“Simplicity of life and elevation of purpose.” – Henry David Thoreau

Now, I am not a transcendentalist like the literary poets, Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson. However, I do believe Thoreau was right about simplicity, at least on the web side of things.

I have been developing on the web for 6 years and have learned a couple of things that I want to share with you. If you are a novice blogger, you may become overwhelmed with surplus of themes and plugins available for your WordPress blog.

I know that it can be a challenge choosing the right plugin, theme, widget, etc.  Don’t panic because you do not need every single one of them. Over time as you gather more plugins that add buttons and sharing tools to your blog, the masterpiece blog you have been working so hard to build has quickly become a jumbled soup of “Click Heres” and “Share Mes”.

Let’s simplify the tools you need and should have on your blog to rocket your traffic and visitors into your blog. Below, I have made a list of just three.

1. Social Media websites have grown into the internet’s Kings of the Jungle. With hundreds of millions of users logging into social networking and media sites every single day has really locked down a large majority of loyalty on the web. So, your blog needs to be connected into that loyalty. What popular social websites do YOU use? Facebook? Twitter? Digg? YouTube? Great! Add them to your blog in a collected organized layout that will elevate the purpose of each one. Mixing and matching plugins for each on can cause confusion and sloppy layouts, so beware! That will turn visitors away and bring down the overall quality of your blog and it’s content. Need help with this? Ask me.
2. Building a list of email address and contacts of your visitors is essential for a business to build a strong relationship with it’s clients and prospects. How do you build a list of email addresses?  Simple. Email Marketing and Autoresponders. Give your visitors a chance to sign up for more information about your blog, receive special offers on your products, or just keep them updated with the latest happenings on your blog. Great email marketing websites like GetResponse.com and AWeber.com have a large array of tools for sending out newsletters and autoresponders.
3. RSS Feeds are often an overlooked marketing tool that has enormous power. RSS feeds (“Really Simple Syndication“) is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works—such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video in a standardized format. Why is that so great? Because of the standardized format, RSS feeds can be read universally across many different platforms on the web. (Check out my RSS Feed) So, your visitors can keep track of your latest blog posts by viewing your RSS Feed that they may have saved to their email client, internet browser, popular homepage, or where ever. I, for example, can view the latest blog posts from some of my favorite bloggers like Katie Freiling, Eric Goldstein, Seth Godin, and Kary Rogney just to name a few. I do this by adding their blog’s RSS Feed to my internet browser’s feed subscription feature. Now all of their latest blog posts and nicely organized in my browser’s toolbar so that I can quickly reference them and return to their site in an instant.

So those are just three tools that are a must on your blog but they are completely worthless if you do not place them wisely in a simple and easy location to find and use. Be classy, tasteful, and really make your visitors feel welcomed and comfortable.

Feel free to use the Retweet, Facebook, Digg, or MySpace sharing tools to share this post with your peers. Thanks!