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5 WordPress Plugins that Increase Traffic to Your Blog

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If you want to grow your blog’s audience and you use WordPress.org as your blogging application, then you need to try the five WordPress plugins listed below.  They’re easy to use, free, and can have a significant impact on the number of visitors to your blog.

1. Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP)

The more great content people are exposed to on your blog, the higher the chances are that they’ll find something they like causing them to return to your blog again, share your content with their own online connections, and ultimately, drive additional traffic to your blog.  YAARP is a great plugin for automatically including a list of related posts at the end of each of your blog posts.  The Link Within widget is another alternative.

2. Tweetmeme Retweet Button

The Retweet button is a must-have for all bloggers who want to increase traffic by making it easy for readers to share your blog posts with their own followers on Twitter.  You can add the Retweet button to your blog as a widget or as a WordPress plugin.  The TwitThis plugin offers similar functionality.

3. Share This

There are a number of WordPress plugins that make it easy for people to share links to your blog posts through their social web profiles like Facebook, LinkedIn, Digg, StumbleUpon, Twitter, and more.  Share This is a popular choice.  Others include Sociable and Add to Any.

4. All-in-One SEO Pack

You can use the All-in-One SEO Pack plugin to give your blog posts an SEO boost and drive more traffic from keyword searches on popular search engines like Google.

5. Subscribe to Comments

When you allow people to subscribe to the comments published on a blog post, they receive an email when new comments are added.  This drives them back to your blog again to keep up with the conversation and continue participating.  The Subscribe to Comments plugin makes it easy for WordPress.org users to allow readers to stay involved in ongoing conversations on their blogs.

What are your favorite WordPress plugins for boosting traffic to your blog?  Leave a comment and share your thoughts!

Image: stock.xchng

Free Forum Scripts that Work with WordPress

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Want to add a forum to your WordPress blog or website?  Don’t want to spend a lot of money?  Don’t need a lot of highly advanced features?

If you answered yes to these questions, then this is the post for you!

There are a lot of forum scripts and tools to create forums out there.  Some are free and some have expensive price tags attached to them.  Some offer a simple design and simple functionality while others are jam-packed with every feature you can imagine!  Fortunately, there is a forum tool for everyone, and today, I’m going to point you in the direction of three great free options for WordPress users.

1. phpBB

There are tons of forums online that operate on phpBB.  It’s free and even comes with a variety of design choices, so your forum doesn’t have to look exactly the same as all the others online.  You can see phpBB in action here and here.

2. Simple-Press

Simple-Press is a WordPress plugin, so it’s extremely easy to set it up to work with your blog.  It’s not as feature-rich as other forum tools, but it gets the job done.  You can see it in action here and here.

3. bbPress

bbPress was created by Automattic, the company behind WordPress, so it makes sense that it integrates seamlessly with WordPress blogs and sites.  It doesn’t offer all of the functionality that you’ll find in forum tools like vBulletin (see below), but it gets the job done for simple forums.  You can see it in action here and here.

And if you’re willing to spend some money on your forum, then I’d recommend checking out vBulletin, which you can see in action here or here.

Do you manage a forum?  What forum script or tool do you use and why?  Leave a comment and share your thoughts!

5 Cool Retail and Ecommerce Premium WordPress Themes

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Do you sell products online and need a cool WordPress theme to make your online store easy-to-use, easy-to-manage, and visually appealing?

Fortunately, there are many free and premium WordPress themes that can help you create a great online storefront, complete with a shopping cart and all the features you and your customers need!

Below are five well-coded premium WordPress ecommerce-related themes from Templatic that might work for you!  One of the things I like about Templatic themes is when you buy one, you purchase a lifetime subscription for a price that is competitive with many other popular premium themes.  However, many other premium theme pricetags only include 1-year of upgrades and support. You can also create a free demo account to test drive Templatic accounts before you purchase one.

1. Store Front

Five color choices and a clean look.

Get the details or View the demo

2. Productz

Six color choices and a less “ecommercey” design for the home page.

Get the details or View the demo

3. Emporium

Four color choices and a design that’s perfect for fashion, jewelry, fragrances, and more.

