Welcome to Part Four of our Web Site Traffic Blueprint article series, where we explain 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 One, we describe the traffic automation process, and explain why using an expertly configured WordPress website is the key to generating automated web traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress site, all you have to do to begin attracting more web traffic is post great content consistently!)
In Part 2, we discuss the setup phase. We explain the best way to get started if you don’t have a web presence yet, how to set things up if you already have a site, and what to do if your site has been built using WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you how to set up WordPress on your domain)
In Part Three, we discuss important configuration decisions.
In this step, we configure hosting settings, WordPress settings, and external settings that can affect your website’s traffic-getting ability …
(In Part 3 we show you how to configure all the settings that can affect your site’s traffic-getting ability)
In Part 4, we will show you how to set up various WordPress plugins that can help get visitors automatically to your website.
Why You Should Consider Automating Your Traffic Generation Process
Depending on which experts you listen to, you could end up trying to spend an hour or two (or more) every day posting content on social media, as well as managing your business, your content and your web presence.
Most small businesses simply lack the time, resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that many online marketing experts advise. If you spend hours checking Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter in addition to planning and writing articles for your blog or website, how can anything in your business get done?
(Keeping their business up and running is how most small businesses spend their working hours. Source: National Federation Of Independent Businesses)
Small businesses 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 make sales in order to survive.
Marketing research done in 2012 by VerticalResponse – an email and social media marketing company, found that:
- Almost half of all businesses surveyed spent six or more hours per week on social media (the other half 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 done today, the figures would most likely be even higher.
- More than half of all businesses surveyed spent 1-3 hours or more creating a blog post.
- Finding and posting content for social media consumed the most time online.
(Small businesses are spending more time every year marketing and promoting themselves online. Infographic: VerticalResponse)
As businesses spend more time promoting and marketing themselves online as a matter of business survival and competition, this leaves less time for under-resourced businesses to focus on other equally important areas …
(Businesses with limited marketing budgets, resources, and time and many different business areas to focus on have to plan their marketing strategy very carefully.)
Another thing to keep in mind is that, in addition to spending time social media websites, you are investing all of your efforts into virtual real estate that you don’t control. You don’t own Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest. These sites can make decisions that affect your business without consulting you. Why invest so much time and effort building content on someone else’s real estate? With WordPress (self-hosted), you can have complete control of your own real estate and distribute your content automatically to other sites.
Investing in automation to leverage time is not new. Businesses of all sizes have been doing it ever since the dawn of the Industrial Age. In the Digital Age, however, the increasing availability of many new channels for promoting and marketing a business online creates a number of dilemmas for business owners and marketing managers, especially for those with limited budgets, resources, and time. For example:
- Which of these marketing channels do you focus more efforts, budget, and your time on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building a web presence on other people’s sites (e.g. Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc.) while ignoring your own domain?
- Do you create new content for every channel you plan to include in your marketing strategy?
The Benefits Of Automating The Traffic-Getting Process With WordPress
What I’d like to show you now, is a free, simple, and effective strategy for automating the web traffic generation with WordPress.
With this formula, you will be able to:
- Save time creating content for your website or blog and social media,
- Save money on content creation and unnecessary web marketing channels,
- Determine which channels you should invest more of your efforts, time, and budget on,
- Invest most of your time building your own asset instead of someone else’s 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 strongly recommend avoiding black hat websites, methods, software, and anything designed to “game” or violate the policies and terms of service of companies like Google, YouTube, Facebook, etc..
(Automating your web traffic does not need to involve using black hat methods!)
What we are focusing here is to show you how to automate your content distribution in order to leverage your time and marketing 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 that many business owners lack the time, human resources and financial means to engage in the kind of content marketing that many online experts recommend doing. What you want to do, then, is be strategic with your limited resources, budget, and time.
So, instead of using this approach …
(Posting content to different channels 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 once, and automate your content distribution to all other services.
You can:
- Automatically distribute content to social services and social bookmarking sites,
- Distribute comments and content automatically to other blogs and web 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 of this done?
Simple … first, set up your WordPress website or blog as described in Part Two. Then, expertly configure things as explained in Part 3. Once all of this is in place, you then connect all of the dots with plugins.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Traffic System – Traffic Generation Plugins
Let’s take a brief look at some examples of plugins that can help:
- Distribute content automatically to social sites and social bookmarking sites
- Post comments automatically to other blogs
- Post content via RSS feeds to other blogs
Jetpack
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Google+, LinkedIn 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 Three …
(Make sure the Jetpack plugin is connected to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate a feature called Publicize …
(Jetpack – Publicize)
Configure this section to share your posts on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, GooglePlus, LinkedIn, and more …
(Share your posts automatically on various social media sites.)
After configuring all account and plugin settings, your content is ready for distribution.
Publicize adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize settings displayed in your post publishing area.)
Now, whenever you publish new content, it will automatically get shared online to all of the accounts you have set up …
(As soon as content is published, it will be automatically syndicated online.)
Jetpack provides a hands-free way to create more exposure for your content online on social websites.
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
The built-in WordPress commenting feature lets your blog readers engage with your web site, post new comments, reply to other users and engage with your content.
You can expand the WordPress built-in commenting feature using third-party plugins that integrate with social media, helping to spread and share them online.
For example, with a WordPress plugin like CommentLuv (Pro version), you can make your site more attractive to commenters by offering them a wider choice of backlinks if they +1, like, or tweet your content. This plugin will visit the site of the comment author while they type their comment and retrieve their last blog posts, which can be included with their comment when they click the submit button.
(CommentLuv Pro version can attract more comments and visitors and improve user engagement on your website.)
Go here to learn more about the benefits of using this handy plugin:
SocialLinkMachine
(Social LinkMachine – WordPress content distribution plugin)
SocialLinkMachine is a plugin for WordPress that allows you to automatically syndicate your content, build anchor text backlinks, include relevant images and videos, and second-tier links and social signals on auto-pilot …
(SocialLinkMachine – syndicate and drip-feed content automatically to dozens of online websites)
With Social LinkMachine installed, you can automatically drip-feed content to dozens of social platforms, such as:
- Social Bookmarking Platforms: e.g. Delicious, Linkagogo, Kippt, Reddit, etc.
- Blogs: e.g. Blogger, Rebel Mouse, WordPress.com, etc.
- Social Platforms: Google Plus, YouTube, etc.
- Image Sharing Platforms: e.g. Pinterest, etc.
- Document Sharing Platforms: e.g. Docdroid, Gett, etc.
Visit the plugin website for more details about the benefits of this great plugin: Social LinkMachine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media tracking (so you can get actionable information about your content marketing campaigns), or to learn more about social media measurement tools that are worth checking out and knowing about, see this article:
The above are just a few examples of the many plugins that WordPress makes available for automating and sharing the distribution of your content online.
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 Sharing Phase – Summary
Once you have your website and plugins configured and fully set up, all you need to do is post great content on a consistent basis to automatically start generating traffic organically.
We have created an entire email series aimed at helping you come up with unlimited content ideas for posting to your website or blog:
Once you have expertly configured your WordPress site, the next step is to optimize the process. This step is addressed in the next article in our WordPress Traffic Automation Blueprint series.
This is the end of Part Four
To keep reading about this topic, click here:
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"This is an awesome training series. I have a pretty good understanding of WordPress already, but this is helping me to move somewhere from intermediate to advanced user!" - Kim Lednum
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