The best way to motivate your visitors to comment is to offer them information that’s inspiring, helpful, and compelling. But it also helps to develop an interactive, dynamic relationship with them. And one way to do that is to reward them.

WP Incentive is a plugin that will do just that. You can offer them a free digital download for their first, tenth, and twentieth comments (WP Incentive is fully customizable, so you can decide on the appropriate interval).

The plugin also comes preloaded with four digital gifts, which again, you can customize with items of your own choice. Setup and configuration are a snap, and there’s a video that steps you through the easy setup procedure. And the beauty of this plugin is that once setup, everything is fully automated. Just set it and forget it.

Make sure that the gifts that you add to the plugin have value – there’s already way too much digital junk out there, and you don’t want to lose the trust of your visitors by ‘rewarding’ them with something valueless. Make it special, and useful.

You can check it out here. Right now it’s less than ten bucks, and they have an affiliate program as well.

WP Incentive Plugin – Keep Your Blog Visitors Coming Back!

With those 7 plugins installed, I then install a suite of additional plugins, selecting those plugins that are consistent with the goals of the blog. This customization varies from one blog to another, but when other plugins are needed, these are the ones I turn to.

1. cformsII – contact form : cforms is a highly customizable, flexible and powerful form builder plugin, covering a variety of use cases and features from attachments to multi form management, you can even have multiple forms on the same page!

2. Dagon Design Sitemap Generator: This plugin creates a sitemap for your WordPress powered site. This is not just another XML sitemap plugin, but rather a true sitemap generator which is highly customizable from its own options page in the WordPress admin panel. Some of its features include: support for multi-level categories and pages, category/page exclusion, multiple-page generation with navigation, permalink support, choose what to display, what order to list items in, show comment counts and/or post dates, and much more.

3. WP-Sticky: Adds a sticky post feature to your WordPress’s blog.  When a post is made ’sticky’, it sticks to the top of the page instead of being pushed down by a subsequent post. Beginning with v.2.7, WordPress also offers a sticky-post function in quick-edit mode, but because WP-Sticky differentiates between sticky posts and announcements, it offers a little more functionality.

4. Sociable: Automatically add links to your favorite social bookmarking sites on your posts, pages and in your RSS feed. You can choose from 99 different social bookmarking sites!

5. CommentLuv: Pass a bit of luv onto your commenters by providing a titled link to their last blog post. This plugin attempts to parse the feed of the comment author by visiting their site and looking for their feed while they type their comment and appends it once they submit. Entice them even more with the new info box ajax popup showing their descript, gravatar and other sites they visit.

6. MaxBlogPress Favicon:  With this plugin you can have your very own favicon in less than 10 minutes. Favicons are an excellent branding tool for webmasters and blog owners. They help you create brand awareness by displaying a little favourite icon (favicon) in the title of our blog next to the URL.

7. AdSense Manager is a Wordpress plugin for managing AdSense ads on your blog. It generates code automatically and allows positioning with Widgets.

8. Pagemash Pagemanager: Customise the order your pages are listed in and manage the parent structure with this simple ajax drag-and-drop administrative interface with an option to toggle the page to be hidden from output. Great tool to quickly re-arrange your page menus.

9. SEO Slugs: The SEO Slugs Wordpress plugin removes common words like ‘a’, ‘the’, ‘in’ from post slugs to improve search engine optimization. The plugin strips common words like “what”, “you” or “can” out of your post slug to make it more search engine friendly.

10. WP Post Ratings: This adds a rating system add the bottom of each post, allowing each user to have there say on how good your post is. It is powered by Ajax, making it very unobtrusive, and to be honest, configured correctly, can be very elegant. You also have (my favourite option) the option to style the ratings star images with you own. You can also show the rating results in the sidebar, this is also done in an elegant way.

Be sure that the plugins you install are compatible with the version of WordPress you’re using. And remember, these are just my recommendations – you may find others more closely suited to your needs.

If you know of a useful plugin, please tell us about it!

Second, because WordPress is ‘open source’, new plugins are continuosly being developed for it. If there’s something new out there with terrific functionality, I want to know about it!

Now, I’m assuming that you know that a plugin is simply a software module that is ‘plugged in’ to a larger application for the purpose of adding or enhancing features and functionality. If you didn’t know before, now you do.

With time and experience, I’ve developed a list of plugins that I consider to be ‘must-haves’. This isn’t to say that they’re the best for everyone, because a lot depends on the goal of your blog. But these are the ones that I install as a baseline on ALL my blogs. While I may later install others, here’s my list of must-have, indispensible plugins:

1. Akismet is a service that checks comments made to your blog to see if they look like spam. These comments will not be posted on your blog unless you specifically allow them. You can review them from your admin panel, and you need a WordPress API key to make it work. Once you have your key, though, you can use it on all your blogs. Akismet comes preinstalled (though not yet activated)  in current versions of WordPress.

