It’s great that you’re able to attract new visitors to your blog, because it means that you are increasing your audience size and improving your reach. That’s a good thing, but many of these new visitors may not have a clue regarding any of your older content.

How can you direct them to the best articles from your archive without overwhelming them with the increasingly large list of blog posts? The Popularity Contest WordPress plugin could be just the ticket. Rather than select individual posts on your own to highlight, this plugin does it for you.

This plugin, created by veteran developer Alex King, keeps track of your page views across posts, the number of comments, the number of trackbacks, and other statistics to determine which blog posts are the most popular. Each post gets a “popularity” score and you can display the generated list as you see fit.

When used in tandem with other plugins, like Related Posts, you can really direct new visitors to some of the best content that you’ve already written. Check out Popularity Contest in the official WordPress plugin directory, where you’ll also find a FAQ and installation instructions.

Do you have multiple blogs, perhaps within the same blog network? Do you have readers on one website that just may be interested in what you’ve been writing on some of your other sites? Wouldn’t it be great if you could have some cross-site traffic in a truly organic and natural way? Well, there’s a new plugin designed specifically for this purpose.

The suitably named Multisite Latest Posts Widget is a plugin that will give you a new widget that can then be placed in your WordPress blog sidebar. The widget displays not only the latest posts from within the current blog, but it can also pull the latest posts from other blogs and amalgamate them into one unified list.

This widget plugin will only work with multisite-enabled WordPress sites, but its functionality is fantastic for people who own and run multiple blogs. The plugin allows you to change the title of the widget and define the number of posts to show. It will also show the post’s stripped down content if the post’s excerpt is empty.

Grab the free download from the official WordPress Plugin Directory at WordPress.org.

Is your website or blog optimized for newer web browsers? Do you find that some elements can appear “broken” if a visitor is using an older web browser? If that happens to be the case, you may want to try installing the IE6 Upgrade Option plug-in for WordPress-powered websites.

In short, it displays a message to all visitors who are using Internet Explorer 6 to access your website. The message says politely and succinctly that the user should upgrade their browser to something more current and that the web experience on your website may be less than optimal while using IE6. Links for Safari, Chrome, Firefox, Opera and Internet Explorer 8 are also provided, making the upgrade process relatively easy.

The “upgrade” message is displayed using a lightbox effect, so your website remains somewhat visible through the semi-transparent overlay. The visitor can close this lightbox and accept the “less than optimal” performance, or they can opt to upgrade their browser to something newer and return to your site for the better experience.

For more information, including a screenshot of the plug-in in action, check out the developer’s site at Doc4Design.com. The free download link is also available on that page.

Want to give your readers a better way to share your blog posts with their Twitter followers? You already see a number of buttons and other widgets that provide this kind of functionality, but WP-Tweetbox offers several unique features that separate it from the pack.

Instead of showing a simple button that will just redirect your visitors over to the Twitter website, WP-Tweetbox lets your readers compose the tweet while still on the same page as your original blog post. Further still, you can get the plug-in to auto-generate the tweet text ahead of time. This way, the user really can just click on “tweet” to send it out.

This WordPress plug-in supports a number of URL shortening services too, so you shouldn’t have any trouble fitting the auto-generated tweet text into the 140 character limit. WP-Tweetbox can be configured to work with Su.pr, Bit.ly, Bitly.pro, and Wp.me.

For more information, including a live demo of WP-Tweetbox, check out the plugin page at riyaz.net.

Any time that you have a blog that allows for comments, you are opening yourself up for comment spam. That’s just part of the territory and that’s where utilities like Akismet and Captcha codes can come in handy. Similarly, if you publicly post your email address somewhere on the Internet, you become increasingly susceptible to spam that way too.

In regards to comment spam, you may find that your filter is constantly picking up comments left by a certain IP address or IP address range. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could prevent people from that IP address from posting spam comments (or malicious code, for that matter) on your blog? You can. And all it takes is a simple plugin.

The appropriately named IP Ban is a plug-in for WordPress that, when activated, will return a 404 error message “for IP’s visiting your blog specified in the IP Ban option on the Discussion Options page.” This “page not found” error will effectively prevent them from not only leaving spam comments, but from viewing your site at all.

You can download IP Ban directly from the Plugin Directory on WordPress.org. As always, it is a free download.

Twitter can represent a huge source of traffic for your blog, but how you can best capitalize on this phenomenon? Part of it has to do with syndicating your blog content via your Twitter stream, but what if your readers want to share your articles with their followers too?

Well, the folks at Twitter have now released the official Tweet button that can be implemented on just about any website. In short, it puts a small “tweet” button your page, automatically generating a shortened URL, and allowing your readers to share the link with just a couple of mouse clicks. This is implemented right on your blog itself. The button also shows the number of times that the link has been shared.

There are two ways to go about implementing this feature on your WordPress blog. You could use the official utility from Twitter.com. This generates a couple lines of HTML code that can then be inserted into your theme templates as you see fit.

Alternatively, you could use any number of different WordPress plugins, like WP-Tweet, to achieve much the same functionality. Both approaches have their respective pros and cons.