Plugins and Pings

Part 9: WordPress Plugins – and pinging.

The basic WordPress installation is great. It does all the things a basic blog should do – allows you to make posts and manage them quickly and efficiently. The developers, sensibly, decided that they would design WordPress with an open framework so that third-party developers could build small additional programs – called plugins – that would add all kinds of extra functions.

A few of the more specialized plugins are commercial programs in their own right and are sold as such. Neil Shearing’s 10-Day Cash Secret plugin that I recommended in Kickstart is one such. That one allows you to use datafeeds from affiliate management programs to feed hundreds or thousands of affiliate-linked product posts into your blog.

But despite there being a few plugins that you have to pay for, the vast majority – thousands in fact – are completely free for you to download and use. You can find over 1600 of them at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/ – some are brilliant and some make you wonder why anyone would have bothered to create them, but all are free and easy to install, so experiment!

Most bloggers never need to pay for a plugin at all – you’d only do so if you needed the functionality it offered, and were pretty sure you could use it to make your blog more profitable.

In today’s installment of this course I plan to show and tell how easy it is to install and use plugins and how to go about finding some of the best ones around.

When you become more proficient with WordPress you will start to wonder ‘how can I get it to do this, or how can I achieve that’. More often than not, someone has had the same thought before you and has created a plugin to get the desired effect.

The video today is short, but it shows you exactly how to install three of the main plugins that I use on all my blogs. As time goes on, we’ll look at other plugins and how they can enhance your blog and your visitors’ experience of it.

http://www.keywordlsispy.com/imkickstart/video6/

In the video I mention my ping list – you can download my list from http://www.keywordlsispy.com/imkickstart/video6/ping.txt

In the next installment I’ll start making blog posts – in fact, I’ll put all the installments of this course on the blog.

See you then.

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