Welcome to Part Four of our WordPress Web Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to grow your business online automatically using WordPress.
So far, here is what we have covered in this series:
In Part 1 of this series, we provided an overview of the traffic automation process, and explained why using an expertly configured WordPress site is the key to generating automated web traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress blog, all you have to do is add great content on a consistent basis to drive more traffic!)
In Part Two, we looked at the setup phase. We helped you understand the best way to get started if you don’t have a web presence yet, how to set everything up if you already have a site, and what to do if your site was built with WordPress.
(In Part two we show you where to set up WordPress on your domain)
In Part Three, we look at the configuration phase of the automation blueprint.
Here, we configure hosting settings, WordPress settings, and external settings that can affect your site’s traffic-getting ability …
(In Part 3 you learn how to configure all the settings that can affect your website’s ability to generate traffic automatically)
In this section, we will look at ways to automate the traffic-generation process with plugins.
Why Automate Your Traffic Generation Process?
Depending on which expert you listen to, you could find yourself trying to spend a couple of hours or more per day promoting your business on social media, as well as managing your business, your content and your online presence.
Most small business owners simply lack the time, human resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that many marketing experts recommend doing. If you spend most of your time checking Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook in addition to planning and writing content for your blog or website, how will you get anything else in your business done?
(Keeping a business up and running is how most small business owners spend their working hours. Source: National Federation Of Independent Businesses)
Small business owners spend most of their time simply keeping their businesses up and running. In addition to running a business, there’s sales and marketing. After all, businesses need to remain competitive and grow in order to survive.
A study of small businesses conducted by VerticalResponse – an email and social media marketing company, found that:
- Almost half of all businesses surveyed spent at least 6 hours each week on social media (the rest spent even more time – between 6 and 21+ hours per week). This was a 66% increase from the previous year, so if the same survey was conducted today, the numbers would probably be 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 was the activity that consumed the most time online for all businesses surveyed.
(Small businesses are spending more time marketing and promoting themselves online. Infographic source: VerticalResponse)
As businesses spend more time on online marketing as a matter of business survival and competition, this puts more and more pressure on businesses to focus their time on other vital areas …
(Businesses with limited time, resources, and marketing budgets and many areas to focus on require careful planning of their marketing strategy.)
One other important thing to keep in mind is that, in addition to spending time social websites, all of your efforts are going into virtual real estate that you don’t control. You don’t own Facebook, Twitter, or StumbleUpon. These companies often will make decisions that impact your business without consulting you. Why invest so much effort and time building content on rented real estate? With a self-hosted WordPress website, you can control your own real estate and distribute your content automatically to other sites.
Automating business processes to leverage time is nothing new. Businesses of all sizes have been doing it since the Industrial Age. In the Information Age, however, the availability of hundreds of new channels for marketing and promoting a business creates a number of dilemmas for small business owners, especially for those with limited resources, budget, and time. For example:
- Which of these channels should you focus more time, budget, and efforts on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building a web presence on other people’s sites (e.g. YouTube, Twitter, Tumblr, etc.) while neglecting your own domain?
- Do you create new content for every channel you plan to promote and market 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 for automating your web traffic generation 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 web marketing channels,
- Determine which marketing channels you should focus more of your budget, efforts, and time on,
- Invest most of your efforts building your own asset 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 strongly urge that you stay away from all black hat solutions, techniques, websites, and anything designed to “game” or violate the terms of service and policies of sites like Facebook, Google, Pinterest, etc..
(Automating your web traffic does not have to involve using black hat methods!)
The purpose of this article series is to show you how to automate your content distribution in order to leverage your time and efforts, and increase your exposure online to websites that your target audience frequents.
An Automated Content Distribution, Traffic And Lead Generation, And Sales & Marketing System
As we’ve just seen in the previous section, most small business owners lack the time, human resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that most experts recommend doing. What you want to do, then, is work smart within your limited resources.
So, instead of posting content to each different channel, which can be extremely time-consuming …
(Posting content to different marketing channels can be extremely 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 the distribution of your content to all other services.
You can:
- Automatically distribute content to social media channels and bookmarking sites,
- Distribute content (and comments) 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 this done?
Simple … first, set up your site as explained in Part 2. Then, configure everything as explained in Part Three. After all this is in place, you can then automate various processes with plugins.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Web Traffic Automation Blueprint – Plugins
Let’s take a brief look at some WordPress plugins that can be used to:
- Distribute content to social sites and social bookmarking sites
- Post comments automatically to other blogs
- Distribute content via RSS to other sites
Jetpack Plugin
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, LinkedIn, GooglePlus 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 many great functions.
After installing Jetpack, connect the plugin to the WordPress.com account you set up in Part Three …
(Connect Jetpack to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate a feature called Publicize …
(Jetpack – Publicize)
Configure this section to automatically share your posts on Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, and more …
(Share your content on several social sites.)
After all of the plugin and account settings have been configured, your content is ready for distribution.
Publicize adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize settings in the post publishing area.)
Now, as soon as you publish a new post, it will automatically get shared on all of the accounts you have set up …
(As soon as new posts are published, they are automatically syndicated online.)
Visit the plugin website to learn more about the benefits of using this handy plugin: Jetpack WordPress Plugin
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
WordPress has a native commenting function that allows your visitors to interact with your site, post comments, reply to other users and engage with your content as part of a community.
You can enhance the WordPress built-in commenting feature using third-party plugins like Disqus, IntenseDebate, LiveFyre, or CommentLuv that integrate your comments with social media, helping to spread and share your content online.
For example, a plugin like CommentLuv (Pro version) can help make your blog more attractive to commenters by offering them a choice of backlinks if they like, plus1, or tweet your content. This plugin will visit the comment author’s website while they are typing their comment and retrieve their latest blog posts, which they can choose to include with their comment when they click submit.
(CommentLuv can attract more comments and create more user engagement on your website.)
To learn more about the benefits of this plugin, go here:
SocialLinkMachine
(SocialLinkMachine – Set-and-forget content distribution plugin)
Social Link Machine is a plugin that allows you to syndicate and drip-feed your content, build backlinks, include relevant images and videos, and social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social Link Machine – syndicate and drip-feed content automatically to dozens of authority platforms)
With Social Link Machine installed, you can automatically drip-feed your content to dozens of authority sites, such as:
- Bookmarking Platforms: e.g. Bitly, Diigo, Plurk, Reddit, etc.
- Blogging Platforms: e.g. Blog.com, Rebel Mouse, WordPress.com, etc.
- Social Media Platforms: Facebook, Xing, etc.
- Image Sharing: e.g. Flickr, etc.
- Document Sharing: e.g. Issuu, Gett, etc.
To learn more about this handy plugin, visit the plugin site: Social LinkMachine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media tracking (so you can get useful information about your content distribution efforts), go here to learn about social media measurement tools and technologies that will help you keep track of online trends, monitor competitor activity, see what online conversations are taking place that could affect your business, etc, see what conversations are taking place online that can affect your business,etc:
The above are just some examples of the many content distribution plugins that are available to WordPress users.
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 System: Content Distribution Process – Summary
Once you have your WordPress site and plugins set up and configured, all you need to do then is add new content regularly to automatically generate more web traffic organically.
If you need help coming up with topics for content that you can post on your website, we recommend subscribing to our email training course on content marketing here:
Once you have configured your WordPress site, the next step is to optimize as much of the process as you can. This step is addressed in the next article in our WordPress Traffic Blueprint series.
This is the end of Section 4
To read more, click on the link below:
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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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