Welcome to Part 4 of our WordPress Website Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to create an automated web traffic machine using the WordPress CMS.
So far, we have covered the following in this series:
In Part One, we describe the traffic automation process, and explain why using an expertly configured WordPress website or blog is the key to generating automated web traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress site, all you have to do to start generating more web traffic is add new content on a regular basis!)
In Part 2, we focus on the setup phase of this blueprint. We explain the best way to start if you don’t have a website yet, how to set everything up if you already have a website, and what to do if your site is built with WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you how to set up a WordPress site on your domain)
In Part 3, we discussed important configuration decisions.
Here, we configure all the settings that can affect your website’s traffic-getting ability …
(In Part Three you learn how to configure hosting settings, WordPress settings, and external settings that affect your website’s traffic-getting ability)
In this section of the series, we will look at ways to automate your traffic using a number of plugins.
Why Automate The Traffic Generation Process?
Depending on which expert you talk to, you could end up spending an hour each day (or more) posting content on social media while also trying to manage your business, your content and your web presence.
Many businesses simply lack the time, resources and financial means to engage in the kind of content marketing that many online marketing experts advise. If you spent hours checking Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook in addition to researching and writing content for your website or blog, how could you get anything else in your business done?
(Small business owners spend most of their time keeping their businesses up and running. Source: NFIB)
Many businesses spend most of their working hours keeping their businesses up and running. On top of this, there’s sales and marketing. After all, businesses need to remain competitive and make sales in order to survive.
A study of small businesses done by VerticalResponse – an email and social media marketing company, found that:
- 43% of all businesses surveyed spent 6 or more hours per week on social media (most of the other businesses surveyed that used social media spent even more time – between 6 and 21+ hours per week). This was a 66% increase from the previous year, so if the same research was conducted today, the figures would most likely be even higher.
- More than half of all small businesses surveyed spent 1-3 hours or more creating a blog post.
- Finding and posting content for social media was the activity that consumed the most time online for all businesses surveyed.
(Businesses spend more time each year marketing and promoting themselves online. Source: VerticalResponse)
As small businesses spend increasingly larger amounts of time on online marketing in order to compete and survive, this puts more and more pressure on businesses to focus their time on other important areas …
(Businesses with limited resources, time, and marketing budgets and many different business areas to focus on need to plan their marketing strategy very carefully.)
Another thing to keep in mind is that, in addition to spending time social media sites, all of your efforts are going into virtual real estate that you don’t control. You don’t own Twitter, Facebook, or StumbleUpon. These sites can and will make decisions that impact your business without prior warning. Why invest so much time and effort building a business on rented real estate? With a self-hosted WordPress website, you can control your own real estate and publish your content automatically to other online accounts.
Automating systems and process to leverage time is nothing new. Businesses have been doing it ever since the dawn of the Industrial Age. In the Information Age, however, the exponential growth marketing channels creates a number of dilemmas for small business owners and business managers, especially for those with limited budget, time, and resources. For example:
- Which of these marketing channels should you invest more efforts, budget, and time on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building a web presence on other people’s sites (e.g. YouTube, LinkedIn, Tumblr, etc.) while neglecting the benefits of building content on your own website?
- Do you create new content for every channel you plan to market and promote your business on?
The Benefits Of Automating The Traffic-Getting Process With WordPress
What we’d like to show you now, is a free, simple, and effective formula that allows you to automate your traffic generation process with WordPress.
With this formula, you will be able to:
- Save time creating content for your website and other marketing channels (e.g. social media),
- Save money on content creation and unnecessary online marketing costs,
- Determine which channels you should invest more of your efforts, time, and budget on,
- Invest most of your efforts building your own asset instead of someone else’s and still benefit from other people’s marketing channels.
Many automated web traffic solutions tend to focus on black hat methods, such as manipulating search engine results. This is not what the focus of this article series is about. In fact, we urge that you stay away from all black hat methods, solutions, sites, and anything designed to “game” or violate the policies and terms of service of services like Facebook, LinkedIn, Google, etc..
(Web traffic automation does not need to involve the use of black hat techniques!)
The focus of this article series is not to manipulate web services or flaunt their terms of service, but to show you how to be smart with your resources and automate your content distribution in order to leverage your time and efforts, and get additional exposure online from sites visited by your target audience.
An Automated Content Distribution, Traffic And Lead Generation, And Sales & Marketing System
As we’ve just seen in the previous section, many small businesses lack the time, human resources and financial means to engage in the kind of content marketing that many experts advise doing. What you want to do, then, is be strategic with your limited time, budget, and resources.
So, instead of choosing this approach, which is very time-consuming …
(Posting content to different marketing channels is very time-consuming!)
