There are plugins to help increase traffic, help boost your rankings, help speed up your blog, encourage the sharing of your content across the Web, and many more. So to save you a little time, let’s take a look at the top 10 WordPress plugins that can be used to help improve your blog.

Google XML Sitemaps

All blogs need a sitemap; it’s a must for SEO purposes and to help improve the rankings of your blog. While there are many sitemap plugins available, the most popular is Google XML Sitemaps. It’s easy to use and will help you create a sitemaps so that all search engines can better index your blog. Also whenever you post new content, it alerts the search engines that your blog has been updated.

cbnet Ping Optimizer

Did you know that every time you publish or even edit a post (and click save), WordPress pings your blog? So if you’re editing a post and hit the save button 10 times, your blog will be pinged that many times! To those specific ping services, this looks much like spamming because, well, technically it is. I’m sure you’re wondering how you can be penalized for something you had no clue you were doing, but unfortunately you will be.

If you’re not already, you’ll soon be banned from even pinging your blog anymore and this can hurt your traffic. Thankfully, cbnet Ping Optimizer helps to fix this issue. It’s stops all of the unnecessary pinging so that you won’t get banned. It’s smart enough to only ping when needed.

Spam Free WordPress

If you are having huge issues with spam comments or just want to prevent serious problems in the future, you might consider Spam Free WordPress. It blocks 100% of automated spam comments and has “zero false positives.” So you can be sure that it will catch all of the spam and keep it out for good. There are numerous features which includes: automatic blocking; local and remote block-list; database load reduction; no cookies or Javascript required. It just works.

Subscribe to Comments Reloaded

This very simple plugin offers a great feature that helps increase user engagement on your blog. Whenever a reader comments on a post, they can sign up for email notifications, alerting them of new subsequent comments. This way the commenting doesn’t have to end; they can return whenever there are new comments and keep contributing to the conversation.

Subscribe to Comments Reloaded is actually a full featured subscription manager. So your readers can go in and manage all of their subscriptions and even stop the ones they’re no longer interested in.

PostRank

This is a great plugin that lets you “showcase your top posts with a PostRank widget, track social media analytics, and engage with your readers from the WP dashboard.” The widget not only displays the top overall posts, but also lets users search for the best posts on a specific topic. The Admin dashboard widget also comes in handy because you can see useful analytics and social engagement behind the scenes.

Simple Tags

Simple Tags is the best way to manage and optimize your post tags. It gives you tag suggestions (based on your post content) from Yahoo, Tag The Net, OpenCalais, Alchemy, Zemanta, and your local database. It also displays a click tags widget within the post editor so that you can add tags with just a click, instead of having to type them out. Other features include autotagging, a dynamic tag cloud, bulk tag editing, and more.

WPTouch

With the mobile Web and smartphones taking over, it only makes sense to optimize your blog for these types of devices. This is exacly with WPTouch does. Whenever your blog is viewed from an iPhone, iPod Touch, Android, Palm Pre, Samsung Touch, or Blackberry Storm/Torch it will display in a fully optmized mobile theme. You can customize many settings and upgrade to the Pro version if you’re looking for more features.

W3 Total Cache

Performance is a top priority for all blogs; the faster your blog is, the happier your readers. A slow blog will have a larger bounce rate because visitors will be sure to leave quickly cause of the slow load time. W3 Total Cache is the ultimate speed machine for your blog and caches every aspect of it. W3 Total Cache will improve the performance of your server and help to drastically reduce page load times. All of the settings can be a bit overwhelming, but there is many informative guides on setting up and optimizing this plugin to its full potential.

Related Posts Thumbnails

One of the best techniques for keeping readers on your blog longer is by providing related posts underneath your content. This way they might just see something else that interests them and click on it to reader. This plugin goes a step further by also including thumbnails, which stand out and have a better chance at grabbing your readers’ attention. Related Posts Thumbnails will automatically insert the code into your theme, so there is no need to edit anything. You can then customize the colors and other settings to fit your needs.

WordPress Backup to Dropbox

Many people are taking advantage of the Dropbox, a free service that gives your own storage space in the cloud (2GB). The service works with mostly every system and device and can be used to save files, images, videos, music and now to even backup you WordPress blog!

