When I first started making wordpress blogs one of the first things that I would do is to go and search for and download every plugin through the plugin search function of wordpress. This is a lengthy process and was something that I didn’t look forward to doing as it was very monotonous. Finally I found a solution to this problem.

An FTP client is a program that you download onto your computer and it allows you to directly login to your hosting accounts system and upload as many files and folders as you want at a time. I’ve known about this for a while but always had trouble setting one up. Once I actually put effort into it, it was quite easy to set up.

The one that I personally use is called File Zilla. This is a very straight forward and very easy to use FTP Client, and best of all it is free!

When you get File Zilla you’re going to see this at the top, prompting you for your server and login information:

This is the only complicated part, because of how variable the information is that you can get.  What I did was go onto my hosts website and go to the help section.  There I searched for FTP client information and it popped up right away.

Once you have been able to log in you’re going to want to have a folder on your computer full of all the plugins that you want to have on all your different websites.  I have a standard of about 7 or 8 that I’ll use on every website.  On the left side will be the view window for the files on your own computer, while the right side will be the view window for the files on the hosts server.  This is what mine looks like:

This is the path on the hosts server for where you’ll want to dump all your plugins

• www –> SITENAME.COM –> wp-content –> plugins

Select all your plugins on the left at once, right click, and click on ‘Add Files to Queue’.  This will then send your files that you want to transfer over to your blog to a queue.  Now that they’re in the queue, look at the top toolbar and hit the ‘Toggles processing of the transfer queue’ button, and all your files will be transferred over at once!

Now login to your WordPress control panel and head to the plugins section.  Hit the box by the plugin heading on the page, and go to the Bulk Actions drop down box and select Activate.  Then press Apply.

You’ve now uploaded every plugin that you use in a very effecient and effective manner and saves you from the drudge of finding every single one and activating it.  Even if your plugins are outdated WordPress now has an updates option on the Dashboard drop down box of the wordpress toolbar in which you can update every plugin all at once, again saving you a lot of time.

There are literally hundres of WordPress plugins that you can choose to use in your WordPress blog.  A lot of them are extremely useful and I wouldn’t want to blog without, and a lot of them are junk.  Plugins can save so much time for you and can do so many things that you might never thought possible with a blog.  If you are not using them, you should be!  I’d like to give you a list of some of the plugins that I find very helpful.

All In One SEO Pack

This is an absolutely crucial plugin if you are looking to rank your blog in the search engines to generate traffic. It adds a convenient little prompt box just below your text area where you can input the page Title, Description, and Keywords.  This should be standard on all blogs.

Google XML Sitemaps

Again if you are going to generate organic traffic for your blog from search engines you’ll be needing a sitemap to submit to Google, Bing, and Yahoo so they will know when you add new pages and will be able to crawl all of the pages of your site.  Crucial for getting ranked.  It’s very simple to use, just activate the plugin and it will generate a great XML plugin file.

AdSense Manager

If you’re looking to monetize your blog to bring in a little extra cash, this is how you should go about doing it.  You create ad units and put the code into the ad manager and it will create easy input codes to easily, and I mean real easily, input your adsense ad anywhere you want it to.  It also includes this in a widget for easily adding adsense to all your pages.

Google Analytics for WordPress

This adds the ability to very easily add your google analytics code into your blog without having to edit your theme to put in the code, or having to redo it every time you change themes.

TinyMCE Advanced

This is one of my favorite plugins that I have found for WordPress.  Just like all the rest this one takes WordPress for what it is and makes it ten times better.  This adds a whole slew of options for your posting toolbar.  It adds features such as font size, font family, paragrah, styles, copy and paste, superscript and subscript, table editing, smily faces , and much more.  This plugin for me is a definite must.

That is the end of my list, but don’t let it be the end of yours.  There are hundres to choose from and while the ones I listed are mostly used to create much more efficient usage with wordpress, if that’s a word, but there are many more out there that are lots of fun.  Check out my tag cloud, that’s a pretty cool plugin.

How to Make Blog

There are several things you can do if you want to install a new plugin.  WordPress 2.8 came with an amazing new feature that enables you to search for plugins right from your WordPress dashboard.  Not only that but you can install them right from the dashboard as well.  This is such an added convenience to the WordPress blog and I think them for adding it.  That is the first way you can do it and its very simple to do.

Now for some of us that works fine, but if you are creating new blogs all the time like I do perhaps you’d like to upload several plugins at once.  What I like to do when uploading a bunch of plugins is create a file on my desktop called “WordPress Plugins”.  In this folder contains the folders of all the plugins that I like, which I got from http://www.wordpress.org.  What I will then do is load up my FTP Client on my hosting account:

FTP Client Plugins

I’ll select all the ones that I want, which I’ve already done, and send them directly to my root/wp-content/plugins folder.  Make sure you get the right path so you’ll be able to use them.

From there just go to your plugins screen, update that ones that need updating, and activate them all!

Thanks for stopping by.

How to Make Blog

I’d like to discuss the importance of Search Engine Optimization for your blog.  If you are looking to get any type of traffic at all from search engines, you need to optimize your blog to do so.  While WordPress does quite the job itself, having the All In One SEO Pack is a neccessity.  It is such an easy thing to install and use that not having it would be unwise.

Installing it is as simple as going to your plugins page on your wordpress dashboard, searching for it, and installing it.  For those who aren’t familiar with that here is a direct link.

After you install it, activate it.  It will show up on your posts page and will look just like this:

How to Make Blog

This will appear just below your post box.  Scroll down to the bottom, and what I usually do is bring it all the way up to the top so it’s right below my text box area so I wont forget to use it.

Happy Blogging!

How to Make Blog