Many blog owners run ad units of some description to help generate blogging income. There are so many different ways to generate this income and so many different ad units that can be used. One Blog plugin that can help manage your ad units is the Adsense Manager for WordPress.

Although titled Adsense Manager, this plugin does more than just manage your Adsense ads. It now also supports  AdBrite, AdGridWork, Adpinion, Adroll, Commission Junction, CrispAds, ShoppingAds, Yahoo!PN and WidgetBucks.

Automatic Ad Code Importer for all supported networks. Widgets & Sidebar Modules compatible (as used in the popular K2 theme). Automatic limiting of Ads to meet network T&Cs (Google 3 units/page)

This plugin generates the code automatically and allows the ad units to be placed using widgets. As it now supports so many different advertising streams, it possibly one of the best Adsense Ad managers around. It is easy to install and fairly easy to use. You really do need to read the instructions carefully however.

If you have ad units on your site then this blog plugin should make life a lot easier. The easier it is to manage your ad the easier it will be to increase your blogging income.

Whether you upgrade a plugin, theme or version of blog software such as the recent WordPress 2.6 upgrade, you should check your blog plugins for any issues.

The recent upgrade of WordPress has resulted in a number of plugins requiring upgrades as well. After upgrading the plugin, it has been noted that some plugins require reconfiguring.

Joost from Yoast.com has reported that several of his plugins, namely Google Analytics Plugin, Robots Meta Plugin and RSS Footer plugin have been updated. However there are still some issues as the upgrade to WordPress 2.6 seems to reset all the settings for these plugins.

As with all upgrades or updates, it is wise to check all parts of your blog to ensure that things are still operating smoothly.  Plugins can cause havoc with a blog if there are compatibility issues. In this case the only cause for concern is the information within your settings.

Failing to check, and the RSS Footer plugin is a good example, could prove to be embarrassing. If you use the footer to promote products, offer free downloads or just link to special pages, unless you subscribe to your own posts you would never know they were missing (do you subscribe to your own posts as a check that everything is running smoothly?).

There are literally thousands of blog plugins available for WordPress and the temptation is often there to install one because it is ‘nice’. However every blog plugin you install adds just a little more to the load time of your blog.

For efficiency, you should only the plugins that you really need. That then raises the question, which blog plugins do you really need?

Talk to 100 bloggers and you will get 100 different answers. Blog plugins should be installed based on your needs. Their are two considerations - what is good for your reader and what is good for your blog. My top blog plugins include:

Akismet -  Spam is always a problem. At least with Akismet you have some help

All In One SEO Pack - Almost every thing you need to help with your blogs SEO

Google XML Sitemaps - Create a sitemap and submit to the search engines

Related Posts - Help your readers find previous posts related to the current one

WP Super Cache - Creates a cached version of your blogs pages for faster loading.

There are many others that could be considered essential, some like the automatic upgrade blog plugin are useful for upgrades but otherwise take up unnecessary space.

What blog plugins would you include in your ‘must have’ list and why?

If you have trouble developing internal links on your blog then you can use of many different blog plugins to do the job for you.

One of the better plugins is the WordPress Related Posts plugin. This plugin adds a short list of older posts to the end of your current post. This is achieved by matching tags. Each post in the list is linked to the posts individual URL.

A second plugin that is a little difficult to follow at first is the Cross-Link Plugin for WordPress. With this plugin you define a set of words or phrases and matching URL’s. The plugin will then automatically insert links whenever it comes across one of those predefined words or phrases.

Unfortunately you can only have one URL for each word or phrase. If your targeted phrase was “WordPress Blog Plugins”, then that phrase can only point to the one URL. Each URL selected can have as many words or phrases associated to it as you would want.

It has some limitations. With this plugin you cannot spread the ‘link juice’ to several different pages for the one keyword. However, if you are targeting only a handful of pages and using keywords specific to those pages then the plugin could be very useful. A handy blog plugin to add to the collection but don’t rely on it for your internal link strategies.

Blog plugins help to extend the functionality of your blog and for users of WordPress, the range of plugins is endless - or at least it seems that way.

The home for WordPress blog plugins is WordPress.org where you can find over 2000 plugins covering an extremely wide range of functions. If you are looking for a blog plugin to do a particular job then enter the function into the search window - you will often be surprised at the results.

The top five plugins at present are - in order of popularity:

1. All in One SEO Pack
2. Google XML Sitemaps
3. Akismet
4. WordPress.com Stats
5. NextGEN Gallery

All in One SEO Pack and Google XML Sitemaps have each been downloaded in excess of 300,000 times and are extremely popular.

As a plugin site it is obviously popular with over 4 million downloads. The site holds the official WordPress blog plugin database and is used by almost all WordPress users to update their current plugins. If you need a blog plugin - check out the official site first.

There seems to be a growing trend towards having more than one writer on a blog these days so a blog metrics plugins sounds ideal. It seems that groups are being established with the sole aim of writing across a dozen or more blogs, rotating between blogs on a daily basis. It would be nice if you could track each writer’s impact on each of the blogs.

