9 Plugins to kick-start your Wordpress blog

You’ve finally made the decision to make the plunge and start blogging - choosing Wordpress was never difficult for you, its the plethora of plugins that leave you at a loss…if this is you, help is on the next line.

Its always best to take it easy and take your time with installing plugins, do them one by one and don’t rush it. Its important to read the readme.txt attached to most plugins as they contain vital information on how to install the plugin, how it works and the FAQ.

There are 7 plugins running on this blog and each is meant to serve a purpose, without more ado, I’ll list them right away.

1. Akismet comes automatically installed with Wordpress and all you need is an API to use it. It is a plugin that’s maintained very well and will catch almost all the spam on your blog (when it gets big!) before anyone sets their eyes upon it. Unless you want a link pointing to a website you don’t want your children to see in one of your comments, you’re best-off activating it. An equally competitive alternative is Spam Karma.
2. Sociable is a plugin that lets your readers share interesting posts that you make. It covers most social networking sites and does not require any template editing at all. For advanced users, the readme.txt offers tips to customise it more effectively. For most of us though, its just plug and play. You now know who to thank when you get snow-balled by Digg.
3. Force Word Wrapping is a plugin that helps wrap long comment lines that stretch beyond your layout. I’m surprised by how few people know and use this plugin. As of writing this post, ProBlogger has comments that stretch beyond the layout and its not really a pleasant thing to see, especially when you invest big money to get a professional layout.
4. Fourth in line is the Subscribe to Comments plugin. This is a nifty plugin to have if you are aiming to build some comment traffic to your blog. If a reader makes a comment on your blog, they are given a choice to have follow-up comments sent by mail. When another reader replies to the comment, a mail is sent to the first reader letting them know that there’s a new comment for the post. It also mentions who made the comment and what the comment is - it makes it easier for the reader to decide if they want to reply to the comment or not.
5. Feedburner Feedsmith is a plugin that channels all your RSS feeds via Feedburner so its easy for you to track them from one place. Feedburner statistics are taken into account when deciding your blog’s worth as a measure of reader-base. It also helps if you decide to write paid posts at a later stage as most services take the Feedburner stats to decide a price tag for your blog post.
6. Related Posts produces a list of posts that are related to the current post. To calculate the PageRank of your blog, Google takes into account several factors, one of which is the number of internal links. You should take measures to effectively link older blog posts from your newer posts so that Google can find them easily. The same reasoning can be extrapolated to include other search engines too. If that’s not a reason that’s good enough, it also helps keep the readers on your blog as they continue to find posts that are related to the ones they are reading. The plugin lists posts that it can find that are related to a few keywords in the post. The number of entries is configurable and so is the formatting.
7. Top Posts by Category lets you display your popular posts ordered by most commented or most viewed. It helps new users find your best posts without having to wade through your entire archive.
8. MyBlogLog is just what the name says - its a log of readers who have visited your site recently. Beyond that, it performs a more important function of letting you connect with like-minded bloggers. When you visit a blog, your profile is listed on MyBlogLog, if you seem to appear often enough, it entices the blogger to find out who you are and they may eventually become a loyal reader! Blogging is increasingly becoming a community based activity and if you’re not in…
9. The All in One SEO Pack optimises your blog for search engine spiders so that you don’t end up talking only to yourself. It optimises your meta tags to include parts of your post so that prospective readers can quickly find out if your blog has what they are looking for. It also reduces duplicate content by setting your category and archive pages appropriately.

Note:

1. Related Posts and Top Posts by Category are best used if you have more than 10 posts at least.
2. If you have been paying attention, you would realise that all the plugins listed here focus on one main aspect - readership. Each of these plugins help build your readership one way or the other and that should be your primary concern when trying to build a new blog. The reason why there are no plugins related to monetising is because without traffic (readership), you probably won’t have any sponsors or ad-clicks in the first place!