Make$ Money$ Blog - Truth, no scam

I like to test every plugins available like a new toy. Sometimes, I used them for a while and found no purpose of it and delete them. Sometimes, I love it so much, I will tell every one of my blogger friends to try it out.

These are the plugiins I found useful if you are serious about monetizing your blog.

1) Auto Meta – Automatically generate and include HTML Meta Tags and Technorati Tags based on the full text of your post.

2) Auto-close comment – I have a food blog which receives decent traffic and along with it, plenty of repititive questions about recipes and stuffs. Sometimes, they never even read what I had posted and ask questions. Though comments are most welcome, these do get on the nerves sometimes. It won’t be polite to ignore them altogether because a few do return and reminded me that I have not replied. Duh. So, I have the plugin to shut off those older posts so that I don’t have to spend my time as an information counter receptionist.

3) Do Follow – I noticed some bloggers left their comments with their URL using no-follow tags. Well, they do not want low PR blogs like mine to leech on to their higher PR. Oh well, I personally think they shouldn’t even bother to write if they are so calculative. I heard WordPress automatically insert the no-follow into our comments. So, with this plugin, it becomes do follow. Hmmm…nice rhyme, dofollowdofollowdofollow. LOL. What I understand is – If I have a PR5/10 blog and I put in a lot of low PR blogs on my links, these low PR blogs will ‘seep’ away my PR, giving me harder time to go higher. But if your PR is low, then, by all means link those high PR so that you can gain. I cannot be sure if this is true. (I heard about this plugin from Owen)

4) Google Sitemap – This is one plugin you should use so that each time you update your blog, Google will be informed of this ‘fresh’ vege and index your page.

5) Random Posts – Most of these plugins I mentioned are installed in only a few of my blogs. So, if you want to see what Random Post is, go to my personal site at 5xmom or Best Recipe. Note that on the side bar and on the single page, I have random posts appearing. This will entice your visitors to check out those old posts.

6) Related Post – Another great way to trap people to hang around. Say you have visitors coming through search engines and they stumbled upon your post but it is not really relevant to what they want. Usually, they will scour the pages and search for something related. The Related Post will bring up some related topics.

(Tks Asho for the updated links)

7) Search Hilite – Our blog pages are so full of words. So, if a person got to our site using some keywords, they probably will have a hard time figuring out what they are looking for. Search Hilite will highlight those keywords for them. It is like those neon colours highlight pen, marking out those words in colour.

8) Simple Tags – You just need to add the tag to keywords and they will be tagged on Technorati.

9) WP Cats – This neat plugin helps you to categorise your blog posts easily. I accidentally delete some categories and after Menj gave me this link, I can now easily categorise my blog posts with few commands.

10) Remember the Spam filters like Askimet, Bad Behaviour and Spam Karma2. (use Askimet with either BB or SP2. See which combination works for you) Plus the WP back-up. These are plugins you cannot live without.

I am sure all bloggers have their favourite wordpress plugins. Care to share what are your favourites?