Having the best plugins to assist you to smash your blogging goals, keep your readers coming back for more,  and sharing your content is essential! Thinktank Media are big fans of wordpress as it’s clean, simple and easy to use.

I have been searching high and low for the best plugins for this blog and by golly, at last……. I have my trusties. So soak these up and save the many hours of work I have spent plugging into the net!

Got your straw…start slurping!!!

Akismet

A must have for any wordpress blog. Its anti-spam blogging armour blocks the weaseliest little spammers!

http://akismet.com/

Google analytics

Get Google to track all your pages with this neat little plugin. Google Analytics provides you with highly advanced website tracking and management information.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-analytics-for-wordpress

Feedburner

Staying in close contact with your readers is a must! Feedburner is your blog promotion machine. Install this plugin to automatically feed your posts to your subscribers and more!

www.feedburner.com/

All in One SEO Pack

This nifty little pack optimizes your WordPress blog for search engines by automatically optimizing your titles and META tags.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack/

Google XML Sitemaps

Generates a XML-Sitemap compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog. This format is supported by Ask.com, Google, YAHOO and MSN Search.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/

Tweetmeme

I love this plugin! Make it easy for your readers to share your posts on twitter by adding Tweetmeme. It also shows how many people have RTed the post making you look pretty popular!

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

Twitter tools

Pull your tweets into your blog with Twitter Tools. You can also create new tweets on blog posts and from within your WordPress site.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/twitter-tools/

Facebook Connect Community

Pop this little gem on your blog to encourage users to sign in from their facebook accounts. It supports comments to be sent to the users news feed, which can bring you some tasty viral traffic.

http://www.sociable.es/facebook-connect

Share This

An easy way for readers to share your blog with their social networks and bookmarking sites. They can also send a link to your post via email, AIM, Facebook, Twitter and more.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/share-this/

Digg Digg

Adds Digg, Reddit, Yahoo Buzz buttons with counters for your readers to easily vote for your posts from your page. Great for organic SEO!

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

cforms II

A neat little plugin that makes it easy for readers to contact you with their questions regarding your services, blog posts and more.

http://www.deliciousdays.com/cforms-plugin/

Well, these are our top 11 wordpress plugins…full yet! There are heaps more yet these ones are great to power your blog up!  If there are any of your favs that I have not mentioned then please share share!

Google.  It’s just a word right, however it brings up so many different emotions in different people! For me, I get excited every time Google releases a new tool. Why, because the majority of these power platforms assist my team and I to grow, and really provide for what our clients demand.

More people use local search engines like Google (82%) than any other media to find local information.

This new tool is a must for small business and it’s a free listing! Welcome to the Google Local Business Centre.

Knowing how to establish numbers and metrics is key to all business models. Google has developed a killer tool that can help us do just that, plus it has made some updates to the way Google Local works. The new added power tool is metrics. What this means is that you can now control how you want to be defined on Google plus you can see how visitors are finding your information. Soaking up these metrics and making changes that reflect these results can be the difference that makes the difference with you and your competitors.

• Google local Business Centre enables you to:
• See who’s searching for you on Google.
•  See how they are finding you
•  See where they are coming from.
• Plus so much more. 

This information can help you make smart decisions that can bring in more customers. You can see trends in what your customers are searching for before they find you – eg. if you are a massage therapist and shoulder massages are being searched frequently, then you could enhance your services to cater for these trends. You can continuously keep changing the listings in Google based on the results you see in your dash board. Woola!

Grab some popcorn and tuck into the video. Next,  take advantage of the free listings www.google.com/lbc  .

Did you find this helpful?  I wanna know in the comments section (click comments) !

This Web2.0 space is bursting with growth and it’s only ever increasing. The numbers below highlight to all businesses how much opportunity is out there on the web right now! Stop crying and start working harder in this space! 2009 for small business owners has never been so great! 

Hold onto your hats and fasten your seat belts!

Internet

1,596,270,108 people are actively using the internet (Internet Usage and World Population Statistics are for March 31, 2009)

Google

 1 trillion URL’s are indexed on Google –  Source 

Here is how Google grew in terms of number of indexed URLs :

1998 : 26,000,000 (26 million web pages)
2000 : 1,000,000,000 (1 Billion web pages)
2008 : 1,000,000,000,000 (1 Trillion web pages)

Google has done 2 billion searches a day, or about 700 billion a year Source

Top 100 google hot trends - http://www.google.com/trends/hottrends

Blogs

133,000,000 - is the number of blogs Technorati has indexed since 2002

A new blog is created every second, totalling 80,000 new blogs every day. 

900,000 blog posts are created daily

Blogging grew 68% in 2008

346 million people worldwide read blogs

77% of active web users read blogs

The average blogger in the US:

• 51% male 
• Aged 35+ (58%)
• Aged 18-34 (42%)
• College educated, 74%   Source

Twitter

Number of tweets as of right now! - 1,691,543, 819 - ( click here for an up to the minute count)

At the start of 2008 Twitter had only around 500,000 monthly visitors

Growth rate for Twitter was 752%, for a total of 4.43 million unique visitors in December 2008  Source

Twitter.com is a top 500 site that reaches over 4.1 million U.S. monthly people. The site attracts a more educated, slightly more female than male, young adult audience. Quantcast, March

Twitter is receiving 8million unique visitors in the month of March 2009.Compete (via Nick) March 10

 Melbourne’s top 100 twitter users

Facebook

• More than 200 million active users

• More than 100 million users log on to Facebook at least once each day

• More than two-thirds of Facebook users are outside of college

• The fastest growing demographic is those 35 years old and older

• More than 20 million users update their statuses at least once each day

• More than 1 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) shared each week

• There are more than 30 million active users currently accessing Facebook through their mobile devices.

• http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics

• Inside Facebook says: “the number of Americans over 35, 45, and 55 on Facebook is growing fast. In the last 60 days alone, the number of people over 35 has nearly doubled. Developers and marketers may want to think about how to serve this group of new users.” Inside Facebook, March

• “Women over 55 remain the fastest growing group, and growth among the teen and college-age set has been relatively paltry. In absolute numbers there are now even slightly more members between the ages of 45 and 65 than there are 13-to 17-year-olds.” Wired Magazine, March.

YouTube

You tube nears 5 billion views Source

 Average internet users watch 2 YouTube videos a day

The average video length, according to comScore.com, was 2.7 minutes.

YouTube Insight, a free tool that enables anyone with a YouTube account to view detailed statistics about the videos that they upload to the site. 

One of the most watched videos on youtube in 2009 – set to break youtube records! 

This illustrates how web clips are mixing with TV shows and bringing in a bigger audience. 

Mobile usage

63 million on mobile internet daily

Significant growth in the numbers of people accessing the internet from their mobile phones vs. a year ago. The company says that today there are just over 63 million mobile web users in the US and 35 percent of them are online via their handset daily. Source.

I trust your mind had been sparking off like a new years eve fireworks show! Here are the numbers, now where are you seeing the opportunities within your own business?