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.

My name is Cris Mitchell and I’m a Twitter-holic.

This is no joke, over the past few weeks I’ve found myself immersed in the inner workings of this quirky little microblogging platform. Those of you unfamiliar with microblogging please read my previous post on the subject.

If you are like me and have spent any amount of time using Twitter, you’ll quickly realize that things could be a lot easier. With that said I’m going to list my Top Ten Tools for day-to-day Twittering.

1. TwitThis – www.twitthis.com – TwitThis is an easy way for people to send Twitter messages about your blog post or website. When visitors to your website click on the TwitThis button or link, it takes the URL of the webpage and creates a shorter URL using TinyURL. Then visitors can send this shortened URL and a description of the web page to all of their friends on Twitter.
2. WP to Twitter - www.joedolson.com/articles/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.
3. TweetDeck – www.tweetdeck.com – TweetDeck is an Adobe Air desktop application. It aims to evolve the existing functionality of Twitter by taking an abundance of information i.e twitter feeds, and breaking it down into more manageable bite sized pieces.
4. SocialToo – www.socialtoo.com – SocialToo is working to complement your social experience by providing you with all the tools you need to get the most you can from those you follow on the web. We’re automating the processes needed to make this experience as easy as possible, and providing you with tools to reach your audience to its fullest potential.
5. TwitScoop – www.twitscoop.com - Great search tool for finding other photographers or people in your niche market.
6. TweetBeep – www.tweetbeep.com – Enables anyone to receive alerts by email whenever a specific word or phrase is tweeted on Twitter, similar to Google Alerts.
7. TwitterBar- https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4664 - TwitterBar allows you to post to Twitter from Firefox’s address bar. A small unobtrusive grey icon sits to the right of your address bar; clicking on it will post your tweet, and you can hover your mouse over it to see how many characters you have left.
8. Twitterrific and Twittelator Pro- http://iconfactory.com/software/twitterrific – http://www.stone.com/Twittelator/ – Both are iPhone applications that allow you to send and track tweets from your cell phone, useful for posting messages when I’m away from my computer (I told you I’m hopeless)
9. TwitPic - www.twitpic.com – TwitPic lets you share photos on Twitter, TwitPic is also included in both Twitterific and Twittelator Pro.
   
10. TweeTree - www.tweetree.com – Tweetree is a usual site for view @reply threads on Twitter. It does so by grouping conversations together so you can follow the conversation in a logical order.

There you have it, those are my 10, can’t live without tools for twittering. I know there a bunch more out there so if you don’t see something in the list that you think I should know about, make sure to post them in the comments section, I want to know.