Blog marketing is a great way to get free search engine traffic. You can also change the way a blog looks and functions quite easily.

You can change the way a blog functions with the use of plugins. What are plugins? They are just addons for your blog to give your blog extra functions which can help increase traffic and revenue.

To get an idea of the kind of plugins you can get for your blog, go to the "Plugins" section in the admin area of your Wordpress blog, click "add new", click "popular".

Or, to keep things simple, let me give you a list of plugins i personally use for my blogs and why you should too:

My 8 most recommended plugins for you:

AddThis Social Bookmarking Widget: This plugin installs the AddThis.com social bookmarking widget on your blog to allow visitors to easily bookmark content on your blog and share it through all social media networks including Twitter and Facebook.

Advertising manager: This plugin allows you to easily display and manage advertising and affiliate links on your blog. It saves a lot of time.

Akismet: This plugin filters spam on you blog such as comments that add no value at all which you can mark as spam (as you do with email).

All in One SEO Pack: This helps make your blog and content more search engine friendly. So you get more free search engine traffic.

Contact form 7: Self explanatory really, but a simple and easy to use plugin and not overly complicated.

Google XML Sitemaps: This helps the search engines find and index your blog in the right way.

Wordpress.com stats: This is a great plugin to see how many visits you get to your blog each day.

To get access to these plugins, go to the admin area of your blog, click "plugins" on the left hand side, "add new", search for the plugin (using the exact name as above), install then activate the plugin.

To modify the options for each plugin, look for the plugin name in the admin area and you'll see the options.

You may also want to install an RSS feed so that your visitors can subscribe to this and get the latest update to your blog. Use feedburner.com to do this. Paste the RSS feed URL into the RSS widget under appearance/widgets in your Wordpress admin area.

If you want more detailed stats, use Google Analytics. Search "Google Analytics" under the "plugins/add new" section in the Wordpress admin area. Follow the plugin instructions to install the analytics code.

Summing up These are just 8 of my most recommended plugins, there are also tons more that may be useful to you (depending on what you want for your blog).

It helps to experiment with plugins to find the most simple ones that are not too complicated. Plugins that actually save you time but also help increase your blog's audience and revenue.