SevenToTen - Blogging About Everything

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How often do we get to see the master in action - a successful blogger who reveals the steps in building a blog up from scratch?

Problogger has started a new blog, TwiTip and he is sharing selflessly all the steps he has taken so far with his vast audience. It is easy to start a blog but how very difficult to take it to the next level where traffic just flows in automatically.

Here are the top ten plugins he recommends for a new blog.

1. Akismet - a great comment spam plugin. Interestingly I had comment spam on TwiTip that Akismet filtered within minutes of launching the blog on Twitter.
2. All in One SEO Pack - a plugin that helps to optimize a blog for search engines. It gives easy ways to set up title tags, descriptions, keywords (both for home pages but also on individual posts) and a variety of other settings that have an impact upon SEO.
3. cforms - a powerful contact form plugin. It’s a lot more complex than other comment form plugins out there but has a lot more features (some that I’m yet to fully test).
4. Google XML Sitemaps - a plugin to help Google and other search engines to find every page and post on your blog - good for getting a new blog indexed quickly.
5. Simple Tags - extends the built in tags features on WordPress.
6. Subscribe To Comments - a WordPress plugin that allows those leaving comments to check a box and be notified when other people leave a comment on that thread.
7. Tweet This - ads an invitation for readers to Tweet a link to the post they are reading. While I wouldn’t put this on every blog - it seemed a no brainer on a blog about Twitter.
8. WordPress.com Stats - I’m using Google Analytics as my main metrics tool for TwiTip but it doesn’t update in real time so this plugin helps to get a quick update of what’s happening on the blog at any given point in time.
9. WP-Polls - an AJAX polling plugin with some nice features. I’ve previously used the Democracy Plugin but this one seems to be working really nicely so far.
10. WP Ajax Edit Comments - this plugin allows those leaving comments to edit their comments for a short period of time after they leave a comment.

This is a must-try plugin if your blog experiences heavy spamming.  WP-SpamFree is among the best plugin I have installed. It eliminates comment spam, including trackback and pingback spam and uses very low bandwidth.

It is better than Akismet which still gives me an average of 15 spam comments per day. The best features include:

* Virtually eliminates automated comment spam from bots.
* No CAPTCHA’s, challenge questions or other inconvenience to site visitors - it works silently in the background.
* Easy to install - truly plug and play. Just upload and activate. There’s an installation status on the plugin admin page to let you know if the plugin was installed correctly.

There are so many nice features that come with this plugin. You have saved me a lot of time and now I can put that spare time to blogging.