Akismet - If you create a blog, you can guarantee that it will receive spam. It is one of those rules of the Internet that you just can't get around. But, rather than wasting hours sifting through spam to find the real comments and approve them, you can use Akismet, along with an API key from Wordpress.This plug-in actually comes along with your basic Wordpress installation. You'll need to activate it by getting your API and setting it up. This is a MUST DO for anyone who manages a blog. It will save you a great deal of time.

All in One SEO Pack - SEO is the root of everything that gets posted on the Internet, and for some reason, blogs are extremely search engine friendly. The last thing you need is for all your hard work in uploading to be useless, so a good plugin is required to insert Meta descriptions, keywords and keep your permalinks straight.

Akin Posts - Ever been to a blog that has a list of related blog posts directly beneath each post. This not only is excellent for matching up related content, it also assists in navigation cross-linking in your site and increases the number of page views per visit. When trying to raise the views on your site for traffic numbers you retain, this is the ideal tool to have. Some themes already have a tool that does something like this, but the free ones usually will not.

Ninja Affiliate - For those of you running an affiliate marketing blog, reviews of various products, this is a necessary tool. Not only does it manage and cloak your affiliate links but it also tracks the sources of the clicks and match up your affiliate links to keep them organized. It also has a tool that lets you target keywords throughout the site. For example, if you wanted to turn every instance of "web host" into a link to your affiliate site, you could do that with this tool.

Google XML Sitemaps - Another thing you most definitely want is for Google to index everyone of your pages as often as possible. This plugin will advise the search spiders, automatically generating new sitemaps every time new content is posted. This is a must have tool for a site like a blog that has new content added to it on a regular basis. Manually creating sitemaps just isn't feasible for this kind of content production.

Sociable - If you don't have a good social bookmarking tool, you'll never be able to get the extra traffic that comes from people liking your posts and sharing them with others. Sociable is one of the easiest to use and the simplest to install. There are 99 different social bookmarking and networking sites to add to the list here, with plenty of options for how to display them.

Wordpress is one of the best blogging platforms around today, and being open source, it allows you to always improve it. If you're not taking advantage of this wide array of tools, you are missing out on what could be the single biggest and best opportunity of your young marketing career.

To discover more marketing tips and tactics, visit my Affiliate Marketing blog at http://theaffiliatebizsite.com