As you may be aware, when you have a conventional website, it is possible to find scripts that will provide a wide range of features. For example, you can find mini programs that enable people to send emails to you without revealing your email address. There are also dozens of applications that will help you create a website filled with all sorts of interesting functions. In a similar way, you can also find widgets or plugins that will help you create a more robust blog. When choosing applications for a money making blog, there are four categories that you will find indispensable.

1) Visitor Tracking Plugins

Many people that own conventional websites will tell you that statistics packages are indispensable. A good tracking program will show you the geographic location of the visitor, as well as entry pages, exit pages, and IP information. When you install these plugins, they will also record information about search engine spiders. If you are working on search engine optimization, this information is absolutely vital. Among other things, it will give you a chance to find out which efforts result in an increased number of search engine spider visits to your site.

2) Spam Blockers

Unfortunately, once your blog begins to get better indexing positions in the search engines, it will also gain attention from spam bots. These programs are designed to visit your site, and then look for ways to spam your comment section with links. WordPress blogs get hit with these bots far more often than Blogspot ones. Even though you can set the comment section to moderate, you may wind up deleting hundreds of spam comments per day. Alternatively, spam blocker plugins will block known spammers. While you may get a blitz of spam from time to time, you can manually block an entire domain, or simply wait for the offending domain to get blacklisted.

3) SEO Propagators

When you create a blog, there is an expectation that you will actually be writing something that is both timely and news worthy. Therefore, a number of blog indexes will ping your site on a regular basis in order to index your new content as quickly as possible. In some cases, fans of your blog may also want to place copies of your content on their own blog. You should make it a point to make sure that your blog information is routinely updated in the following locations:

(b)
Blog Indexes: Technorati, Digg, Reddit
Social Networks: Facebook (on a fan page set to public), Myspace, Ning
Misc Announcement Sites: Twitter, Ebay blog feeds, and sites relevant to your subject.

(/b)

Rather than copy/pasting the content, readers can also set up RSS feeds that will link back to your site. Ideally, you should make sure that your blog is set up to enable as many transmissions of your links as possible. This includes email links at the bottom of each post that will enable visitors to send specific entries to others.

4) Advanced Editing Features

When you are composing an email, you may not be overly concerned about the size of the text, its color, or the location of images. On the other hand, a blog post must be carefully designed in order to look appealing. If you are an affiliate marketer, it is also very important to make sure that visitors do not miss your affiliate links. Even though blogging platforms come with a basic set of formatting features, it will be of some help to install plugins that extend your abilities. For example, if you want larger text for your links in WordPress, then you will need the TinyMCE plugin.

Even though it may take some time for you to draw significant amounts of traffic to your blog, it is very important to make sure that you viewers have a good experience. It is also very important to learn as much about them as possible. A site that is filled with spam comments, or one that is poorly formatted will ensure that visitors will not come back again. On the other hand, if you do not have access to statistical information about visitors to your site, it will be virtually impossible to find out if you SEO strategies are effective. While these plugins may not always be visible to site viewers, they still play an enormous role in ensuring that your blog will stand above all the others.

Author Bio: Learn how to make money blogging today. Visit Brian’s website, http://www.HomebasedBlogging.com and learn how you can make money online from blogging using social media, affiliate marketing, podcasting, article marketing, and many other money-making topics from blogging professionals.

Category: Writing
Keywords: blogging, work at home, make money online, freelance writing, social media, blogger