The WordPress Popular Posts Plugin (try saying that 10 times in a row) is a great plugin to add to your WordPress blog or website to let your readers know about more content that they might be interested in.  By highlighting the content that’s popular with your other readers you’re likely to entice your current reader to click on another post, which will result in more and more page views over time.

In setting up the Popular Posts Plugin I first set it to show the posts with the most comments as when you first set up the plugin it won’t have any page view data to go off of.  I then let it accumulate some stats for a day or two and then switched the p lugin to rank the posts by the total page views.  It’s cool that the plugin gives you a these two options along with avg. page views.  You can also choose the time in which to calculate your stats such as 24 hours, 7 days, 30 days or all time.  All time is great for starting out, but as you will probably want to lower that to 7 or 30 days once your start to get more traffic.  Especially if you have a post that gets a lot of traffic in a short period of time due to it’s relevancy at that time.

It’s easy to add the posts as you just need to add the widget to the area of the site you wish to show the links and thumbnails.  If you look to the right you’ll see that I added a widget to my sidebar and set the thumbnails to 25 x 25 pixels.

Do you know of any other good plugins that someone should install?