Of late, tons and tons of people have resorted to blogging to hit a fortune. It might be one of the most lucrative means to earn by expressing what’s in your mind, but you just can not possibly win an audience by mere writing posts. You need to accessorize your blog with plugins and widgets for attracting every single person who is interested in the written genre. Here goes a compilation of 5 most helpful plugins to gain traffic to your site:

1.Similar Post Plugin:
Usually, a visitor has some special taste of content.…

Last week I started a short series on creating a contact page for your site, and wrote about the form markup and CSS. This week I’m writing about validation. Contact forms are notorious for being insecure and left wide open for email header injections, allowing someone to hijack your form and spam anyone and everyone through it. However, there are steps you can take to ensure the email address supplied is valid, even the name given, is of a valid format (ie. a name!).

Validate the Email Address

There are 3 functions we…

I spoke to Dan Grossman recently and he was kind enough to send me a copy of his his new WordPress plugin WPReview. WPReview is a commercial product which lets you add ratings to your posts and pages, effectively making your blog a review site. It currently retails for $97 ($199 for a multi site license).

Short Story : What does WP Review do?

WPReview is a plugin which adds a star ratings system to your posts. Ratings are very popular in review sites and using this plugin will let you add this functionality…

Once you’ve got an established blog you’ll most likely want a contact page with a contact form on it. Whilst there are a few plugins that do this for you, I tend to find that they either bloat your pages with additional CSS code in the header (CSS code should always be put in an external stylesheet whenever possible), badly written form markup, or probably the worst culprit, the PHP code doesn’t validate the information in the form to help prevent spam or email header injection.

Create your Page Template

First of…

The ever resourceful Joost de Valk has released a great little plugin for WordPress which automatically adds breadcrumbs to your blog. Breadcrumbs are those handy navigational links which you find at the top of many sites and forums. They make your blog more user friendly and help search engines map your blog more easily.

Heres an example of the breadcrumb the plugin added to the BT Simplicity Theme page :

Since the if statement for the plugin needs to be hard coded into your blog template, you can place the breadcrumbs anywhere…