1. Branded Admin

Bloggers using WordPress based websites will find this plugin very useful. It allows you to brand the WordPress admin section using unique header and footer. It also removes WordPress links to better distinguish the site as a custom work and reinforce the sites branding.

Download Here

2. Insights

You can search your blog, Wikipedia, images, videos, and Google while writing a post with this plugin. You can then link the search results to your post’s keywords. You can also edit them if they are from your own blog increasing productivity and at the same time the appeal of your posts.

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3. GD Star Rating

This plugin allows you to have your own rating system for your posts. You can display stats on the sidebar and also customize the stars in your rating.

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4. Old Post Promoter

This plugin allows you to promote older posts by classifying them under latest posts. The plugin chooses a particular older post at random and revises the timestamp. As a result, the post appears as a latest post on your blog.

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5. WordPress Backup

This compact plugin allows you to back up the current theme, uploaded images and plugin directories. You can schedule the backup to occur at a particular time and set it to be sent to your email address.

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6. WP GreetBox

This plugin inserts a special greeting box on top of blog posts based on the source of the readers like Google, RSS, Technorati etc. It also informs the visitor about how simple it is to subscribe to the RSS feed.

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7. Google XML Sitemaps

This is an essential plugin to help your blog do well in search engines. It helps by automatically informing Google on updates in your website.

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8. Broken Link Checker

Broken links can severely affect your page rank. This plugin investigates your webpages and shows all the broken links, allowing you to repair them with ease.

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9. In the Loop

With this handy plugin you can easily add stuff to the end of your blog posts. You don’t have to mess up with the template to add codes to your webpages anymore.

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10. RSS Includes Pages

When you use wordpress as CMS, you would have found that the WebPages are not shown in the RSS feed. To solve this issue, all you have to do is install this plugin and your web pages will start showing in the RSS feed.

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Rather than talking about Social Bookmarking/Social Media sites or writing another article of telling you which one is better. I thought to present a case study.

February 11, 2009 I posted a link from my blog Even The Babies Know [Dont Miss The Last Picture] on Reddit, Digg and Stumbleupon. Keep in mind that this post didn’t hit the Front page on both Reddit and Digg.

Here is the Google Analytics Screenshots from Feb 11, 2009 – Apr 12, 2009.

Click here to see the image in Full Size…..

As you can see I got total 95,720 PageViews and 85,462 Unique Visitors. In which 64,209 pageviews are from StumbleUpon alone. Reddit gave me 10,980 pageviews and it gets 10,190 pageviews from direct traffic. To my surprise Digg is not even in competition to reddit and stumbleupon.

Another thing I noticed is that when I submitted my post on Digg, StumbleUpon and Reddit, there was a spike in traffic but after two or three days, traffic was almost dead from Reddit and Digg. However, I am still getting traffic from Stumbleupon. Recently on April 7, 2009 I got 3,285 pageviews from StumbleUpon for that particular post.

Following is a picture showing stats of traffic got from StumbleUpon on April 7,2009

Click here to see the image in Full Size….

Your comments are much appreciated. It is always nice to learn from experiences of other persons.