You’ve started your blog, you’ve posted a few posts and now it’s time to build traffic to your website! In Post #6 (of my first 100) we’ll cover how to build traffic using widgets and plugins. This is a historic post. It marks the first time I’ve ever posted a 2-part video series!

OK… I was kind of forced to… YouTube has limits you know!

In the first video, we’ll go over the basics of widgets and plugins. It’ll show the behind the scenes setup and give you a tour of some of my favorites. The second video will review another blog I run (http://www.doitordont.com) and show you the “public” view of what a website looks like with various widgets and plugins installed.

I’ll mention a number of different plugins that I personally use in the video. Remember, everything contained in this blog is “the most current truth.” Under the videos, you’ll find a table of every plugin that I’m currently using. (At least as of this writing, 09/06/2010). If you are reading this after 09/06/2010 (and who isn’t?) things may have changed. My promise to you remains the same… as I learn, I teach. If I started using other plugins to build this blog you can be sure they are probably blogged about somewhere here!

Enjoy the videos… the comments are always appreciated… they help to remind me I’m not talking to myself!

**UPDATE – 09/08/10 – Based on an initial suggestion in the comments section, I’m playing around with the IntenseDebate plugin for comments. So far… so good!

Plugin	Description
All in One SEO Pack	Out-of-the-box SEO for your WordPress blog.
	Version 1.6.12.1 \| By Michael Torbert \| Visit plugin site
Greg’s Threaded Comment Numbering	For WordPress 2.7 and above, this plugin numbers comments sequentially, including an hierarchical count up to ten levels deep (e.g., replies to comment number 2 will be numbered as 2.1, 2.2, 2.3 etc.).
	Version 1.4.2 \| By Greg Mulhauser \| Visit plugin site
CommentLuv	Plugin to show a link to the last post from the commenter’s blog by parsing the feed at their given URL when they leave a comment. Rewards your readers and encourage more comments.
	Version 2.81.2 \| By Andy Bailey \| Visit plugin site
Dagon Design Sitemap Generator Plus	Generates a fully customizable sitemap + map on the main page (modified “Dagon Design Sitemap Generator 3.17″ plugin)
	Version 1.0 \| By Igor Olemskoi, Dagon Design
Digg Digg	All-in-One social shared count / vote buttons – Digg, Reddit, dDone, Twitter, Yahoo Buzz, TweetMeme, Topsy, facebook share, facebook like, Polladium, StumbleUpon, Delicious, Sphinn, Post comments, Google Buzz, Designbump, Designfloat, Thewebblend and blogengage.
	Version 4.2.2.2 \| By Yong Mook Kim \| Visit plugin site
Facebook Comments for WordPress	Allows your visitors to comment on posts using their Facebook profile. Makes use of Facebook’s new Social Graph plugins.
	Version 1.5.2 \| By Graham Swan \| Visit plugin site
FD Feedburner Plugin	Redirects all feeds to a Feedburner feed
	Version 1.42 \| By John Watson \| Visit plugin site
Feed Facebook, Leave Facebook	Creates a separate, partial feed for Facebook. Use this to direct Facebook visitors to your blog while leaving your main full-text feed intact.
	Version 1.0 \| By Keyvan Minoukadeh \| Visit plugin site
Filosofo Gravatars	Add Gravatars to your WordPress theme in a way that customizes easily and degrades nicely.
	Version 1.8 \| By Austin Matzko \| Visit plugin site
Google XML Sitemaps	This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask.com to better index your blog.
	Version 3.2.4 \| By Arne Brachhold \| Visit plugin site
HeadSpace2	Meta-data manager on steroids, allowing complete control over all SEO needs such as keywords/tags, titles, description, stylesheets, and many many other goodies.
	Version 3.6.33 \| By John Godley \| Visit plugin site
Kontera ContentLink	This plugin will add your Kontera JavaScript code to your blog
	Version 1.3 \| By Kontera \| Visit plugin site
Official StatCounter Plugin	Adds the StatCounter tracking code to your blog. After uploading this plugin click ‘Activate’ (to the right) and then afterwards you must visit the options page and enter your StatCounter Project Info to enable logging.
	Version 1.5 \| By Aodhan Cullen \| Visit plugin site
Twitter Tools	A complete integration between your WordPress blog and Twitter. Bring your tweets into your blog and pass your blog posts to Twitter. Show your tweets in your sidebar, and post tweets from your WordPress admin.
	Version 2.4 \| By Crowd Favorite \| Visit plugin site
Yet Another Related Posts Plugin	Returns a list of related entries based on a unique algorithm for display on your blog and RSS feeds. A templating feature allows customization of the display.
	Version 3.1.9 \| By Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine \| Visit plugin site