Widgets and Plugins to Use on Your Wordpress Blog

"Widgets" or "plugins" add functionality to your blog without you having to know any type of coding whatsoever. Just like updating the theme of your wordpress blog, adding a widget or plugin is just as easy. Download the widget file (usually in a zipped folder) to your computer, upload to your blog using an ftp program, and activate it from your blog dashboard.

After that, you simply need to go in and update any settings that you might need to, and add your widgets to the sidebar or sidebars of your blog, and order them the way you want to. The video below will show you how to do that process.

The trick is knowing WHICH widgets to use, and WHY you should use them. I'll answer that after the video below, by providing a full list of the widgets that I personally use and recommend.

Here is an exhaustive list of all the widgets I recommend, with download links and the reason you should use each one. You can simply google "wordress widgets" to find more, browse through the wordpress widget library, or simply note cool things on other blogs that you'd like to do, to get more ideas for widgets.

The list below is a great starting point though.

Don't Forget, once you activate each of these by clicking "activate" in the "plugins" section of your wordpress dashboard, you also need to go to the "settings" section to modify or add settings that you want. Then, you can go to Design, Widgets to add and reorder the widgets to use.

Some of these are plugins that operate behind the scenes, without having to be added as widgets in your sidebar, so don't be confused if they don't show up as widgets to add!

So, here is the list, with descriptions of what they do:

All in One SEO Pack - Must-have plugin that aids in making your Blog SEO-friendly (search engine optimized) automatically. Set default titles and attributes, and use to set title tags, meta-keyword tags, and meta-description for each page and post. See more information on making your blog SEO-friendly here.

SmartLinks- Enter affiliate links (for example, your amazon affiliate link), and this plugin will double underline book titles. When the cursor is hovered over the link, a box will pop up with description, cover image, and affiliate link out to product. See more information on how to monetize your blog here.

AdSense Manager - Allows you to add and change adsense ads in your sidebar. You must still paste adsense code into your posts and pages to show ads in that content area, which I highly recommend you do in a strategic, non-invasive way. See more information on how to monetize your blog here.

aLinks - Allows you to link a given word in your blog out to a predetermined page. Works with affiliate programs like clickbank too! Great way to unobtrusively monetize your blog.

Collapsible Comments - Makes comment chains in your blog easier to read.

CommentLuv - Provides a titled link to commentator's last post, if they are a member. Encourages participation with your blog.

Comment Relish - Send a welcome e-mail automatically to first-time commentators. Great way to get people to come back! Click here to learn more about getting more participation to your blog.

Custom Smilies - Allows you and your readers to add emoticons to posts to liven it up.

Dagon Design Sitemap Generator - Generates a human-viewable sitemap automatically for your site.

Dean's FCKEditor For Wordpress - Makes the wysiwyg (what you see is what you get) editor in the wordpress dashboard easier to work with for pages and posts. The default editor in wordpress isn't extremely functional.

FasterIM Opt-In - The only plugin you need to pay for from this list to get full functionality, but there is a free version linked to from here. Adds an opt-in box in your sidebar so you can collect names and e-mails to build a list. Works with any autoresponder service. Click here to learn more about auto-responders. This is an absolute must if you want to fully monetize your work.

FeedBurner FeedSmith - Get this plugin, then follow the instructions in the settings area after activation. This will help you get a feed set up for your blog that people can subscribe to in order to get automatic updates. After you have your account and plugin properties set up, log into feedburner and check the "publicize" tab. You can grab a link to your feed from there (in html format), and use the text widget to paste in the necessary html that you copied from feedburner's site. May also want to add the "subscribe by e-mail" version too.

Flexi Pages Widget - Allows you to make a list of selected pages that nest. (ie, "children" pages only show up if the "parent" page or post is clicked on) Particularly useful if you have a lot of children or sub-pages for a particular category.

Hint on web design basics: For any list of links you have in a sidebar, only have 5-8 at the most per grouping. That is much easier on the eyes. You can have up to 9 flexi-pages widgets, so you have plenty groupings to work with.

Google XML Sitemaps - Automatically generates an xml sitemap for your blog. This is critical in getting google to index your site deeply.

Kontera ContentLink - Sign up for a free account, then add the widget. Cool way to monetize your blog, through IN CONTENT linking (vs stand alone ads as in Google Adsense) that is done automatically. See more about how to monetize your blog here.

Lucia'sLinkLove - Removes the "nofollow" tag from comments. This allows people that comment on your blog to get links back to their sites that search engines will recognize and give weight to. (Blogs are set automatically to NOT follow links, so you need to over-ride the default to encourage comments.) This is known as being "dofollow". More about that at How to turn visitors to your blog into readers and commentators.

Nofollow Reciprocity - Makes links from your posts and pages nofollow to large sites that are set to nofollow others. Helps to eliminate google pagerank leakage from your site. You can make changes to this manually from the "plugin editor", where you can see the list of 1000 sites included. You should consciously decide on EVERY link which give out pagerank and which do not. More on that at Making your Blog SEO friendly.

SezWho - Adds a box of info that pops out upon hover-over for each blog commentator that is in the system. Encourages community.

ShareThis - Adds a button to the end of each page and post that allows people to easily bookmark or pass on your page.

Subscribe Remind - Reminds people to subscribe to your RSS blog feed at the end of each blog post. Great to have something like this automated.

Subscribe To Comments - Allows people to be notified by e-mail when comments are made to a particular blog post. They can always change settings and opt out later.

Ultimate Google Analytics - Absolute necessity. Ties in to your google analytics account and allows google to track anonymous details about your blog's visitors: how they got to you, what pages they looked at, how long they stayed, what they clicked on, what they downloaded, what page they left from, etc.

WP-DBManager - Allows automatic backing up of your blog.

WP-reCAPTCHA - Anti-spam filter for your blog comments, developed by Carnegie Mellon University. Uses actual words rather than random number and letters, so less annoying than other spam filters. And, VERY effective.

After adding these plugins and widgets to your blog and updating any necessary settings, you still have a couple things to do for your blog appearance-wise. And, several more things function-wise, but much of the ground-work has already been laid.

Next, for your one or two sidebars, you need to add in widgets, links, and images as you want. I would strongly recommend putting the most important elements of your blog at the top, and generally progress to less and less important items, while still keeping things arranged logically.

If you are using an opt-in box for an auto-responder, have that near the top. If you are using the fasterIM plug in above for that, you can easily add in an image too, to attract the eye of your readers. (I made a quick animated gif image in flash, so that the movement is VERY eye-catching.)

Other than that, obviously an easy way to navigate your blog posts and pages is very important too, so that should be prominent as well. As mentioned above, only group 5-8 links together at most. Otherwise, the list is too long without a break up of white space, and your readers will tend to have more difficulty finding what they are looking for.

Having a blog makes this design quick and easy to go, and equally as easy to change and update later.

The best advice overall is to go blog surfing, note what you like and what catches your eye, and use that to aid in your own design.

Once you have your blog generally looking the way you want, there are 3 more on-site things to do: Luckily, setting up the widgets and plugins above already does alot of that work for you automatically. However, there are some additional things you need to be consciously aware of in order to get as much as possible out of your blogging efforts, so do read these pages:

• Make sure your blog is seo-friendly,
• Monetize your blog,
• Set up your blog to attract visitors to become readers and commentators.

I hope you've found this helpful! Please ask any questions that you have, other recommendations, or other comments here: