A Nudge in the Right Blog Direction

I have a friend who asked me to help set up a new blog for them using WordPress. Since they are pretty new to this whole blogging thing, they especially needed some help with plugins that will help get their blog running as smoothly as possible from the start. After I finished installing all their plugins, I wrote him an email to let him know what most of the plugins do and also gave some hints on how to increase some traffic. I thought it would be a good idea to post my email since it was a pretty damn long email and with my lack of posting, I thought . . . “perfect!”

 Dear Jon, 

 Per your request:

 1) List of Plugins I used for your Blog

Akismet – Spam Filter

All in One SEO Pack – Allows you to override the Meta Tags to Title your blog post with the correct keywords and titles.

Brian’s Threaded Comments – Great Plugin to Directly respond to comments of a Post instead of having them compile towards the bottom.

Contact Form – Creates a Basic Contact forum that gets forwarded to jrognerud@microsaw.com

Enforce http://www.preference – This is to make sure backlinks don’t get split up between microsaw.com and http://www.microsaw.com

Executable PHP Widget – This allows the insertion of PHP code into the sidebar widgets

Feedburner Feed Replacement – Once you have the RSS Feed set up, you will want to use Feedburner to distribute your RSS.

Get Recent Comments

Google Analytics – Insert your Google Analytics Code into the Options and it will automatically tag every page so that you can track everything on your blog.

Google Search Widget

Google Sitemaps – Creates a Google Compliant sitemap that you can upload to Google Webmasters

MyAvatars – Places the MyBlogLog avatar next to comments to place a face to someone’s words.

MyBlogLog Widget – Used in the sidebar to load MBL Widget to see who has been to the site.

Name Dropper – Social Bookmarking tool so that your readers can submit your posts to help drive new sources of traffic.

No Self Pings – I use this to decrease the amount of unnecessary pings to search engines and technorati

Optimal Title – In case you don’t use the All in One SEO Plugin, this automatically places the title of the post in front of the title of the blog in the Meta Title to promote better placement on Google SERPS.

PostPost – If you are promoting anything, you can place a 468×60 banner below each post.

Posts Related / Related Posts – Lists 5 Posts that are related to the Post just read by the reader to increase more page per viewers.

Show Top Commentators – I use this to encourage more Comments. The rewards are a free backlink from your site.

Smart Update Pinger – Pings only when publishing a new post.

Top Posts by Category – Once you have enough posts, this will display the Top posts based on views or comments

WP-PostRatings – This adds a rating system at the bottom of each post.

2) Suggestions. Off the top of my head, this is what I think you should do.

- Build your Content Quickly. I would suggest at least 4-5 posts per category.
- Join a Group of Bloggers who will help link to your articles and get your blog noticed.
- Set up an Account at the Following Social Networks: Stumble Upon, Netscape, Technorati WTF, and of course Digg.
- Comment on other Blogger’s sites and don’t forget to respond to comments left on your own site.
- Leverage your own network and your association.
- The best thing to do right now is to write high quality/controversial articles that can get dugg easily and quickly.

3) Sites that I would suggest reading right off the bat:

http://www.doshdosh.com – Great Analysis
http://www.bluehatseo.com – Crazy Out of the Box Thinking
http://www.johnchow.com – Great Marketing

As you can see, I didn’t link anybody since I’m really lazy right now. I’ll probably link all the plugins if there is enough requests for them, but i’m assuming most of my readers already have installed a majority of these plugins.

If you have some friends who are interested in getting started in the blogging world, then feel free to reference this page to give them an idea of what they need to install to get off on the right foot.

If you’re interested in seeing which blog I helped out, click here to see what my friend has so far on his blog. From what I’ve seen, he has some really great content that all of you might be very interested in.