Twitter has exploded in popularity over the past year as many mainstream media sources have been using the service to communicate with their readers/viewers, but did you know that bloggers can now use Twitter to promote their content as well?

While searching for a WordPress plugin that could automatically publish my blog posts on Twitter, I was thrilled to discover the WordTwit WordPress plugin.    With this plugin, simply upload and activate, then enter the Twitter login information for the account you want the tweets to appear under.   Once done, all your WordPress posts will start to appear on your Twitter account (almost instantly from my experience).

[Download the WordTwit WordPress Plugin]

If your WordPress blog has been around for awhile, chances are there is some clutter in your MySQL database.   For these situations, Joost De Valk of Yoast.com has an easy to use WordPress plugin called Optimize Database.

This free WordPress plugin simply needs activated, then whenever you click Optimize Now, the plugin runs an optimize table command on your WordPress tables, effectively defragmenting it. This is very useful for tables that are frequently updated. If you’d like to learn more about why this WordPress plugin might be necessary, you can read more information on this post.

Great plugin Joost!

[Download the Optimize Database Plugin]

About a year and a half ago we wrote about how to backup your WordPress blog.   In that post, we covered a few different WordPress plugins to manage your database backups, and explained why that was so important.  

For the record, the plugin I primarily recommended back then and still prefer today is the WP-DB Manager plugin.  This plugin allows you to backup and restore databases, as well as delete database tables, giving users full control over their database backups.

Unfortunately, that plugin only creates a backup for your database.   What about everything else?   WordPress blogs have a theme (or multiple themes), many use several WordPress plugins, and most bloggers use images that you’ve created to help draw attention to your posts or to illustrate a point.

Blog Exchange Traffic decided to fix this with their WordPress plugin release, the WordPress Backup plugin.   This plugin backups up your themes, plugins, images, and gives you the option to download these backups or have them emailed to you (this only works if it is a smaller sized backup).   WordPress Backup also works along side the WP-DB Manager plugin mentioned above, so it is recommended that you use both.

What do you use to manage your WordPress backups?

If you are an affiliate marketer, I’m sure you will be able to see the tremendous value in a new WordPress plugin (which was just released today) known as the LP Jumper WordPress plugin.    I’ve been working with the author of the plugin for over a year now on various affiliate campaigns and was thrilled to be able to get a sneak peak at the Landing Page Jumper plugin a day early and try it out.

With the LP Jumper WordPress plugin, the concept is really simple.   All you have to do is upload and activate the plugin.  Once activated, you can control all the WordPress themes in your theme directory from the settings panel, setting rotation percentages (percentages much total 100% in order for the rotation to work properly).   Once done, the theme displayed will change each time the website is refreshed based upon the percentages you set.

Here are some of the features of this premium WordPress plugin, which are any affiliate marketers dream:

• Rotate Multiple Landing Pages from One Traffic Source
• Find Out How Many Times the Specific Landing Page was viewed
• Give Specific Priority to a Landing Page base on its Performance
• Ability to Test your Current Landing Page Layout with Different Color Variations
• Easily Create One Campaign and Utilize One Traffic Source to Test

If you’d like to learn more, you can read about the LP Jumper plugin here.

WordPress’s default comment system isn’t exactly the greatest, and whilst you can improve the comment system manually, not everyone has the time or skill to do so. Thankfully, one of Automattic’s recent acquisitions, IntenseDebate can help.

Before we dive into installing IntenseDebate (which is really easy!), here is why you should use it, according to the IntenseDebate website:

So IntenseDebate is pretty much everything you could want from a comment system, so next we’re going to walk through the installation.

First thing is to go to www.intensedebate.com and signup. Next you’ll be asked to enter the URL of the site you want to install IntenseDebate on. Do so and click next. Assuming you’re running WordPress, you’ll be told you need to install the plugin:

Before you intsall the plugin, make sure you backup your database.

Once you’re backed up, follow the instructions above to step four. Once you’re at the tab, login with the account you just created, and then on the next screen click the big ‘Import Comments’ button. Sit back whilst your comments import themselves. When it is done, this screen will appear:

You’ll find a whole load of options to fiddle around with, so fiddle away, and then you’re done. Told you it way easy!

This was a guest post by Alex Denning, a WordPress power user, web design freelancer and Twitter fanatic (follow him here!). You can check out his site, Nometet.com here. If you have WordPress knowledge and are interested in writing a post for WordPress Hacks, please contact us.