Anticipate is an easy to use plugin that adds a “coming soon” page to your website. It allows you to display your most important pages to your visitors. If you are launching a new blog or website, you can show your visitors how much time is left till your grand opening. The progress bar is a pretty neat feature that keeps your visitors up to date with the progress you are making with your project.

This plugin is highly flexible. Users can add their logo, launch date, and the percentage of work done on the options page. It does support Twitter, Facebook, and RSS. The slider on your front-page can be modified to include as many pages as you want to display to your visitors. The best part? You can collect e-mails conveniently using this plugin.

All in all, Anticipate is an easy to use and flexible plugin that gives you the freedom to work on your blog’s design and features without turning your visitors off. It is ready to go right out of the box. What more can you ask?

Social bookmarking plugins are available for all kinds of platforms. I personally only care about WordPress (at least for my blogging efforts). If you, too, are hooked on WordPress, you should give these 5 plugins a look:

Sharebar: one of the best social bookmarking plugins around. It adds a Mashable-type floating box to your website and stays out of your visitors’ way.

SexyBookmarks: one of my favorites. It is a beautiful plugin for WordPress blogs, adds your favorite social bookmarking buttons to your posts in an attractive fashion.

Share and Follow: not only adds social buttons to your website, it has a super cool tab that you can take advantage of to give your visitors a more stronger call to action.

WP Greet Box: a wonderful add-on that keeps track of who is coming to your website from which site. You can use this information to customize your call to action and target your visitors more effectively.

Socialize: gives you yet another opportunity to ask your visitors to submit your posts to those top social bookmarking websites. This script sits after your posts or inside your content (whichever way you decide).

Which social bookmarking WordPress plugins are you using?

Scribe SEO: not too sure about your SEO strategy? Maybe you need some help optimizing your posts and content for the search engines. That’s what this premium plugin offers. It’s not a cheap service by any means. It does let you enhance your keyword list and make each and every post on your website just right for the search engines.

Wibiya: one of the best services you can take advantage of to take your blog to the next level. It has branding, social media, collaboration, communication tools to help you empower your visitors and build a solid relationship with them.

WP-Answer: a fun script that turns your website into a Q&A portal. You’d be surprised what a Q&A section can do for your blog. Just throw a few prizes for best questions on a monthly basis, and your website traffic will skyrocket.

PadPressed: when you install this plugin on your website, it does not change the way your website operates except on iPad devices. It is a very powerful tool if your site gets lots of traffic from people using iPads.

Job Roller: a very flexible theme that bloggers can use to add a job section to their website. Top websites have had a lot of success running their own job boards. With this theme, you can follow in their footsteps without breaking the bank.

What are your recommendations? Which WordPress products have impressed you the most?

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When I started blogging many years ago, I never thought I would reach 1000 blog posts one day. It’s tough to see that far ahead when you only have 5 or 6 posts on your blog. Once you start blogging twice a day for a few years, you are going to pass that number very quickly. Creating fresh, valuable content for your blog should be at the top of your agenda, but you should not forget about your older blog posts. Just because you are putting a lot of effort into writing new stories does not mean that your old posts can’t help you grow your business. You just have to let people know about them (and update them to help them keep their value).

WordPress has various plugins and scripts that you can take advantage of to promote all your content and get the word out about your older blog posts. You can integrate these scripts into your sidebar or after each post to point your visitors to the right direction.  The more you can keep your visitors going through your content, the better chance you have of making a loyal reader out of each of them.

Here are 6 ways you can breath new life into your older posts:

• Display your all time popular posts: displaying your most popular posts on your blog can help your visitors find some of your old, classic stories. You can find plenty of such plugins on WordPress .org. Some of these plugins actually let you define how far back you want the script to go. I personally prefer popular posts by hits rather than by comments. Both ways do work though.
• Refer your visitors to similar posts: these plugins may slow down your site a bit but can help your visitors find other stories that you may have written about a certain topic. Chances are your visitors can gain a lot of value for those related articles too.
• Don’t forget about random posts: if you are just showing your similar and popular posts on your blog, you are really taking the surprise element out of the process. Random post plugins help your visitors find other stories that they may be interested about. You can use tags and categories to make these plugins act not so random (choose from posts you want to display to your visitors).
• Implement a post recommendation system: Amazon has implemented this beautifully on its website. Plugins such as WWSGD let you do the same for your posts. WWSGD recommends posts that people have visited after reading a certain article on your website.
• Use Facebook Recommendations: Facebook has a ton of social widgets you can integrate into your website. Just add Facebook like button to your website and add the appropriate widget to your blog. If you have an established blog, there is a good chance your old classic posts will get some love on Facebook.
• Use social media to renew old content: from time to time, you’ll have to update some of your older posts to keep them relevant. Once you have done your job, you can retweet your post or ask your newsletter/feed list to retweet it for you.