Get the details or View the demo

4. e-Commerce

Five colors and a very simple look.

Get the details or View the demo

5. Store

Four color choice and a very unique design for an online store!

Get the details or View the demo

Do you use WordPress to power your online store?  What theme do you use?  Leave a comment and share your thoughts!

How to Truncate WordPress Posts without Creating a Partial RSS Feed – Post Teaser WordPress Plugin

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I own a blog for women working in the field of business (Women on Business) that is written by a team of contributors with varying levels of ability when it comes to WordPress.  I wanted to truncate the posts on the home page to clean the design up a bit, but I didn’t want to ask each writer to insert the HTML More tag in their posts.  Also, the contributors don’t always include images with their posts, so I needed a solution that ignored the image component entirely.

At the same time, I wanted a solution that ensured my blog’s full feed would not switch to a partial feed.  I don’t have time to redesign the site right now, so I needed a quick and easy solution.

I thought about it for a while before I finally remembered the Post Teaser WordPress plugin!

The Post Teaser WordPress plugin is a great solution for WordPress.org users who need a quick, easy, and free solution to automatically truncate blog posts on their blog home pages without cutting the RSS feed to a partial feed.  Even if you don’t care about whether or not your feed is full or partial, the Post Teaser WordPress plugin is still a handy thing.

It takes seconds to install and set up the Post Teaser WordPress plugin.  You can determine where your posts are truncated, and the plugin automatically truncates all posts at that location (or close to it if necessary for better formatting).  Also, you can customize the link message that visitors click on to read the full post.  It’s a simple plugin that can help streamline a cluttered home page or a blog that is written by multiple authors with varied styles.  In other words, the plugin helps entries appear more uniform.

So if you’re not ready to redesign your blog and want to control where all of your posts are truncated without affecting your blog’s feed, give Post Teaser a try.

Note that the WordPress Plugin Directory lists the plugin as only being compatible through WordPress 2.8, but I use it with WordPress 2.9.2 without any problems.

Do you truncate posts on your blog’s home page?  Do you use a plugin?  Do you truncate posts manually?  Or does your theme truncate posts for you?  Leave a comment and share your experiences and preferences!

Image: stock.xchng

Bet You Didn’t Know that Site’s Built on WordPress – Tufts University

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This is the first post in an ongoing series I’m writing for Performancing.com called, “Bet You Didn’t Know that Site’s Built on WordPress” where I’ll highlight businesses and brands using WordPress that might surprise and inspire you.  If you thought WordPress and blogging was just for hobbyists and personal blogs, you’re wrong.

Today’s installment of “Bet You Didn’t Know that Site’s Built on WordPress” features Tufts University, one of the leading higher education institutions in the United States and located just outside of Boston, Massachusetts.

Each of the student and administrator blogs sponsored by the Tufts University Office of Undergraduate Admissions runs on WordPress.org.

The main Tufts Blogs site offers links to recent posts from each Tufts University blog as well as a list of all the blogs in the left sidebar.

The Inside the Dean’s Office blog offers insight from Dean Coffin, which is written in his own voice and with a touch of humor that makes it far more interesting than you might expect from the dean of a leading university, as you can see from the post shown below.  You can read his post here if you can’t see it in the image below.

The Tufts Engineer blog is pictured below.  Each Tufts blog is simple in design with the same background and the only change being in the post content and the About page link.  I’d actually like to see better branding at the top of each blog to better identify what each blog is about that makes it unique and interesting.  The consistency in the background is a good idea, but I’d like to see uniquely branded headers or some other way to better identify what visitors can expect to find in each specific blog.

Despite the need for better individual blog branding, Tufts University shows from its blogs and its use of WordPress that is is keeping up with the essential technology and social media conversations that students, donors, businesses, and communities expect to see.  Furthermore, the prominent links to Tufts University Facebook, Twitter and YouTube profiles are done well to maximize community and relationship building opportunities.

What do you think of Tufts University’s use of WordPress.org and blogging?