2. All-in-One SEO Pack automatically optimizes your WordPress blog for SEO (search engine optimization. Some configuration options are available, but it also works right out of the box.

3. WP-SpamFree is a powerful plugin that dramatically cuts down on comment spam, including that of trackbacks and pingbacks. I use it in conjunction with Akismet.

4. MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer prevents your blog from being banned by limiting the number of pings generated per post per specified time period. This is very useful if you edit your blog posts on the fly, as I do.

5. Google Sitemap Generator will create a Google sitemaps compliant XML-Sitemap of your WordPress blog. Whenever you create or edit a post, your sitemap is updated and all major search engines that support the sitemap protocol, like ASK.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO, are notified about the update.

6. Google Analytics automatically tracks and segments all outbound links from within posts, comment author links, links within comments, blogroll links and downloads. It also allows you to track AdSense clicks, add extra search engines, and more.

7. WP-DBManager allows you to optimize, repair, backup, and restore your database, repair database,  delete the backup database, drop/empty tables and run selected queries. Supports automatic scheduling of backing up and optimizing of database. Easy to use, this requires little or no configuration.

There you have it. My top recommendations for must-have WordPress plugins. You’ll find these plugins – and almost 4000 more – at the WordPress.org Plugin Directory.

While these are the plugins that I consider indispensible, there are many more plugins that add very useful functions and features to one’s blog. I’ll tell you about these in another post very soon.

The one action that I hadn’t yet taken was something that now, a week later, I couldn’t put off any longer – that of protecting my blog. First, I want to protect it against any inadvertent mistake that I might make that could corrupt the database.

And secondly, like it or not, our blogs and websites are susceptible to hackers. It’s easy to think that this is the kind of problem that happens only to someone else, but it’s happened to me before. Thankfully, I had a backup that was no more than a week old, so I was able to recover most information.

Easy to overlook, but critically important that we don’t, is the need to back up our blog. When we first install and setup our blog, there are many processes that go on in the background, including the creation of a database. Stored in that database are blog configuration settings, theme information and edits that we may have made, posts, comments, and so forth. The entire substance of our blog is contained in that database.

If our blog is hacked or made corrupt inadvertently, and if we have backed up our database, we can restore our blog from the backup. Depending on how frequently we back up, we still may lose some information, but that’s  a heck of a lot better than starting over from scratch.

While there are ways to manually backup the database through our hosting service’s administrative control panel, the easiest way to back up your blog is with a plugin. Now, you’ve got to be a little careful with plugins, because there are a lot of them, and not all of them are compatible with later versions of your blogging platform – which for me, and hopefull for you too, is WordPress (it’s the best).

When I look for a plugin, I may perform a simple search at Google for the type of plugin that I’m looking for. But my preferred method is to go to the plugin directory on the WordPress website:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/

Once there, I do a search by keyword – in this case ‘backup’ (without the quotes). In sifting through the search results, I look for three different features:

1. Compatibility: is the plugin compatible with the version of WordPress I’m using (v. 2.7 at the time of this post)

2. Ease of installation: just a few clicks? How much configuration is needed?

3. User ratings: while this is something to look at, you must also take it with a grain of salt. Sometimes there may be only one or two reviews – and it could have that five star rating because the plugin developers themselves have rated it.

The plugin that I ultimately chose was WP-DBManager, just one of many excellent plugins by Lester Chan. I downloaded the file, extracted it on my hard drive, and uploaded it to my WP-content/Plugins folder. Then I logged in to my WordPress admin panel and activated the plugin.

Upon activation, a new section, entitled ‘Database’, appears in the left sidebar of the admin panel (the positioning of the plugin options will be different for pre-2.7 releases of WordPress).

Here’s the homepage of the plugin:

http://lesterchan.net/portfolio/programming/php/#wp-dbmanager

One of the nice features about this plugin is that automatic backups can be scheduled. By default the automatic backup option is set to one week, but because I’m making a lot of changes to my blog right now, and adding a great deal of new content, I changed the backup schedule to every three days.

The ease with which this plugin works was impressive. When the backup option is selected, the plugin scans the directories to make sure that the right directory structure is in place and that the permissions of the relevent files are set properly.

Click the ‘backup’ button and the backup is completed in a matter of seconds. I don’t know that all backup plugins are this easy, but this one was. If you haven’t yet backed up your blog, do it soon. It will be good both for your blog and your peace of mind.