WordPress is an amazing platform that allows you to create a blog quickly and easily without having to know any kind of programming languages or any other complicated skills. Although it has traditionally been used to create blogs, nowadays it actually serves as a full content management system (or CMS) that you can use to create basically whatever kind of website you want.

All you have to do is choose a particular theme that will determine the look and feel of your website, and then you can focus most of your energies on adding content like articles and videos to your website. If you don’t like any of the available themes, you can always purchase a premium theme from a third party, or you can even have a special design made to suit your needs. That’s the great thing about WordPress. It is powerful and flexible, and it will adapt to your needs.

So where exactly do WordPress plug-ins come in anyway? WordPress plug-ins act as extensions of the main program. Some are free, while others are sold on third-party websites. In either case, they try to add some sort of functionality to the main WordPress software. This is what makes this system so powerful, because all kinds of talented programmers can create their own plug-ins, and then various users like you are able to choose exactly what they need for their particular websites. Without plugins, WordPress would not be anywhere near as powerful.

There are far too many available plugins to list here, but here are just some of the things plugins can do for you. They can help you manage your tags, coordinate your pinging so you don’t get banned by pinging services, add optin forms to your websites, take care of your on page SEO like title tags and header tags, automatically insert pictures from free sources like Flikr and others, create analytics features to keep track of your traffic, help you promote your RSS feeds, and much, much more.

The Clickbump Jumpstart Plugin by Scott Blanchard is a great example of an excellent plug-in that saves you lots of time by automating a number of different tasks. For example, when you first install a WordPress blog, WordPress will automatically create a new post that says “hello world.” It is basically a test post or sample post, and it lets you know that everything is working properly. When you set up your website, however, you won’t need to include this page, and this plug-in will automatically delete it from your entire blog.

If you are doing anything related to Adsense or affiliate marketing, you’ll want to include certain legal pages such as a privacy policy and an about us page. Once again, the Clickbump Jumpstart Plugin will take care of this for you automatically so you don’t have to worry about it. The privacy policy is not a blank page either, and it actually comes with full text and ready to be used as is (or you can edit the text as you see fit).

About Our Author -

Adam Troy has been involved with Internet Marketing and Search Engine Optimzation (SEO) for 12+ years. Adam has created dozens of niche websites mainly built on the WordPress platform. His main focus is building SEO friendly sites and driving traffic to these blogs.