Building a killer blog is more than just writing fresh content all the time. You should also take time to renew and promote your older posts. The above steps can help you do just that.

Most bloggers choose WordPress as the main platform for their websites. WordPress is not only very user-friendly, it has a very solid community behind it. Bloggers can get plenty of support and tips from other WordPress users, which is especially nice if you are new to this platform. If you are looking to start a new WordPress blog or are completely new to this platform, you want to make sure you install the right plugins on your site to improve its performance, make it more social media friendly, optimize it for the search engines, and keep spammers away. These 10 plugins should help:

• All In One SEO: a must have plugin for every WordPress blog. It lets you optimize your title tags and other on-page factors for the search engines. You can automate the process somewhat or search-engine optimize your individual posts as you see fit.
• Sharebar: a wonderful social media plugin that adds a Mashable-type floating box to your blog posts. That way your visitors can enjoy your content without your social buttons disturbing them too much.
• Akismet: an anti-spam plugin for WordPress that catches a lot of those annoying spam comments before they make it to your blog. It does not stop everything, but it still does a very good job in protecting your blog against spam attacks.
• WP Page Navi: adds page links to the bottom of your pages, giving your visitors the chance to jump from one page to another on your website.
• W3 Total Cache: the best cache plugin for WordPress hands down. It can cache all aspects of your blog and reduce the load on your servers. We wouldn’t be in business without this.
• Login Lockdown: it helps you keep some of those hackers at bay. It is designed to handle brute force attacks on your website (though it does not stop everything).
• WP Polls: a simple to use plugin that gives you the ability to add polls to your posts or side-bar and keep track of the results without doing any coding.
• Contact Form: every blog needs a contact page. This plugin makes the process of adding a contact box to your website a piece of cake.
• PadPressed: turns your blog into a native application for iPad. Designed specifically for those sites who get a lot of traffic from iPad tablets.
• Redirection: a powerful plugin that lets you create your own URL redirection service using your own domain. Great for creating branded URLs for Twitter and other social sites.

Depending on the type of blog you intend to run, you may need more plugins. But the ones listed above should give you a good start.

What are your must have WordPress plugins?

Nothing is more frustrating than waking up one day and realizing that your blog has been successfully defaced. That’s if you get lucky. In most cases, hackers go after blogs and add malicious code to them that is hard to find and get rid of. Sometimes, they may even lock you out of your own blog. Make no mistake about it. There is no hack-proof blog out there. Some security holes we all know about. Some nobody knows about until they are exploited. Your goal as a blogger should be to make the process as hard as possible for hackers. Having your data backed-up can give you the cover you need just in case someone gets through your blog’s security defenses. But it is not the only thing you need to do to secure your blog.

As a blogger, your focus should be on creating the best content possible for your readers. But there are a lot of us that get too attached to our work and forget about other issues that we need to take care of to keep our blogs going. Blog security should be at the top of every blogger’s agenda. Your blog’s admin pages are like a closed gate of a tower. If someone finds a crack in there somewhere, you are in deep trouble. Of course, if you let someone kick at your door long enough, the door might open (brute force attack). If you happen to run your blog on WordPress, there are plenty of plugins you can download to strengthen your blog’s security. Even if you are using other platforms, there are still simple steps you can take to protect your blog:

• Hide sensitive information: hiding the information that hackers can use to get through your defenses easier is smart. You should take time to hide plugin information as well as anything else that you do not need to show to the world (but can be a security threat). Encrypting your database information is a must too (use a public/private key if you must).
• Use secure passwords: it’s so tempting to use the same password you use for everything to manage your blog. That’s a huge security risk. If your password is cracked, you are in deep trouble. It’s even worse if you have used the same password on multiple blogs. I personally write my passwords on a piece of paper and also store them on an offline hard-drive. That’s actually not smart if you don’t encrypt your passwords, which is what I do with mine (both the paper and digital versions). So even if someone finds my pocket-book, they are not going to be able to find my password that easily.
• Limit login attempts: brute force attacks are not the best way to crack a blog, but it does not matter if they produce results for hackers. You should make sure people can not play with your admin pages by keep trying all kinds of passwords to get through. Just ban those people who don’t seem to get it right after the first few tries.
• Look out for mySQL injections: these can be nasty if you fall victim to them. Make sure you look out for those nasty parameters and use third-party scripts to catch them.
• Lock your admin files (IP): tie your mission critical files to your own IP. It can be easily done by modifying your .htaccess file (Matt Cutts has some good tips on it).
• Keep an eye out on your comments: hackers may use your comments to hurt your blog. So do not approve every little comment that you see on your blog. It’s just not smart.
• Monitor your members: the best way to bring down a castle is by having someone inside (behind the walls). That fact still has not changed. If you allow people to sign up for accounts on your blog, you need to keep an eye on them. I personally do not allow registrations on my blog,  just to be on the safe side.

How do you keep your blog secure?

