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Plugins Plugins Plugins (of the WordPress Variety)

Posted: 17 Dec 2008 12:05 PM PST

Andy Beal has posted a great list of 21 WordPress plugins that he uses and recommends. Check it out at

21 Awesome WordPress Plugins That I Selfishly Kept to Myself Until Today.

There are a few others that I’ve included in my own recent list - 10 WordPress Plugins for New Blogs.

What others do you recommend?

Best Seller Lists

This technique is used in retail stores everywhere. Head into your local bookstore and you’re bound to find a ‘best seller’ list or even a full display showing what the best selling books of the month are.

Books that sell well and get on these lists often go to the next level - simply because they are on the list. People see that they’re popular and so when they are looking for a book - they’re more likely to go for them because obviously others like them. It’s partly about using the wisdom of the crowd to identify quality and make decisions but it is also partly about ’social proof’.

Here’s an example of how I use this same concept to create my own best seller list on my blog.

You can see the list at my Popular Digital Cameras and Gear page. On this page you’ll see a number of lists of best selling photography books, DSLR cameras, lenses and point and shoot cameras. The lists were compiled simply through my Amazon Affiliate program statistics.

Amazon gives you quite detailed reports of what products have sold through your affiliate links. You can arrange them by the number of items sold and it isn’t hard to take that information and put it into a list of your own.

Of course this works best if you have an audience who has been making purchases - but if you don’t all is not lost. Go to any Amazon category page (for example this Small Business and Entrepreneurship Books page) and you can see the products there arranged in order of ‘best selling’.

There’s your best selling books on that topic. Simply find a category that relates to your topic and you can create a relevant post on your blog that taps into the social proof idea.

Popular Product Lists

Another similar technique that I’ve found to be very effective is to create ‘popular product lists’. This is similar in that it creates a list of products that are popular for your readers to interact with - but the difference is that you don’t use Amazon stats to put the list together - you use your readers own feedback to create the list.

Here’s how it worked for me recently:

I asked my readers what DSLR lenses that they considered to be their favorite lenses. I asked them to leave a comment with details of what lens they loved.
After 10 days of reader feedback (I promoted this question post heavily in my weekly newsletter) I spent a couple of hours sifting through everyone’s answers.
I took those answers and constructed a new post - The Most Popular DLSR Lenses - According to Our Readers. I broke the list down into different manufacturers to make it more useful and then published it.

The result was really good. The post didn’t generate a lot of comments - but it did generate quite good sales at Amazon over the coming week. Interestingly the post was also very very popular when I linked to it in the following week’s email newsletter - it was the most clicked upon link in that email with over 5000 people viewing the post.

This resulted in some good sales of the lenses mentioned in the post - but also considerably secondary sales of other products when people continued to surf around Amazon.

Again - this technique relies upon your blog having readers and readers who leave comments - but even with a small group of readers I’m sure it could be done.

Good luck creating your best seller and popular products lists!

PS: One more type of List that I’m experimenting with on DPS today is a compilation of reviews that I’ve published on the blog previously. You can see this in action in a post titled 12 Great Digital Photography Books for Your Christmas Stocking.

In short it is a list of books on the topic of photography, with links to Amazon and the reviews that I’ve previously written on the books plus short quotes from those reviews. I’ve not done this type of list before but suspect it’ll do well.