Welcome to Part Four of our Web Site Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to drive visitors automatically to your website using WordPress.
So far, here is what we have covered in this series:
In Part 1, we provided an overview of the traffic automation process, and explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website or blog is the key to generating automated traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress website or blog, all you have to do is publish content consistently to attract traffic!)
In Part 2, we discuss the setup phase of this process. 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 site, and what to do if your existing website was built with WordPress.
(In Part two we show you where to set up WordPress on your domain)
In Part 3, we focus on the configuration phase of the traffic automation blueprint.
In this step, we configure all the settings that affect your website’s ability to generate traffic automatically …
(In Part Three you learn how to configure all the settings that can affect your site’s traffic-getting ability)
In this section of the article series, we will show you how to set up various WordPress plugins that can drive new traffic automatically to your website or blog.
Why You Should Automate The Traffic-Getting Process
Depending on which marketing gurus you talk to, you could end up trying to spend a couple of hours every day (or more) promoting your business on social media.
Many small businesses lack the time, human resources and financial means to employ the services of a full-time marketing and content creation department and engage in the kind of content marketing that many marketing experts are advising. If you spent most of your time checking LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook in addition to researching and writing content for your website or blog, how would anything else in your business get done?
(Keeping a business running is how most small business owners spend their time. Infographic source: NFIB)
Small business owners spend most of their working hours 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 make sales in order to survive.
A study of small businesses conducted in 2012 by email and social media marketing company Vertical Response found that:
- Almost half of all businesses surveyed spent 6 or more hours per week on social media (the other half of businesses surveyed that used social media 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 research 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.
(Businesses spend more time each year marketing and promoting themselves online. Image source: VerticalResponse)
As small businesses spend more time marketing and promoting themselves online in order to compete and survive, this puts more and more of a squeeze on businesses to focus their time on other areas …
(Businesses with limited budget, time, and resources and many areas to focus on require careful planning of their marketing strategy.)
Another thing to keep in mind is that, in addition to spending time marketing and promoting your business on various social sites, all of your efforts are going into virtual real estate that you don’t control. You don’t own Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube. These companies often will make decisions that can significantly affect your business without requiring your input. Why invest so much time and effort building a business on someone else’s asset? With WordPress (self-hosted), you can control your own real estate and distribute your content automatically to other sites.
Investing in automation to leverage time and increase productivity is nothing new. Businesses have been doing it ever since the Industrial Age. In the Information Age, however, the increased availability of so many new channels for marketing and promoting a business creates a number of dilemmas for small business owners, especially for those with limited time, resources, and budget. For example:
- Which of these channels do you invest more time, efforts, and budget on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building a web presence on other people’s sites (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc.) while neglecting your own website?
- Do you create new content for every channel you plan to promote and market your business on?
The Benefits Of Automating The Traffic Generation With WordPress
What I’d like to share with you now, is a free, simple, and effective formula that allows you to automate your traffic generation with WordPress.
With this method, you will be able to:
- Save time creating web content and social media,
- Save money on content creation and unnecessary web marketing costs,
- Determine which channels you should invest more time, budget, and your efforts on,
- Invest most of your time and efforts 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 urge you to avoid using black hat sites, strategies, software, and anything that violates the terms of service and policies of sites like Twitter, Google, Facebook, etc..
(Automating your web traffic does not require the use of black hat methods!)
What we are focusing in this article series is to show you how to be smart with your limited resources and automate your content distribution so you can leverage your time and marketing efforts, and get additional exposure online from sites 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, many business owners lack the time, human resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that many experts recommend. What you want to do, then, is be strategic with your limited resources, time, and budget.
So, instead of choosing this approach, which is very time-consuming …
(Posting content to individual channels is very time-consuming!)
Why not choose this one 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 channels.
You can:
- Automatically distribute content to social media services 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 of this done?
Simple … first, set up your site as explained in Part 2. Then, configure your site settings as shown in Part Three. After all this is in place, you can then automate various processes using plugins.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Traffic Blueprint – Traffic-Getting Plugins
Let’s take a brief look at a few traffic-generating plugins that can be used to:
- Distribute content to social sites and social bookmarking sites
- Distribute comments automatically to other blogs
- Post content to other web properties via RSS
Jetpack WordPress Plugin
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, GooglePlus, 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 many useful features.
After Jetpack has been installed, you will need to connect the plugin to your WordPress.com account (as described in Part 3.) …
(Connect Jetpack to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate a feature called Publicize …
(Activate the Publicize feature on Jetpack)
Configure this section to share your posts on Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, LinkedIn, GooglePlus, and more …
(Share your posts automatically on several social accounts.)
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 settings displayed in the post publishing box.)
Now, as soon as you publish new content, it will automatically be shared on every account you have set up …
(As soon as you publish, your new posts are automatically distributed online.)
This is an automated and hands-free way to create more exposure for your content online on social media websites.
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
The built-in WordPress commenting system allows your visitors to interact with your website or blog, post new comments, reply to existing comments and participate in discussions as part of a community.
You can expand the WordPress built-in commenting feature using a third-party plugin like Disqus, IntenseDebate, LiveFyre, or CommentLuv that integrates with social media, helping to share and spread them online.
For example, with a plugin like CommentLuv (Pro version), you can create more user engagement on your website. The plugin encourages readers to comment using SEO and social rewards like the ability to add twitter usernames to comments, backlinks, social enticements for content-sharing, and using keywords in the username. This plugin will visit the website of the comment author while they type their comment and retrieve their last blog posts, which they can include with their comment after clicking submit.
(CommentLuv can attract more comments and visitors and improve user engagement on your site.)
For more details about the benefits of using this great plugin, go here:
SocialLinkMachine
(Social LinkMachine – Content distribution plugin)
Social Link Machine is a set-and-forget plugin that allows you to syndicate content, build anchor text backlinks, include relevant images and videos, and second-tier links and social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social LinkMachine – syndicate your content to over 30 social sites)
With Social Link Machine installed, you can automatically drip-feed content to over 30 traffic-generating platforms, such as:
- Social Bookmarking Sites: e.g. Bitly, Folkd, Plurk, Reddit, etc.
- Web 2.0 Blogs: e.g. Livejournal, Sett, WordPress.com, etc.
- Social Media Platforms: Facebook, Twitter, etc.
- Image Sharing: e.g. Pinterest, etc.
- Document Sharing: e.g. Docdroid, Sendspace, etc.
To learn more about this handy plugin, visit the plugin site: Social Link Machine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media monitoring (so you can get actionable information about your content distribution efforts), we have written a detailed article listing several social media measurement tools that you may want to check out. More info:
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 Sharing Process – Summary
Once your site and plugins have been fully set up and configured, all you need to do to begin attracting new web traffic is add great content consistently.
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 explained in the next section of the WordPress Traffic Automation System series.
This is the end of Part Four
To keep reading this article, click on the link below:
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"This is AMAZING! I had learnt about how to use WordPress previously, but this covers absolutely everything and more!! Incredible value! Thank you!" - Monique, Warrior Forum
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