This past week I was interviewed by Rodney Washington of Photo-Marketing-Mentor.com as part of his Photo Marketing Tele Summit. I had a great time sharing the virtual stage with some big names in the industry including Rick Sammon, Jim Zuckerman and others. The interviews can be downloaded for a few more days for free at which point the entire 3 day event can be purchased on CD. Click Here for more Information.

In my talk i mentioned my personal Fav 7 WordPress plugins when it comes to helping market your blog. These are what i consider the mandatory set of plugins and the ones that i install with every deployment of WordPress for my sites and my clients sites.

Akismet - Spam has proliferated to the blogosphere and just like email spam you need a way to fight it. Akismet checks incoming post comments against spam database and automatically filters out the offending comments. Once the questionable comments are detected they are quarantined for manual approval. Akismet is installed by WordPress by default but you do need to register for a key before using it.

Feedburner – Feedburner is RSS on Steriods. It not only allows you to syndicate your posts and podcasts but also allows you to track subscribers as well as gives you statistical information. Feedburner has recently been purchased by Google and if you have a google account you can manage your Feedburner feeds within your Google account.

What Would Seth Godin Do - This Plugin with the funny name allows visitors coming to your blog will see a small box above each post containing the words “If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!” After 5 visits the message disappears. You can customize this message, its lifespan, and its location. This is a great way to help build your RSS Subscriptions.

Platinum SEO - Platinum SEO extends the basic SEO functionality of WordPress and is a must have to help you in your quest for getting picked up by the search engines. Platinum SEO helps generate relevant meta tages for every post and page. It’s competitor is All In One SEO but i’ve had better luck with Platinum.

Google Analyticator - Google Analyticator adds the necessary JavaScript code to enable Google Analytics logging on any WordPress blog. This eliminates the need to edit your template code to begin logging.

WP to Twitter - The WP-to-Twitter plugin posts a Twitter status update from your blog using the Cli.gs URL shortening service to provide a link back to your post from Twitter. The plugin sends a default tweet but allows you to override and customize your message for each blog post.

TwitThis – TwitThis places a small icon on the bottom of your blog posts and allows readers to easily tweet about your content.

If you are serious about your blogging efforts and are using wordpress, I strongly urge you to take a look at the above plugins and add them into your your blogging arsenal.