order to unlock the full potential, the bloggers will have to pay.

Aweber Integration: This is a small plugin which will allow the bloggers to use Aweber to send emails to their mailings lists. However, the bloggers will have to pay Aweber to use this service.

There are few other WordPress plugins for mailing lists however; the above mentioned 5 plugins are the best available plugins. Though some of them are paid services, you will definitely not mind spending some bugs because of the nature of services that they provide.

The Top 10 WordPress Plugins for Admin

The WordPress program has become one of the most popular blogging platforms all over the Web. The fast growing demand for this blogging platform has led to the development of some great plugins which can help the bloggers to manage their site and make it friendlier for both the end users (the readers) and the backend people working in managing the blog. The top 15 WordPress plugins for admin are mentioned below:

404 Notifier: This plugin helps in logging all the 404 errors so that the admin for a given WordPress blog can readers are finding broken pages. This helps the admin to fix those errors or redirect those users to some relevant page.

Ajax Spell Checker: It is the job of the admin to ensure that all the postings are free of grammatical or spelling errors. This small plugin helps in checking the posts for spelling errors using a combination of dictionaries.

Admin Dropdown Menus: The admin menu panels for a WordPress are generally overstuffed and crowded. This panel helps in arranging the menu items in dropdown menus and hence makes the place, clean and orderly.

Batch Categories: A page for category management can be added using this plugin which can show all the posts under any particular category. As a result of this, adding other categories becomes simple.

Custom Admin Menu: This WordPress plugin helps in renaming, hiding or moving anything in the admin area and hence becomes a very handy tool for the admin.

Dashbar: With this plugin, the administrators can have admin access while they are working on the blog’s frontend and hence, it discards the need of having multiple open windows.

Dashbar Editor: This plugin helps the WordPress administrators to change the Dashboard and make it more useful and productive.

Digital Fingerprint: This is a must have plugin for those who are worried about copyright infringement. This plugin allows adding a digital fingerprint which allows the admin to search the Web and find whether the content has been plagiarized or not.

FeedBurner FeedSmith: This plugin ensures that all the RSS feed subscribers for your blog are counted along with those people who subscribed through FeedBurner.

OneClick Install: This is an extremely powerful plugin for the WordPress users. This plugin helps uploading and installing themes and plugins for WordPress and thereby discards the need of FTP or unzipping.

There are many more admin plugins which the WordPress administrators can find useful. This is only a small list of the most popular plugins which can be used by the admin to make WordPress more user friendly and productive.

The Top 10 WordPress Plugins for Social Media Sharing

Social media plays a crucial role in popularizing a blog or a website and also helps in getting new traffic. There are a number of WordPress plugins for social media sharing which help the blog owners to get social exposures. The top 10 WordPress plugins for social media sharing are briefly described below:

Sociable: Sociable, places social bookmarking site buttons below every post allowing easy submission of vote for the posts by the readers. This plugin allows selecting buttons that you want.

Share This: Similar to Sociable, this plugin also allows to ad buttons for social bookmarking sites below the posts for easy voting. However, button cannot be selected by the users but the button colors can be changed to match the blog theme. This plugin also provides tracking reports.

Antisocial: Just opposite to Sociable, the “Antisocial” plugin helps in putting nofollow tags to those links which point towards the social media sites and still it allows in harnessing the link juice, which is good for the purpose of SEO.

Notable: It is just like Sociable which allows adding buttons below the blog posts for social bookmarking sites.

Gregarious: This plugin helps in promoting the blog posts to Del.icio.us, Reddit, Digg and others. It also has a number of features to help the users to customize the plugin according to their needs.

I Love Social Bookmarking: This plugin has a dropdown menu which allows the users to select the social media site according to their choice and then place a vote for the blog post. This helps in reducing the number of icons on a blog.

Add to Any Bookmark Button: This plugin allows the users to bookmark a page by choosing a bookmark manager of their choice by creating a simple bookmark button.

