I have helped a few folks setup new blogs, like my friend Andrew Bolson and often I am asked how to get the best out of using a platform like WordPress.

The plugins I use and get the most value out of are below and I thought I would share them here and see if I am missing anything.

1. Akismet
This is a plugin from the folks at Automattic and comes with WordPresss. Easy to use once it is activated, it keeps the spam away.

2. All In One SEO pack
This plugin is always in the most popular list, and that is because it works so well. You can control title tags, meta tags, extra description information and control and tweak what the engines see to your hearts content. Great for controlling header and footer data to be globally changed across your site.

3. Disqus
I have written about Disqus before. it is a great platform that allows you to approve, delete, and spam comments via email make interacting with your community much easier. It backs up your comments and synchronizes them with Disqus in case you ever want to move back – and is a great solution to handling comments. Being able to track and watch the social media mentions is also a great feature.

4. Feedburner Feedsmith
This plugin is no longer listed anywhere I could find – but made my life easier by pointing all instances of my RSS feeds to Feedburner in one step. Many blog themes have this feature built in as well.

5. flickr RSS
The bottom right hand side of my blog integrates my latest Flickr photos. My use case is to use Ping.fm with my blackberry to take and broadcast my photos once, and flickr, twitter, and a few other services all get updates.

6. Google XML Sitemaps
Straight from the plugin page “This plugin will create a Google sitemaps compliant XML-Sitemap of your WordPress blog. It supports all of the WordPress generated pages as well as custom ones. Everytime you edit or create a post, your sitemap is updated and all major search engines that support the sitemap protocol, like ASK.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO, are notified about the update.”

7. Most commented
Shows most commented posts in the sidebar widget you see to the right.

8. Popularity Contest This shows a behind the scenes look at what posts are popular. I recently changed hosts and lost all previous data, but it was nice to hit the reset button on those stats.

9. Lifestream This is the newest plugin on Marketing.fm and has its own page showing what I am up to – it aggregates all my social info into this blog.

10. RSS Footer
This is a great plugin that allows me to put in the text and links of my choice into my RSS feed. The reason for this is that as this blog gets syndicated (sometimes without permission) I can ensure a link back to my blog and a link to what I choose. Great for adding your Twitter credentials to the bottom of each post as well.

11. Simple Tags
I stopped tagging posts specifically for Technorati years ago, but this ensures the posts that do exist with those tags are compatible. I believe the latest WP tags are Technorati compliant so I am still submitting tags without the extra links at the bottom of each post.

12. TweetMeme Button
Also a fairly new plugin addition to this blog – TweetMeme allows me to include a tally and quick link back to Twitter to allow people to easily share my posts. This is great as it is a one click solution for readers and it ties back into Bit.ly analytics for me.

13. WP Database Backup
If there is one plugin you choose to implement off this list for your WP site, let it be the WP database backup plugin. It allows you to store remotely or have a DB backup emailed to you with the latest contents of your blog. I get a weekly data dump of posts in a zip file and have them all in my gmail inbox. If anything ever went wrong at my host, I would have a backup of this blog.

14. WP Touch
A great plugin that creates an iPhone and iTouch friendly design for your blog that looks elegant on the mobile screen. If you have an iphone checkout www.marketing.fm in the browser and test drive it for yourself.

15. Zemanta
Last, but certainly not least is Zemanta which has its own post on this site about how Zemanta can help with SEO as well as images and tags.

Disclosure; my employer USV has an investment in Zemanta and Disqus