Why not use this time-saving approach instead …
(Set up an automated content distribution, lead and traffic generation, and sales and marketing system with WordPress)
With an expertly configured WordPress site, you can build more than just a website for your business … you can set up an automated traffic and lead generation and sales & marketing system, where all you do is publish your content and WordPress then automates the rest.
With WordPress, you can publish content once, and automate your content distribution to all other services.
You can:
- Automatically distribute content to social media services and bookmarking sites,
- Distribute content (and comments) automatically to other blogs and online properties using RSS
- Automatically import content (e.g. videos)
As your business evolves, you can add more functionality and automate processes like:
- Sell products and services with e-commerce,
- Capture leads with opt-in forms and add your subscribers to newsletters and autoresponders,
- Allow visitors to register on your site with different membership levels,
- And so much more!
You can do all of this using inexpensive WordPress plugins. Once these plugins are installed and configured on your site, just direct your visitors to the appropriate sections (e.g. your store, subscription forms, membership area, etc.)
How do you get all this done?
Simple … first, set up your website or blog as shown in Part Two. Then, configure your site settings as shown in Part 3. Once all of this is in place, you can then connect all of the dots using plugins.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Traffic Automation Blueprint – Traffic Plugins
Let’s take a brief look at a few traffic-generating plugins that can be used to:
- Distribute content to social media sites and social bookmarking websites
- Syndicate comments automatically to other blogs
- Syndicate content via RSS feeds to other websites
Jetpack
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ and more as soon as you publish your content using a WordPress plugin like JetPack.
Download URL: https://jetpack.com/
Jetpack is a free WordPress plugin with loads of great functions.
After installing Jetpack, you will need to connect the plugin to the WordPress.com account set up in Part 3 …
(Connect Jetpack to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate a feature called Publicize …
(Jetpack plugin – Publicize)
Once this section is configured, you will be able to automatically share your posts on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, and more …
(Share your content automatically on various social media networks.)
After configuring all of the account and plugin settings, your content is ready for distribution.
Publicize adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize account options in your post publishing area.)
Now, whenever you publish a new post, it will automatically be shared online to every account you have set up …
(As soon as you publish, your content will be automatically syndicated online.)
This is a hands-free way to get more exposure online for your content on social media networks.
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
The native WordPress commenting function allows your site users to interact with your website or blog, post new comments, reply to existing comments and engage with your content.
You can enhance the WordPress built-in commenting feature using a third-party commenting plugin like Disqus, IntenseDebate, LiveFyre, or CommentLuv that integrates your comments with social media, helping to spread and share them online.
For example, using a plugin like CommentLuv (Premium version) can encourage a greater level of commenting and improve user engagement on your website or blog. The plugin encourages readers to comment using SEO and social reward features like backlinks, adding twitter usernames to comments, using keywords in the username, and social enticements for sharing your content. This plugin will visit the comment author’s website while they are entering their comment and retrieve their latest blog posts, which they can choose to include at the bottom of their comment when they click the submit button.
(CommentLuv can encourage a greater level of commenting and create more user engagement on your site.)
Visit the plugin site to learn more about the benefits of using this plugin:
Social Link Machine
(SocialLinkMachine – WordPress content distribution plugin)
Social LinkMachine is a plugin for WordPress that allows you to syndicate and drip-feed your content to over 30 authority websites, build diverse anchor text backlinks, include relevant images and videos, and social signals on auto-pilot …
(SocialLinkMachine – drip-feed your content automatically to over 30 online platforms)
With SocialLinkMachine installed, you can automatically syndicate content to many traffic-generating sites, such as:
- Social Bookmarking Platforms: e.g. Delicious, Diigo, Instapaper, Zotero, etc.
- Blogging Platforms: e.g. Blogger, Rebel Mouse, Tumblr, etc.
- Social Media Platforms: Google Plus, YouTube, etc.
- Image Sharing Platforms: e.g. Flickr, etc.
- Document Sharing: e.g. Docdroid, Scribd, etc.
Visit this website to learn more about using this plugin: Social LinkMachine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media monitoring (in order to get useful information about your content marketing efforts), we have written a detailed article listing a number of social media monitoring tools that will help you identify new business opportunities, track competitor activity, see what online conversations are taking place that can affect your business,etc. To learn more, visit this page:
The above are just some examples of the many content distribution plugins that WordPress makes available.
Kickstart Your WordPress Traffic System
After your traffic automation system has been set up, we recommend kickstarting the process of driving traffic to your site with the steps shown in this tutorial:
WordPress Traffic Blueprint: Content Distribution Phase – Summary
Once your website or blog and plugins have been configured and set up, all you have to do then to start generating new traffic is add new content on a consistent basis.
We have created an entire email training series designed to help you come up with endless content for your website or blog:
Once you have configured your WordPress site, the next step is to optimize the web-traffic generation process. This step is addressed in the next article in the WordPress Traffic System series.
This is the end of Part Four
To continue reading, click here:
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