Blogging is hot again! No wonder, since your blog can be vital to your success online! In this post, I won’t go into the importance of having a blog, ‘cos many have done that before me.
I’d rather give you some  free tools & resources that will help you to make your blogging experience fun and easy.

In between all my other projects, I’m working on a new concept for my homebase and blog. I started from scratch, which allowed me to go out and look for the best and most interesting tips, tools and addons. And I found loads!

Don’t worry,  this isn’t just another list with the same old ‘must-have WP plugins’. Not even a top 10 of some sort. You can find thousands of those all around, like here and here. I just want to share with you those sites and tools that have really enriched my blogging, but are almost never mentioned by others. In my opinion, the sites and tools below deserve way more credit than they actually get.

Here we go…

MaxBlogPress
At MaxBlogPress, you can get some great free and easy to use plugins for your blog. I adore their Favicon plugin,Psychic Search and the brand new Max Banner Ads (allows you to add & rotate banner ads in your blog - anywhere), but my absolute favorite is the ‘Stripe Ad‘ plugin, which adds a non annoying, text-ad rotating bar at the top of your blog.

More cool plugins can be found at the site!

FCKEditor For Wordpress
I can’t understand why this plugin never shows up in the lists of must-have plugins. Basically, it replaces your standard WP editor with a fully equiped WYSIWYG editor. This makes formatting your posts piece of cake. This little tool has really fired up my blogging!

What Would Seth Godin Do
By default, new visitors to your blog will see a small box above each post containing the words “If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!” After 5 visits the message disappears. You can customize this message, its lifespan, and its location.

TweetMyBlog
A brand new Wordpress plugin that makes it super easy to combine the powers of Wordpress and Twitter to drive massive amounts of traffic to your blog.

I didn’t install the following plugins yet, but I fell for their features:

Faster IM Opt-Ins
Add an attention grabbing opt-in form to your Wordpress blog in 5 minutes!

Wordpress Magnet (not free)
An easy to use Wordpress Plugin designed to get people to leave comments on your blog by giving them an incentive.

Easy Ad Block Generator (not free)
This widget lets you easily add a variety of ads to a block, and position it ANYWHERE on your WordPress sidebar on ANY WordPress theme.

This list will grow longer as I continue to design my new homebase/blog!