Blogs about blogging are one of the more competitive niches in the blogging community. These are the ones run by bloggers who have a lot of experience and success in running websites, especially blogs.
Anyone considering on getting into this niche should have experience and success in another blog niche before trying. This post shares WordPress plugins that you should consider installing if you are in the blogs about blogging niche. If there are more than one plugins suggested, it doesn’t always mean that you should install all of them.
All of these plugins are 100% GPL. Most of them are free, but a few may be premium or may only work with certain premium themes.
Niche Recommended WordPress Plugin Series: Blogs About Blogging
Newsletter
MailChimp List Subscribe form
For MailChimp users, this plugin allows you to integrate a widget optin form into your website.
This is a plugin for Aweber users needing an optin widget.
This does just about all you need for a newsletter. This may not be a good solution for larger websites as it may take up a lot of resources.
Some of the other newsletter and opt-in plugins, I’m not so happy about, especially with their support. You will need to try them out and see what works best for you.
This allows you to hook your website up to Google Feedburner to optimize your RSS feed and give you stats too. The plugin is older, but works for most people. There are some cases that this plugin may not work.
Spam
Growmap anti-Spam Plugin (G.A.S.P)
Growmap Anti-Sam plugin is suppose to help deter comment spam by placing an extra field in to ask commentators to verify that they are human. This tool also has other options for moderating comments.
Akismet – (This comes as a default plugin with WordPress installations)
This is a plugin under the Automattic company developed to reduce comment spam. It requires signing up for an account and for some users, it may cost a little to use.
Security
WordFence Security
Both of these plugins both identify and help harden WordPress security. I recommend trying out each one individually before selecting the one that suits your needs.
Site Speed
W3 Total Cache
W3 Total Cache reduces load time to your site by offering to minify your css and reduce page load in browsers by producing a cached copy. This plugin can be integrated with a CDN (content delivery network) to add a level of security and reduce load time even more. If you have a dedicated server with memcache installed, you can take advantage of this plugin’s option to use that feature to store your site’s cached pages.
Comment Additions and Reader Love
CommentLuv
This adds a field that users can checkmark to subscribe to comments in the case that they are interested in the blog post’s discussion and may want to come back to it at a later time.
Social Sharing
Digg Digg
Digg Digg offers a few ways to place social share icons on your blog like manual display and floating display.
Flare is much like Digg, but is a floating display. It has uniformed design to promote more design congruency with how the social share icons should look.
The Floating Social Bar is a bar you can put on individual posts or pages that float from top to bottom when you scroll down your posts. It also is designed to be fast and offers the most important social share places that bloggers need.
Featured Content Sliders
Meta Slider
Slidedeck 2 Lite for WordPress
Both the Meta Slider and the Slidedeck 2 Lite offer several different choices to display a featured content slider.
The Genesis Responsive Slider is highly recommended for people who use the StudioPress Genesis theme framework.
Forms
Gravity Forms
After a lot of problems with free plugins available for forms, I stopped using them and switched to Gravity Forms. It is user-friendly and has a lot of options. It is more than worth a $40 investment.
SEO
WordPress SEO by Yoast is an in-depth plugin to help you optimize your site for the search engines. You can optimize it for your RSS feeds, and it will even put together a sitemap for you.
Google XML Sitemaps puts together a Sitemaps.org valid sitemap.
As a notation, you can have both WordPress SEO and Google XML Sitemaps installed, BUT you do need to make sure the WordPress SEO plugin’s settings are not checkmarked to allow the plugin to create a sitemap.
If you have links coming up as not found, you might want to use the redirection plugin to manage all those links.
Reviews
Author hReview
Author hReview adds a way to list a product and give it a star rating that an be picked up in the search engine listings. It also has a widget that you can feature the highest rated items you have reviewed.
Polls
WP-Polls
This plugin gives your WordPress installation a section to create and manage polls. You can display the polls and their results in widgets and in an archive page.
Polldaddy is a third party poll management system that is under the Automattic company… same company that WordPress is under. You create the poll, promote it on your site or elsewhere, and Polldaddy does the rest.
Podcast
Blubrry PowerPress Podcasting plugin
PowerPress or Blubrry allows you to host and play audio on your website, especially for podcasts.
