Bill Masson 
November 13, 2009, 5:48 am|
There comes a time when you need to ramp up your blogging machine by using premium WordPress plugins. Free plugins and there are thousands of them are both useful and beneficial to your WordPress site but sometimes they just don’t cut the ice. I would still argue that there are many free WP plugins that do an excellent job of enhancing and promoting your blog, but if you want to take it to the next level then premium plugins have many more advantages.
The thing about free plugins is that the developers go through a pretty tough time just trying to survive, they constantly upgrade their work often with no reward in fact they even get abuse sometimes by ill mannered users. Thus the end result is often abandonment of their projects. Premium WP plugins are more likely to survive this fate by offering lifetime support and upgrades, although they are not immune to abandonment they are more likely to survive in the long run.
This recent short post by GOBALA KRISHNAN picks out some of the premium WordPress plugins available to buy. I wanted to extend this thread and look at the debate of Free versus Paid so leave a comment and let me know what you think. Plugin List from Gobala’s Blog, you can find many more automated blog plugins at his home site. Well worth a visit if only for curiosity.
Max Banner Ads Plugin (Wrote about this before and use on all my Blogs)
Ninja Affiliate Plugin (Have promoted this plugin but haven’t used it)
LightPop Plugin (Another pop up script which seems more stable, free ones are available)
Auto Social Poster (Hugely beneficial for your SEO, builds solid one way links)
WP Review Site ( One of many on the market, parses info from many sources)
WP Blaster** (See description below) $57.00 video presentation is quite old!
Synonymizer Plugin** (See description below) both plugins together a hefty $147.00
Legend: ** These two plugins work hand in hand to deliver article posting and article spinning capabilities. What you do once you install WP Blaster on your blog is to input any number of URLs preferably your own (-: The article is then posted automatically to all your URLs, once there the article is then spun or re-edited by Synonymizer to produce different articles, and thus avoid the duplicate penalty imposed by Google. Haven’t tried this out yet but it sounds cool. If you have tried it out let me know how it’s performing, and if it’s worth the money.
Personally I wouldn’t use these two plugins but if you do then use with caution, if you are a complete novice to blogging then don’t go near them. Most bloggers are well aware if you get sandboxed by Google it can take a long time to get out, so beware.
WordPress Cloner Plugin to Manage Multiple Blogs and FirePow
These plugins from Gobala’s blog interested me the most because I need a solution to maintain my blog network more efficiently. I will post about these in due course, effectively they are blog network plugins that help to maintain your blogs, and they can be used to network and share articles with other bloggers and spin them. They also help to build up one way links and streamline plugin upgrades. Below are just a few of the attributes that this plugin can handle. FirePow is not cheap at a recurring $127.00 per month, but if used right can more than pay off.
- Build and manage an unlimited amount of WordPress blogs
- Easily add / remove plugins and themes to all your blogs
- Manage content distribution and publishing to all your blogs
- Submit your posts to most popular social bookmarking sites
I use many free WP plugins throughout my network and truth be told I couldn’t do without some of them. There is another argument of free versus paid and that is the WordPress ideology of remaining open source. It should remain a free blogging platform for any software developer to enhance and reach out to the masses. But in the end I have to say that there needs to be a premium element involved in WordPress, it’s healthy and it’s competitive for all of us.
Thanks’ for reading
If you are making a website, it's not plugin you are looking for. You need to register with a hosting service, and then either use a template, or create your website from HTML code.
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The best way to change the look of your Word press blog is to get a custom theme. You can hire a theme designer to make one for you. I also have a few word press blogs and all of them have custom themes.
If you are having a custom design made for you then talk to the designer and let them know exactly what plugins you are going to be using and ensure that they know how you want to use them.
Isn't it true that Premium wordpress plugins can become free plugins? I heard somewhere because of the way that the wordpress user agreement is written. Personally I've never used premium wordpress themes, but it is something I may want to look into it.
Till then,
Jean
approve
There's no such thing as 'free lunch'. I guess that even if WP wants to remain an open source, premium elements can never be avoided. Thanks for this interesting post.
The most excellent way to transform the come across of your Word press blog is to get a hold a custom subject matter. You be able to employ a theme designer to create one for you. I in addition have a small number of word press blogs and every one of them contain tradition themes.
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If you are having a custom design made for you then talk to the designer and let them know exactly what plugins you are going to be using and ensure that they know how you want to use them.
I made a gaming site with Wordpress, but I feel that it still just looks like a simple Wordpress blog. I want it to look like most popular sites, like Engadget. I'd like to know if there are plugins I can use to change the basic Wordpress look, so it won't look like your basic blog.
Hi,
There are many plugins that will help you to achieve what you’re after but it’s the design and layout of your site that determines how you want to portray your message. EndGadget is a hugely popular site and its layout is a very visual experience for obvious reasons. For a gaming site you need to have plenty of interactivity for the readers like video, forums, comparisons, polls and so on. If your budget is tight then use the free Atahaulpa theme which allows many different layouts..The link to the theme is at the bottom of the page, they have an excellent forum to help you out.
As for plugins you could make use of "GD Star Rating" NextGen Gallery, WP Polls, forums, FeedWordPress to gather YouTube feeds. There are many others, just click add new on your plugin admin and search plugins. If you have funds then there are some excellent review plugins that can enhance your site with, ReviewAZON plugin pulls in Amazon products and populates the article with buyer reviews and allows you to post video reviews from Youtube. There’s a special holiday discount at the moment for ReviewAZON which you can find at the top of the home page right here on Web-Work At Home.
I would say for a Gaming site that you would be better keeping to the Blog format, but you can still have separate landing pages without sidebars if you make use of Themes like Atahaulpa.
Hope this helps thanks’ for the comment
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I have used many of them, and the best is the Flickr Photo Album plugin from silaspartners.
Basically, you upload the full res photos to flickr.com (a yahoo service) and they automatically appear in the album.
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