Beef Up Your Blog

Leveraging the power of your Wordpress blog in your own niche market by using plugins and other tools is part of the power of Wordpress.  To post content and then know that the software is going to use that content in various ways to help you on your way up the ranking ladder is a real joy.

On this page I will be listing any tools that I add to this blog to increase it's power.

RSS Power Plus Pro.  This is a paid plug in that I acquired for free as part of a membership site but if you were to buy it then it would cost $67.

RSS Power Plus generates backlinks to your site by creating a unique RSS feed for each individual post and submitting the feed to RSS aggregator sites.   The basic version is free when you optin to the author's newsletter and submits to 5 RSS aggregator sites.

RSS Power Plus Pro is the upgraded version of this plugin and it submits to 20 RSS aggregators on each post.  You are also allowed multiple profiles at several different aggregators.  This has the advantage of possibly reducing your footprint by which the search engines can track all this activity back to you.  On its own the Pro version costs $67.

Out of the 20 sites that it submits to there are 2 that I know don't work and the automated submission can fail on a random basis with the others.  But on average I guess that it may be creating between 10 and 15 inbound links for each post.

Frankly, I have no idea whether this is yet having any effect but the theory sounds good and all inbound links are good so as it costs me neither time nor effort once set up I am happy to add it to the arsenal of tools.

27th April.  Added Twitterfeed.  This takes your RSS feed and submits it to Twitter.  In effect, it saves you having to tweet your friends when you make a new post and ensures that everyone following you on Twitter is going to know as soon as you Publish a new post.

Yet another reason to make sure that you check everything about your posts to make sure they are perfect before you hit the Publish button.

3rd May 09.  Added Related Websites plugin.  This seems to be rather a complex plugin but comes highly recommended so I've given it a go and you should be able to see it working on the front, blog page.

Similar to the Related Posts plugin that shows links to other posts on your own site (determined by them having the same tags) the Related Websites plugin goes out and finds related posts on other people's blogs.

The service is moderated by the authors to ensure that only valid blogs are included in the exchange and the concept conforms to the whole idea of blogs of providing a community of information on any given subject.  Why should you use it?   Because links to your posts are going to appear on other blogger's blogs under their post – thereby attracting more traffic to your blog.