Some plugins, however, that you simply can’t live without. They help you improve your SEO score, keep up-to-date stats of your visitors, and much more. While these aren’t in any particular order we can assure you that you’ll find them extremely helpful.

1. Yet Another Related Posts Plugin

Yet Another Related Post is a plugin that automatically plugs similar entries you’ve created into your post. How does this help you? It allows you to keep your visitors around longer which, in turn, can improve traffic and even ad revenue and usually shows them you have more to offer on the subject they’ve came to your site to read about.

2. WP Super Cache

If you haven’t heard of WP Super Cache, what rock have you been living under? The benefits of this plugin are apparent usually within a day of having it installed. How does it benefit you? It lowers load times on your server (be it shared or dedicated) so there is less strain on your blog and server by creating static HTML pages of your entire blog. Then when visitors come to your site, it displays your HTML pages up instead of processing PHP and MySQL. How it benefits your visitors? Faster page loads, and what visitor wouldn’t love that?

3. Akismet

Akismet comes standard with all WordPress blogs. Use it and consider your spam troubles history. It runs various tests whenever you receive a new trackback, comment, or ping to see if it should be allowed in your blog. No blacklisting or work is needed from you once you’ve activated it and put your API Key into the system. The key can be obtained at WordPress.com by registering.

4. Feedburner

Replace your old RSS feeds with this amazing system. Your feeds get redirected to Feedburner and in return Feedburner gives you amazing stats on your subscribers. From what post they read, where they came from, and so much more.

5. Google XML Sitemaps

Unless you’ve been on Mars for the last several years, Google is the top search engine out there. Sitemaps makes crawlers, those pesky little things going all over your blog, able to retrieve the data they need to update their pages about your site. It supports custom URLs and it even notifies all major search engines when you’ve made updates.

6. AddThis

AddThis is an amazing Social Bookmarking tool that allows your visitors to share the things they find most interesting on your site with the world. It supports all the major Social Bookmarking websites and dozens you’ve probably never even heard of. It has several options to let you adjust their button to match the look and feel of your theme.

7. OnlyWire

OnlyWire is one of those secret “tools of the trade” so many people don’t want you to find out about. Imagine a website where you can input login information to dozens of Social Bookmarking and Social Media websites then have new updates you make be automatically posted to them through the use of a WordPress plugin. Sounds to good to be true, right? Think again! OnlyWire offers free and paid services and is a true one stop spot to obtaining traffic, ranking, and so much more.

8. WP-Polls

There are any number of bloated poll plugins for WordPress. Many that add unnecessary graphics, text, and links to polls you’ve added when all you really want is a simple and easy to use feature to offer your visitors. WP-Polls is the answer to your prayers! Lightweight, customizable, and as easy, WP-Polls gives you what you want and leaves out what you don’t need.

9. SpamShiv Lite

SpamShiv Lite, being the free version, converts email addresses you input to your blog into an unrecognizable code for crawlers going around the Internet looking for addresses to add to their spam list. This plugin protects not only your email address, but any that is added to your blog from spam. A must have, some might say.

10. All in One SEO Pack

Words cannot describe what this plugin can truly offer. It allows you to control every aspect of SEO for your blog, internally, with several small extras. One extra being the use of “tags” as meta keywords in single entries. It would take a whole page to write about all the features and benefits All in One SEO Pack has to offer but until you try it for yourself, you’ll never really understand.

11. Contact Form 7

Contact Form 7 isn’t just a simple contact form, it’s a contact form which offers multiple form creations (depending your various needs), customization of exactly what you want, and an easy to use admin interface. Create any number of forms for your users to contact you and have those messages sent to any email address you require. Oh and it supports AJAX, CAPTCHA, and Spam Filtering.

12. Honorable Mention: Exec-PHP

Exec-PHP may not be something that you find yourself needing often but when you do it can be a life saver. It allows you to run PHP script within entries and pages.

While you may find only a few of these plugins useful for your needs, they are all truly amazing. They help increase usability and options you can offer your readers and even yourself. Best of all, they’re free!

