• Askimet – Prevent comment spam. If you want to leave your blog comments section open to posters to comment on them without having to have your visitors register thus increasing your odds that you will actually get comments, this plugin is for you. But, leaving your blog open to comments without registering can leavesyou open to that dreaded automated advertising spam – which is why this plugin is for you.  “When a new comment, trackback, or pingback comes to your site it is submitted to the Akismet web service which runs hundreds of tests on the comment and returns a thumbs up or thumbs down.”

Speed Up Your Blog Plugin:

• WP Super Cache – Caches your site and serves html version to your users in order to speed it up and prevent your site from crashing if you happen to get lots of traffic.

Manage 301 and 404 Redirects on Your Business Blog:

• Redirection – easily manager your 404 and 301 redirects on your blog, useful if you are moving pages around, changing your website to a new URL, or myriad of other situations that either affect your users or search engines from finding your moved content.

XML Sitemap Plugin:

• Google (XML) Sitemaps Generator for WordPress – This can’t do without WordPress plugin generates a XML-Sitemap compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog. Ssupported by Ask.com, Google, YAHOO and MSN Search/Bing allows you to alert the search engines of all the pages in your website to help them find all your pages in consideration of indexing them.

SEO – Search Engine Optimization Plugin:

• All in One SEO – Optimize your blog for search engines. Great for beginning bloggers who can let it run automatically out-of-the-box, to advanced users who can customize each individual post for search engine optimization from canonical URLs to title and meta tags including helping to prevent duplicate content pages.

Related Posts Plugin:

• Yet Another Related Posts Plugin – presents a list of related posts or pages related to the current post you are publishing. Helps your users find relevant posts and content on your blog in order to keep them on your website.

Database Backup Plugin:

• WordPress Database Backup – automatically create backups of your wordpress tables (your posts for example) in case of emergency for easy restoring. Set it up to email you the backups, download directly, or save on your server

Forms Plugin:

• Cforms II – allows you to easily put forms on your website, such as contact us forms where users can submit information to you. Completely customizable to form fields that you desire.

Social Media Sharing Plugin:

• Add To Any – you’ve probably seen this on many blogs. Allows you to easily setup a sharing button, so your readers can share your posts on many social media sites such as Digg, Facebook, Delicious, Twitter, Google, Yahoo, etc. Customize your list of sites as well.

Please share your favorite WordPress Plugins for Business Blogs in the comments section below.

No related posts.

Technorati, the leading blog search engine, recently completed their 2008 State of the Blogosphere report which has been released annually since 2004 reporting on their analysis on the trends of blogging.

 The 2008 report consists of the who, the what, and the how of blogging; blogging for profit; and the brands entering the blogosphere.

In The How of Blogging section of their 2008 State of the Blogosphere they nicely break down what the top bloggers are doing compared to their blogging counterparts based on Technorati indexing data.

Audience Building Strategies – listing, commenting, linking, and tagging.

“Top audience-building strategies include: listing their blog on Technorati and Google, commenting or linking to other blogs, and tagging blog posts so that they are more easily searchable. Active bloggers have learned a variety of techniques for attracting visitors to their blog, conducting an average of five different activities to attract visitors. 28% do at least seven activities.

Posting -The top blogs post daily and post multiple times per day.

“Technorati Top 100 bloggers are twice as likely to post ten or more time daily compared to the next 500, and 14 times as likely than the next 5000. Looking again at Technorati’s tracking data shows how often the Top 100 bloggers post each day compared to the next 500 and the next 5000. The Technorati Top 100 are prolific, with 43% posting ten times per day or more often. Only 8% post once a day or less frequently, compared to 13% of the next 500 bloggers, and 22% of the next 5000 bloggers.”

Linking Strategy – The top blogs consistently link from their website to other blogs.

“Bloggers are also adept at linking to and from other sites – they have a median of 29 links from their blog to other web sites (with a mean of 3400), and a median of 30 links from other web sites to their blog (with a mean of 4800).”

Reader Loyalty – The top blogs actively pursue ways to create reader loyalty.

“To build loyalty with readers, bloggers create events for their readership. In order to retain visitors to their blogs, sophisticated bloggers are creating readership events.”

In Conclusion – Should you adopt ALL of these blogging strategies?

Although these may sound like good ideas or no-brainers, are these strategies the right choice for your blog? Technorati has an obviously large user base, but at the same time they are also a “technically advanced” audience.  The average consumer, be it B2B or B2C doesn’t visit their site or possibly even know who they are.

Does your audience need 5 posts per day, or will it annoy them enough that they delete you from their RSS feed or stop reading your blog. Is your blog’s goal to convert visitors to purchase your products, think of you as a thought leader, or to increase page views so that you can sell more ads or increase your advertising rates? These are three totally different strategies that require strategic planning that comes from different angles. As with anything in internet marketing optimization, no one strategy is right for every website or blog so you will definitely need to test to uncover what works best for your readers and your blogs goals with the least amount of compromise.

For the business bloggers out there reading this, check out LinkedIn’s corporate blog editor Mario Sundar’s post on 7 Habits of Highly Effective Business Bloggers that are takeaways and a slideshow from a presentation he did with Lionel Menchaca from Dell, Nicki Dugan from Yahoo!, Carolyn Abram from Facebook and Thomas Hoehn from Kodak. This will help get your mind on the right track.

No related posts.