With the Blog Metrics plugin you can do just that. To quote from Joost de Valk’s site:

“…it calculates how many track-backs you received on average per post, and does a better job of calculating comments. But that’s only a small part of what’s cool in it, the coolest part, is that it now generates stats per author as well!”

This blog metrics plugin is handy for determining how often each writer publishes a post, the average length of each post, the number of comments received on posts and the number of words per comment.

You may wonder about the number of words per comment, however this help to distinguish between posts that receive discussion type comments and those that receive ‘nice post’ type comments. Blog Metrics plugin is useless for blogs with only the one author as it is designed to track several writers.

If you have more than one contributor to your blog and you want to keep a track of their activities, the Blog Metrics plugin may be worth considering. It would certainly be worth a test.

If you use WordPress for your blog then you are going to find that you need to update your blog plugins fairly frequently. Rather than update them, it can often be a good opportunity to check out what is available and whether or not there are better plugins available to do the same job.

WordPress.org is the home of many of the blog plugins available, particularly for the latest version of WordPress. The only trouble I have with visiting this site is that I often come away with far more than I went looking for.

One of the blog plugins that caught my attention today was PodPress, which as the name suggests, is a plugin that provides a range of options for publishing your podcasts including download stats. It can even manage your video podcasts as well.

WPDigsby is a blog plugin that allows you to place a widget on your sidebar. Through the widget you can communicate with others using MSN and ICQ. There are other instant messenger services covered as well.

This one large repository of blog plugins (over 2200last count) so there will be a plugin there somewhere to do the job you want. Either that or at least an upgrade to what you are currently using.

If you use WordPress and have a presence on Facebook then you may like this little blog plugin - Facebook Dashboard Widget - that enables you to stay in touch with your Facebook friends.

The blog plugin is quick and easy to install running under WordPress 2.5 and utilizing the dashboards widgets feature, will add an RSS feed for each of your friends.

….this plugin will process your Friends status updates RSS feed and/or your Facebook notifications feed, and add a widget for each to your WordPress admin dashboard. So now you can keep up with whats going on in your friends lives from anywhere without needing to access Facebook!

Now there is no reason not to stay in touch with your Facebook friends - at least not if you install this blog plugin.

Have you updated to WordPress 2.5.1 yet. Are you a little nervous about going through the update process. Worry no more. Keith Dsouza has written a post on a blog plugin called WordPress Automatic Upgrade plugin.

As the name implies, this blog plugin will upgrade your WordPress installation to latest version almost automatically. I say almost as you do need to click through some of the processes. However it is as auto as you are ever going to get. In fact the whole process takes no more than five minutes.

The upgrade follows the recommendations for WordPress upgrades in that it:

1. Checks that everything is okay to upgrade
2. backs up your data files
3. disables plugins
4. puts the site ofline
5. uploads the upgrade files from WordPress
6. install the files
7. updates data files
8. enables plugins
9. puts your site back online

All this is done while you basically click okay at each step. You can put it on auto and the blog plugin will do many of these steps without you clicking ok. It certainly makes the upgrade process much smoother and less intimidating.

An interesting blog plugin came to my attention recently that enable the blogger to go into some of the WordPress functions and tweak them. Some of the features of this plugin include:

• Remove “nofollow” from comment author links
• Remove “nofollow” from comment body links
• Open external comment links in new windows
• Open external post links in new windows
• Show post excerpts (instead of full content) on archive pages
• Add “nofollow” to the “Register” and “Login” links

There are more features available listed on the download site. WordPress Tweaks blog plugin can be downloaded and quickly installed with little drama. One of the convenient things about a plugin like this is that it performs several jobs and may even enable you to remove two or three plugins that you have used in the past.

With the update of WordPress to 2.5.1 it may well be time to check each of your blog plugins for updates. While you are at it double check to see whether or not you really need that plugin.

Blog plugins are everywhere and just occasionally you come across one that can do the job of two plugins. One less blog plugin means your system will run just that touch faster.

You never know when your going to write a killer post that hits the front page of Digg. Can you imagine all that traffic? Is your server up to it, or your blog software for that matter? WP Super Cache is one of the best blog plugins for protecting your site from that super hit.

WP Super Cache does everything that WP Cache does but it goes that one step further and serves up static HTML files rather than loading the PHP scripts. PHP is memory and server load heavy so if your server is even slightly underpowered, a jump in traffic could cause server issues winding up with your site being suspended for a short period of time.

Loading static HTML files is not server friendly, it is also browser friendly. Pages load much faster, particularly those with graphics. A faster page load creates a much smoother experience for your visitors, this is particularly handy if your page is a little sluggish.

If you are expecting a huge flood of traffic, you can go in and use the ‘lock down’ option which will force all page views to come from the cache and not from running the PHP script.