WordPress Plugins to Reduce Load-time

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This is a guest entry by Selena from esvienne.com and searchenginejournal.com.

As our blogs grow and get more traffic, more “fun” things tend to get added on. We add a sidebar image here, a tracking script there, Adsense on top and below, etc. All these things eventually start becoming too much, and slows down your blog- especially when we start forgetting to delete old and outdated plugins as time goes on.

I don’t have to tell you this, but a slow loading blog makes for a poor user experience – and you do not want to lose those visitors you worked so hard for. Keep in mind that visitors subjected to poor site performance rarely complain – they just leave and don’t come back. Nobody is going to take the trouble to find your contact form and say, “hey buddy- your site is loading slow. I will be back here in 1 week to check to see if it’s fixed.” [Read more…] about WordPress Plugins to Reduce Load-time

WordPress 3.0 – Have You Upgraded Yet?

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The first stable release of WordPress 3.0 launched on June 17th.  Have you upgraded yet?

The new version of WordPress offers some cool new features like a new default theme (Twenty Ten), which has been getting a lot of buzz.  Also, the new multi-user functionality makes it easy for anyone to run multiple WordPress blogs from a single WordPress installation.  I’m sure I’m not the only WordPress user who is happy about that!

So there is no doubt that the new WordPress 3.0 is cool, but are you the type of blogger who jumps in as soon as a new version of WordPress is launched?  Or do you prefer to wait it out a few weeks (or longer) to see what kinds of bugs people experience before you upgrade?

Since upgrading became so easy when WordPress 2.7 came on the scene, even the least tech-savvy blogger can upgrade to the latest and greatest version of WordPress with a couple of clicks of the mouse (although you really should take the time to backup your WordPress database first — just in case).

So which are you — a Nervous Nellie or a Fearless Freddy?  Take the poll below and leave a comment to share your thoughts on upgrading to WordPress 3.0.


How Gravity Forms Can Rock Your WordPress Blog

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love musicI’m in love with a WordPress plugin. Let me stop right now and tell you that I’m not a WordPress plugin floozy. I don’t dive in and try every WordPress plugin I hear about, and I definitely don’t jump on the bandwagon and pay for WordPress plugins. Nope. I’m usually late to the WordPress plugin party and try plugins after other people test them out and share their thoughts about them.

So why am I telling you this?

It’s simple. I wanted to make the point that it takes a lot for me to get really excited about a WordPress plugin. However, Gravity Forms (*) has achieved what few other WordPress plugins can in my mind. It got me really psyched and I want to create more forms with it!

A single-user license of Gravity Forms is just $39, but you definitely get $40-worth out of this WordPress plugin. You can create highly customizable forms using a super easy click-and-drag tools. You can also set up custom notifications, easily add forms to any page on your blog, and more. It’s so cool! There is even a support forum at GravityHelp.com.

With all that said, I have yet to tell you about the coolest part of this plugin. If accept guest posts or other types of content on your blog, then you know it can be a hassle to reformat submissions, upload them, and publish them on your blog. It sounds like it would only take a few seconds to publish a guest post, but depending on the format the guest blogger sends it to you in, it could be a big time investment. Gravity Forms takes that headache away by allowing people to submit posts quickly an easily.

As an example, check out two pages on my blog for women in business. The first link takes you to a page where I used Gravity Forms to set up a guest post submission form and the second takes you to a page where I set up a press release submission form. Both took me just a few minutes to set up, and now the process of receiving content submissions is so easy! I get an email when new content is submitted, so I simply have to log into my WordPress account to approve it. If you want, you can set up submissions to publish automatically, so you don’t have to approve them before they publish. It’s up to you.

If you’re still not convinced that this is one cool WordPress plugin, watch the video tour and try the demo on the Gravity Forms website to see how it works.

So that’s why I’m in love with the Gravity Forms WordPress plugins. It makes my life easier, saves me time, and it’s easy to use.

Have you tried Gravity Forms? Is there a WordPress plugin that rocks your blog? Leave a comment and share your can’t live without WordPress plugins!

Image: stock.xchng

(*) Big mean affiliate link!