This plugin lets you backup your WordPress blog and then save the backup directly to your Dropbox account. You’ll have to use OAuth to link your account and then from there everything is automatic. Whenever you need to restore your blog, just find the backup in your Dropbox account.

Remember, there are many plugins that can do the same thing. In your searching you’ll want to pick plugins that are up-to-date, have a 4-5 star rating, and are compatible with your current version of WordPress. Plugins can become obsolete and inoperable pretty fast, so make sure that you keep them up-to-date on a regular basis.

Do you use any of these plugins? If so, which one is your favorite? If not, which ones do you plan on trying out?

This guest post is written by Lior Levin, a marketing advisor for a to do list app company, and who also consults for a shipping company that offers pre shipment inspections in China and in Latin America.

However, if you’re willing to go the long mile and do what it takes to keep your blog going, here are 5 essential tools that can help you with that. If you’ve been blogging for awhile, then you know that there are way more than 5 essential tools that you need as a blogger, but these are definitely 5 that you should be using if you aren’t already.

SEO Blogger: Optimize Your Posts As You Write

If you’re a Google Chrome user, this is one of those tools that almost makes it worth it to switch to Firefox (at least for blogging). This Firefox Add-on helps you find the most sought-after keywords for whatever you’re writing about. It happens all within the Firefox sidebar so that you never have to leave the current window/tab.

This is a very essential keyword research tool that shows you how popular a keyword is and then shows you how often it is used within your content, thus helping to increase your search engine rankings for those keywords.

MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer

There are a few ping optimizing plugins around that you can use for your WordPress blog, but MaxBlogPress is one of the most popular. Whenever you publish or edit a new post, WordPress pings it. This means that a single post could be pinged 10+ times in a matter of a few minutes. Unfortunately, this excessive pinging puts your blog at risk for being banned altogether from ping services, because it appears as if you’re spamming. So a ping optimizer is essential because it helps you to control how often your blog pings so that you won’t lose out on traffic.

While some users believe that these plugins are no long needed, since WordPress supposedly fixed the issue a few updates ago, it definitely won’t hurt to use it for extra precautions.

nrelate: Free Products For Online Publishers

nrelate offers extremely useful and stylish tools for publishers like in-text linking, a most popular plugin, and a related content plugin. However, my favorite plugin of theirs that is great for any blogger (and eye catching too) is the flyout plugin. It works by flying out from the corner of the page once users scroll to the end of your article; it’s really great for suggesting more content that they may like.

This is “not just another related posts plugin, it’s a patent-pending technology that continuously analyzes your website content and displays other related posts from your website”. This, of course, results in higher pageviews and lower bounce rate since users will remain on your blog longer.

Additionally, you can also enable advertising for the plugin and it will display sponsored content mixed in with your related content, so that you can also make money. There are many different styles to choose from such as an animation style to thumbnails with text to Huffington Post style.

Social Sharing Buttons

There are so many social button options out there to choose from, that finding the right sharing tools for your blog can be overwhelming, but it’s definitely essential! If you’re looking to increase your Web presence and want others to be able to share your content, you must have share buttons somewhere on your blog. Some prefer buttons above their content, others below, and some even prefer on the left side of their content. There are also social toolbars that you can add that encompass social sharing buttons, plus a lot of other great features.

Here are a few choices that provide options for all preferences.

• AddThis – The AddThis Social Bookmarking Widget allows any visitor to bookmark and share your site easily with over 330 popular services. (Blogger version)
• Share and Follow – Add Share Icons, Follow Links, Facebook Like, Twitter Tweet and other buttons in the way you want. Simple & adaptable social networking.
• Sociable – You can get more Sociable with Sociable Skyscraper and easily getting Rating and Review of: posts, pages, comments, Facebook, G+, LinkedIn, Twitter.
• ShareThis – The ShareThis plugin seamlessly enables users to share your content through Email,Facebook,Twitter, Google +1, Like, Send and many more. (Blogger version)

Real-Time Analytics

I’m sure that I don’t have to tell you how important and essential it is to use an analytics tool. You can’t measure how well your blog is doing and you certainly can’t create a marketing plan if you don’t know anything about your traffic (how much you’re getting, where it’s coming from, what is being viewed the most, etc). Personally, I prefer a real-time tool to a static one because I can see everything as it happens.

So let’s take a look at a few tools (besides Google Analytics) that can really help.

