50 Awesome WordPress Plugins To Help Automate & Monetize Your Blogs!

Posted by Lisa Preston

October 13, 2008

These plugins are great for helping you automate and monetize your blogs! As far as I know, all these plugins are compatible with the latest WordPress version. Please feel free to suggest other great plugins below.

If you find these useful, help spread the word and STUMBLE THIS POST!

Landing Sites - When visitors is referred to your site from a search engine, it shows them related posts to their search on your blog.
http://theundersigned.net/2006/06/landing-sites-11

Maintenance Mode Plugin - Adds a splash page to your blog that lets visitors know your blog is down for maintenance. Logged in administrators get full access to the blog including the front-end.
http://sw-guide.de/wordpress/plugins/maintenance-mode/

Theme Test Drive - allows you to safely test drive any theme on your blog as an administrator, while visitors continue to see the default one.
http://www.prelovac.com/vladimir/wordpress-plugins/theme-test-drive

Comment Relish - Sends a thank you e-mail to your first time commentators.
http://www.justinshattuck.com/2007/03/19/comment-relish-wordpress-plugin

Digital Fingerprint — useful for detecting content theft.
http://www.maxpower.ca/wordpress-plugin-digital-fingerprint-detecting-content-theft/2006/09/25/#intro

Subscribe To Comments - Allows readers to recieve notifications of new comments that are posted to an entry.
http://txfx.net/code/wordpress/subscribe-to-comments/

MyAvatars - shows MyBlogLog’s avatars in your comments
http://www.napolux.com/2006/12/14/myavatars-a-wordpress-plugin-for-mybloglog/

Brian’s Threaded Comments - adds a ‘Reply to this comment’ link to every comment. Makes it easy for people to reply to comments and discuss better.
http://meidell.dk/archives/2006/12/19/brians-threaded-comments-159/

Dofollow - lets you remove the nofollow attribute from your comments.
http://www.semiologic.com/software/wp-fixes/dofollow/

WP-Contact Form with Spam Protection - creates a contact form on your blog, through which your readers can contact you easily.
http://www.douglaskarr.com/projects/wp-contactform/

Google XML Sitemaps Generator - creates a sitemap of all articles on your WordPress blog. Helps Google and other search engines index every article you write.
http://www.arnebrachhold.de/projects/wordpress-plugins/google-xml-sitemaps-generator/

All in One SEO Pack - Optimizes your Wordpress blog for Search Engines (Search Engine Optimization).
http://wp.uberdose.com/2007/03/24/all-in-one-seo-pack/

Enforce www. Preference - will help preserve your permalinks by enforcing your no-www or yes-www preference and will strip off index.php from the ends of URIs.
http://txfx.net/code/wordpress/enforce-www-preference/

Quick META Keywords - will automatically add META Keywords tags to every single post based on categories under which the article is categorized.
http://www.quickonlinetips.com/archives/quick-meta-keywords-wordpress-plugin/

Related Posts - Returns a list of the related entries based on active/passive keyword matches. Increase pageviews by providing targeted related content.
http://wasabi.pbwiki.com/Related%20Entries

Lightbox JS Plugin - used to overlay images on the current page into neat Javascript-powered overlay popups.
http://www.4mj.it/lightbox-js-v20-wordpress/

WordPress Mobile Edition - shows an interface designed for a mobile device when visitors come to your site on a mobile device.
http://alexking.org/projects/wordpress/readme?project=wordpress-mobile-edition

Popularity Contest - keeps a count of your post, category and archive views, comments, trackbacks, etc. and uses them to determine which of your posts are most popular.
http://alexking.org/projects/wordpress/readme?project=popularity-contest

Clean Archives - designed to display your archive listings in a clean and uniform fashion. It lists the Month / Year, the day of the month the article was published, the title of the article, and the number of comments that have been made on each article.
http://sporadicnonsense.com/index.php/2005/04/28/clean-archives-plug-in/

KB Advanced RSS Widget - a wordpress widget that gives you complete control over how RSS feeds are parsed for your sidebar.
http://adambrown.info/b/widgets/category/kb-advanced-rss/

Adhesive - lets you make the posts “sticky”, such that the posts will remain at the top of the page.
http://wp-plugins.net/plugin/Adhesive/#plugin_63

Permalinks Migration Plugin - safely change your permalink structure without breaking the old links to your website or affecting your search engine rankings.
http://www.deanlee.cn/wordpress/permalinks-migration-plugin/

