Starting a blog isn’t easy, whether it’s for your own personal use or for delivering more useful content to your audience or customer base. While WordPress is a robust blogging service just on its own, there are dozens (if not hundreds) of WordPress plugins for blogs.

These plugins transform your blog and your workflow, adding things like embedded video, image galleries, affiliate links, social media feeds, and even speeding up your entire site.

Take a look at these plugins that could transform how you blog.

1. Easy Affiliate Links

If you’re unfamiliar, affiliate links are an interesting and sometimes effective way to make a little extra cash on your blog. An affiliate link is a link to a product where you will receive a portion of the proceeds if someone comes from your site to the product page in question. Obviously, the amount of money you can make depends on the size of your audience, their purchasing proclivities, and your own relation to the products in question.

Easy Affiliate Links is a WordPress plugin that simplifies the process and gets you making money faster.
As you can see from the image, the plugin adds a small link icon to the normal blog editor for adding affiliate links. The plugin is free, but the premium versions ($29 for a single site or $119 for multisite) add access to more robust analytics.

2. NextGEN Gallery

Is your blog heavy on images, drawings, or other visuals? Even if it isn’t, it may be wise to consider adding more pictures to engage with your audience better — users process images up to 60,000 times faster than text. NextGEN Gallery is a WordPress plugin for blogs that helps you embed galleries and slideshows in your WordPress site.