10 Must Have WordPress Plugins For AdSense Niche Sites

AdSense niche sites should always be seen as an investment you can sell and profit from in the future. While wordpress offers some great out of the box customization capabilities, you can use some handy plugins to extend that functionality to quickly monetize, secure and optimize your site for long term profitability.

Here I have compiled a list of 10 most useful and absolute must have wordpress plugins to help you make the most of of your niche sites.

1. Akismet

Comment spam is unavoidable for just about any wordpress blog or niche site. If your site is bombarded with spam it will most likely turn away genuine visitors as they will see a spammed site as a sign of low quality and are probably not likely to stick around for very long. Akismet can successfully block most comment spam with upto 95% accuracy and also allows you to automatically delete spam comments after a certain period. This plug-in is an absolute must to keep your site spam secure!

Akismet is free for non commercial use but requires an API key for a small $5 annual subscription fee. An absolute no brainer to keep your site spam free!

2. Ad Injection

Ad injection is my favourite AdSense code injection plugin. You can use several pre-defined ad locations to display AdSense ad units in your niche sites. The plug-in easily allows you to display ad units above and below the content, in the site header, footer and skyscraper ad units in the sidebar.

Ad injection also allows you to inject random ad units inside your content body. For random ad units I recommend using either the full or half banner text units to maximize your CTR. Ad injection also offers advanced level functionality allowing you to include and exclude ads on certain types on pages and posts, ad alignment and padding.

3. All In One SEO

This ever reliable and 100% free plug-in is another absolute must have SEO tool to format and optimize and your posts and sites for those all important title, description and keyword tags. You can also control additional features such as site URL’s and permalinks.

4. Manage WP

Manage WP can be huge time saver for making those necessary updates if you own multiple niche sites. This fantastic and robust plug-in offers a common wordpress dashboard which allows you to make updates to multiple sites and blogs through a single hub. Manage WP also sends out regular updates about any issues or updates requiring attention and then its simply a question of logging into your central control panel and making the necessary updates to one or multiple sites from just one location. No more logging into individual sites which can mean several wasteful hours if you manage a big portfolio of multiple niche sites.

5. SEO Pressor

Offers a score based review of your posts and content using key performance indicators like keyword in title, header tags, keyword density, alt tags in images
and also internal and external linking.

The idea here is to continuously optimize your on page SEO to get as close as possible to a score of 100%. SEO pressor is often badly under-utilized and most users will only optimize their posts upto 50-60%. I aim for a minimum of 90% and ideally 100% with all my content and have seen a vastly positive effect on my rankings.

6. Google Analytics For WordPress

Track your site’s traffic and performance using this free plug-in from WordPress guru Joost De Valk . No more manually pasting our analytics code into your site header. Simply add your Google account profile, select your analytics site profile and start tracking your traffic!

7. Tubepress

Fantastic free plug-in to help you insert youtube videos into you posts and blog. Allows you to easily insert entire video galleries, playlists or single videos using a wide range of Tubepress short codes.

8. WP Lockup

Ever heard of those horror stories of hackers sabotaging someones site or blog? Well, that can happen to just about anyone. For many marketers loosing 1 or 2 niche sites can mean thousands of dollars or even their complete living. Of course you can make backups of your site but it is not worth the risk.WP lockup provides several levels of security against hackers. This includes customized admin login URL’s instead of the most common www.yoursite.com/wp-admin.

You can also add an additional layer of security through a HTTP authentication to prevent unwanted visitors from accessing your admin login page.Additionally, you can also add a login captcha on the admin panel. The plug-in also allows you to lock out the site after a limited number of unsuccessful login attempts and sends out an email if such an event occurs.The WP-lockup plug-in was offered as a WSO (warrior special offer) on the warrior forum not so long ago, I pounced on it straightaway and got myself the multi site developers license for just $27 to secure all my niche sites. Single site licenses can be purchased for as little as $7 using this link.

9. WP Zon Builder

Great plug-in for auto inserting your Amazon affiliate product feeds to complement AdSense and other forms of monetization. See my other post on AdSense and Amazon niche sites for a detailed explanation of how this works.

10. WP Affiliate Ultimate

Another great plug-in I bought for a bargain price through a WSO. Although, mainly designed for affiliate sites, this plug-in can automatically link your pre-defined keywords to affiliate offers using a variety of text styling options.

The plug-in also allows you to automatically add pretty links (eg “http://www.nichesense.com/go/offer”) to all your affiliate links which prevents those ugly affiliate links showing up on when visitors hover on your link (eg http://hop.clickbank.12iu827898782881hjlkop2136…)

Special Mention

Backup Buddy

Backup your entire wordpress blog with a click of a button using this fantastic plug-in. If you own an authority site with hundreds of pages of content, just the very thought of loosing or risking your site can send shivers down your spine.

Although slightly pricier than most other plug-ins in my top 10 list, this is definitely worth a mention as a quick and easy solution to securing your wordpress blogs.

Do you know of a plugin that could be a good addition to this list? Please leave your comments below.

Tagged as: adsense niche sites, best wordpress plugins, wordpress