• Woopra – Features real time web analytics, live chat, and web statistics including tracking conversion and funnel reports.
• Leftronic – Create a website dashboard in minutes. Combine data from Google Analytics, Twitter, Chartbeat, and others tools. Easy web reporting templates.
• Cyfe – Web-based software that helps you bring all your business metrics into one single location. Monitor individual departments, multiple websites and anything else.
• Newsbeat – Tracks the activity of every page you publish in real time, from the top performers to the diamond in the rough.

What are some of your essential blogging tools that you regularly use?

Having a launching soon page for any under development business is very important to get interested subscriber upfront. Use a launching/coming soon page with options to subscribe to RSS and social media.

Here we tried to list 20 best launching soon pages for WordPress. Hope you’ll enjoy.

1. Ultra Sleek 3D Look Under Construction Page

2. Ready 2 Launch

3. Beback Coming Soon Theme

4. Simple Coming Soon Theme

5. Simple Coming Soon And Under Construction Theme

6. UnderFlo Constructionz

7. Speedo Under Construction

8. COSoo COming Soon Page Template

9. Paper Launch Under Construction Theme

10. Road Cone Under Construction Theme

11. 6-In-1 Coming Soon Page

12. A Stylish Under Construction Word Press Theme

13. Influction

14. Coming Soon Landing Page

15. Coming Soon Cool Vector Template

16. Under Construction Template-2 Styles-4 Colors

17. Super Charged Under Construction Themes

18. Chronos Under Construction Template

19. Cool Under Construction Theme

20. We Are On Holiday Under Construction Theme

This guest post was written by Nancy, a lead writer over at NTHEMES. Adding one new WP Theme daily, they keep their visitors informed on the latest and greatest in WordPress Themes broken down by category including Responsive, Photography, and Business just to name a few

1.

WordPress can be an easy to use project management system if you work with a team of people who all need access to the same content. It can set up as a members only site to keep your material private.

2. Forum

People love community areas and WordPress can be used as a community site as well as a blog site. You can use it as a public forum or a private forum.

This is also a great way to do group coaching sessions.

3. Help Desk

You can set up WordPress as a ticket system so clients and customers can contact you with technical problems, order problems or any other thing that relates to your business.

4. Article Directory

Tired of fighting for placement on the big article directories? With WordPress, you can start your own directory. You can grow it as big as you’d like or just limit it to a few select authors. The choice is yours.

5. Auction Site

If you like sites like eBay or if you want to auction off websites or even physical products, you can set up your own auction site and let viewers bid on your items.

6. Storefront with e-Commerce

If you don’t want to use a commercial eCommerce site for your products, you can set up your own site with WordPress. There are many plugins and themes that you can use to accomplish this. One of the benefits to this option is it’s a one time fee for a great plugin instead of a monthly fee like some commercial sites charge you.

7. Membership site

Membership plugins are available for WordPress if you decide to go private, or you can have different levels of membership. Some are free and some will cost you a little bit of money. The paid plugins are usually the best option because most offer support if you run into problems with installation or other issues down the road.

8. FAQ portal or Q&A site (private or public)

WordPress is a great way to set up an FAW section or a Q&A site where others can ask you questions and have them answered. You can do this as a public site or as a member site.

9. Easy to use CMS (content management system)

WordPress is a great way to organize content, either for your own personal use or as community group or as a group of team members. WordPress really is easy to use and manage so this is a great way to line out your content in a systematic manner.

10. Client/Customer Management

WordPress can be used as an invoicing system and a way to keep up with your clients, customers and contacts. This is much like a Help Desk except you organize it for customers so you can manage them better.

image credit: http://www.freshtilledsoil.com/

So when I was trying to figure out the problem, I then noticed the links listed under “Recent Comments” did not work either! I saw the permalink structure was like this:

workinmypajamas.com/url-link/comment-page-1/#comment-123456

When I took out the comment-page-1/ string, the link worked! Okay, so how do I get rid of that string permanently?  And I was off to visit my best friend for help. I refreshed my permalinks. I changed my .htaccess file. I updated my theme. I searched all the files in the Appearance Editor. Nothing helped. Just as I was about to pull my hair out, I found this post. And here is exactly what I did in case you are having the same problem:

• Log into WordPress Dashboard
• Under Setting, Click on Discussion
• Unclick “Break comments into pages…”
• Save Changes.
• Hooray, comment form and links work once again!

