Make Money Blogging: 36 of the Best Wordpress plug-ins for 2009

The 36 Must Have Killer plugins to help make money blogging

There are hundred’s if not thousands of Wordpress plug-ins available to help you optimize and monitize your Wordpress blog. Some of those plug-ins will help you customize your blog’s performance while others will help enhance your readers’ experiences, helping to create long term subscribers. My focus is for both novice and experienced individuals who have a key interest in Internet Marketing, Affiliate Marketing, and just want to make money blogging. While some of these plug-in’s will not directly bring you an increase in income, they are very important to help you achive and maintain that income stream.

I have compiled an overview of the 36 must have Wordpress plug-ins that no Wordpress blog should be without. A blogger’s success comes from the time they spend creating great and unique content, networking, testing new opportunities, and promoting their blog. For the average person, this is very time consuming. Fortunately, the 36 Wordpress plugins listed below can help automate and potentially shorten the amount of time spent on blog-related tasks. This will allow you to spend more time writing, networking and promoting, and less time on the time consuming tasks that don’t provide much upfront benefit.

For the most part the list I have below is not in any specific order of importance, EXCEPT for the first 5 Wordpress plug-ins below:

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1. Wordpress Database Backup

I rate the Wordpress Database Backup plug-in Number 1. Why? Very simple: What would happen if something happened to your blog database and all of your content was hosed, lost, disappeared, went into a black hole - what every you want to call it? All of your information, potential income, and most subscribers would be right along with it. If you choose not to backup your Wordpress Database then you are not only risking all of the content that you have but you are also risking the relationship of your subscribers, search engine result, and page ranking.
This plug-in will back up the core information in your blog. There are also more sophisticated Wordpress backup plug-ins such as the WP-DBManager (number 4) plug-in that will allow you to further customize your backups. This is listed as the Number 1 Must Have Killer Wordpress plug-in for 2009. Setup is very simple and once installed you can set up the plug-in to automatically backup your Wordpress database files. There are options to save them the local server, your personal computer, or send the backup file to your email. Obviously your blog is important to you, do yourself a favor and at the bare minimum install this plugin, and set it up to backup your Wordpress database regularly, don’t chance losing all of your information because you were ignorant.

2. Akismet

Internet SPAM is inevitable and well Akismet is the most critical WordPress plug-in to help manage and prevent spam comments on your blog. Every time someone comments on your blog it is sent to the Akismet Web Service which preforms hundred’s of tests to determine if the comment is spam. Its accuracy in blocking spam comments amazing. Akismet places these comments in a special moderation qeue separate from independent review, which you will either confirm is spam or mark it as not spam. The comments that were falsely moderated are then approved and reset back to Akismet for analysis. It help them make their spam protection service better. This is listed as the Number 2 Must Have Killer Wordpress plug-in for 2009 because as your blog gets more popular, the number of spam comments you receive will increase, and Akismet will save you a significant amount of time in terms of catching and deleting the spam as it’s left on your blog.

3. Smart Ads

In order for any person to make money blogging you need to advertise, promote affiliate marketing, and generate interest in products that will make you money. Smart Ads is a great plugin that helps place advertisements on your blog without having to constantly input the html code. The Smart Ads Wordpress plugin will allow you to automatically place ads before and after your blog posts. There are additional options to remove ads for subscribers, showing ads on posts older then a certain amount of time, and to disable the top ad if the top of the post contains an image. One of the nicer features of the SmartAds Wordpress plug-in is the ability to create a “SmartAd” which is a custom ad that you can add to your blog by typing


. This is great for those who want to strategically place ads in their post and this helps make this the Number 3 Must have Killer Wordpress Plug-in for 2009.

4. WP-DB Manager

The WP-DB Manager is an alternative to the Number 1 Wordpress plugin above. This plug-in give you more control over the database backups. It allows a fully automated process of backing up your Wordpress database.

You might ask, what makes this plug-in different from the Wordpress Database Backup plug-in that is listed as Number 1? Good question, Let me clarify my position. The Number 1: Wordpress Database Backup is Most Basic but Essential Plug-in that you need. The WP-DB Manager plug-in allows you to backup the entire databse (the Number 1 only back-ups core tables), but the WP-DB Manager allows you to manage that backup, restore the database, optimize the database, and set both a database backup and a database optimizing schedule.

For those of you who like to have a hands on approach to managing your blog, this is one KILLER plug-in. Want to ensure optimal performance from your Wordpress blog download and install the WP-DB Manager…That is why this is considered the Number 4 Must have Killer Wordpress Plug-in for 2009.

5. WP-Cache

I’ve hinted at it before but now I will state it directly, Wordpress is a database driving application. Wordpress can not function properly unless the database is functioning properly and its best to be fully optimized. So, when a website has an increase in traffic the database is getting constant requests for the same information and as a result there could very well be a performance issue (normally resulting in a delay of the page being displayed fully). The WP-Cache Wordpress plugin performs queries against your wordpress database and generates a local file of all your blog pages. The WP-Cache plug-in stores each page locally on disc and by doing this, instead of constantly doing database queries, it allows your pages to be loaded much faster. That is why this essential plugin is considered the Number 5 Must have Killer Wordpress Plug-in for 2009.

6. Share This

The ShareThis Wordpress plug-in allows your readers the ability to add your posts to social bookmarking sites (Myspace, Twitter,Xanga, Facebook,etc). ShareThis creates an icon that, by default, appears at the end of each of your blog posts. You have the ability to customize it’s location. One of the great features of this Wordpress plug-in is the ability to add your contacts from your account on each one of these sites. By adding these contacts you create more networking opportunities and internet exposure.

7. All in One SEO Pack

The All in One SEO Pack plugin does exactly what its name implies - it allows you to customize and automate adding title tags, descriptions, keywords and meta tags to every page and post published on your blog. The All In One SEO Pack allows you to optimize each individual post on your website and users have reported a noticeable increase in traffic to their blogs from Google searches after installing and using the All in One SEO Pack plugin.

8. Simple Tags

The tagging functionality in Wordpress is great, but the Simple Tags plugin takes it to a whole new level. Great tags can boost your blog’s search traffic, so adding the Simple Tags plugin is a great way to get started.

9. Feedburner Feedsmith

The Feedburner Feedsmith plug-in automatically redirects to your Feedburner feed regardless of how various users access it. Taking a couple of minutes to setup a feedburner account allows you to combine this plug-in with the feedburner subscribe by email option. As you see on my blog (its the subscribe to my blog form). This means you’ll give subscribers multiple options of subscribing, whether by RSS feed, email, or ShareThis.

Interested in finding out what the other 27 Best Wordpress Plugins are? Subscribe to my blog and get a notification instantly as I publish the next set of plugins.



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Tags: best wordpress plugins, must have wordpress plugins, word press plugins for better results, wordpress plugin review