Here is a list of things I’d highly recommend doing to your blog to help increase traffic and tracking.

  1. Syndication – Make it easy for people to subscribe to your blog. Sign-up with Feedburner and then create a “syndication” area on your site.
  2. Analytics Anyone? – Sure some blogging software has visitor traffic data but nothing compares to Google’s free analytics package. It’s amazing how detailed their reports get and you’d be surprised at how people find and view on your site.
  3. Targeted Advertising – Who knew that someday anyone could build a site and generate revenue from it. Yes, it’s possible by using Google AdSense to display highly targeted ads on your site. Once you’ve setup an account and placed the ads on your site, just sit back and watch the cash come in. Cha-Ching.

  4. Email Your Blog – RSS, Blogs, XML, readers and aggregators can be confusing. Adding email services to your blog isn’t. There’s a free service out there called FeedBlitz which gives you such power.
  5. Blog Top Links – Get your readers what they want as soon as possible. With MyBlogLog “Top Links” inserted, you can keep your readers aware of the most popular links on your site with no work.
  6. Localize Your Blog – Talk about coolness factor. This plugin for WordPress translates your blog into eight different languages…..on-the-fly. It uses Google’s translator service which isn’t perfect but still does a decent job. The beauty is all the translation is done behind the scenes and it’s seamlessly displayed within your existing blog. Now you can drive international traffic to your site using this Simple Thoughts plugin.
  7. Rate Your Posts – You know how rating movies in Netflix can become addicting? Well, here’s a cool WordPress plug-in that allows readers to rank your blog posts. It uses AJAX technology which doesn’t require the page to reload once a vote has been casted. The plugin is call Votio and it’s a great add-on to any blog.
  8. Display Related Posts – Isn’t it nice when you get to the end of an article and there’s a listing of “related” posts? This WordPress plug-in called Related Entries does just that and helps keep visitors on your site.
  9. Generate a Page Site Map – Site maps are great fodder for search engine spiders but who wants to spend time manually updating their site map? I sure don’t and that’s why I use this Sitemap Generator plugin for WordPress. It automatically grabs all your posts and categories, and spits them out. Another great add-on.
  10. Generate a Google Site Map – On top of the above site map generator, I wanted to have an xml site map especially for Google. Luckily someone has already written a WordPress plugin so it was an easy addition to my site. It also integrates perfectly with Sitemap Generator. The plugin is called guess what…..Google Sitemap Generator.
  11. Automatic RSS Aggregator – This is by far my favorite plugin. I used to typically spend 30-60 minutes a day looking for relevant content and then posting it on my blog. Not anymore. Introducing FeedWordPress. It syndicates content from newsfeeds that you choose into your WordPress blog and then automatically posts them. Thank you for writing this plugin Charles Johnson.

That’s my list. If you’ve got any others to add, please share them in the comments below.

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