When you’re blogging for business, you need to be as efficient as possible if you’re going to drop the maximum profits possible to your bottom line. And when it comes to moderate/heavy marketing with business blogs, efficiency starts with the administrative management of your blog. If you can minimize the amount of time you or one of your team needs to spend administering your blog — you can focus more time and effort on marketing actions that yield more traffic, more sales, and more profits.

Minimizing your research time and maximizing your results is why we put this series of Business Blogging Plugin articles together. Being busy business owners ourselves, we want to save you time by sharing what we know works best and help you filter through the hundreds of plugins available to help streamline your blog admin when using WordPress.

So without further delay — here’s the first installment covering general blog administration and content protection. These are the plugins we’ve found (through our testing and the testing of our blog coaching clients) to be the most valuable especially, for small business owners.

EASING THE ADMINISTRATION OF YOUR BUISINESS BLOG

Event Calendar

This plugin is particularly helpful if you run special events for promoting your business (online or offline.) It’s also great if you’re using WordPress for a membership-type setup (paid of free.) It makes posting a practical, interactive event calendar in the navigation column of your blog a snap.Here’s the page for downloads and updated information on this WordPress plugin: Event Calendar.

Category Organizer

WordPress has lots of advantages with it’s extensive category capabilities. Advantages for both practical organization and search engine optimization. But sometimes when you have a lot of categories on your business blog, or when you’re using WordPress for more a membership type site for subscribers — you want more direct control over the way your categories show up.

‘Category Order 1.9.2′ allows you to set the explicit ordering, spacing, and indentation of categories in the category list that appears in the sidebar. All you need to do is use the handy “Category Order” management page to customize your navigation area and make things look exactly like you want.

Here’s the page for downloads and updated information on this WordPress plugin: Category Organizer plugin (Scroll to the bottom of the page and look for ‘Category Order 1.9.2′)

PodPress ****

If you’re going to be using your business blog to it’s full potential, you’ll want to be using multimedia (audio, video, PDFs, and regular blog posts.) And there is hands down no better way to make that multimedia posting easy than this great 4-star plugin called PodPress.

Dan Kuykendall over at MightySeek.com has done an outstanding job with this plugin. His passion for podcasting shows in the work he’s put into this WordPress plugin. He’s got the most extensive installation and configuration instructions and help pages I’ve eve seen for a free plugin. He even has an (active) support forum setup!

There’s really too many helpful features of PodPress to list here, but trust me — this is THE plugin you want if you’ll be using multimedia. It makes adding a podcast to a WordPress post a snap.

Here’s just a few of the many time saving, viral multiplying features:

Full featured automatic iTunes feed generation makes integration with the most popular podcast service a ‘no-brainer’

• Auto Generation of enclosure tag for fully compliant podcasts
• Automatic Media player for MP3, MP4, MOV, FLV, and more, with inline and Popup Window support.
• Control over where the player will display within your post.
• Support for various formats, including Video Podcasting
• Easy way to link to your podcast within iTunes
• Preview of what your Podcast will look like on iTunes

Here’s the page for downloads and updated information on this WordPress plugin. PodPress Plugin

WordPress Data Backup

All the content you’re creating on your business blog is gold. Whether it’s written word, video, audio, or special reports, you want to make sure this data is safe and secure.This plugin is a great tool that makes it easy to manage your Wordpress database. It allows you to optimize, backup, restore, delete, and run selected queries on your database.

If you’re not comfortable with MySQL Admin or want an assistant with very little technology know-how to maintain backups for you — this is for you.

To download this WordPress plugin, go to http://www.lesterchan.net/portfolio/programming.php and look for ‘WP-DBmanager’ in the list

PROTECTING YOUR CONTENT… LEGAL STEPS and PASSWORD PROTECTION

RSS Feed Copyright Protection

There are more and more aggregator sites popping up out there on the web. These are automated sites running on scripts that pull in RSS feeds to supplement, or entirely make up their site content. Most of these sites are built by internet marketers to attract traffic, usually to monetize that traffic with AdSense.

Unfortunately some of these people are unscrupulous, and their equally unscrupulous sites display the full content from the RSS feeds. Basically your content gets thrown together on a site built to be bait for search engine spiders and ends up contributing to a spam site.

What this means is that your hard work and unique content is being used by these marketers with not even the courtesy of a link back to you crediting you with authorship. What can be even more damaging is that if a site is in trouble with Google (or any of the major search engines) and they do link back to you — that inbound link to your site could blow back and damage your page rank.

To help stop this from happening to you and your business, Angsuman Chakraborty from Simple Thoughts has developed a great plugin to help at least give you a legal basis to go after these type of companies if things get ugly. It’s simple and straight forward to use, so put it to use right away — especially if you’re in a niche where internet marketers can make a killing off AdSense!

Here’s the page for downloads and updated information on this WordPress plugin. Copyright your blog’s RSS feed

Post Levels Protection

If you’d like to make some or all of your blog private for internal team use, membership access, private courses, etc. — this is the best plugin I’ve found out there for business owners. We’ve tested several protection plugins on blogs we use to manage our outsource team and our internal team blogs — this is the most convenient and reliable plugin for this purpose out there.

Here’s the page for downloads and updated information on this WordPress plugin: Password protecting business blog content

If you’ve tested or developed any additional plugins for streamlining the admin of WordPress blogs, plugins that would be particularly helpful for business owners blogging with WordPress — please share them below in the comments sections. Anything that can help busy business owners save time is a BIG plus!

Copyright © RPM Success Group Inc. 2002-2006. Other bloggers and journalists are allowed to excerpt and link to posts (as is common with bloggers,) as full credit/attribution is given to AdvancedBusinessBlogging.com and RPM Success Group Inc.

Learn how to unleash the maximum marketing power of business blogs, podcasts, and RSS (in any industry, profession, or niche) with Marketing With Business Blogs™.

John-Paul Micek is known as the “Communication Commando.” He and his partner Deborah have developed a simple scientific code for maximizing your persuasion, power, and influence in business. John-Paul is a published author and weekly columnist for the Honolulu Star Bulletin. As a Click-and-Mortar Business Coach he helps small business owners integrate offline and online marketing strategies for rapid, reliable business growth. You can reach J.P. directly via [communicationcommando@gmail.com].