Further reading said it probably had something to do with updating my MySQL database and then upgrading to the latest version of WordPress. Not that I care. I just care that my site works again! And if I ever build up enough comments to warrant pagination of them, then that will be a good problem to have!

To avoid any confusion between actual posts I was writing, and guest posts that were submitted to the blog, I created a new “Guest Blogger” account on the blog, and then wanted to change all of the previously published guest posts to being written under “Guest Blogger“, instead of “Zac Johnson“. Sure, each of these posts had an author line and guest info footer, but I wanted to make the change as soon as possible to save me time and any problems down the road.

So how can it be done in wordpress?

After looking around the settings on the post page, I didn’t see what I was looking for, so then I headed over to the ALL POSTS section and figured it out. Here’s what you need to do.

DASHBOARD >> ALL POSTS >>

Once there, simply click on any of the posts that you would like to change the author on. When they are checked off, then you should click on EDIT from the bulk action pull down menu, then click APPLY. Once loaded, you will then see a new BULK EDIT window like the one below. From here you can select the author names from the list and change to the posts to be published under your new desired user name. It’s that simple!

It’s a simple fix for a solution many people might be looking for. Hopefully this post has helped you out!

Let start exploring:

Share This: This is a highly customizable and flexible wordpress plugin that will let you change its look and feel to match the theme of your website. It blends seamlessly with the existing theme of the website and the best part of this plugin is that it provides tracking reports. With this plugin, your visitors will be able to vote for your website and you will see your website bolstering its presence in different social media websites.

Sociable: This is a simple social plugin for wordpress blog. With this plugin, each post of your wordpress blog will have icons of various social bookmarking sites and thereby making it easier for users to promote your website on different social media websites. All they have to do is to click on the social media button and there you go. You will see steady growth in traffic from different social bookmarking and social media sites.

Antisocial: Those of you, who are bit serious about search engine optimization and do not want to give any favor back to social media sites in the form of do follow links, this is the perfect plugin that they can have. As the name clearly indicates, this plugin will add a no follow tag against all links of social bookmarking sites. A life saving plugin for all SEO enthusiasts.

Gregarious: With different customization options under its hood, Gregarious is the must have plug-in that you need to have in your WordPress blog. Though this plugin will promote your post on a lesser number of social sites, most of the sites are good enough to draw a decent amount of traffic at the end of the day.

Add to Any Bookmark Button: The name of this wordpress plugin says it all. It will let the visitors bookmark any post with any bookmark manager they want.

I Love Social Bookmarking: This is another cool wordpress plug-in that does not add any visual distraction on your blog. It will add a drop-down menu on your wordpress blog and that will let users vote for your blog on different social bookmarking sites. Slightly different from other wordpress-plugin of its clan, it is here to rock with a neat and clear interface that does not creep on the existing theme and design of the blog.

Digg This: If you cannot live without dig, which is a vital source of driving traffic to your website, this plug-in is the way to go. Visitors will be able to vote for your blog posts in this popular social booking site and if it manages to get some social love in the forms of vote, you may see a deluge of traffic from it. So, another must-have plug-in for all WordPress blog owners.

This guest post was written by Michael Evans, a writer who enjoys writing in the tech niche and he also promotes Flash templates with the integrated Flash CMS.

Yet, there are some who love to change their themes with the seasons and holidays. So to get the month started, I decided to share a few Christmas WordPress themes that will help put your readers in the holiday spirit.

Mistletoe

The free Mistletoe theme is a beautiful theme featuring a winter backdrop, snowman header, and a little mistletoe in the sidebar headers. It also includes Christmas tree icons and 5 custom widgets. This theme is even optimized for mobile devices and tablets. There is also a Hello Snowman theme that is quite similar.

Red & Gold

The free Red & Gold Christmas template is extremely festive with a gift wrapped background and bold red header. The sidebar features red headers while the main area of the blog is a nice gold color. If you like the style of this theme, you’ll also love the other Christmas WordPress themes featured on Holiday Nook.

