I’ve always been a closet fan of Darren Rowse, aka Problogger.  I bought his book ProBlogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income when it first came out.  It’s a great read for a newbie wanting to start a blog for extra revenue, and it’s currently on sale at Amazon for $15 (regularly $25).

More recently, I participated in Darren Rowse’s Challenge 31 Days to Build a Better Blog (for those already with an established blog).  I can honestly say he offered some helpful tasks (including why and how they work) to perform each day to improve your blog’s traffic and income.  You can now download Darren’s Workbook and use it daily (like I did) or set your own timeframe (weekly, monthly, all at once), and I guarantee you’ll see positive results.  Actually Darren himself offers a money-back guarantee if not satisfied.  All I offer is my word.  Join over 16,000 other bloggers in the 31 Days to Build a Better Blog Challenge today.

I just got done recording TheSpew.fm podcast with Missy Ward, Karen Garcia and special guest Chris Pearson creator of the Wordpress Thesis Theme. Follow @TheSpew on Twitter to be notified when the episode is produced and uploaded online to listen!

On the show, we talked about various Wordpress Plug-Ins that we recommended.  Chris, on the other hand is “anti-plugin” and stated you don’t need plugins if you use the Thesis Theme from DIYThemes (hint, hint). Chris gasped and had to pull the sword from his chest after I said I currently have 36 plugins activated on my shoe blog (obviously I don’t use Thesis Theme…. as of yet anyway…) 

I picked 8 of the plug-ins I recommend to highlight…

1. Aggregate – Allows you to place the contents of an RSS feed into your posts, pages &/or sidebar.

2. All in One SEO Pack – Out-of-the-box Search Engine Optimization (I actually forgot to mention this one, but Karen brought it up!)

3. Google XML Sitemaps – Generates a Sitemap.xml for search engines (Chris recommends submitting your sitemaps to Google Webmaster Tools.)

4. Link Cloaking Plugin - Cloaks outgoing links (ie masks affiliate links). Missy recommended the MaxBlogPress Ninja that Shoemoney has been pimping, so I may have to give that plugin a try.

5. phpBay Lite – Adds eBay auction listings to your posts with just keywords.

6. Post-Plug Library Supports Similar Posts, Recent Posts, Random Posts, and Recent Comments plugins.

7. Subscribe to Comments – Allows readers to receive an email when new comments are posted to an entry. This is the only plugin that Chris recommended!

8. Youtuber – Adds YouTube videos to posts easily.

Other Wordpress Plug-Ins we discussed were…

AdRotator – Rotates Ads (duh)

Adsense Deluxe – Inserts ads into posts

Category Visibility – Post only certain categories (Karen recommends this for “hiding” personal stuff from the main category line up)

Linkshare Link Lookup – Shawn Collins reviewed this.

Do you have a favorite plugin for Wordpress not listed above?  Please leave a comment and tell us!

Missy Ward announced that she is the new affiliate manager for DIYThemes, the home of the Thesis Theme for Wordpress. And the best part, Missy is working on a performance basis, with all the money earned to be donated to the National Breast Cancer Foundation (NBCF). WTG, Missy!

The Thesis Theme boasts the strongest SEO of any theme, so I see why Missy herself uses it for her blog, MissyWard.com and loves it.  Lots of other well-known bloggers, such as CopyBlogger and SimpleMom use the Thesis Theme as well. In fact, I think I may purchase it for my shopping blog.

So, improve your website and donate to NBCF at the same time either by purchasing the Thesis Theme for your Wordpress blog or sign up to be an affiliate yourself.  Missy is also offering great incentives, like a free pass to Affiliate Summit East 2009 in NYC (details). See you there!