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Making Money Online

5 Top Free WordPress Plugins

Posted May 6th, 2008

As well as being new to making money online, I am also a newbie blogger and I am still in the early experimental stages of using WordPress. For the last few days or so I’ve been playing with WP plugins, and here are 5 great plugins that I think could be very useful for any WordPress site, but especially if you want to monetise your site.

Best of all, of course, is that all of these plugins are absolutely free!

Akismet

Akismet is an anti-comment-spam plugin. Every time someone posts a comment on your WordPress blog/site, the content of it is checked against the Akismet spam database, if it sees the comment as likely to be spam then instead of posting it on your site it will put it into a separate spam container. From the WP control panel there is a section under Comments where you can view any spam messages that are held, and choose to allow them through or delete them. Although I’ve yet to have any spam comments, from reading on other blogs I gather that this plugin is a godsend! Definitely a must for anyone using WordPress.

SEO Title Tag

This is a great, easy to use plugin that means you’re not stuck with just having your blog name in the title bar on all your pages/posts. SEO Title Tag gives you the ability to use page/post titles in your title bar, which is much better from an SEO perspective.

This plugin also gives you the ability to override the default action, so you can give your posts custom titles, and you can even mass edit titles, so this plugin really is very useful.

Google XML Sitemaps Generator

Google XML Sitemaps Generator allows you to automatically generate a Google sitemap consisting of your entire site. The plugin has a very good configuration page where you can choose which parts to include in the sitemap (ie. posts, pages, category pages, archives etc.), as well as some other very useful options.

aLinks

I think aLinks is a very clever and useful plugin indeed. Basically with aLinks you can choose to link certain keywords automatically. So, for example, if you wanted to link any mention of your blog/site name so it pointed to your homepage (possibly some SEO value here), you could just add an entry for the keyword “mysitename” (replacing with your actual site name of course) and make the URL your homepage. That’s it! Now any post that includes “mysitename” will be linked to your homepage.

Another obvious use for this is to link to affiliate products automatically. So every time you mention a product or keyword related to a product you are trying to market you don’t have to manually link it everytime.

obsocialbookmarker

I’m sure everyone has seen the social bookmark links in many blogs out there, these are the links (or icons) usually at the bottom of a post which allows users to add your page to their bookmarks on sites such as del.icio.us, digg, stumbleupon etc. Well I was looking around for a plugin that would add all these for me automatically. I tried a couple before finding obsocialbookmarker and found that this was my favourite by far.

Apart from the fact that it gives you the option to select from pretty much ALL the popular social bookmarking sites, it also allows you to have some cool effects like fading icons (so they “light up” when you put your mouse over them), and a cool AJAX “blind” effect for hiding these icons, so when someone clicks on the link. ie, Show bookmarks, the icons slide into view. You can also add exceptions so you could exclude any pages that you don’t want these bookmarks to appear on.

Well, that’s the roundup. There may well be other essential WP plugins that I haven’t come across yet, and there could also be plugins which are better than the ones i’ve mentioned, but I still think that each of these can add a valuable function to a WordPress site.

Feel free to post a comment if you have any experience of the plugins in the list above, or if you have some suggestions for other cool or essential plugins.