Blue Christmas

The free Blue Christmas theme is absolutely stunning with a dark blue background. The headers comes complete with snowmen and actually falling snow, while the sidebar showcases Christmas trees and candy canes. It may be a little too much for some, but it definitely gives you that “I’m dreaming of a white Christmas” feel. You may also like the similar Christmas Days theme.

Santa Details 1.0

The free Santa Details 1.0 theme is not very stylish, but it is pretty unique as far as the artwork. It features a wood background with what almost looks to be a hand-drawn Santa header. The sidebar is pretty basic, but a couple Christmas trees and snowflakes extend on the side of the main content area. If you’re looking for a Santa theme that is a bit more stylish, check out the Xmas Bag 1.0 theme. The Xmas Desktop 1.0 theme is also similar to the Santa Details 1.0 theme, but features a more stylish header.

While there are very many Christmas themes to choose from, these are the ones that really stood out to me and are nicely designed (for the most part).

Do you change or decorate your WordPress theme for Christmas?

I’ve already been using MBP Ninja Affiliate for a few years now, but that plugin will cost you some money. As mentioned, Jeremy is offering this plugin for free. You just need to subscribe to his mailing list.

Click on the video screenshot below to visit the post that goes into detail on how the plugin words, and walks you through the process of installing and going live with new text links on your blog.

Another cool feature of the plugin is that you can change, remove and delete existing links throughout your wordpress site. A great example of this would be if you were linking to a web site, then if they changed their name or updated to a new url, you would want to replace all of these old links with a new url. Instead of having to do all of this manually, this plugin can quickly do it in a few steps.

Download Content Link Manager WordPress Plugin

The best way to do this is through the use of plugins. Since there are so many to choose from, I’ve narrowed the list down to 9 amazing plugins that will help you optimize your blog and increase the load time of your pages. In most cases, you can get away with using just 1 or 2 of these – since plugins also contribute to slow loading times. So let’s take a look at these 9 plugins and see just what they can do to help make your blog faster and your readers happier.

Parallelize

Parallelize means to “adapt (a program) to be suitable for running on a parallel processing system.” This plugin helps you do that by paralyzing resources across multiple hostnames. Doing this helps to speed up the load time of your blog pages. This plugin will automatically parallelize your all of your blog attachment files to help speed up your pages. We used it on our psd to html blog and it worked like a charm!

WP File Cache

This plugin “implements object level persistent caching and can be used instead of the built in WordPress WP_Object_Cache.” Unlike other caching plugins, this one does not cache your entire pages, it only caches the data specified within the plugin’s API functions. In other words, it will noticeably reduce the load of your databases, hence speeding up page loads and increasing the overall performance of your blog.

Quick Cache

Quick Cache takes real-time snapshots of everything on your blog from pages to posts to categories and then stores them for later referencing. This helps to save time when your pages are loading. You can use the settings to configure how these cached pages should be used, in order to optimize your blog’s performance. “By default, Quick Cache does not serve cached pages to users who are logged in, or to uses who have left comments recently.”

W3 Total Cache

This is another great plugin for caching everything on your blog, reducing load times, and improving the performance of your server. It promises “at least 10x improvement in overall site performance when fully configured.” If you can understand all of the settings, you’re sure to to save up to 80% on your bandwidth as well. This huge improvement will also help to improve blog’s rank on Google, which is a huge plus! There’s also a very thorough setup guide available for those who need help.

WP Minify

Minification is the “process of removing all unnecessary characters from source code, without changing its functionality.” With that being said, this plugin will combine and compact your JavaScript, CSS, and HTML files, which helps to increase the load time of your pages. It’s also great for finding and removing duplicate sources in your code. In the settings you can specify files that you don’t want minified and also set the cache expiration time.

WP Smush.it

WP Smush.it works with your images by reducing their size, stripping meta data, optimizing compression, converting to indexed versions and stripping unused colors for indexed images. It may sound like the plugin is ruining your images, but it’s not. These are actually recommended methods of optimizing images in lossless ways. The plugin works automatically and requires no work on your end; just install, activate and go on as you were.

WP Super Cache

WP Super Cache is “a very fast engine for WordPress that produces static HTML files.” After this file is created, it will show this instead of processing your WordPress PHP scripts (which slows down the loading of your blog). It will only shows these files to users of your blog who are not logged in, haven’t left a comment, or haven’t viewed a password protected post. In other words, the majority of your users will be served with these super fast static HTML files when loading your blog.

