Welcome to Part 4 of our Website Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to grow your business online automatically using the WordPress CMS platform.
So far, we have covered the following in this article series:
In Part 1 of this article series, we describe the traffic automation process, and explain why using an expertly configured WordPress site is the key to automating traffic to your site …
(With an expertly configured WordPress website, all you have to do to automatically start generating more web traffic is add content regularly!)
In Part 2, we look at critical setup decisions. We explain the best way to get started if you don’t have a website yet, how to set everything up if you already have a site, and what to do if your website is built with WordPress.
(In Part two we show you how to set up a WordPress web site on your domain)
In Part 3, we look at the configuration phase of the traffic automation blueprint.
In this step, we configure all the settings (hosting, WordPress and external) that affect your website’s ability to generate traffic automatically …
(In Part Three you will configure all the settings that can affect your website’s traffic-getting ability)
In Part Four, we will discuss ways to automate the traffic system using a number of plugins.
Why Automating The Traffic Generation Makes Sense
Depending on which marketing expert you get your advice from, you could end up trying to spend an hour or more each day promoting your business on social media while also trying to manage your business, your content and your online presence.
Most small businesses lack the time, human resources and financial means to employ the services of a full-time marketing department and engage in the kind of content marketing that many marketing experts recommend. If you were to spend all of your time checking Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn in addition to researching and writing articles for your website or blog, how would anything else in your business get done?
(Keeping their business up and running is how most small business owners spend their working hours. Infographic: National Federation Of Independent Businesses)
Small business owners spend most of their time keeping their businesses up and running. In addition to running a business, there’s sales and marketing. After all, businesses need to stay competitive and grow in order to survive.
A study of small businesses conducted by VerticalResponse – an email and social media marketing company, found that:
- 43% of all small businesses surveyed spent around six hours each week on social media (the rest spent even more time – between 6 and 21+ hours per week). This use of social media was a 66% increase from the previous year, so if the same survey was done today, the numbers would probably be higher.
- More than half of all small businesses surveyed spent 1-3 hours or more to create a blog post.
- Finding and posting content for social media was their most time-consuming online activity.
(Small businesses are spending more time marketing and promoting themselves online. Image source: VerticalResponse)
As businesses spend increasingly larger amounts of time marketing and promoting themselves online in order to compete and survive, this puts more and more pressure on businesses to focus their time on other equally important areas …
(Businesses with limited resources, time, and marketing budgets and many business areas to focus on require careful planning of their marketing strategy.)
Another thing to consider is that, in addition to spending time social media websites, all of your efforts are going into virtual real estate that you have no control over. You don’t own Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest. These companies often will make decisions that can dramatically affect your business without consulting you. Why invest so much time and effort building content on someone else’s asset? With WordPress, you can have complete control of your own real estate and post your content automatically to other sites.
Automating business processes to save time is nothing new. Businesses have been doing it since the Industrial Age. In the Digital Age, however, the exponential growth channels for marketing and promoting a business online creates a number of dilemmas for business owners and marketing managers, especially for those with limited resources, budgets, and time. For example:
- Which of these channels should you focus more of your efforts, time, and your budget on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building a web presence on other people’s sites (e.g. YouTube, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc.) while ignoring your own website?
- Do you create new content for every channel you plan to market and promote your business on?
The Benefits Of Automating Your Traffic-Getting Process With WordPress
What we’d like to show you now, is a free, simple, and effective formula that lets you automate your traffic-getting process with WordPress.
With this formula, you will be able to:
- Save time creating web content and other marketing channels (e.g. social media),
- Save money on content creation and unnecessary online marketing channels,
- Determine which channels you should invest more of your budget, efforts, and time on,
- Invest most of your time building your own asset and still benefit from other people’s marketing channels.
Many automated 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 software, strategies, sites, and anything that violates the policies and terms of service of sites like Twitter, Google, Facebook, etc..
(Automating your web traffic does not require using black hat techniques!)
The focus of this article is 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 websites that your target audience frequents.
An Automated Content Distribution, Traffic And Lead Generation, And Sales & Marketing System
We’ve just seen in the previous section that most small businesses lack the time, resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that most experts are prescribing. What you want to do, then, is work smart within your limited resources.