Digg This: Compared to any other social media site, Digg holds the potential of sending high traffic in a very short span of time. This WordPress plugin helps you to place a button on the pages of your blog and thereby help the users to digg your postings easily.

AddToAny: This is a small plugin which allows bookmarking, sharing and emailing the posts as well as pages to websites like Twitter, Facebook, Del.icio.us, Google Buzz, Digg and many other popular sharing and bookmarking sites.

SphinnIt Button: Sphinn is known for targeting the search-related topics and internet marketing. The SphinnIt Button helps the users to easily Sphinn the postings of your blog with the help of a simple button.

The Top 5 WordPress Plugins for Search Engine Optimization

WordPress is one of the most popular blogging platforms available. The reason why WordPress has gained so much popularity is that, there are hundreds of plugins available which allow the users to customize their WordPress sites as per their requirement. There are a number of plugins available for Search Engine Optimization as well. However, the top 5 plugins which are widely recommended are mentioned below:

All-in-One SEO Pack: Armed to features like Meta data, auto page titling, management of navigational link, avoiding duplicate content problems and more, this plugin is a must have for those who use WordPress. Not only easy and user friendly for the beginners, this plugin has the ability to start functioning immediately and helps even the expert SEO specialists to revamp their SEO approach.

SEO Smart Links: It is a well known fact that if blog or website pages are interlinked properly, it can have a positive impact on SEO. This plugin is designed for identifying the search terms within a website and then interlinking them with the relevant content or pages.

Google XML Sitemaps: You must learn one thing that Google, Bing and Yahoo! love those sites which have well structured sitemaps. Sitemaps help in proper indexing. This WordPress plugin creates XML sitemaps on its own and whenever a new content is created, the plugin informs the same to the search engines. The plugin also helps in automatically creating priority for the blog posts based on the number of comments received and thereby helps in reducing time required in manually adjusting them.

Redirection: Websites are evolving one after the other. Pages are being changed and contents are being removed. The end result is that often at times, organic searches lead to 404 error pages (Not Found error). Unfortunately, from a website’s perspective 404 is not good! Search engines do not like this resulting in a decline in page rank. It is because of this, Redirection plugin for WordPress becomes extremely handy. It helps in redirecting the pages so that URLs don’t end up with 404 Not Found errors.

SEO Friendly Images: Alt tags for images are very important for SEO. Very often people forget to use alt tags for the images in their blogs and websites. Alt tags help in improving the keyword density and hence alt tags are very important. This plugin helps in filling the Title and Alt attribute for images without alt tags.

WordPress Plugins to Use For Internet Home Business Success

Internet home business is not just about blogging, selling products and services, getting new visitors and retaining old customers! It is something more. Just like conventional market based business, internet home business is also about interaction with the consumers, understanding them and going that extra mile to help the consumers and giving them importance.

Arguably, WordPress remains the most popular blogging platform for setting up an internet home business and keeping in mind the ideology of business, there are a number of excellent WordPress plugins which can be used to achieve internet home business success. Here are some of them:

Layout: It is very important for an online entrepreneur to have a well organized blog or website. If you are using WordPress, you must have noticed that the categories, links and pages of your blog will be organized in alphanumeric sequence. This can be annoying because your business requirements can be different and you may like to reorder them for ease of navigation for your visitors. Luckily WordPress has a number of plugins which can help you to achieve this. “My Page Order”, “My Link Order” and “My Category Order” are the three best plugins for the purpose and they are extremely user friendly because of their drag-and-drop feature.

Multimedia: Audio-visual interaction always plays a very important role in business. There are several WordPress Plugins which can be used for displaying images and videos in posts. It is true that WordPress has its own Media Gallery but only with limited functionalities. Plugins like “Pyramid Gallery FX”, “FV WordPress FlowPlayer”, “ShowTime Slideshow”, “Lazyest Gallery”, “WP JW Player” are some of the most extraordinary multimedia plugins with support for different forms of images and video codes. Some of them require flash support but just in case flash is not available; they can fall back to the default WordPress Media Gallery.