Whilst WP Super Cache is one of those blog plugins that helps to keep your blog running smoothly, nothing beats having a good reliable web host to start with. This plugin will not prevent a problem if you are using a slow ill-equiped host to manage your web site.

Blog plugins are one of those ‘cannot live with - cannot live without’ things that occasionally irritate us.  Don’t get me wrong, plugins do a great job at adding that extra dimension to your blog. They are also a great aid to reducing your workload - well sometimes anyway.

The problem is, unless you check them every day they have this habit of getting out of control. You check your blog plugin option from the dashboard and it seems like every second one needs an update. So you go through all the updates. A week later, here we go again.

I have found one solution. Go through each of the blog plugins that you have activated and really think about whether or not you need it. I would also do a search on the specific plugin to see if there are any others out there that can do the same job. Better yet, there are some blog plugins available that can do multiple jobs, particularly in the SEO area.

Once you have sorted out what can stay and what can go, delete the unnecessary ones and learn to live without them. As a side benefit you will find that your blog loads a just a little faster.

As bloggers I think at times we become to ‘plugin happy’. A new blog plugin becomes available and the first thing we do is download it and give it a try. Often it is a plugin that we have done without in the past - and if that is the case, we can do without it in the future.

Before installing a blog plugin, or keeping what you have now. Ask yourself these questions:

1. Does it improve my readers viewing experience
2. Does it improve my readers ability to communicate
3. Does it have any SEO value
4. Does it have an blog protection value (spam)
5. Does it help me create a better post

If you answer no to all those questions, then deactivate the blog plugin. If you answer yes to any of those questions then ask one more - is it being duplicated with another plugin?

Blog plugins can be a great aid - they can also be a pain in the ……..

If you write good content and find that when publishing your post could go into more than one category, what do you do? Do you tick each of the relevant categories boxes? I am sure your readers would appreciate it if you did tick each of the relevant categories. You cannot second guess your reader. They may place this article in the WordPress tip category, or the blog plugins or perhaps even the blogging tips.

Unfortunately, when you tick more than one category box you run the risk of having your post placed in the duplicate content pile by search engines. As they crawl your pages they read each post in each category. Use two categories for your post and the spider reads it twice - hello - duplicate content.

There is a plugin available that puts a stop to the duplicate content issue. It works by placing a ‘noindex, follow’ into the robots meta tag for each of the offending pages. A simple cure for a potentially big problem.

Blog plugins like this are everywhere, they are just difficult to track down sometimes. This plugin is available from the SEO Logs along with all the information needed to download and install. You can check out other blog plugins from our wide range of articles and blogging tips.

WordPress is arguably the number one platform for bloggers in today’s Web 2.0 environment. Everywhere you look there are blog plugins that can do everything from changing your admin screen to administering comments to monetizing your blog - and everything in between. Not only are you faced with so many plugins, everywhere you look there is another WordPress tip about which blog plugin is best for your blog.

As a blogger it can be difficult to know where to start. Which blog plugin is right for me? Which WordPress tip should I follow? At the risk of being added to those questions, here a few tips to help you out.

Less is More: Start with the bare bones and build slowly. Don’t add every plugin that sounds good. Plugins actually slow down the load speed of your blog  so the fewer installed, the less drain on your blogs load time.

A Plugin Should Solve a Need: Plugins should really only be installed if they are either solving a problem (for example, a spam filter for spam comments) or fulfill a need (for example, improve your RSS feed).  I have come across blogs that have had both Askismet and Big Brother installed - and they wondered why they were having problems.

Plugins Should be Optimized: If you install a plugin then read the install files and the usage files. If there is a configuration option then ensure it is configured to do what you require. Some plugins will not work unless configured correctly.

Blog plugins are generally written to fulfill a need. At last count there were over 1500 plugins - possibly more. It is obvious you are not going to need all of them. You need to be selective with your choice of plugin. If it doesn’t do the job required, de-activate it and delete it and find a plugin that will do the job.

I quite like the concept of writing posts in the form of a series, either sequentially over several days or by releasing each edition at a set time, for example weekly. The concept of posting a topic as a serial is not new and can be a great tactic to entice your visitors back. Of course the content of the series needs to be such that it lends itself to serial release and is written well enough to encourage return visits. This WordPress plugin makes the process of series writing so much easier.

The WordPress plugin is In Series from Rem State and to quote their blurb:

[source]In Series is a plugin that lets you write series of posts in WordPress, without having to deal with the hassle of manually writing up tables of contents or “next” and “previous” links in each post. It adds a new set of controls to the post editing screen, allowing you to add the post to a series (new or existing), re-order the post within a series it’s already in, or remove the post from a series entirely

When writing a series using this WordPress plugin you can smoothly connect all the parts with relevant links. This of course is a very useful SEO strategy for internal link building.

If you like the idea of writing posts as a series then this WordPress plugin is for you. It is easy to install, easy to use, and makes the life of a content writer so much easier.