Video
While you can use shortcode within WordPress to embed audio and video within your own site, with video, you probably will want to use Youtube’s embed. This helps for SEO and the Youtube’s iframe embed is more responsive.
Photo Gallery
The WordPress Media Library by default allows you to create a gallery. However, you may want to add effects to make the navigation much easier. The FooBox plugin allows a lightbox effect to your photos that also allow people to share them on the social networks. I know there are similar plugins, but this premium plugin is a great investment.
Monetization
Chitika
Text Link Ads Advertiser Plugin
Chitika, Linkworth, Text Link Ads, and Adsense are all third party advertising services. You can place their network ads in widgets, and posts, and earn money from each click of your visitors.
Both Ads by datafeedr.com and WP125 allow you to have in house advertising on your website in order to earn money.
I do want to note that I would mention Amazon, but there are several states in the United States that cannot use Amazon affiliates.
Do you use any of these plugins for your blog in the Blogs About Blogging niche? What other plugins do you recommend?
Hi Niles,
Awesome resource indeed 🙂
Oh yes…I’m using most of the plugin you mentioned, though additionally Cloudflare and WordFence too. Yes, some people do have a few issues with Cloudflare, though it’s working well with me so far.
I was onto DiggDigg earlier but it does take a lot of space, thus switched to ShareBar, which is working well presently. Flare too is coming up in a huge way and many bloggers are using it too. CommentLuv of course, takes the cake, doesn’t it? I think we ALL just love it.
Thanks for sharing these with us, needs to be shared. Have a nice week ahead 🙂
Hi Nile,
Great round up you got there! So many great plugins such as W3TC and Yoast SEO. Totally speechless 😀
Two things I am very interested is the Adsense Explosion and Gravity forms. Hmm!
Thanks for everything and added to my buffer schedule 😀
You are right, blogging about blog or blog about blogging is a hot niche, a very good keyword at that.
I use WP super cache instead of W3 total cache!!.Is it makes any difference?
Thanks for the good list of guest blogging sites.
Wow, thanks for sharing such a long and information packed article. I use quite a few plugins on my blog but you have pointed out some good ones that I will be sure to try out. I like the idea of people being able to subscribe to comments, very interesting. Keep up the good work.
What a wonderful resource list you’ve provided here Niles! I use many of the plugins like CommentLuv, Digg Digg, Google Sitemaps and WordPress SEO, but there are a few here I’ve made notes of so I can take a closer look. Thanks for the information and inspiration!
Hi Nile,
That’s quite some loads of plugins. I don’t use all of them as it may affect my page loading speed but some of them are really Godsend. Akismet, W3 Total Cache, and Floating Social Bar are simply a life saver. I’d recommend to use Robots Meta, though, as it gives you all control over your robots.txt file.
You have shared very important information with us . There are lots of plugins out here that i have not ever heard about them , I will try to use these plugins , once again thanks a lot . 🙂
Thanks Nile, It is a great resource of the word press plugins. I love reading your blogs always. I keep on waiting for your new blog posts.
Nile, this is the greatest list and full of features I had no idea to use. I love the photo storage based on my problems with WP storage. I believe this will solve my issues and love to upload my new pics from the my first digital camera. Hey, I am enrolled in a class to learn to use my camera correctly so I am serious about this.
You are one of the best tech people I come to with my issues. I am learning to navigate through you site to see if I find my answers to question prior to asking. It has been great and I find my golden needs.
Thank you for sharing and caring about us.
Good Morning Nile! What a Great list There are a few here like the FooBox that I am going to look into. I do have a question for you Nile! I was told my blog loads slow. Is this because I have to many plug-ins already? How many is to many? HUM?? This is all so confusing to me. Thanks for sharing this great list with us.. Chery 🙂
This is nice list of plugins. From making a wordpress blog efficient up to making money on it. Thanks Nile.
I tested Better WP Security on my website and it killed it, I had to do a full website back up and lost quite a bit of work, just a warning to everyone that some plugins can cause some major issues.
Thank you for posting all of this information! I need all the help I can get with WordPress plugins.
Thanks a lot for this info, it will help me to build my business.
Nile,
What can I say? You’ve put together a totally Kick Ass list of top-notch plugins!!!! I know most of them and love most of them! I learned a lot here, too! I need to check the Genesis slider out cause I’m using Genesis now (even though I still use and love Thesis, too! ). Love the two security plugins, of course. Love gravity forms and Yoast, SEO, too!
