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?

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.

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.

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?

At WordPress.org there are 14,263 plugins listed. That does not include all the privately created plugins that you can purchase or grab for free at other sites, but that’s a lot of plugins. You obviously don’t need that many, although many bloggers have hundreds on their blogs (albeit not all of them are active) you really only need a handful.

This post is not about the plugins you need. This is just a simple list of my personal “gotta have them” plugins that I really enjoy and want to share with you.

TinyMCE Signature – I enjoy this plugin because it automatically adds a closing to my blog posts. I don’t have to type “To your success,” “To your health,” or “Have a Great Day,” followed by my name every time I add a post. I can add my signature in my user profile and it’s there every time I post.

Exclude Pages – This plugin has become very popular for adding landing and thank you pages or bonus pages to your blog. These pages are still active but they don’t show up in your site’s navigation. This makes it easy to keep them hidden and only show them to your email subscribers or members.

Broken Link Checker – If you add a lot of links to your blog posts this is a plugin you will definitely want to have. It works in the background keeping up with all your links. If one of your links get broken due to someone removing a page or the site goes down completely, this plugin will send you an email to alert you that you have broken links.

Datafeedr Random Ads V2 – If you run ads in your sidebar but need to change them up, this is a great plugin. It refreshes your ad campaigns each time the page is loaded so there’s always a fresh, new ad in the sidebar.

WordPress Editorial Calendar – This is my favorite plugin of all. It gives you a calendar view of your posts or scheduled posts. Instead of going down a list looking for the right post, you simply flip through your calendar. You can edit or delete right from the calendar too. One thing the whole world has in common is we all live by a calendar; our lives revolve around a calendar. This plugin makes it so much easier to find old posts you need to update or get a glance of the topics you’ve posted on in the past.

What are you favorite “gotta have them” WordPress plugins? Please share them with us in the comments below.

This can sound like a daunting task for even intermediate affiliate marketers, but it doesn’t have to be difficult. Eclipse Link Cloaker is designed to be the “easiest way to instantly cloak, track and manage all of your affiliate links.” Oh, and it also claims to “prevent lost commissions” too.

An Affiliate-Minded WordPress Plugin

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: WordPress is one of the best content management systems on the Internet and it’s great for more than just blogging. Affiliate marketing is one such scenario and this link cloaker fits right into that niche.

In a nutshell, it will take your affiliate link and mask it behind your own domain. These cloaked links conceal your affiliate code, since some visitors don’t trust affiliate links. This way, it looks much more natural and you can prevent dishonest folks from inserting their own affiliate codes into your links.

The plugin effectively comes in three parts, all of which are accessible under the “Link Cloaker” subsection that is created in the WordPress settings menu.

The first is Link Cloaking, shown above. Various options are made available to you, like whether you want to automatically cloak all links or if you want to use selective cloaking. You can also define the link prefix, exception list, cloaking type (301 permanent redirect, 302 found, etc), and so on.

Keyword Autolinking Too

What if you want to turn keywords into links? You can do that too.

Under this tab, you can configure whether you want every instance of a certain keyword (or keyword phrase) to automatically become a corresponding cloaked affiliate link. For instance, you might want to link the word “widgets” to a widget store. This way, every time that you write about widgets, you can be sure that your visitors are being directed toward one of your affiliate links.

To manage these cloaked links and their associated keywords, you go to the Cloaked Links section under Tools in the WordPress dashboard. This is also where you can add, remote, and edit the links, as well as view their statistics.

Conversion Tracking

The third tab is where you can set up conversion tracking. Some affiliate programs allow for this kind of functionality and it can help you better tweak your affiliate campaigns accordingly.

This is based on a tracking pixel that you would place on the merchant’s confirmation page. With a single code, you can track all the outbound cloaked links from your WordPress site.

Cloaking Your Way to Success

Considering that you can make some more money back through its own affiliate program (via ClickBank), Eclipse Link Cloaker is a solid tool to include as part of your overall Internet marketing strategy.

It’s easy to use, offers a robust set of features, and is priced affordably at just $57.

Link: Eclipse Cloaker

One such type of site is a paid job board. Thanks to WPJobBoard, you can quickly and easily convert a WordPress blog into a fully functional job posting board. Charge people for premium listings and watch as your PayPal account balance grows each day. At least that’s the plan.

A Premium WordPress Plug-In

The amazing thing about WordPress is that it is so incredibly versatile. The content management system is used by most as a blogging platform, but using premium plug-ins like WPJobBoard, you can transform that site into just about anything you want.

With WPJobBoard, you can have a website filled with all sorts of job postings. Such a plan would probably work best if you stick to a certain niche or related group of niches, because you’re more likely to capture a targeted audience this way than with a “catch all” job posting board.