Hyper Cache

If you’re using a low resource hosting for your blog, this plugin is for you. Hyper Cache is kind of like PC optimization software, but for your blog. It’s is easier to configure than the more complex cache plugins like W3 Total Cache (mentioned above). Not only does it cache your pages for faster loading, but it even auto-cleans your system to help reduce disk usage and compresses your storage.

CDN Tools

Lastly we have CDN Tools, which is designed to “drastically speed up your blog’s load time by loading data onto a content distribution network” (also known as content delivery network). Your JavaScript and media files will all be loaded on an external server via Cloud Files, which helps to free up and speed up your own server. You really can’t beat a free additional server for your files, plus setup process is pretty simple.

With speed optimization out of the way, you can focus on other things like search engine optimization and social media campaigns.

Which WordPress optimization plugin do you prefer?

This post was written by Lior Levin who is an online consultant for various companies and is a long time adviser to one of the best task management tools online.

WordPress’s powerful engine allows you to run a simple personal weblog, or even build a fully custom framework to run your website on. Lets not forget about the hundreds of thousands plugins and themes which allow you to customize your blog just the way you want to.

Now, if you’re running a blog, eventually the time will come to tune it up with a custom theme, or to modify  the current template  in order to get the look you are looking for; or maybe you would like to implement advanced features. Regardless which of the above fits your requirements, you will have to hire a WordPress expert, a designer or developer who lives for WordPress, and can %100 get the job done.

Hiring a wordpress expert will remove the hassle and the large number of wasted hours in dealing with amateurs. Below i’ve showcased the Top 10 job boards which are constantly browsed by wordpress experts, looking for freelance projects:

Free to use job boards:

1. WordPress.net Job Board

Jobs.wordpress.net is the official WordPress job board. This job board is updated daily and has a huge wordpress experts audience.

2. Freelancer.com WordPress Section

Even though I hate outsourcing websites, Freelancer.com is a place where you can find great wordpress designers and developers. Quick hint: Pay attention to the feedback score and reviews, and always ask for a full portfolio.

3. Smashing Jobs

Smashing Jobs is Smashing Magazine’s job board. The jobs listed here are featured in Smahsing Magazine’s rss feeds, posts and newsletters, so it’s definitely worth posting up a job here.

4. FreelanceSwitch Job Board

The name speaks for itself. FreelanceSwitch bears the pride of having one of the best freelancer communities around. Note: Freelancers need to pay a small fee to view the jobs.

5.WP Hired

WP Hired is one of the best job boards dedicated solely to wordpress.

6. WOO Jobs

WooThemes is an authority premium themes website. Even though they sell premium themes, the WOO ninjas were cool enough to create a free to use job board.

7. DigitalPoint Forums Design section

DigitalPoint Forums is one of the BIGGEST web forums around. With an Alexa traffic rank of 434, this is definitely a place you want to post your ad to. Note: You must be a member for over two weeks and have at least 25 posts to be able to post in the services section.

Premium job boards:

8. Krop

Krop is the best place to find top-notch wordpress professionals for your high-budget projects. $199 for 60 days.

9. Authentic Jobs

Authentic Jobs is where companies and creative professionalsmeet to make a better web. Companies like Skype, Apple or even facebook use this job board to find professionals. $99 for 30 days.

10. Sensational Jobs

Sensational Jobs is a premium job board, which puts a great deal in promoting the job listings on twitter, social networks and email alerts. $60 for 60 days.

There you have it!  The Top 10 best job boards around to post up an ad on your quest to finding a wordpress expert to get either a custom theme or customizations done. If you want to avoid posting a job on public job boards, there is always the option to ask fellow webmasters to refer you to an exceptional wordpress expert.

Reminder –  always do a background check on the designer or developer you are about to hire. Look for references, ask for a full portfolio.

Toolbars with integrated social features, like sharing and chatting, can really help you to get your readers involved. Social toolbars are also a a great way to help increase your reach and the visibility of your content on the web. Let’s take a look at 5 social toolbars that you can easily integrate with your blog to increase user engagement.