SEO Plugins: It important that search engines find your blog so that you can have target traffic to your blog and business. For this, you will Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Manual SEO is always better but just in case you are not very comfortable with that, you can use some of these plugins for quick and easy SEO work on your own and get prominence in Organic search queries. Some of the most popular SEO plugins are “Greg’s High Performance SEO”, “XML Sitemap Feed”, “SEO Friendly Images”, “Google Analyticator” are some of the best high performing SEO Tools that can be used to internet home business success.

Speed Up Your WordPress Blog Load Time

In order to achieve internet home business success, you need to make sure that your readers don’t face long delays. Internet surfers tend to be impatient and the longer your WordPress blog takes to load, the greater the chances are that the readers will jump to your competitor. You can avoid this by boosting up the load time for your blog. Here are some of the basic things that you can do to achieve faster load time:

Prevent Hotlinking: Bandwidth theft is known as hotlinking. Often spammers will directly link their articles to the images on your blog. When this happens, sever will be slowed down and your blog will take longer to load.

Hotlinks can be disabled from the root .htaccess file where you need to place the following code:

# disable hotlinking of images with forbidden or custom image option
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www\.)?wpbeginner.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www\.)?google.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www\.)?feeds2.feedburner.com/wpbeginner [NC]
RewriteRule \.(jpg|jpeg|png|gif)$ – [NC,F,L]

You need to make sure that you follow your feeds so that the feed readers can see the images.

Web Hosting: Don’t think of saving a few bucks when it comes to selecting a web host. The hosts which have strong servers will ensure faster load time for your WordPress blog and this will indirectly play a role in your internet home business success.

Split Your Posts: If your posts are very long, you may need to split them into several pages. Splitting up the posts into multiple pages will not only speed up the load time but also increase the page views.

Using Excerpts and Limiting Post Count: It is not wise to show full posts on the blog’s home page. You can use excerpts and reduce the page load time significantly. You can also reduce the number of posts to be displayed on the page. The higher the number of displayed posts, the greater is the time needed to load the page.

Reduce the Image Sizes: If the images that you use in your blog posts are high resolution images, the blog will take time to load. It is therefore suggested to use lower image sizes. The best WordPress plugin that can help you to reduce the image size is “WP Smush.it”.

Removing the Inactive Plugins: Very often people install plugins which they don’t actually use. If you have more that 15 plugins installed on your WP blog, you need to remove those which are inactive. This will decrease the page load time and make your blog load faster.

You need to always remember that readers will like your blog if it loads quickly and this will pave the path to your internet home business success.

User Optimization for Internet Home Business Success-Blogger, Twitter Usage

Internet home business success depends on the degree of “User Optimization” applied to your blog. User optimization refers to the use of target audience to improve search engine rankings. This is sometimes known as organic link building. If you have high quality content about your business niche, the readers will not hesitate to mention your business in their own blogs. Moreover, when they tweet, they will potentially bring more links for you. Thus, you need to optimize your users.

It is not necessary that the readers will keep coming back to your blog. It is because of this, you need to give them a reason to come back. Always remember that people are busy with their own life and thus, you need to give them some options which can be utilized by them to stay updated. RSS Feed Reader, email updates and Twitter are some of the most powerful tools that can be used for the purpose.

If the users subscribe to your blog, you are actually assuring that your readers will read your blog regularly and this is when your chances to get quality backlinks increases.

The next thing that you need to do is to keep your readers engaged. The possibility of attracting new readers increases significantly when your existing readers stay engaged in the community. The new readers will find this motivating and they will join the discussion. The more the readers get engaged, the possibility of getting backlinks and retweets increases and this will increase the possibilities of internet home business success.

You must remember that increasing user activity is important and this can be achieved only when you increase your involvement. You need to make sure that you reply to the comments and encourage further discussions. You can also thank the commentators for their contribution. However, you must refrain yourself from thanking them every single time they post a comment. This will become annoying! Sending out “Thank You” emails with personalized messages to people posting comments for the first time will make them revisit your blog. If you are using WordPress as your blogging platform, you can use the “Comment Relish” plugin to send such emails to the new commentators. The plugin will allow you to customize and personalize your message.

