15 Niche Blogging Plug-Ins You Shouldn’t Be Without
The idea here is not to overwhelm you with plug-ins, however in building successful niche blogging sites, I use most, if not all of these. Each one plays an important role. Depending upon your server, too many plug-ins can definitely slow you down, so be careful. My recommendation is to download them now, so that you’ll have them when you need them.
Advanced Category Excluder
This plug-in enables CMS like functionality in WordPress. If you’ve ever wanted to write to a category but not have it appear on your front page, in your sidebar, or in your RSS feed, this is the plug-in for you. ACE hides unwanted categories from defined parts of your blog.
Why would you want to do this? Maybe your operating a niche blog that focuses on news events. On a news blog you may post 10 – 30 stories a day. The stories are all relevant and each brings
traffic but you don’t want to overwhelm your subscribers with a feed that’s a mile long, or clutter up your front page with 30 stories.
Here’s what you would do:
Create two categories. Call the first one ‘Featured News Stories’ and in it, post your best 5-10 stories each day. Your second category might be called ‘Miscellaneous News Stories’ and that’s where everything else goes. Problem solved.
There are as you can imagine many uses for this if you’re using WordPress as a CMS or Marketing Platform.
Link: Advanced Category Excluder
All In One Seo Pack
If I could only use one plug-in on any of my niche sites, this would be the one. The All In One SEO Pack allows you to optimize each post on your site as well as the pages. It defines your title,
description and keywords easily and efficiently. This is THE MOST IMPORTANT plug-in you can use.
Link: All In One SEO Pack
Privacy Policy
Earlier this year, Google started requiring AdSense publishers to display a privacy policy on sites that displayed AdSense. If you’re running Adsense and don’t have a Privacy Policy posted, now
would be a good time. Don’t underestimate the power have posting a Privacy Policy on your blog.
Link: Privacy Policy
Google Site Map Generator
A Google site map can do wonders for your site. When you have a site map, Google knows what your site is about and will establish a regular and consistent ‘crawl’ or ‘spidering” schedule. Having a valid site map is critical to the success of your niche blog. Google Site Map Generator makes this task easy to maintain.
Link: Google Site Map Generator
RSS Footer
If you gain any notoriety at all with your niche blogging site, you will eventually run into one of blogging’s greatest nemesis… The ‘Scraper”. This is the guy (or gal) who steals your hand-crafted posts and through various scripts, posts it to their sites as if it were there own. What’s a hard working blogger to do?
Enter, the RSS Footer plug-in, this plug-in places a small footer message at the bottom of each post you write and publish. The automated scraping programs won’t notice it and when your content is illegally copied elsewhere, your footer message will also be included with a generous link back to your site.
Link: RSS Footer
WWSGD – What Would Seth Godin Do
On one of my niche sites it took over a year to grow to around 1500 RSS subscribers. However; that number tripled over the next 6 months thanks primarily to this plug-in. By default, new visitors to your blog will see a small box above each post containing the words “If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!” After a pre-determined number of visits
the message disappears. You can easily customize the message, the number of visit’s when it appears, and its location. If you need to grow subscribers, add this plug-in.
Link: What Would Seth Godin Do
Similar Posts
The Similar Posts plug-in is based on the Related Posts plug-in, but with extra functionality. This plug-in displays a list of posts which are related or similar to the current post. Great for deep links into your site and improved stickiness.
Link: Similar Posts
Sociable
Social bookmarking sites allow websurfers to save, catalog, and share interesting pages they find online. The Sociable plug-in appends links for your readers to use those sites to the end of each of your blog’s posts, increasing your potential audience. Creates a nice display of site Icons and will contribute significantly to your sites overall traffic over time.
Link: Sociable
WP Super Cache
This plug-in generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. After a html file is generated your web server will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts. If you have concerns about your site withstanding being Dugg or Stumbled, worry no more. With Super Cache your site should be able to withstand most spikes. I’ve tried a number of other caching plug-ins and Super Cache surpasses them all. If you’re looking for a caching plug-in, don’t waste your time with any others.
Link: WP Super Cache
Paged Comments
Breaks down comments into a number of pages. A few months ago I posted on a fairly hot topic on one of my sites. The comments quickly grew, numbering in the 100′s. Up until that point comments were fairly manageble. Fortunately I was able to find the Paged Comments plug-in. It installed quickly and my problem was solved immediately.
Link: Paged Comments
Adman
This plug-in allows you to pre-format each post with whatever Adsense ads you want before, in the middle of, or at the end of each post. Simply enter the code into the AdMan dashboard and you’re set!. It’s that easy. If you plan on running Adsense, save yurself some hassle and get Adman.
Link: Adman
WP-Affiliate
Easy affiliate link masking and cloaking. If you have to ask, you wouldn’t understand so get this one later… When you need it.
Link: WP Affiliate
A- Links
What is aLinks?
aLinks is a free wordpress plug-in that allows you to setup and manage keyword and key phrase hot links in your blog posts. Once activated it’s fairly simple to set up.
Example:
Key phrase: niche blogging tips
Description: Niche blogging tips and tactics.
URL: http://www.nichebloggingtips.com/blog
aLinks will now scan all of my blog posts looking for the key phrase “niche blogging tips” and create a link pointing to my blog.
You can also expand aLinks with modules.
aLinks users have created some modules for specific functions like turning your links into Clickbank Products using the Clickbank module. Some other modules that have been created are, eBay, Google News, iTunes, and Commission Junction.
Link: aLinks
Secure and Accessible PHP Contact Form
Your niche site needs a contact form, so why not use the best one available. The ‘Secure and accessible contact form for WordPress’ has been a huge success (over 10,000 downloads!)
It’s designed to make contacting you from your website easy, accessible, and secure and it will definitely deter spam emails from arriving in your mail box!
Link: Secure and Accessible PHP Contact Form
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