TurnSocial

While TurnSocial is built more for local business websites, they do offer a WordPress plugin that lets you easily add it to your blog.  Your readers will be able to:

• Share via AddThis
• Subscribe to your RSS feed
• View and “like” you Facebook fan page
• View your latest tweets and follow you on Twitter
• View your YouTube channel
• View your Flickr photostream

And much more…

Sharebar

Sharebar is a social toolbar created by AddThis. Even though they’ve recently stopped active development on it, it’s still available for use and works quite well. The toolbar is smart enough to remember which services you’ve recently used on the toolbar or with another AddThis product and then display those first on the actual toolbar. You can also customize the toolbar to display just the services that you want you readers to be able to share your content on. There are many other configuration options that you can view in the configuration section.

Wibiya

This is probably the most popular social toolbar that you’ve seen. It lets you integrate Facebook and Twitter applications so that your readers can interact on your Facebook fan page or Twitter right from your blog. The toolbar can be customized with other apps and features like:

• A search bar (for your blog)
• Recent posts view
• whos.amung.us integration
• Instant page translation
• Social sharing via AddThis
• Live chat rooms
• RSS feed integration
• Live notifications

And much more…

Meebo Bar

The Meebo Bar is more than just a social toolbar, it adds drag-and-drop sharing capabilities to all of the images on your blog. This means that users can simply click on an image and then drag it to the left to bring up sharing options. It also includes sharing buttons and IM capabilities built right into the toolbar. Clicking on “Connect via Meebo” will let you sign into Meebo chat, Facebook chat, AIM, Windows Live and/or Google Talk. Lastly, with the integration of ads right into your toolbar you can also earn a little income.

WP Social Toolbar

Finally we have WP Social Toolbar, a colorful WordPress plugin that lets you “showcase all of your social networks in one easy toolbar that is both eye-catching and functional.” This toolbar is more for displaying your social networking profiles and letting your readers connect with you, but it also has a few social sharing features; readers can like and tweet about your blog or content. It can also display your latest tweet in a status bar right above the toolbar.

Which method do you prefer, buttons within your template or social toolbars? Which toolbar do you like best?

Feel free to share your thoughts and opinions in the comments.

Broken Link Checker

This plugin continuously monitors your blog and lets you know whenever it finds any broken links. Having too many broken links can affect your search engine rankings because it shows that your blog is not being regularly updated or maintained. So it’s important to keep up with these and keep them to a minimum. This plugin monitors your posts, pages, comments, blogroll and custom fields. It can also detect missing images and redirects. You can get notifications on your blog dashboard and/or via email.

WP CleanFix

This is an all-in-one tool that can help you check, repair, fix and optimize your WordPress blog. Features include:

• Database tables optimization
• Check/remove meta data and tags
• Check/remove unused categories
• Find and replace content in posts and comments
• Check/remove posts and pages without authors

AntiVirus

Just like an antivirus program for your PC, this plugin will protect your blog against exploits and spam injections. You can perform manual scans or enable automatic daily scans. If you’re 100% sure that something is not a virus yet it keeps marking it as suspicious, you can add it to a whitelist.

Backup

There are quite a few decent backup plugins for WordPress. The one you choose is up to you, just make sure that you are doing a backup at least 1-2 times a month in case anything drastic happens to your blog.

XCloner – Can fully backup and restore your files and databases automatically or manually.

Backup to Dropbox – This plugin “automatically uploads your blog’s files and a SQL dump of its database to Dropbox.”

Online Backup – Lets you backup your entire database and send it to your email, desktop or free MiB space on their secure servers. Features include: locked backups, compression, encryption, scheduling, on-demand backup.

Validation

Lastly you’ll want to frequently check the markup validation of your blog to make sure you don’t have any serious coding errors. Most bloggers and website owners are already familiar with this tool. Just enter the URL of your blog and within a few seconds you’ll get a report with error messages (if applicable). It will also tell you what line the errors are on. Try to fix as many as you can; the less errors you have, the better.

What tools do you use to keep your WordPress blog maintained?

Thesis Theme is totally open to customization, but you might not have the time or expertise to do exactly what you want to do. For that, you can turn your attention to ThesisAwesome, a subscription service that provides you with a continuous supply of Thesis Theme skins and styles.

We Decided to Make Thesis Awesome

When I first saw the name for the site, I read it as “this is awesome.” I guess that’s not terribly inaccurate as a description, but it’s really about making “Thesis awesome.”