So, instead of choosing this approach …
(Posting content to different marketing channels individually can be very time-consuming!)
Why not do this 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 one-time, and automate the distribution of your content to all other services.
You can:
- Distribute content automatically to social media channels and social bookmarking sites,
- Distribute content (and comments) automatically to other blogs and online properties using RSS
- Import content automatically (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 WordPress website or blog as shown in Part Two. Then, get it configured as shown in Part 3. Once all of this is in place, you can then automate these processes using plugins such as the ones discussed in the following section.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Web Traffic Automation System – Plugins
Let’s take a brief look at some examples of plugins that can:
- Post content automatically to social sites and social bookmarking accounts
- Post comments automatically to other blogs
- Syndicate content automatically via RSS to other web properties
Jetpack
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ and more as soon as you publish new content using a plugin like JetPack.
Download URL: https://jetpack.com/
Jetpack is a free WordPress plugin with many useful features.
After installing Jetpack, connect the plugin to your WordPress.com account (as described in Part Three.) …
(Connect Jetpack to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate a feature called Publicize …
(Jetpack – Publicize feature)
Once this section is configured, you will be able to automatically share your posts on Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, GooglePlus, LinkedIn, and more …
(Distribute your posts automatically to various social media networks.)
After all of the settings have been configured, your content is ready for distribution.
Publicize adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize options show in your Publish section.)
Now, whenever you publish new content, it will automatically get shared on every account you have set up …
(As soon as new content is published, it is automatically syndicated online.)
Visit the plugin site to learn more about this plugin: Jetpack Plugin
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
The WordPress commenting function lets your site users interact with your website, post new comments, reply to existing comments and participate in discussions as part of a social community.
You can enhance the WordPress default commenting feature with 3rd-party plugins that integrate with social media, helping to spread and share your content online.
For example, a WordPress plugin like CommentLuv (Premium version) can encourage a greater level of commenting and improve user engagement on your website. The plugin encourages readers to comment using SEO and social reward features like SEO backlinks, social enticements for sharing your content, using keywords in the name, and the ability to add twitter names to comments. This plugin will visit the site of the comment author while they are typing their comment and retrieve their latest blog posts, which they can include with their comment when they click the submit button.
(CommentLuv can encourage a greater level of commenting and improve user engagement on your site.)
Visit the plugin site to learn more about this plugin:
Social Link Machine
(Social Link Machine – WordPress content distribution plugin)
Social LinkMachine is a set-and-forget plugin for WordPress that allows you to syndicate and drip-feed your content to dozens of social websites, build backlinks, include relevant videos and images, and create 2nd-tier links and social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social LinkMachine – drip-feed your content to many authority sites)
With Social LinkMachine installed, you can automatically drip-feed your content to dozens of social platforms, like:
- Bookmarking Platforms: e.g. Delicious, Linkagogo, Instapaper, Zotero, etc.
- Blogs: e.g. Blogger, Sett, Tumblr, etc.
- Social Media Platforms: Google Plus, Xing, etc.
- Image Sharing: e.g. Pinterest, etc.
- PDF Sharing Platforms: e.g. Docdroid, Scribd, etc.
Go here for more information about the benefits of this plugin: Social Link Machine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media tracking (so you can get actionable information about your content distribution campaigns), we have created a detailed article where we explore over 30 social media tracking tools and technologies that are worth checking out and knowing about. More information:
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 Automation System: Automated Content Distribution Stage – Summary
Once your site and plugins have been expertly configured and fully set up, all you have to do is post new content regularly to automatically start generating more web traffic.
If you need endless topics for posting content on your website or blog, then subscribe to our FREE email training series here:
Once you have configured your WordPress site, the next step is to optimize the web-traffic generation process. This step is explained in the next section of our series.
This is the end of Part 4
To read the rest of this article, click here:
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"Wow! I never knew there's so much to learn about WordPress! I bought one of the WordPress for Dummies three years ago, such authors need to be on this course!" - Rich Law, Create A Blog Now
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