Share This - lets your visitors to add your post to various social bookmarking sites, or send a link via e-mail to a friend.
http://sharethis.com/publisher?type=wpplugin

Digg this - detects incoming links from Digg.com to your wordpress post and automatically display a link back to the digg post, for people to digg your story.
http://www.aviransplace.com/index.php/digg-this-wordpress-plugin/http://www.aviransplace.com/index.php/digg-this-wordpress-plugin/

WP-Notable - displays a series of icons below each post allowing your readers to easily submit you to many different social bookmarking and networking sites.
http://www.calevans.com/view.php/page/notable

WP-Email - Allows people to recommend/send your WordPress blog’s post/page to a friend.
http://www.lesterchan.net/wordpress/readme/wp-email.html

WP-PostRatings - Adds an AJAX rating system for your WordPress blog’s post/page.
http://www.lesterchan.net/wordpress/readme/wp-postratings.html

EasyTube - allows you to easily embed YouTube and Google Videos using one simple tag.
http://www.ejump.co.uk/wordpress/easytube-plugin-for-wordpress/

Twitter Updater - automatically sends a Twitter status update to your Twitter account when you create, publish, or edit your WordPress post.
http://blog.victoriac.net/blog/twitter-updater

WordPress Database Backup - On-demand backup of your WordPress database. Back up your blog today.
http://www.ilfilosofo.com/blog/wp-db-backup

WP-Supercache - A modification of WP-Cache that produces static html files.
http://ocaoimh.ie/wp-super-cache/

Batch Categories - Easily manage the mass categorization of posts that match various criteria. Power edit your categories.
http://robm.me.uk/projects/plugins/wordpress/batch-categories/

PodPress - adds lots of features designed to make WordPress the ideal platform for hosting a podcast.
http://www.mightyseek.com/podpress/

TinyMCE Advanced - adds 16 plugins to TinyMCE, the WordPress wysiwyg editor. Adds over 40 new buttons to the toolbar, which is now two rows plus one hidden row.
http://www.laptoptips.ca/projects/tinymce-advanced/

Exec-PHP - allows php tags inside the content or excerpt of your posts and pages to be executed just as in usual PHP files.
http://bluesome.net/post/2005/08/18/50/

Photo Dropper - lets you add free photos (Flickr/Creative Commons) to your blog posts without leaving Wordpress.
http://www.photodropper.com/

Wordpress Reporter - allows you to easily view your Google Analytics and Feedburner reports in your WordPress administration area.
http://tantannoodles.com/toolkit/wordpress-reports/

WordPress.com Stats - Tracks views, post/page views, referrers, and clicks. Requires a WordPress.com API key.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/stats/

Ad Rotator - Rotates Ads randomly from a specified text file.
http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/wordpress-plugin-adrotator-rotate-your-ads-including-adsense-dynamically/2/

AdSense-Deluxe - is a WordPress plugin offering advanced options for managing the automatic insertion of Google AdSense or Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN) ads to your WordPress posts.
http://www.acmetech.com/blog/adsense-deluxe/

Buy Me a Beer - allows your readers to donate money to you via PayPal on pretext of buying a beer.
http://www.blogclout.com/blog/goodies/buy-me-a-beer-paypal-donation-plugin/

Wordpress BankRoll - offers to help you cut out the middleman by allowing advertisers to buy reviews directly on your blog.
http://www.wpbankroll.com/

Global Translator - Translate your blog into multiple languages in a search engine friendly way.
http://www.nothing2hide.net/blog/wp-plugins/wordpress-global-translator-plugin/

Feedburner Feedsmith - Forwards all feed traffic to Feedburner while creating a randomized feed for Feedburner to pull from.
http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/help/wordpress_quickstart/

Simple Feed Copyright - adds a simple copyright notice to full text wordpress feeds.
http://www.quickonlinetips.com/archives/simple-feed-copyright-wordpress-plugin/

RSS Signature - allow the addition of a custom tagline, signature or copyright message to the wordpress generated rss feeds.
http://www.smackfoo.com/plugins/sig2feed/

Democracy - adds AJAX polling functionality to your WordPress blog.
http://blog.jalenack.com/archives/democracy/

No Self Ping - keeps your site from pinging itself.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/no-self-ping/

Draft Notifier - sends a notification email to your blog’s admin address when a post is written by a Contributor or when such a post is edited.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/draft-notifier/

Cap Comments - turns off comments when a post achieves a pre-set comment count.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/cap-comments