Another article from http://www.dkspeaks.com/
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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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
