I am a very loyal person. I have been married to the same woman for 32 years. Most of my close, personal friends have been friends for a decade or more. I have gone to the same church for 27 years. Once I let you into my life, I almost never ask you to leave.

But I just unsubscribed to your blog.

Since converting my blog to Standard Theme a few weeks ago (read about why here), several people have written me to ask, “What WordPress Plugins are you now using?” Rather than answer these people individually, I thought I would post my current list in the hopes of stimulating your thinking plus getting a few ideas from you.

One of my favorite things about WordPress as a blogging platform is the ability to extend its features through plugins. Unfortunately, the more plugins you use, the more it slows down your blog. As a result, features have to be balanced with speed.

Recently, I was reviewing my blog’s statistics. I was really curious to find out what posts were the most popular. To my surprise, my About page was in the top ten most visited pages of all time.

Prior to that, I hadn’t really thought much about my About page. I viewed it as obligatory but not really as an opportunity. (Obviously, anything that is getting clicked on that much is an opportunity.)

I often hear authors complain about how “frontlist driven” the book publishing business has become. Frontlist is the term used to describe new book releases—those in the last twelve months or even the current season. In contrast, backlist is the term used to refer to books that are older than that—basically, anything that is not new.

While backlist sales account for 50–60 percent of all the books sold, they typically don’t get a lot of attention. The reading public and the book-selling industry tend to focus on what is “new and notable,” rather than what is “tried and true.”

I have read several books on blogging and subscribe to several blogs for bloggers. I have even attended a few blogging seminars. They seem to all talk about similar things.

If you have been following my blog for more than a week, you know that I am a big proponent of social media. We have used it at Thomas Nelson to achieve some dramatic results, particularly for a few of our authors who don’t otherwise have a media platform. As a result, I am convinced that social media marketing works. Except when it doesn’t.

Yesterday, I was reading a blog post by Tim Ferriss, author of The 4-Hour Work Week. I am a fan of his, so when I discovered that he had worked with StumbleUpon to develop a new blog traffic builder called Su.pr (pronounced “Super”), I got very excited.