If you’re blogging then you should be using Wordpress. And sense you are using Wordpress you understand that the plugins you use are really what help make Wordpress so powerful.

Have you ever wondered what the best plugins are for Wordpress? I have and so have many others.

So I did some research and I came across a few sites that I thought you might find interesting:
The Top 30 Wordpress Plugins that are actually useful
The Top 30 Wordpress Themes
Top Wordpress Plugins
Best Wordpress Plugins

Good question. The answer is whatever works best. Here are a few criteria that you should look at when choosing a template.

Front page
Add placement
Commenters section
Good Navigation
Is easily customizeable.
Is it SEO friendly
Pleasing colors

Front Page
Many new themes are being built with what they call a magazine layout. The actuall blog is placed at /blog and the main page at / is a landing page in a sense to show as many posts as possible and maximize the ad space. Because after all if you are tryingto get new users, it is better to give them a wider selection of posts to choose from. This may actually help you gather more readers. The front page isn’t neccessary, but a lot of the big bloggers have them. I may go that route eventually, but not yet. It’s still something to consider though.

Add placement
Add placement is always important. You want to be able to have a place that you can display your 125×125 ads and Google Adsense or YPN. You will also want a place to store any text link ads, such as “featured sites” and perhaps a banner at the top. You can even place ads in your RSS feed.

There are many areas in a theme that you can place ads, some themes have these already built in, which is nice. It is nice to have to figure out how to add ads to different areas of your site. Now at some level you will have to do this yourself. It’s very difficult almost impossible to find a theme that has multiple ad positions built into it.

Commenters section
A top commenters section is a good thing to have. I haveseen a Wordpress plugin for recent comments, but not top comments. I’m sure there is one out there. If not you may have to have it built for you. But the top commenters section is a place where you can let your commenters share some of your popularity. This allows them to gain some off-site clicks to their own sites. For beginner blogs its not neccessary until you get some people commenting on your blog. There is no need to advertise that your blog is a ghost town.

Good Navigation
One of the reasons I choose the superAdsense theme is because of the built in Adsense and Clickbank capabilities. I also chose it because it had a good navigation bar at the top that easily showed any pages that I added through Wordpress. I can also go directly to the theme and add a non-Wordpress link into the navigation area where the other pages have been added. It’s easy and simple. One less thing I have to concern myself with.

Easily Customizable
If you need to look at the code for more than 10 to 20 minutes to figure out what is going on, its too complicated. Now this could be because you are a novice when it comes to programming or it could really be that difficult. Choosing a theme that you can easily customize will make it a lot easier to expand your blog or site as yoursite grows.

Pleasing Colors
If you have a garden theme you probably don’t want to use purple. That’s basic stuff, but you should grab something that is somewhat neutral but also asthetically pleasing. Look online to find some netural color palettes.

You probably know about Google and MSN and how they allow other site owners to use their login interface. This allows many different sites to use the MSN signin or MSN signin functions.

Facebook is getting into that game as well know. So for all of those other applications that you have online that require multiple username and passwords, pretty soon you will be able to use your Facebook account to connect to a lot of them.

It’s called Facebook Connect. Digg.com is one of the first ones that is trying this system out. And with Facebook’s 100 million users, they are out of reach in a sense from Microsoft and Google - or so it has been stated.

You know those little plugins that you can put on your blog so your readers can tell someone else about that great post you just wrote? Well, Share This and Add This, both take readers away from your web site. Tell a Friend keeps the reader at your web site and lets him send an email to whomever he chooses. So if the readers stay on your site, they read more. It’s always a good thing if you can provide a way for your content to go viral, but keep your readers reading at the same time.

You can download a code snippet or a plugin for whatever blogging software you are using. It actually works with standalone web sites as well. The problem that I have found with the plugins is that they don’t work properly in your RSS feed. You may want to think about that. If you have a large RSS readership group that reads a great article but is unable to tell anyone about it, it may keep your great article from going viral.

Do you use a blogging client? I just started using one. I am using w.bloggar. It seems to be pretty good. I’ll post an update later on after I use it more.

No matter what blogging software, Wordpress, Moveable Type, TypePad, etc. there is a blogging client that supports your blog. Here is a list of blogging clients.

If you’ve been playing around with making money online for any length of time you’ve probably heard that if you aren’t developing and marketing your products and services to a list you’re leaving money on the table.

I read recently that a guy at a particular site had a list but wasn’t really paying much attention to it until this year. He finally got serious about adding users to his list and marketing to them. He makes close to $3,000 a month now just from his list. That’s not to bad for reviewing a product and then telling his users about the benefits of it. Since it was an affiliate product he didn’t have to do any software development of his own.