Many blogging platforms, such as WordPress, have several plugins which can cut your post writing time in half. This is a feature known as Auto Blogging. It is the ability to have fresh, relevant, content posted to a blog. As mentioned previously, many of us simply do not have the time needed to post fresh content to one or more blogs. If you are one of those people then Auto Blogging is something worth looking into.

While there are quite a few plugins to help you achieve this, there are some that stand out from the rest. WP Robot, WP-o-Matic, and WP Mage, just to know a few, and each one works a little differently. Some allow you to pull content from sources like YouTube, Amazon, and article websites, while some relying on RSS Feeds. Worried about duplicated content being seen by Google? Some Auto Blogging tools even have the ability to change keywords within the content you are “grabbing”. Essentially making it appear unique to search engines and the readers of your blog.

And with the ability to get content from sources such as Amazon, eBay, and even ClickBank it’s safe to say that not only can Auto Blogging be a way to obtain mounds of content for your blog, but can potentially be an even bigger revenue earner!

WP Robot can be an amazing tool in the right hands. It has the ability to provide you with relevant content to your blog without lifting a finger, hence save you time needed to write blog posts.

We’ve known Rebecca for a little over 3 years, and seen her site grow from a personal hobby blog to something that is now her full time job, working from home and doing what she loves!

Tell us about yourself. How long have you been blogging?

I set up my first blog sometime around the end of 2003. I was just one of those typical ones where I linked to articles I liked, talked about my favorite music, pets, etc. After a couple of years of that, I got bored with it and took it down. In mid 2006, I got the idea fir what eventually became ElasticPop.com

How long did it take you to get your blog launched?

I would say it really took me about a eighteen months. Because my blog is a Blu-Ray/DVD review site, it took time to make contacts with the studios and PR firms that provide titles. In order to convince them that I could write and publish the reviews, I wrote for some established blogs before soliciting material for my own.

How many hours per day do you spend working online?

During the week, anywhere from 7-11. On the weekends, I try to cut it down to half that, but It doesn’t always work out that way!

What are your favorite revenue sources?

Google AdSense, Commission Junction, Amazon Affiliate Program, iReel

How long did it take you to see real profits from your blog?

That took a good eighteen months, and I’m always looking for ways to refine and increase profits.

What were some of the challenges you had to overcome to see your online visions come to life?

For me, I think the biggest thing was remembering that the site needed to be accessible to people, no matter their level of computer expertise. My first impulse was to build a site with all sorts of bells and whistles, but in reality, a clean speedy site is more likely to be revised.

Any particular methods to generating traffic you could share?

Use Social Networking! Twitter your posts, put them on Facebook and make sure you’ve set up an RSS feed. Outside of that, Make sure your URL is in the signature of every email account you have. Also, you might consider having business cards made up and giving them out, posting them on bulletin boards of business etc. Another great thing to do, is visit forums related to the topic of your blog, participate in discussions, leaving your URL.

What are some online resources you could recommend for people looking to becoming a Professional Blogger?

These are sites I keep bookmarked.

http://www.problogger.net/
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/
http://www.dailyblogtips.com/

Did you ever think you would be successful?

I hoped I would, but I had a fair amount of skepticism going in.

What’s the most common mistake(s) you see other bloggers make?

While it’s important to choose a topic that is popular, it’s equally important to choose something you’re interested in. Too many people choose something they clearly aren’t passionate about, and the site dies before it really gets off the ground.

What’s the best advice you have for would-be bloggers out there?

If you’re going to be a professional blogger, it’s best not to expect overnight success. It’s a lot of hard work, and growth tends to come in increments. However, if you are in it for the long haul, it can be a rewarding experience.

Any future plans you would like to share?

I’m in the midst of getting my forum up and running, so I hope my visitors will come on over and join the discussions!

Thank you Rebecca for taking your time to answer our questions! We wish you best of luck and great success!

So what’s changed with WordPress 3.0? For starters, they’ve created a new default theme, Twenty Ten. It proves to be much more robust and eye pleasing than the previous default theme, Kubrick.