The only one I think you forgot (unless I missed it) is Backup Buddy!!!
Thanks for this great list!
Nile, You Da BEST!!!!
~ Jupiter Jim
This is an excellent list of valuable plugins, Nile. I have some of these plugins installed already. I am looking at the security plugins Wordfence Security and Better WP Security. The latter one seems to have way more good reviews than Wordfence, I wonder if Wordfence is just new in the market. Both seems to be good, I guess my question is which one is easier to use?
My favorites: Gravity forms, SEO by Yoast, and Comment Luv Pro (worth the extra money) – I use 3 all the time.
You mentioned Mail Chimp which I use too – plus there is also a plugin for Mail Chip to integrate it with Gravity Forms – we use it to invite people contacting us to sign up for our newsletter at the same time they’re completing the contact form – it’s a great 2-fer
I love wordpress SEO by Yoast and Commentluv premium. WordPress SEO by Yoast is a complete package for the SEO needs, it covers many aspect including sitemaps, rss feeds, breadcrums etc..
Commentluv premium is also a good plugin and covers many feature but recently there is lot of spam comments are going through….hoping to get an update so that we can get rid of that….
hi nile
great article nice plugin list very helpful for all weordpress website admin. i used many of them in my site. and i never know about some plugin that are very helpful to website. thanks for sharing this list.
Nile,
Talk about providing valuable information in a blog, this one certainly is at the top. You have provided the names and links to so many useful plugins. Although blogging about blogs is not my main niche, I do sometimes write about that. But what is more important is that many of these plugins are useful no matter what niche I am in. I will certainly keep your post as a reference. I want to look into the newsletter plugin.
Warmly,
Dr. Erica
I ditto the expression of so many of the previous commenters Nile: This is an awesome list of WordPress plugins. I use or have used most of those listed and will check out the ones you suggested that I am not familiar with (i.e. Meta Slider, Author Review, Blubrry Podcast). Thanks!
It’s important to make our blogs professional and user friendly, while optimizing their performance capabilities.
You’ve given us a great list of plugins that can help us achieve most of this. I’m sure there are others, but this is about as good a list as I’ve seen anywhere.
Thanks so much, Nile, for saving us tons of research, and a bunch of frustrating trial and error.
Rss FeedBurner, Better WP Security, CommentLuv are the most important plugins because we need to add sitemap and comment box in blog. WP security is important to protect blog.
Thank you for introducing other important plugins. I want to use them.
I didnt had idea of these so many plugins . thanks for sharing. i hope it will be helpful for my blog.
Hi Nile,
This is the best list of plug ins I have seen. I really don’t know where to begin…I’m interested in them all! The best thing is that it is recommended by you! I would be stumbling in the dark if someone told me about just one! But with your experience, I can trust that they work well.
I do know that I have many on the list, and I must say that CommentLuv is my favorite! I didn’t know about Flare but that seems like a pretty one for me!
Thanks for compiling this list, I will pass it on!
-Donna
If I am going to make a Niche blog then two Plugins that i will must install is the newsletter plugin and Gasp as there’s no life without them in Niche blogging.
Hi,
That seems to be a great list. Most of the plugins in the list have been used by me. But some of them are new to me. So, I am hoping to play with them soon.
By the way, congrats on getting a rank <500K. I hope you will make it below <100K soon.
It was under 50K, not 500,000. But thank you 😀
First of all, the idea behind this series (plugins per niche) is very smart and the first of its kind that I have seen. After reading this I have quite a bit of homework to do.
I might be a bit biased, but Polldaddy (trying to be a monopoly) is very much overrated and overpriced. Consider looking into Feedweb, and other alternatives.
This is a great list of resources for WordPress. Some of my favorites are Yoast SEO, Foobox, NextGEN Gallery, Royal Slider, and G.A.S.P. I speak about some of these in my recent article below.
I can’t imagine my blog without GASP and W3 Total cache plugin.They are my sites backbone.
hi thanks for this article these things would be kept in mind
Hi Mam
Thank for sharing out the basic and must need plugin if we run a blog related to Blogging. I almost use all these plugins in my blog.
And also I want to ask, using these many plugins will reduce our page load speed ??