In short, you gain access to a collection of skins and styles for Thesis Theme for WordPress. Thanks to the Thesis Theme Options Manager, it is very easy for these guys to transfer the whole new designs to you. In this way, you can be rocking a totally new style for your blog in a matter of minutes.

They are constantly developing new WordPress skins for Thesis Theme, adding at least one new theme every month. That’s why it pays to get the subscription, especially if you run multiple sites and you can want to shake up their designs periodically.

A Look At Thesis Blog Skin

At the time of this review, Thesis Awesome is offering six different skins. We’ll take a closer look at the Thesis Blog Skin here, but feel free to explore the other five at your leisure.

As you can see, this skin comes loaded with a bunch of cool features. The featured image toward the center automatically switches between highlighted posts, for example, and you’ll notice the pre-set space for a 300×250 ad banner. Social media integration features prominently in the header, as does the area for signing up new subscribers to your e-mail newsletter.

Thesis Blog Skin also comes with the “Awesome Options Control Panel” for Thesis Theme. This gives you quick an easy access to 18 variations of the theme, social media options, multi-author options, advertising options, opt-in form options, and more. There’s no need to mess with the raw code, which is part of the reason why you got Thesis in the first place.

For more of a hands-on, check out the live demo of Thesis Blog Skin.

How Much Does It Cost?

There are three ways for you to pay for Thesis Awesome.

The $260 developer option is the biggest of them all. It gives you one year of unlimited access to the skins, including the ability to use them on an unlimited number of both your own sites and the sites of your clients. You also get full e-mail support, free upgrades, and footer attribution removal.

Stepping down a notch is the $120 personal option. It’s much like the developer option, but you can only use the Thesis Awesome skins on your own sites. You also give up e-mail support, getting community support instead. Alternatively, you can buy each of the skins individually. They currently range in price from $39 to $67, though that can change of course.

Thankfully, WordPress can be used for so much more than just running a blog or another content-based site. Combine the popular CMS with the new Premise Theme and you’ll have effective landing pages up and running in no time.

Using WordPress to Close the Sale

The whole idea here is that Premise takes the pain out of landing pages. It takes the process of developing an effective landing page and makes it as easy and straightforward as possible.

This is because Premise is more than “just” a WordPress theme. It’s meant to be a comprehensive system for creating landing pages. You start with the basic design, continue with the (included) copywriting advice, and then optimize the performance of the landing pages by way of the included tools and analytical data.

You don’t need to hire a good designer on short notice and fork out extra money every time that you want to make a change or build a new landing page. Just use Premise, follow the robust yet straightforward guides, and away you go.

Adding Plenty of Style to Landing Pages

So, let’s start with the web design. Premise comes with seven different landing page styles, each of which can be customized to suit your target demographic and personal flair.

Here is a partial screenshot of the user dashboard. As you can see, you can change the color of just about everything on the page, alter the global links, make changes to the text alignment and font weight in the footer, and so forth.

Going through the rest of the control panel, you can add custom graphics, alter styles, and more without ever touching the raw code. To help you create just the look that you’re trying to achieve, Premise also comes with over 1000 custom graphics by Rafal, as well as simple point-and-click design controls.

More Included Features and Customization

Yes, you can get a range of graphics like the “add to cart” buttons shown here. They’re included as part of the package.

Unfortunately, the right look oftentimes isn’t enough to close the sale. That’s why Premise goes further by offering all kinds of advice on effective copywriting. The right kind of web copy can mean the difference between another satisfied customer and one that walks away.

The advice is right inside of WordPress itself, including all sorts of tips and templates for each page type. An e-book, The Premise Copywriting Approach, is included in the package too, as well as ongoing copywriting seminars.

Beyond the copywriting, you get lots of testing and optimizing tools too. Split-test your landing pages from right within WordPress. Use the built-in SEO tools. Attend a number of conversion optimization seminars from experts in the industry. That’s all included.

How Much Does It Cost?

So, how much does it cost? You have two options when you’re ready to buy Premise. Both plans comes with a 30-day money back guarantee and the ability to use Premise to create unlimited landing pages on unlimited domains.

The $85 Starter plan comes with six months of seminars, advice, access to the graphics library, support, and updates. If you want access to these features for more than six months, then the $165 Ultimate plan is for you.