There are thousands of plugins out there online today. Some will  add great value to your blog and some will just be unnecessary. It’s quite a bit of work and pretty time consuming to go through all of the countless plugins out there on the web and decipher which ones are relevant and which ones aren’t. So, if you’re an entrepreneur and you’re building a business for yourself online, I’ve put together my personal top 10 list of favorite plugins to help you optimize your blog in the best possible way!

To install a plugin, you just log into your WP dashboard, click on ‘Plugins’ in the left sidebar, and then click ‘Add New’.  From here, you can do a search for each of the plugins listed below.  When you find it, click on ‘Install’ on the right side of the screen, and then follow the prompts to install and activate your plugin… And voila!  It’s as simple as that! 

Ok, so here are my top 10 favorite WordPress plugins… (In no particular order really):

1.  Tweetmeme ~ This is the Twitter icon you see on this post both at the beginning and the end.  It helps visitors ‘Re-tweet’ (share your post on Twitter) your content and it also tracks it nicely, so you have great social proof on your blog! 

2.  What Would Seth Godin Do ~ This is a plugin that actually cookies visitors and tracks who’s new and who’s returning.  You can then craft welcome messages accordingly… See the welcome message at the beginning of this post for an example. 

3.  Viper’s Video Quicktags ~ This plugin will help you easily embed videos onto your blog from Youtube, Google, Vimeo, Viddler, and other top video sharing communities. 

4.  Sociable ~ This is one of many possible content sharing plugins that you can add to your blog posts to encourage readers to syndicate (or share) your content on other social networking and bookmarking sites.  Other popular ones:  ShareThis and I Love Social Bookmarking. 

5.  Tiny MCE Advanced ~ This plugin gives you ‘Microsoft Word-like’ functions when writing your posts… Very helpful when it comes to paragraph spacing, font size, and other various typing features. 

6.  Comment Re-Direct ~ You can direct first time commenters to a page of your choice thanking them for their support and feedback… Great for relationship building! 

7.  Commentluv ~ This is the plugin you see on my post here that showcases commenters latest blog posts with a little heart icon.  It helps drive traffic back to your commenters’ sites and encourages more people to want to comment on your blog! 

8.  WP Related Posts ~ This is a plugin that lists related posts down below each blog post… Very helpful in encouraging multiple post reading! 

9.  WP Super Cache ~ The more plugins you install, the slower your blog load time will get… So this plugin will help speed up the load time of your blog. 

10.  Pretty Link ~ This is a plugin I found recently thanks to one of my amazing Blog Mastery students, Kary Rogney.  It will help you drive traffic to your tribe members’ blogs.

I hope this has been of value and your blog attracts a heap more traffic. (Article by Kate Frieling)

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