Yesterday I spoke briefly about moving from a personal blog to a pro blog.

I covered very briefly that you need to move from blogspot or wordpress.com or any other free hosted platform to a platform like Wordpress, were you have more control.

The main reason I love Wordpress is because of its plug-in structure. You can upload plugins to enhance your blog, and it’s as easy as pie.

Wordpress also has great theme support, as you may have already noticed. So changing themes is a piece of cake.

There are a few plugins that I consider crucial to any pro blog. It’s a simple means of managing your blog more effectively, and making sure that everything works like it should. It’s also a good idea to get into the habit of using plugins to manage your blog, before it gets big and you drown in the confusion of a rapidly growing blog.

The first and most crucial plug-in that I suggest is Akismet. It comes installed with Wordpress. Spam comments can be a royal pain in the @$$, and you could find yourself spending hours deleting spam comments.

The second plug-in I cannot live without is Cforms II . Cforms II, allows you to create contact forms in a jiffy, and install them on your blog with ease. I consider this indispensable; you want to make it as easy as possible for people to contact you. Blogging is about interaction with your audience. Hiding behind a site, and trying to keep people out is going to hurt you in the long run.

Then you also want to have a look at the All-In-One-SEO-Pack. If you want to use SEO as a traffic strategy, then this is a must. It allows you to control some of the most critical SEO factors.

Your RSS feed is critical to your blog. You need a means to syndicate content directly to your audience. RSS is a fascinating technology that is both simple and very very powerful. Wordpress supports RSS by default, but I would highly recommend that you use FeedBurner instead. They have a great way for you to control some of the aspects of your feed, including monetization, which we will get to later. They have a plug-in that you need to install, and it’s really simple and worth it.

WordTwit  is a nifty little twitter plug-in. Wordtwit takes your post as you post it and sends it as a tweet to all your twitter followers. It’s very very useful and saves you a step in the process of getting your content out.

You’ll also want to ad a plug-in that allows you to share your content on social networks. There are many many plugins for this, and you’ll need to do some hunting and some testing to find the one that works best for you. I use Slashdigglicious.

This is by no means a comprehensive list of plugins, but it’s a short list that I consider critical to any pro blog. I would also suggest that you spend some time looking at the plug-in directory  and see what other plugins might be useful.

The beauty of the open source plug-in model is that there are always new plugins becoming available, and being improved. So you’ll want to keep your eye on what’s happening in the plug in world.