Pimp Your Blog, Part 2 – 8 More Must Have Plug-ins
We’re going to look at 8 more “must have” plug-ins, in addition to the 9 we looked at in my last blog post.
This time we’re going to look at plug-ins that:
- Add that gives you MUCH better search capability than WordPress
- Adding lots of social media links
- Twitter Tweet and Re-tweet capability
- Gives you peace of mind by making sure your blog is safely backed up so that is some technical glitch happens you can get it back
- A nice visitor greeting facility
- Helps protects your blog from hackers and thieves
Let’s look at the plug-ins in more detail.
10. The Librarian (
Search Everything)
Like a good librarian, Search Everything will help your visitors find whatever they want no matter where it is on the blog.
It greatly increases the default WordPress’ Search capability to include searching any or all of the following:
- Highlighting
- Every Page
- Every Tag
- Every Category
- Non-password protected pages only
- Every Comment
- Only approved comments
- Every Draft
- Every Excerpt
- Every Attachment (post type)
- Every Custom Field (metadata)
And it let you have a protected section of the library by excluding posts and categories from search.
Get it at: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/search-everything/
11. The Social Secretary (Sociable)
Sociable automatically add links to the most important social media sites on your posts, pages and in your RSS feed; you can choose from 99 different social bookmarking sites!
I also like that you can customize it to include only certain sites and how things are displayed.
Since social media lets you drive huge amounts of traffic this is one “hot” social secretary.
Get it at: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/sociable/
12. The Make Up Artist (StatPress)
Unlike “the statistics guy” from my last blog post, StatPress takes the statistics it keeps (traffic volumes, keyword/search terms, referring websites, browser & operating systems, search spider visits and lots more) and, like a good make up artist, makes them more attractive by showing them in easy to understand graphs.
Sure you can get that with Google Analytics but sometimes Analytics just “feels” laborious whereas StatPress is effortless to use.
Get it at: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/statpress/
13. The Third Cousin (TweetThis)
Basically, I use this because I like the “Tweet This Post” link it adds to every post and page.
It also includes, Plurk, Yahoo Buzz, Delicious, Digg, Ping.fm, Reddit, and StumbleUpon which some of the other plug-ins do, so you could get by without it but I like the look of this one’s Twitter link more than the others so I use it.
Get it at: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/tweet-this/
14. The Tweeter (TwitMe)
I am all for saving time, even if it is just 15 minutes a day. Hey, it is still 15 minutes you don’t get back.
TwitMe lets you automatically send out a Twitter tweet notifying your followers of your latest blog post.
This is a valuable plug-in and saves me from having to manually log into twitter and send updates when I update each of my blogs.
There are others out there that do the same thing and I’ve tried many of them but I liked this one the best overall. The only negative is I would like to customize each individual tweet not just use a specific pattern for all tweets.
However, I do suggest that you do the general customization available for a better auto-tweeting experience.
Get it at: http://www.phpvrouwen.nl/twitme/
15. The Wife (WordPress Backup)
Rightly or wrongly, wives are usually having to pick up, clean up, and generally look after their husbands.
WordPress Backup does part of a wife’s “job” by making sure that your blog is safely put away and taken care of; that is, it makes sure the blog is backed up.
If you are not doing backups of your blogs then your blog is just an accident waiting to happen.
Don’t take this for granted if you lose everything on your blog you will NOT be happy and the only way to be safe is to keep copies; don’t wait until you have an “incident” before your realize this is not something you should ever take lightly.
This plug-in doesn’t backup everything (I’m currently testing one that backs up the content) but is does backup the “upload” directory used for images, the current theme directory and “plugins” directory to a zip file and, if you wish, e-mail it to you.
WordPress provides database backup instructions at http://codex.wordpress.org/Backing_Up_Your_Database
Get it at: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-backup/
16. The Receptionist (WP Greet Box)
I think this plug-in is actually quite ingenious. It lets you show a different greeting message to your visitors depending on where they came from.
For example, when a Digg user clicks through from Digg, they will see a message reminding them to Digg your post if they like it. Or if they come from Twitter, they will see a message asking them to tweet the post and follow you on Twitter.
Targeting these visitors with specific suggestions will help your blog and anyway, it’s cool!
Get it at: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-greet-box/
17. The Security Consultant (WP Security Scan)
As good as WordPress is, it isn’t the most secure thing on the Internet.
WP Security Scan acts like a security consultant and scans WordPress installations for security vulnerabilities and suggests corrective actions.
This plug-in is comforting to have but, while it tells you good information, it does require manual work on your part to fix any security issues. Sometimes the security problems aren’t that easy to fix but it’s better to know about the problems so you can fix them than be blissfully ignorant.
Are you willing to take chances? If not, get your own security consultant.
Get it at: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-security-scan/
Bonus: Google Analytics for WP
I don’t use this because I use others to do the same thing but if you prefer to use Google Analytics to analyze your website traffic statistics, this plug-in works seamlessly with it.
What I really like about this plug-in it that since it is part of the Google Tools Family, it also allows you to track AdSense clicks
Get it at: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-analytics-for-wordpress/
Conclusion
All these plug-ins help turn WordPress into a lean, strong thing of beauty instead of a nice, but boring, washed out blog.
In this second part we looked at 9 more plug-ins. They were:
- The Librarian (Search Everything): to make your blog highly searchable
- The Social Secretary (Sociable): to make it easy for visitors to bookmark your blog posts and spread the word
- The Make Up Artist (StatPress): to “pretty up” all the raw statistics about your blog
- The Third Cousin (TweetThis): to ad a Tweet This button to your blog
- The Tweeter (TwitMe): to automatically send a tweet when you make a blog post
- The Wife (WordPress Backup): to backup parts of you blog
- The Receptionist (WP Greet Box): to put a semi-personalized greeting on your blog
- The Security Consultant (WP Security Scan): to make sure your blog is secure
- Bonus: Google Analytics for WP: to “play nice” with Google Analytics
Next time we’ll look at customizing your theme so you blog sparkles! And maybe more plug-ins if I like the ones I am testing.
Got any plug-ins you love? Tell me about them in the comments.
Talk soon,
The “Shameless” (but “Ethical”) Marketer
http://www.Twitter.com/DavidHusnian
http://www.8-8-8Sale.com
http://www.MusicForInternetMarketers.com
http://www.SecretsOfGoogleAdwords.com
http://www.MadMondaySale.com
http://www.2ForTuesdaySale.com
O.Y. Want to learn how to profit from your blog, use it to get floods of traffic, and get some theme and other things to pimp it up, then go to http://www.8-8-8sale.com/blogging.htm and use the coupon code PimpYourBlog in the shopping cart to get an immediate 27% discount just for readers of this blog post.
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[...] Pimp Your Blog, Part 3 – Glam Up with Themes Posted by David on Jul 15, 2009 in Other Stuff | Subscribe Hello there! If you are new here, you might want to subscribe to the RSS feed for updates on this topic.The last 2 parts of this series gave you a bunch of plug-ins to pimp your blog inside and out; see http://fromthedeskofdavid.com/blog/other-stuff/pimp-your-blog-1 and http://fromthedeskofdavid.com/blog/other-stuff/pimp-your-blog-2. [...]
You may be interested in our WP Backup Plugin that automatically backs up both database and files to Amazon S3
I can’t vouch for this but if you need to backup Amazon S3 then it may be of interest to you (it isn’t free though but if you need it it may be worth it).
Be sure you check reviews and things first.
David
P.S. I believe in backups but if the files aren’t already “backed up” with the original files I think that a mistake. I create files and COPY them up to the Web but if I ever lose the Web version I have the originals.