You can do the same. You can buy software to send out your lists or use a popular email list service, such as Aweber or GetResponse. I am still working on setting mine up. After I get my list setup I will be sure to tell you all about it.

Are you still using a spreadsheet to keep track of all those things you have to do on your web site? Well STOP. I’ve found this cool tool called ViewPath. It looks like this:

It’s a very nice tool. There is a pay version and an express version for all of us that just want to use something quick, nice and Free.

And if you are a big time Google Docs fan, then you can use the Gant Chart capabilities in a Google Doc Spreadsheet. Just select the area you want charted, click chart and then select Gant Chart. The ViewPath settings window will come up and ask you a few questions about column names. Click apply and you have a Gant Chart in your Spreadsheet.

The Excel Gant Chart isn’t as easy to use as ViewPath itself, but with Google Docs you can share the document with a friend or business partner and even chat about it online while you are both viewing the data. Pretty cool, but all that collaboration is standard with the Google Docs apps.

I’m using it now on Google Docs, because I don’t want to go through the hassel of setting up another site or an application that I am responsible for. Plus using it on Google Docs is easy, I can share it and oh yeah it’s Free.

In a word yes and no. Wait, that’s two words. Actually, you can be successfull at it, but it takes more work than you might realize. And for the amount of work you have to do it’s much easier to just make the posts yourself.

Now if your plan is to create 100 blogs on each of the ten domains you own and autoblogging on all of them, I would venture to say that’s near impossible. I’ve heard that talk that yes, if you only make $1 a day off of each blog, then on your 1,000 blog network that would give you a $1,000 a day. Which in turn is $30k a month?

It’s amazing to me how far people will go to cut corners and find the easy way. If they look back they could have just started one blog, built it up and had a good income from that.

So have you tried auto blogging? If so have you been successful at it? Or did you get a bunch of emails from other angry site owners about their content being used on your site without permission?

I challenge someone to prove to me that it is possible and that they have succeeded using the model I detailed above. If so I would rethink it entirely. I mean come on, who couldn’t use an extra $30k a month?

As blogging and in particular blogging for profit becomes ever more popular amongst online entrepreneurs, we’re seeing new tools developed to assist in this process being released, what seems like every week.

In this post I’m going to talk about one such tool, Firepow Blogging Software,because I believe it might just be a cut above the rest in terms of it’s flexibility of use, and overall effectiveness in accomplishing the three primary aims of blogging - creating a blog, managing it or maintaining it, and getting traffic to it.

It was hard to know where to start with this post because there are so many individual features of this software that could be mentioned.

To give you a brief overview of how it works&

Firepow is based on the Wordpres platform, and allows a user to install a fully customized and functioning wordpress blog with a few clicks of the mouse.

If you’ve used Wordpress before, you’ll know that one of the best things about it is it’s ability to be enhanced by third party plugins. You’ll also know that it’s not hard to get LOST in all the plugins and potential feature additions that CAN be made.

The first thing great about Firepow from my point of view is that they have done the plugin work for you. The best 50 or so plugins from around the web have been programmed into the software so as to be automatically installed when your blog is.

That’s a good feature, but it’s even better when you consider that while these plugins normally require manual fiddling to get installed, tweaks made to your theme CSS code and more - the software actually does that part for you too - so you click the button, and you have the function of that plugin added - VERY time saving!

The Create part of the process is also helped by the ability to create your own custom wordpress theme completely from scratch, with more functionality than we’ve seen from free theme generators EVER before - not to mention the ability to create your own categories from scratch, automatically create the perfect permalink structure for SEO, and more.

Before even getting into the Wordpress panel of the site Firepow creates you’ve also got a site management tab where all your blogs can be managed from one place, an SEO tracking tool to monitor the search rankings of all your sites, and a task manager
that tells you what needs to be done to maintain your blog/s and when.

I dare say though that the best things happen once you’re actually IN the blog.

Here you have crazy abilities to make your post content better, easily being able to add relevant images, videos, or trackbacks (automatically building backlinks to your site) to your posts& and even that’s leaving alot out.

OR the crazy abilities to monitor your blogs success, like being able to split test the results of different posts, monitor your traffic through in depth reporting (utilizing Google analytics), monitoring your search spider activity, the popularity of your posts, the terms people are searching on your site, and more still.

I feel like I’m getting too salesy in this post to you but I can assure even with everything you’ve read here, I haven’t even really touched the surface of what’s going on inside this thing called Firepow - heck we didn’t even get to the promotional tools.

The best thing I can probably do is tell you go to look at the darn thing yourself:

FirePow

Oh and I could also tell you that if your into blogging and you don’t, you’ll probably regret it big time.

I hope you’ve found the information here valuable, and don’t hesitate to leave your comments on Firepow here to share with others.