Going through the list of features, you’ll find that this plug-in not only changes the appearance of your WordPress site; it also provides a number of useful utilities accessible through the WordPress admin panel.

This include defining different categories, implementing promo codes, optimizing listings for search engines, personalizing emails, customizing listing types, setting up automatic PayPal payments, providing easy localization, and more.

From the Job Hunter’s Perspective

Since WPJobBoard is “just” a WordPress plug-in, it can effectively be used with nearly any WordPress theme or template. You can check out the live demo to get a sense of what to expect.

A little tinkering around can move and alter elements like the job location, position title, and so on. You’ll also notice the basic navigation in the sidebar for viewing jobs, posting jobs, browsing resumes and so forth.

The live demo is very basic in its approach, but how does a more “fleshed out” installation of WPJobBoard operate? You can see it in action on such sites as BloggingPro. The layout has been slightly customized, but the core backend remains the same.

From the Site Owner’s Perspective

As mentioned earlier, WPJobBoard will populate your WordPress admin panel with additional options after it has been installed and activated. This is displayed as two additional “sections” via the admin sidebar.

The first part is the Job Board. It is here that you can post new jobs, approve pending jobs, generate discount codes, create job types, and define additional fields, among other configuration options. The second part is for managing employers and resume access.

You’ll notice that the job board allows for an import process. This pulls job listings from such places as CareerBuilder (using their API), based on country, category, job location, and keyword. This helps to make your site look busy, because nothing is more of a deterrent than an empty site!

How Much Does It Cost?

WPJobBoard really makes it easy to set up a job posting board, but it is up to you to properly optimize and market it. With no traffic comes no passive income. The core functionality, though, appears to be quite good.

The plugin is available for purchase under two different license options. The $97 single site license includes free updates, email support, and documentation. The $199 multi-site license allows you to use the plugin on all sites you own and operate. There does not appear to be a developer’s license at this time.

Link: WPJobBoard

These days, our lives are quite a bit easier. If a search engine or Wikipedia doesn’t return the answer we need, we can just as easily turn to somewhere like Answers.com or Yahoo! Answers and pose the question ourselves. What if you could capitalize on this traffic with a website of your own?

Letting your “turn WordPress into a cash-generating question and answer website” is WP-Answers. It’s a premium WordPress plugin and theme that helps you “earn cash on auto-pilot.”

They Ask Questions, They Post Answers

One of the best ways to generate passive income with a site is to utilize user-generated content and that’s exactly how a Q&A site works.

When you use WP-Answers, all you have to do is set it up, attract some traffic, and let the online community do the rest. Each question takes on the same properties as a blog post and each answer is like a blog comment.

If you get enough people coming to your site and participating, it really can run on auto-pilot while you make money from the advertisements you place on the site. WP-Answers is pre-built with places for contextual advertising, as well as ad blocks in the sidebar.

Earning Points and Getting Rewards

It’s up to you how you want to best utilize a site powered by WP-Answers, but it does provide the opportunity to reward your community members with points.

These points are tracked automatically and you can define the various values for posing questions, providing answers, and being chosen for providing the best answers. This added incentive can help you attract return visitors, but they all have to register with the site before they can do anything.

You’ll also notice that they can have profile pages and profile pictures, though the integrated utility for the latter is either missing or not obvious enough for the average user. Social networking being what it is, a strong profile page utility would be great for WP-Answers.

What You See Is What You Get

Using WordPress as its core content management system, WP-Answers is actually very easy to use, implement, and customize. After upload and activation, you can change several settings from within the WordPress admin panel.

This includes the ability to import both questions and answers using the Yahoo! Answers API. You can pull this content based on search term, geographic location, frequency, category, and post status. Yes, it’s scraping, but it’ll give your site the appearance of bustling activity (even if it’s not that busy).

WP-Answers is available now with prices starting at $89. After this introductory price expires, it’ll return to the regular price of $149.

Link: WP-Answers

I had the chance to try out a new service called LinkTrackr, and they actually have a very nice and advanced system. Let’s breakdown their services and what they are all about.

Right when you get to the site you are given a quick run down of how affiliate marketing works, and much easier it could be using LinkTrackr for tracking links and campaigns. The basic concept here is that if you promote your own product, blog or web site using a direct url or a simple redirect, you are potentially missing out on a ton of viral traffic.

Once you sign up for an account it really easy to get started and create a few links. I recently came out with my own free affiliate blogging guide at SixFigureAffiliateBlogging.com. Instead of sending people directly to that site, I can send them to a viral enabled link using LinkTrackr. Here’s how…

The setup is really self explanatory. Just fill in the blank fields with your site info and how you want the viral options to work, then you would be setup with a url like the following: http://moneyreign.linktrackr.com/sfab. You also have the option of using your own domain name for better marketing and branding.

