Your blog is your business, but do you really want your business to be managing your blog?
For most of us focusing on what we do best is how we put our best foot forward and contribute to make the world a better place.  I know that’s how it works for me.

One of the fabulous things about WordPress is that it can make your blogging life very streamlined and easy (that was the intent behind the platform).  Having the right plugins from the get-go is one of the ways it can make your life really easy.

Once you’ve gotten your WordPress Blog installed you’re going to want to add these plugins to keep bad guys out, you backside covered, spammers at bay and your finger on the pulse of your business.

Here’s the quick list:

1. Askismet – Anti-spam
2. Bad Behavior – Anti-hack
3. WordPress DB Backup – CYA!
4. All in One SEO – An easy Search Engine Optimization tool
5. WordPress Stats – know what’s going on easily, clearly and right in your blog admim panel.

Now for the longer story:

2. Bad Behavior
This one’s a bit geeky and very backend oriented.  Basically, because WordPress runs on a database (remember you had to get all those nasty numbers and keys to set things up?) there are “back doors” that hackers can access to use your blog for their own purposes such as spam.  Unless your a MySQL database engineer I don’t know of any other way to “close the backdoor” than this.  It’s great.  It works.  I got hacked once and swore I would never let that happen again.  This plugin does it!

3. WordPress DB Backup
You just have to have this one. Period. If your blog is your business, your musings, your ramblings, whatever you have to backup the Database on a regular basis.  That’s where all your content is stored (what you write) and if it gets corrupted, crashes or you hit delete by accident you loose it all.  Think of it… OUCH!  This plugin is fab and used by most to protect themselves.  You can set it and forget it, it will email you a copy of the backed up Database on a regular basis.  You can also have it store a copy on your blog server (but if the server crashes that may not be useful) or you can download it to your local computer.  No matter what do this…it really is important.

4. All in one SEO
I find this is pretty much the standard plugin for adding search engine key words to your posts.  It also has a section where you can add keywords for your blog in general.  It’s a well built plugin, has never given me any trouble.  Essential for making sure that you can have snappy titles and still get the right words out to the search engines.

5. Wordpress.com Stats
Everyone always wants to know “how am I doing?”. On the web we do that with stats.  And there are more stats out there than any one person can analyze in a lifetime! But, you’re going to want to know how your posts are doing, whether they draw visitors or not.  Normally you would have to log out of WordPress and then log into your hosting control panel to see what’s going on. Or you could sign-up for Google stats, but I think you need at least a Masters Degree to understand a lot of it.  This plugin will tell you the key pieces of info about your blog and how your visitors are interacting with it.  And the best part?  It’s right there in your WordPress admin panel… you don’t have to go anywhere else to use it!

I hope this has been helpful…let me know! And also let me know what else you’d like to learn about.  I’m here to help so feel free to ask!