The Internet is an increasingly social place. You may already have a website of some kind or another, but it’s also important to have a strong brand presence on the major social networks too. How, then, can you combine these two different sets of efforts for the best possible case of synergy?

Well, you might want to think about implementing Social Crowd on your WordPress site. This plugin will automatically pull the latest counts from your favorite social networks, displaying these numbers proudly on your blog. This can help to encourage visitors to your site to also check out your social profiles and “like” or “follow” them accordingly.

For now, the plugin supports Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Vimeo and Feedburner. Each of these can be displayed, with the appropriate identifying icon, as a simple widget in the sidebar of your site. The numbers themselves are not stylized with the plugin, so you can adjust their look and feel to suit the styling of your site.

If there is a social network, like LinkedIn or Foursquare, that you feel should be included, you can leave a note on the developer’s site. That is also where you can see screenshots of Social Crowd (both of the control panel and the widget), as well as download the plugin for your own use.

It can be difficult to remember a long and complicated URL, and that’s part of the reason why QR codes are slowly rising in popularity. These Quick Response (QR) codes can come in very handy if you have an audience of smartphone users, but how can you capitalize on this trend in a simple and easy to implement way?

If you’re looking to use it for your WordPress blog, then you might want to look at the WCS QR Code Generator. This WordPress plugin is exactly what you think it is: it works with your WordPress installation to automatically generate a QR code for any post or page on your website. You can also adjust the attributes of the generated QR code image to suit your needs.

These attributes include the size, color, URL, tooltip, image format (PNG or JPG), and error correction level. The URL attribute can be for a conventional URL, like a blog post that you’re trying to promote, but it can also be used for an e-mail address, plain text, phone number, vcard, or other uses too. You can then display the QR code using the basic shortcode syntax as outlined on the plugin’s page.

More information, including a FAQ and screenshots, can be found at the WordPress Plugin Directory. The free download link, as always, can be found on that page as well.

Someone new arrives on your blog for the first time. He or she likes the initial blog post read, whether the referral came organically from another site, via a Twitter mention, or through a search engine result. Whatever the case, he or she likes what you have to offer, but how do you make the most of this positive experience and earn a long-time loyal reader?

Yes, you should absolutely promote your RSS feed and other ways to stay in touch, but the Top Posts WordPress Plugin could prove to be quite useful too. This simple sidebar widget will automatically display the most popular blog posts on your site, not based on the traffic that each post gets, but rather based on the number of comments they receive.

This is a critical distinction, since blog posts with lots of comments usually mean that the online community is actively engaging with that content and having an active discussion about it. These are the articles that you want to promote, because the hope is that the new reader will join in on the conversation too. You can set the Top Posts plugin to show the top posts based on a monthly, weekly, or all-time perspective.

Basic screenshots and the free download link can be found at TentBlogger.com, a site that talks about “blogging for fun and profit.”

Part of running a successful website as a business is looking for all the right opportunities. It seems simple enough to put up ad banners on the main page, but it’s also about monetizing the areas that may otherwise be forgotten or neglected. And you need to do this while still providing a positive user experience.

To that end, you might want to explore the Search Integrate WordPress plugin. In short, it allows you to get monetized search on your site without having to deal with any messy code. The search results page is oftentimes poorly monetized, so this plugin allows you to deliver sponsored results, along with the main content.

Further still, the plugin also acts as “a tool to learn about your users with detailed search analytics.” By getting a better understanding of what your audience wants to find, you gain a better ability to cater to these preferences. These can reveal some great content opportunities!

Search Integrate is available as a free download through the official site. If you want to see the plugin in action, go that site and use the search tool. Support and FAQs are on the site too.

A blog without comments is like sports without commentary and television without viewers. Audience members add a great deal to the overall value proposition, which is why it is important to encourage comments on your blog.

One way to do that is through the Simple Top Commenters Widget. There are other plugins available that serve a similar purpose and go by similar names, but it’s the combination of simplicity and robustness in this offering that helps it stand out.

After installing and activating the plugin, you can go to the options panel from within your WordPress admin dashboard. Once there, you can define the title of the widget, choose the date range, activate links to commenter URLs, decide whether or not to display Gravatars, and opt to hide the total comment count.

If you want the sidebar widget to integrate better with your blog, you can additionally edit the CSS, customizing it to suit your needs. More information, including screenshots and the download link, can be found at TentBlogger.com. The same site contains more WordPress plugins and themes too.

There are all sorts of WordPress plugins to integrate a variety of social networking and social media platforms with your blog. You will have no trouble finding a widget or two to put your latest tweets in the sidebar, just as you can find plugins for Flickr, YouTube, Facebook and more. Foursquare shouldn’t be any exception.

If you love “checking in” to just about everywhere that you go, the Foursquare Latest Checkins WordPress widget plugin is for you. Rather than simply providing a text-based list of your most recent check-ins on Foursquare, the displayed widget will actually show the appropriate icons relevant to each location. Restaurants show a fork and knife icon, for example.

The plugin is very simple to install and configure. All you do is download and upload the appropriate files, activate the plugin, and enter your Foursquare credentials. You can change the title for the widget, as well as the number of recent plugins to display at any given time. A widget like this can be fantastic for a travel blog, but it can be just as easily applied to a range of other sites.

More information can be found at no-panic.at, including a couple of useful screenshots. Download Foursquare Latest Checkins via the official WordPress Plugin Directory on WordPress.org.