Once you visit that tracking url, you will see that your blog or landing page would have the following viral bar on top of the page. Feel free to try it out and event “tweet” or “facebook like it” using the toolbar.

The top portion of the page may be cut off a bit, but other than that, the site is fully functional and your visitors now have the option to tweet, facebook share or facebook like the post. Even if only 1-3% of your visitors decide to share the content, it could result in a great amount of extra and free viral traffic back to your site.

As a member of LinkTrackr, you will also have access to videos, guides and tutorials on how to use the system, though I picked everything up within minutes of joining the site. You will also have access to other areas of their site which offers a wordpress plugin for link management, pdf reports on blogging and affiliate marketing, and you can also help promote LinkTrackr as an affiliate and earn 40% on all referred sales.

So what does all of this cost? As mentioned, there are a lot of programs out there that offer link management and redirection services, but none that really blew me away. LinkTrackr costs $27 a month (through paypal), but also has a one month trial for only $1. I would recommend you give the one month trial a run and see how much free viral traffic you can bring it.

In the end, I think it really comes down to your web site, offer or blog traffic. If it’s really good content, people are going to want to share it, but if it’s a general offer where you make a quick buck, I wouldn’t expect anyone to share the offer.

Head over to LinkTrackr. Try out the 30 day trial for only a buck, and at the least you can download their free report to discover the “7 Sins of Affiliate Marketing”.

In their own words:

“ManageWP is a WordPress service offering modern technology to manage multiple WordPress blogs from a centralized Dashboard.”

So whether you’re someone who just has a few blogs, or you manage WordPress blogs of several clients, ManageWP will be a tool that you’ll want to keep close at hand. ManageWP is actually built on a WordPress blog itself. So, when registering you’ll just need to enter your username a email; a password will be emailed to you.

Next you’ll need to add your blogs. To do this you’ll first need to add the ManageWP Worker plugin to the blogs that you want to manage. Then you’ll have to enter your URL, username and password into the ManageWP dashboard area. If you’re worried about the security of your account, be sure to check out their privacy page.

The control panel will show you which plugins on are up to date. You can upgrade all the plugins (on each of your blogs) at once with the click of a button. This is a definite time saver — rather than having to go to each blog separately. From the control panel you can also upload new themes and plugins, create new blog posts and pages, import/export, clone blogs and backup/restore.

Under the sites area, you’ll have options that you can perform on each blog individually (instead of all together). You can manage posts, pages, categories, tags, comments, plugins and themes. If there is a new version of WordPress available, you can even upgrade the blog right from here. When you click on a button/action, it actually opens up a new tab (along the top of the dashboard). Then you can simply click the X on the tab to close it out when you’re done.

The company is also planning to offer a self hosted version of ManageWP for companies and individuals out there that want to run their own dashboard. It’s still in the works but you can sign up to receive notifications about its release. This is great if you do have numerous clients and want to use your own domain to manage them all in one place.

ManageWP is a lifesaving tool that will save you lots of time and effort. It’s such a convenience to be able to login to just one WordPress blog and manage all of your blogs from there. I have 6 sites that run WordPress and this plugin has really made my day. How about you?

If you’ve visited sites like Cracked, you’ve probably noticed the collection of recommended articles for when you are done reading the page you are on. Very likely, you’ve found these links to be extremely addictive, keeping you long on the site long after you’re done reading the article you came to the site for.

While WordPress has a slew of related posts plugins, the most popular of which is YARPP, they aren’t for everyone.

While these related posts plugins are great, they aren’t exactly the most visually appealing (at least not without a great deal of work) nor can they be used on other blogging platforms. LinkWithin, however, aims to make this process incredibly easy. In fact, the process doesn’t have any signups or advertisements to put up with. You simply enter your site’s information, paste a few lines of code and go.

But how well does it work? The answer really depends on the type of site you have and how you designed it but for many bloggers it will likely be a near-perfect solution.

How it Works

The fundamentals of LinkWithin are pretty straightforward. You simply visit their site, enter your blog’s information and, depending on your blog’s platform, you’ll either copy and paste a short embed code into your blog’s template or install a WordPress plugin.

Once you do that, LiinkWithin will start spidering your site and using an algorithm to find posts that are related to each other. The process can take several hours and, during that time, the recommendations likely won’t make much sense. In the case of my site, it took about four hours before the results were truly “good”.

Once that’s done, at the footer of each post (or wherever you place the code) you will see a series of recommendations for content similar to what is there. If possible, LinkWithin will include an image with each recommendation, pulled from the post itself.

If done correctly, it should look like this article on For the Love of Cooking. Attractive, neat and relatively well-targeted.