You can encourage your users to post comments by adding some texts which they will like. This will definitely help you in building up relationships which will pave the way to your internet home business success.

Social Media Interaction for Internet Home Business Success

Social media interaction can make a huge difference when you are looking for internet home business success. Blogs and social media sites are today considered as two sides of the same coin. This is because of the fact that blogs are social by nature. Using the social media site, you can harness the power of “Word Of Mouth” to reach out for the target audience and it has been proved again and again the social media interaction plays a very crucial role in generating quality backlinks which translates into new targeted traffic.

Social media interaction is essentially a method of interaction with the likeminded people to popularize the blogs. Interaction or conversation and promotion are entirely two different aspects and social media should not be used for promotion. Promotion can be done by a number of other methods, like article marketing, promotional emails, new letters, press releases and more.

Conversation is something different. You need to speak with people. Put across your ideas and thoughts to them and ask them to voice their thoughts. Respect their opinion and try to understand their view on the subject. Try to find out what they think to be important. There can be differences in views and you need to discuss the source and reason for such difference. This will give you a fairly good idea of what you need to do to get more traffic. This is where you do not promote your business. Let people do the job for you. Start a discussion and you will see that more and more people will join which eventually translates into traffic for your internet home business.

There are several social media sites that you can use. It is not necessary to use all of them. You can use the ones that you like. Different social media sites which can be used are Facebook, StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us, Twitter, Digg and more. There are some WordPress plugins which can be used to reach out for multiple social interaction sites at a time.

However, it is not suggested to use auto tweets. It is because, auto tweets are generic in nature and they can create a negative feeling. It is always advisable that you use customized tweets every single time you use twitter. This will show that you are always updating and personalizing your account. They will realize that they are dealing with a real person and not a bot. Social interaction is one of the best ways to expand new business and they can play a vital role in internet home business success.

Linkbaiting Techniques For Bloggers

Bloggers who want to achieve internet home business success can definitely use the method of linkbaiting to get targeted traffic. There are several linkbaiting techniques which can be used by the bloggers. Some of the most popular techniques are mentioned below:

Giveaways and contests: This is the most popular method of linkbaiting. Creating a contest and asking people to write about the contest will work the best. However, you need to have some resource which can be used as a giveaway to the winner. You need to select something which people will find useful. For example, you can give away something electronic like and iPad or iPod to the winner of the contest. Once you do this, you will see a huge number of participants writing about your contest and you will get permanent backlinks. Successful site also will offer a discounted price for their service or product, everyone loves a deal.

Free Creative Tools: Everyone loves freebies. When you give away creative tools for free, you will get huge traffic and exposure because everyone will write intensively about your tools. This is just another popular way of linkbaiting. Your tools will be the talk of the water cooler banter.

Creating List: Creating lists like “top 10” or “top 50” will grab the attention of the readers! This is because of the fact that people love to read about these things as they act as a motivating factor for them or help them with decision making and open up choices for them. This method is a known and proven method of getting immense exposure for you blog which can lead to internet home business success.

Creating Controversy: You can also create controversial posts! Remember that controversies attract attention. Controversial posts will spark discussions and you can actually see a number of people actually participating in the conversation and thereby creating backlinks. You can also attack companies or other bloggers to get more and more traffic but going along that route will mean that you will attract attacks from other bloggers on you!

Lead the Way: If you become the first person to blog on a particular niche you will definitely increase your chances to attract backlinks. For instance, if you are the first blogger to write on a certain topic, you will find other bloggers mentioning your blog in their postings which will eventually translate into backlinks.

Content Rules! This cannot be denied. Good and informative content always attracts readers and more readers will mean more backlinks. You can consider writing some kind of tutorials for the readers as tutorials have a tendency to attract huge traffic.

Linkbaiting is one of the best methods that can be used by the bloggers to get exposure on the Web which will help them in achieving internet home business success.