I have a friend who might be interested in starting a blog later this year. In order to help her get plugins that will help her, I thought I would go through and list some of the ones I use here or on Lunch It Punch It.

What Would Seth Godin Do – it displays the custom message before or after posts welcoming and welcoming back readers.

CommentLuv – I like that when readers post, it links to their last post. It is a nice way to build community and for me personally when on my blogs or another, I’ll click through and visit a blog based on the title versus just clicking on a hyerlinked used name.

TentBlogger Add RSS Footer – believe it or not my RSS feed was being used elsewhere to populate a blog that was just skimmed content and affiliate links. Adding this footer says something like “you’ve just read [name of post] from [name of blog] and [my wording]. My RSS readers might be annoyed that I put two links to shops that I’m affiliated with, but it is because if my blog posts are going to be used elsewhere on the Internet, I might as well get something from the clicks.

WPtouch – it is an plugin specifically for the iPhone. Don’t have an iPhone? Doesn’t matter, your readers might be viewing your blog on an iPhone and this plugin provides a nice layout for the site (see photo)

Twitter Tools – for the most part I send Lunch It Punch It posts to Twitter, but indicate on this plugin to do so along with creating a hashtag if I want. There are plenty of plugins and services that do the same thing and even without having to tell each post, but then you get into the trouble of forgetting to stop it and/or looking like everything is on auto-bot.

I’m very much against those who post to Facebook fan pages and let it auto-tweet to twitter, so I don’t want to look like my Twitter streams are on auto-pilot and I don’t tend to them. I do use Hootsuite to schedule tweets and Facebook fan page updates and that is because weekdays, I am working full-time at my job, which does not include my personal blogs or social media accounts. But I do reply back to both tweets, Facebook and blog comments when I’m online, it just might not be in the most timely manner.