Diary of an Affiliate Marketer
If you control all aspects of your business, which is a posh way of saying, you do everything yourself, then one of the things you will need to do is add plugins to your Wordpress blog. I’ve been reviewing some of the plugins available and here are some of the more popular ones.
Akismet: Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. You need a WordPress.com API key to use it. You can review the spam it catches under “Comments.” Anyone who has used a computer for any length of time will know how tiresome spam content can be.
Adsense Deluxe: Place Google AdSense ads in your WordPress Posts and receive payment. Not advisable on your sales pages if you are setting up an affiliate site but a good source of income on your non-selling pages.
Blubrry PowerPress: Blubrry PowerPress adds podcasting support to your blog. Features include: media player, 3rd party statistics, iTunes integration, Blubrry Services (Media Statistics and Hosting) integration and a lot more. As you build up the media content on your site this is a powerful plugin.
Fast and Secure Contact Form: Fast and Secure Contact Form for WordPress. The contact form lets your visitors send you a quick E-mail message. Blocks all common spammer tactics. Spam is no longer a problem. Includes a CAPTCHA and Akismet support. Does not require JavaScript.
Forms are a necessary method of contact these days due to the high amount of spamming.
FeedBurner Feedsmith: Originally authored by Steve Smith, this plugin detects all ways to access your original WordPress feeds and redirects them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber. To get your content out there a feedburner is a must.
Google XML Sitemaps: This plugin will generate a sitemaps.org compatible sitemap of your WordPress blog which is supported by Ask.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO. In my opinion a must for anyone seriously optimizing for the search engines.
When you submit a page you will get a report like this one:
- Your sitemap was last built on October 22, 2009 4:45 pm.
- Your sitemap (zipped) was last built on October 22, 2009 4:45 pm.
- Google was successfully notified about changes.
- YAHOO was successfully notified about changes.
- There was a problem while notifying Bing. View result
- Ask.com was successfully notified about changes.
Now you know that the search engines have been successfully notified about your new pages and you are also aware of any search engines that may not have received an update about your site.
Subscribe to Comments: Allows readers to receive notifications of new comments that are posted to an entry. This builds interaction and relationships with your site.
TubePress: Displays gorgeous YouTube galleries in your posts, pages, and/or sidebar. Please visit http://tubepress.org for more info! A stunning visual media aid for your site.
These are just a few of my favorite plugins out of the thousands that are available. Before adding plugins to your site carefully evaluate if it is adding any value to your business through increased traffic, more inter-action through comments, social networking and all the other benefits are good blog can bring.
Set up right and used wisely plugins are just another free tool that can assist you in building a professional website/blog that helps you get the most value per visitor.
