Whether you wish to admit it or not plugins are the LIFEBLOOD of all of our blogs, if we did not have any plugins or widgets to make our blogs stand out then all of our blogs would look exactly the same.
Something I like to do a couple of times a year is to publish a list of the plugins that I use on this blog. I do this because I like to know what other people are using on their blogs so I assume my visitors are the same.
Maybe you will find a couple in this list that you had not heard of and might make your blogs even better.
Advertising
Ad Injection – A plugin that injects pretty much any ad code into your post, pages and widget areas. You can tweak things even further by restricting ads by IP address and age.
OIOpublisher Ad Manager (premium) – This is the advertising management plugin that I use to run ALL of my blogs. It costs $47 but it is well worth it as it makes life so much easier and you can use it on as many blogs as you wish.
Affiliate
GoCodes – Creates shortcut URLs using your domain name (example: http://makemoneylessons.com/go/package1/ which is helpful when you want to cloak affiliate links.
Blog General
NoFollow Free – A tiny plugin that turns the links in your comments dofollow, this will help attract more comments.
Weasel’s HTML Bios – This plugin helps me place HTML code into the author.
WP-PageNavi – Adds a nicer paging navigation to your blog.
WP PHP widget – A neat little plugin that lets me slip PHP code into a widget area without pulling my hair out!
Contextual Related Posts – Produces a list of related posts at the bottom of your post to tempt the reader to stay around a bit longer.
Comments
Akismet – The best way I know of combating spam bot comments!
Commentluv – Rewards your commentator by placing a link to their last blog posts at the bottom of their comments.
Growmap Anti Spambot Plugin – A tiny plugin that forces commentators to tick a box in order to comment, I use this with Akismet to really cut down on the spam comments.
Top Commentators Widget – Displays a list of your top commentators for the past hour/day/week/month/year and gives them an extra backlink.
Google Related
Google Analytics Popular Posts – A plugin that uses Google Analytic to determine a list of the popular posts on your blog.
Google Analyticator – Displays your Google Analytic stats on your admin dashboard.
Google XML Sitemaps – Creates a sitemap of your blog and helps search engines 9not just Google) find and index your pages quickly.
Pages
Fast Secure Contact Form – My contact form of choice, very customisable and it has CAPTCHA and Akismet support to slow down the bots from emailing you.
SRG Clean Archives – Creates a nice clean archives page, they say you can use it in the sidebar as well but I’ve been unable to make this work.
Social Media, RSS & Email
Tweet old post – Does it it says on the tin, it retweets your old posts on Twitter.
SocialBox (premium) – Displays a widget for your sidebar that shows your stats for Facebook Page, Twitter, Dribbble, Forrst, Digg, YouTube, Vimeo Channel and Feedburner feed subscriptions.
FeedBurner FeedSmith – A tiny plugin that grabs any attempt to access your blog feed and redirects it to your Feedburner feed.
PopUp Domination (premium) – a plugin that produces a popup to attract people to sign-up to your mailing list.
Speed
WP-Optimize – Keep your database clean, blitz spam comments and basically help keep your blog running smoothly with this neat plugin.
What plugins do you guys use for your blog(s)?