Many webmasters assume that they have the best content in the world. But if you are not getting any feedback (or comments) from your visitors, you may be doing something wrong. Adding a thumbs up/down system to your WordPress site lets you figure out if your visitor are liking your posts and the types of topics you can cover to further get in their good graces. Here are 5 plugins that add thumbs up thumbs down functionality to WordPress:
ThumbsUp: lets your visitors rate posts or groups (videos, topics, images) on your site. You can create an unlimited number of voting groups. It comes with 3 different widgets.
GD Star Rating: adds an advanced rating system to your posts and comments. Provides support for cache plugins. It is available in multiple languages.
Likebot: a decentralized rating system for WordPress. It is easy to integrate into your site and does not require any registration or authentications.
Vote It Up: this plugin adds voting feature to your posts. Your visitors can vote or against your posts. You do have the option to enable guest-voting. [click to continue…]
Amazon Affiliate Program is one heck of a money maker for those promoting products from Amazon. Amazon has great conversion rates and can make you a decent amount in commissions if you promote the right products on your website (and get a decent amount of traffic to it). The good news is WordPress is a very Amazon friendly platform. There are plenty of plugins you can use to build a killer Amazon portal using this platform. Here are 4 Amazon associates plugins that stand out:
WordPress Amazon Associate: It makes it easy to add Amazon products to your WordPress website. It also adds Amazon Affiliate tags to all your links in your posts. That means even if you have been linking to Amazon without your tracking code in the past, you can tag all your Amazon links using this plugin. It works for international Amazon sites too. Amazon Product Preview is supported as well.
EasyAzon: perfect for those of you who rely mostly on Amazon products to keep your publishing or affiliate business afloat. It makes adding Amazon affiliate links to your site a piece of cake.
Spam is one of the biggest issues to deal with for all webmasters. Spam can not only be annoying but also dangerous at times. Most new bloggers may not have to worry about spam as long as they have Akismet or similar solutions installed. But as soon as your website becomes popular, new challenges arise. These 10 anti-spam plugins for WordPress can help you tackle those issues:
Akismet: a great plugin for beginners and advanced users. In fact, you should not go live with your blog without having this plugin (or an alternative) turned on.
WP-reCAPTCHA: CAPTCHA can’t stop all spam comments and registrations. At the same time, it can make life difficult for spammers who want to mess with your website.
AVH First Defense Against Spam: checks comments before they are posted to your website and blocks spammers before they can do any harm.
Fast Secure Contact Form: so you thought your e-mail account would be safe against spammers when you used a contact form plugin? That is simply not true. This plugin lets you protect your forms and contact page against spammers. [click to continue…]
There is nothing fun about spam. Lots of people have nothing better to do than spamming other people’s websites and e-mails. While certain spamming activities are illegal, some people still do them anyway. If you value your WordPress website and your loyal visitors, you want to take advantage of these 5 anti-spam plugins to keep spammers at bay:
Akismet: checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam and catches them. It won’t catch everything, but it can get rid of a lot of those nasty comments. On the down side, this is not free for most of us anymore.
reCAPTCHA: a wonderful solution that can make life more difficult for spammers. reCAPTCHA will force your visitors to input the right words in order to post their comments to your website. It may reduce the number of comments you get slightly, but it can reduce your spam count too. [click to continue…]
When you get started with your own WordPress website, chances are you do not have that many visitors from the get go. You may not even have enough content for your visitors to put enough load on your database and server. Your WordPress website will start performing worse when you get a ton of traffic or don’t have enough hosting resources. It’s easy to throw money at this problem. But before you do that, you want make sure you have installed a couple of cache plugins to help you manage your website’s load. Top WordPress cache plugins can improve your website’s performance and reduce the load on your server and database.
While there are plenty of cache plugins around, here are 10 plugins that stand out:
W3 Total Cache: one of the most powerful cache plugins around. It has done wonders for our network. Increases performance, reduces load, and can save you some bandwidth too. It is compatible with shared hosting, virtual private / dedicated servers and clusters.
HyperCache: a legendary WordPress cache that yields amazing results for those of you who have your websites running a budget hosting plan. Depending on your environment, it can even perform better than the first item in this list.
WP Super Cache: the plugin most WordPress webmasters graduate to from WP Cache. It’s much more effective and works great if you combine it with some other plugins in this list.
Plugin Output Cache: works with other plugins to cache portions of their output for efficiency. Very useful if you use popular or random posts plugins on your website.
Quick Cache: Quick Cache caches every page, post, category, and link on your website and reduce load on your server when those elements are requested. A nice alternative to WP Super Cache, especially if your web host is not too WP Super-Cache friendly.
LinkedIn is one of the most underrated social networks around these days. While Facebook and Twitter get all the attention, LinkedIn keeps growing and adding exciting new features. If you are a webmaster with valuable content to offer to the pros, there is no reason you should not be involved on LinkedIn. At the very list, you can encourage your visitors to submit your stories to their LinkedIn accounts. These 5 LinkedIn plugins for WordPress let you do that and more:
LinkedIn Share Button: a cool plugin that lets you add a LinkedIn button to your posts. It’s pretty flexible and enables your visitors to share your stories with their contacts with a click.
WP Greet Box: one of my favorite plugins, WP Greet Box lets you target your visitors based on their referring URL. So you can spoil your LinkedIn, Facebook, or Twitter clients (but not others).
Social Bookmarks: a pretty flexible social media plugin for WordPress that lets you add some of the top bookmarking sites to WordPress. That includes LinkedIn too.
Sociable: another one of my favorite social media plugins around. It has a very dynamic back-end and is very flexible. The buttons are attractive too. You can customize its look and feel if you know some CSS (many settings can be changed in the back-end). [click to continue…]
Are you looking for a decent WordPress calendar plugin to replace the default calendar in WordPress? Maybe you have an event site and want to give your visitors an easier way to keep up with your events. Whatever the case, there is a plugin for you out there. You can use calendar plugins to share information more effectively with your visitors, add an event calender to WordPress, and even let people bookmark your events.
If you need a killer calendar on your blog, here are 15 WordPress calendar plugins you should check out:
Calendar Press: adds an event calendar to WordPress. Google Maps, directions, a RSVP system are integrated in this plugin.
CGM Event Calendar: a sophisticated calendar for WordPress that lets you add classes, events, and all kinds of information to it. Makes it easy for your visitors to print your calendar too.
Event Calendar / Scheduler: a dynamic calendar which provides Ajax-based scheduling solution similar to Microsoft Outlook Calendar, Apple’s iCal or Google Calendar on your WordPress website. Unfortunately, not compatible with WPMU.
Dairise: OK. This is cheating as this is a theme and not a plugin. However, it’s one of the best event / calendar enhanced themes for WordPress. [click to continue…]