The Good

Though LinkWithin is far from a perfect system, there are many things it does very well. First and foremost, it is dead simple to use. Whether you are using the plugin or the embed code, it is pretty much a matter of selecting your options, uploading the code and forgetting about it.

When working, LinkWithin does a great job selecting relevant posts and thumbnails. Though it isn’t always perfect, its algorithm is at least as good as any related posts plugin I have seen and its image selection, for the most part, is very solid. Though you have to give it time to finish indexing your site, once it does you will probably be very pleased with the results.

Finally, it seems to work and achieve its goal of increasing pageviews. Having installed it on my site just a few days ago, making the results far too premature to be conclusive, I have already noticed an increase in the pages per visitor. The difference isn’t drastic, perhaps only about 10%, but it is still noticeable.

All in all, the system seems to work great, load fast and be dead simple to use. However, there are limitations that have to be weighed.

Limitations and Drawbacks

What LinkWithin gains in simplicity it does so by sacrificing features and customization. When setting up the script, you only really have two options, the first is how many recommended posts are displayed (3-5 specifically) and whether to use a light background or a dark one. Beyond that, you really don’t get a lot of say in image size, orientation, etc.

This means that there are a lot of things you can’t do with LinkWithin. For example, I’d like to either ignore or limit the linking to certain categories on my site, especially on my main articles, but there is no way to do that. Likewise, you can’t change the orientation or make any manual adjustments as the actual code for adding the links is pure JavaScript.

Furthermore, since it is pure JavaScript, not only are you putting much of your site in the hands of this third-party service, trusting that they will be reliable and quick, but it seems to cause problems with analytics applications and doesn’t allow the search engines to see the links.

Still, for those who want what LinkWithin offers, it is a very tempting service and likely one that you will at least want to try out.

Bottom Line

It’s important to remember what LinkWithin is: It is a simple way to add an attractive list of related posts to the bottom of your blog posts. It is that and nothing more.

It is not a sidebar widget, it is not a customizable solution, it is not Google fodder. It is simply a way to get you readers to click on more articles on your site.

It’s simple and it works. If you don’t need more than what it provides, have a blog that regularly uses images and don’t mind losing a little bit of control, you have nothing to lose by giving it a try. If you need more power, you’re better off with another solution.

If you do decide to go with YARPP, you may find this template particularly useful for mimicking LinkWithin using the plugin.

One of the most effective methods is a simple pop-up on your website and that functionality has been further simplified with the PopUp Domination plugin for WordPress. You can literally have it set up and running in a couple of minutes.

Pop-Ups Generated the Easy Way

That’s effectively the value of PopUp Domination. If you know anything about using WordPress and installing plug-ins, then you’ll have no trouble using this product.

It is likely that your chosen mailing list provider, like AWeber, already comes with some pre-built forms that you can use. However, PopUp Domination appears to offer more options, greater simplicity, and better overall looks. Little graphical differences can make a world of difference when it comes to your conversion rate.

According to its developer, this plugin allowed him to increase the number of daily opt-ins on his mailing list from 17 to over 100. That represents monumental growth and, consequently, the potential for monumental growth in income as well.

Installation and Customization

The installation process for PopUp Domination is the same as most other WordPress plugins. Upload the appropriate directory, activate the plugin, and head over to the “settings” page to customize.

The settings area, which is accessible from within the WordPress administration dashboard, is broken down into eight different sections: Look and feel, Mailing List HTML, Template Fields, List Points, Schedule, Preview, Promote PopUp Domination, and Advanced.

The first section allows you to choose between the four different templates and select the appropriate color scheme. With Template Field, you enter your custom text for the title and body, as well as the field values for name, email, and submit. This is also where you can upload a custom image up to 243 x 270 pixels.

The templates typically involve spaces for bullet points too and you define these from the List Points section. The Schedule section is quite handy, because it allows you to set the delay before the lightbox pop-up appears and the number of days until the popup reappears if the user clicks the close button (cookie-based, presumably).

So, How Does It Look?

Running quickly through the available options and features, I was able to generate this lightbox for Beyond the Rhetoric in a few short minutes. The interface was easy to understand and changes can be made on the fly.

Whether this “lightbox” popup results in much higher opt-in rates will depend on a number of different factors, but I can see how an attractive and professional-looking box like this probably doesn’t hurt. It’s slick, sleek, and easy on the eyes.

The ability to define the number of days until the box reappears for a visitor is good too, as it helps to ensure a better overall user experience.

How Much Does It Cost?

Does PopUp Domination offer incredibly innovative functionality? No, not really. However, it is a remarkably easy-to-use WordPress plugin with plenty of customization options.

The current list price is $37 and that comes with a 60-day money back guarantee.

Link: PopUp Domination

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