Digg Digg: one of the best social media plugins for WordPress platform. It covers almost any social network that matters. Delicious, StumbleUpon, Google Buzz, and Digg are all covered by this plugin.

Tweetmeme: a simple to use plugin that adds Tweetmeme buttons to your blog. Twitter is one of the best sources of traffic for blogs, which is why this plugin is worth a serious consideration.

Fixed Social Plugin is an amazing little plugin that is worth a try for anyone who’s looking to get more exposure for his/her content on sites such as Facebook, StumbleUpon, and other top sites. Adds social media buttons to your blog in a manner that can’t go unnoticed by your visitors.

Buzrr: a cool shiny plugin for WordPress that installs a Google Buzz counter on your blog. As I mentioned earlier, it’s tough to say how big of a player Google Buzz is going to be, but it’s worth testing.

WP Greet: a very useful plugin lets you keep track of who’s coming to your blog from where and display a message on the top of your posts accordingly. Useful for targeting your users based on their referring URL. Just watch its memory usage if you decide to install it.

There you have it. 5 powerful social media plugins for WordPress that give your readers everything they need to promote your posts. Please feel free to add your favorite plugins below.

If you are looking to speed up your WordPress blog and improve its performance dramatically, here are 3 powerful cache plugins worth trying:

WP Super Cache: one of the most powerful cache plugins available for WordPress. This plugin generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog, meaning that your server won’t have to deal with those resource intensive PHP scripts all the time. The bad news is this plugin is known to have issues with some web hosting services (e.g. Dream host).

W3 Total Cache: the plugin I am using on my blogs. It’s super fast and compatible with all my hosts. It comes with a ton of options to help you resource load on your server by caching all aspects of your website. It can improve your website’s performance ten-folds and reduce your bandwidth costs in the process. There is a reason popular websites such as Mashable have used this plugin in the past.

Plugin Output Cache: many bloggers use popular plugins such as Popular Posts or Similar Posts on their blogs. These plugins let you promote your best posts to your readers. This plugin lets you cache a portion of their outputs to reduce the load on your blog and make it load up faster.

Remember, Google and other search engines are going to pay attention to your site’s speed. More importantly, your readers care about your site’s speed. So it pays to have a fast loading blog.

If you have bought anything from Amazon recently, you have probably seen the above message. Essentially, Amazon is trying to encourage you to browse through more of its products and spend even more money on the site. That’s exactly what WDTGFH does, except it focuses on your blog posts instead of actual products. It keeps track of what stories people click on and provides a link to them on the source page. So your readers can go through your posts and figure out what posts other readers have found interesting after viewing a specific post.

If you happen to use WordPress, you are going to love WDTGFH. It not only makes it easy for people to find your other posts, it can help you retain your readers for a longer period of time. Of course, you can always combine this plugin with Random Posts or Popular Posts to get the most out of it.

The plugin is very easy to install and flexible at the same time. It allows you to change the look and feel of it from the back-end. If you know PHP coding, there are plenty of cool things you can accomplish with this plugin. Of course, you don’t need any knowledge of PHP to make basic changes to this plugin. If you happen to have many posts on your blog and want to get them the exposure they deserve, Where Do They Go From Here? is a handy plugin to try.

One of the best ways to drive traffic to your blog is by optimizing it for the search engines. Getting free traffic from Google, Bing, and other top search engine sites enables you to spend money on growth and more premium advertising opportunities. There is no simple way to dominate the SERPs on Google and other engines. But you got to start somewhere, so you might as well start with the most important SEO factor that you can control on your blog — your title tags. Your title tags can make a big difference in the amount of traffic you get for free through the organic search. Choosing the right keywords and using them through your content gives search engines the indication that your page should probably get ranked for those keywords. I admit there are a lot of moving parts here. But without optimized titles, you are not maximizing your blog’s traffic.

All-in-One SEO is a cool free plugin for WordPress bloggers that allows you to optimize the title tags on all your pages without doing too much. If you happen to have a blog that has never been optimized for search engines, you can use the plugin to mass update your title tags in a flash.

Now, I don’t recommend this option to those who are just getting started with their blog. But if you have over 10,000 pages and don’t have time to go through them one by one to optimize your title tags, using the mass update feature is a good way to get started. The plugin allows you to optimize your post, page, archive, and category titles on the fly. Since you are defining a format for your titles, you won’t have to do anything other than write a headline for each of your posts (which you should already have done).

Advanced users can always use the option provided under each of their posts to customize their title tags on an individual basis. You do want to make sure that you approach the process with a strategy. At the same time, you should use long-tail keywords to make every post count. Think about it. If your blog receives 10 visits per post each day (on average), and you have 10,000 posts, you are looking at a decent amount of traffic. Now getting to 10,000 posts that people want to read could take a lot of work. But once you get there, your optimized title tags (and your content) will give you a better chance of maximizing the traffic to your blog. This is not all that you need to do to optimize for search engines but is a good place to start.