In addition, the interface is lighter and has over 1,200 bugs fixes and enhancements. That’s only the beginning of the myriad new features. Creating a custom theme for WordPress is now easier than ever before thanks to new API integrations. Customized backgrounds, menus, headings, and more are now simpler to implement in new designs.

Another notable feature is the ability to perform bulk updates with the internal upgrading system. You can upgrade 15 plugins at once!

Probably the most significant change is the integration of WordPress MU (multi-user). WordPress 3.0 offers the multi-user system built directly into its structure. You can now run millions of blogs from one dashboard. Some of our notable customers are already taking advantage of this functionality.

You can learn more about new features and changes, including an exceptional video about the latest and greatest WordPress 3.0 by clicking here.

We highly recommend you upgrade immediately or contact us for further assistance.

The merge! WordPress and WordPress MU have merged. This does not mean that you can suddenly start adding a bunch of new blogs from within your regular WordPress Dashboard. If you’re interested in testing the Super Admin stuff associated with multiple sites, you’ll need some simple directions to get started.

The new default theme, Twenty Ten, including the custom background and header options.

Custom Post Type functionality has been beefed up.

Bulk Plugin and Theme Upgrades.

Shortlinks API.

If you are planning to upgrade as soon as it comes out then be sure to make a backup first, just in case things don’t go the way you anticipated. For popular or business blogs it’s recommended to first make a development environment and test it there before upgrading your live blogs!

If you think about it, RSS feeds are very similar to email newsletters, but without all the fuss of collecting your visitors email addresses and manually sending them out. Now lets look at what we can do if we add Google’s FeedBurner to the mix.

By registering (also called burning) your blog RSS feed with FeedBurner, you’ll see how many subscribers you have; how may people click on your links to get to your blog posts; you can see what kind of tools your blog readers are using to read your blog updates; a geographic view of where your feed items were viewed in the most recent full day. You can even make some cash with your feeds by including Google Ads between the posts! So if you have a blog and are not using FeedBurner yet – I urge you to go ahead and sign up right now. You’re missing out!

Another popular resource for website designs as well as blog designs is the popular Template Monster where themes come with a download fee and are generally better quality if that’s important to you. My personal favorite would have to be Elegant Themes. For a small membership fee of just $19.95 you’ll have access to over 35 professionally designed themes. When I say professionally design I really mean professionally designed. The themes are simply stunning, well coded, well documented, and even come with a Photoshop file so you can make any design changes your heart desires.

For even more themes there’s always Google or the place called Woo Themes featuring a number of different themes that come with a small fee. What most people do is buy or download a theme, and then hire a blog consulting company to personalize that theme matching their specific needs. This method saves them quite a bit of money comparing to hiring a blog design company to design one from scratch.

I’m writing this post on my BlackBerry Tour. The application is really easy to use, it is packed with features and looks great!

I highly recommend this to any WordPress user that has a BlackBerry phone (iPhone version is also available). It is becoming more clear that WordPress is years ahead of its competition.

You can download this application from BlackBerry World App site by searching for the keyword: wordpress.

Happy Mobile Blogging!

There was even a movie released last year called Julie and Julia (available on DVD) that’s all about blogs and cooking. Since it’s about blogs I just had to watch it :) You see, I started working with blogs in 2002 (you can read more on our About Us page) and just a couple of years ago you would have to really look hard to find a magazine or a book that mentions blogs. Now it’s all over the place which is both shocking and exciting at the same time. To me anyway. Before people used to say “If you don’t have a website you are not a real business”, and today it’s “If you don’t have a blog you are not a real business”. Amazing how far blogs have come.

It is fun to watch getting Fortune 500 companies become our blog hosting and consulting clients. Companies like Adobe, TIME, Cisco, Washington Post, CapitalOne, Harvard, Expedia, National Geographic, and many others. Over the years we’ve assisted many companies and individuals with various blog requests, and I’m really looking forward to helping many more in 2010, and years to come.

If you don’t have a Blog, Facebook or Twitter — you should really start one. It’s fun, and to some it’s life-changing.