18 Handy Plugins for Web Entrepreneurs

Welcome back!

You probably know that there are mountains of Wordpress plugins out there with new ones coming out every day!

Here are 18 WP plugins that are either totally essential or will make your life a lot easier as a web entrepreneur.

Making your blog a popular place to go will always be about ‘quality content’ but this some of these will also give your blog a helping hand.

Advertising Manager
Advertising Manager manages your Google Adsense and other ad network accounts, and allows you to easily place the ads either within your Wordpress blog posts, or within your Wordpress theme.

All in One SEO Pack
Automatic Search Engine Optimization (SEO) out of the box for your wordpress blog

Article Directory Plugin
Turn your blog into an article directory.

aLinks
Tag your key phrase and embedded your ClickBank, eBay,
Amazon, CJ, Linkshare. Turns commonly use phrases into
links to Amazon, eBay, Clickbank and more

CommentLUV
This plugin will visit the site of the comment author while they type their comment and retrieve a selection of their last blog posts, tweets or digg submissions

e-Commerce lite
Integrated shopping cart for selling products or services.

Google Sitemap Generator
The Google Site Map site map helps the search engine to
spider your site.

LinkHarvest:
This plugin will go through all of your posts and pages and compile a list of all external links. Then it will create a linkroll for you based on your actual linking activity.

Podpress
A podcasters dream plugin with long list of features.

WP Automatic upgrade
Easily update your version of Wordpress from the admin area.

MaxBlogPress
Prevents your blog from over pinging and getting tagged as a ping spammer.

WP Database Backup
WordPress database backup creates backups of your core WordPress tables as well as other tables of your choice in the same database.

Wordpress Security
Avert successful hacker attacks and enhance security with this easy-to-use plugin.

404 SEO Plugin
This plugin will give you a customized‘Page Not Found(404)’ error message and automatically display links to relevant pages on your site, based on the words in the URL that was not found.

Tweetmeme
Similar to the Digg “vote” buttons, this Tweetmeme plugin creates a button that lets readers easily retweet your blog posts.

TwitterTools
This plugin creates an integration between your WordPress blog and your Twitter account. It allows you to pull your tweets into your blog (as posts and digests) and create new tweets on blog posts and from within WordPress.

Premium Plugins:

Datafeedr
Powerful Affiliate Stores using WP, wide range of affiliate networks

WPReviewSite
WP Review Site turns WordPress into a powerful review site engine, allowing you to easily create niche review sites on virtually anything

Also, I’d like to point you to a free service for fixing plugins. Upgrading to a newer version of Wordpress can be a frustrating experience when some plugins suddenly don’t work and the author doesn’t update them. Well, Maxblogpress are offering a solution to this problem:

http://www.maxblogpress.com/blog/219/maxblogpress-revived/

Check out the Wordpress Plugins Guide for more than 150 Great Wordpress Plugins! >>> The Wordpress Plugins Guide

Wordpress Installation

Installing wordpress on your own server is the way to go. This gives you more control to be able to add your own themes and plugins and own your own content. Some online blog services can shut you down without any reason apart from 1 complaint. Imagine that? losing however many months or years of content at the press of a button!!

If you have C panel with your web host you can usually install via fantastico clicking one or two buttons. This is fine but sometimes manual installation gives you a better understanding of the process..and it isn’t that difficult to do.

Step 1.
Go to wordpress.org and click ‘downloads’ from the horizontal menu and download the zip file. Extract this to your local folder.

For Initial Steps of setting up hosting and using winzip and ftp files please refer to these resources:

http://www.winzip.com
http://www.ftpplanet.com/ftpresources/basics.htm

Step 2.
Once uploaded, you’ll need to create a MySQL database. Find the MySQL in your host’s control panel.

Then create a new database:

· Fill out the name of the database
· Click to go back
· Create a user and password
· Again click to go back

Then select ‘all’ under Privileges and add user to the database.

Step 3.
Rename the wp-config-sample.php file to wp-config.php
And open in a text editor to fill out your database details

Step 4.
Upload the files to your server either onto the top root if you want the blog to be your main website or into a subfolder, usually named ‘blog’.

Or just drag the whole ‘wordpress’ folder to your root directory and rename it.

Step 5.
Run the install script by going to it in your browser.
* If you installed WordPress in the root directory, you should visit: http://yoursiteexample.com/wp-admin/install.php

* If you installed WordPress in its own subdirectory called blog, for example, you should visit: http://yoursiteexample.com/blog/wp-admin/install.php