These plugins give us additional functionality within the WordPress software – giving us the ability to put our blogging on autopilot.

Here's my recommended… must-have list of my favorite WordPress plugins I use myself to enhance my WordPress blog (listed in order of importance):

All in One SEO Pack – This is my all-time favorite WordPress plugin.

It adds automatic search engine optimization options into each WordPress post… ultimately attracting visitors to your blog almost automatically.

I say almost automatically because there are three empty fields to fill out for each post you make:

- Webpage title

- Meta description

- Meta keywords

When you fill out these the right way, you're going to get a lot more clicks from search engine results to your blog post.

WP Auto Tagger – -This plugin automatically scans your blog post and looks for popular keyword phrases. It takes these phrases and creates a backup search engine friendly duplicate page.

Don't fret about the technical details of this plugin. All I can say is that after checking my blog stats, a large majority of my search engine referrals come as a result of WP Auto Tagger creating these tags.

Google XML Sitemaps – This amazing WordPress plugin generates a special Google-friendly sitemap every night helping you get your blog post noticed by search engine spiders and bots.

Google XML Sitemaps creates a file called "sitemap.xml" — an A to Z index listing the details of each blog post. For example, mine is found at:

http://www.marketing-ideas.org/sitemap.xml

Submit your sitemap to Google, Yahoo! and Bing and watch your blog content show up faster in these popular search engines.

AdSense Now! – If you're not making money with your blog, you should.

And Google AdSense is the fastest and easiest way to make money I've ever tested (when you put my AdSense secrets into action, that is).

The AdSense Now! plugin makes it a breeze to add Google AdSense revenue sharing into your blog… just install the plugin, copy and paste your AdSense code and configure the positioning settings to display your ads between your blog post's headline and content:

Top: Center

Middle: Suppress

Bottom: Suppress

W3 Total Cache – WordPress is great, but it's notoriously slow loading. It takes many many seconds just to start to see your blog content display.

In today's world, speed is everything. If your site doesn't display in a second or so, your visitor clicks to your competitor.

The good news is this WordPress plugin DRAMATICALLY improves the speed of your blog by adding page and database caching which displays your blog faster.

wpuntexturize – By default, most WordPress themes add "graphic embellishments" to your blog posts… that includes those sometimes fancy curly quotes.

You've probably seen the problem frequently… you go to read a blog post and it's riddled with question marks and other weird characters. This happens when a blogger copies and pastes content from another blogger with curly quotes.

This simple plugin prevents WordPress from making HTML entity code substitutions of single and double quotation marks with their curly alternatives.

Broken Link Checker – Search engine robots and spiders don't like it when your hyperlinks to recommended sources are outdated and don't work.

This WordPress plugin checks your posts (while you're sleeping) for broken links and missing images. If there's an issue, you're notified in your WordPress dashboard just after logging in.

Blogging has been around since 1993, but really became mainstream in 1999. And the benefits of blogging have remained virtually unchanged since then.

I LOVE blogging and know you will too. Here's why:

FREE lead generation
For me, putting my lead generation efforts on autopilot is the single biggest benefit of blogging.

Every word I write on my blog has the ability to show up in a search result at the most popular search engines like Google, Yahoo! and Bing…. in just days (maybe even in a few hours). And when a Google customer searches for words that also appear on my blog, I have an excellent chance to have that same visitor swing by my site FREE.

While my competitors are paying 50 cents… a dollar… or even up to $50.00 for each lead, getting the same precisely-qualified visitor to my blog at no charge is quite exciting.

That's an amazing concept worth repeating…

… Every word you display on your blog is likely to show up in a Google search in hours (or even mere minutes). And when a Google search matches the words on your blog, there's an excellent chance to have that same searcher click to read your entire blog post.

That means every time you write on your blog, you're almost instantly scaling out your lead generation efforts. How awesome is that?

Gain international fame
Blogging positions yourself as the expert on the topic you choose to write about. It's true. The fact that you've put your thoughts in writing is much more powerful than saying it out loud. And the more you blog, the more your "fans" (i.e. repeat visitors) are going to adore you.

Become an instant free agent
Another one of the many benefits of corporate blogging is it gives you instant "free agent" status. Just like a star football player.

When you name your blog with your actual name in the blog title, you retain ownership no matter where you blog from (or for whom you work for).

In today's economic climate, odds are you're not going to retire at the same company you're currently employed with. But the good news is blogging vritually bulletproofs your job security. If your boss threatens to fire you or let you go, just remind him/her that the competition would LOVE to have you continue blogging for the away team.

Blogging is easy
And blogging today is easier than ever. The latest version of WordPress sets you back about 30 minutes to install. After that, you're done. Time to blog. Internet marketing couldn't be easier.

WordPress' blogging software offers us hundreds (maybe even thousands) of "plugins"… almost always free software enhancements that adds additional features to your blog.

I currently use 8 plugins. These plugins help speed up the load time of my blog pages… display the best-matching corporate sponsors next to each blog post… and even handle the SEO work automatically.

The bottom line is no aspect of internet marketing delivers as many benefits as corporate blogging… and the best part is it's all entirely FREE.