Welcome to Part Four of our Website Traffic Blueprint article series, where we explain how to drive new visitors automatically to your website using WordPress.
So far, we have covered the following in this series:
In Part One, we explain why using an expertly configured WordPress website or blog is the key to generating automated web traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress website, all you have to do to automatically start attracting web traffic is add content consistently!)
In Part 2, we looked at critical setup decisions. We helped you understand the best way to get started if you don’t have a website yet, how to set things up if you already have a site, and what to do if your existing site has been built using WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you where to set up WordPress on your domain)
In Part 3, we discussed the configuration phase.
In this step, we configure all the settings (hosting, WordPress and external) that can affect your site’s ability to generate traffic automatically …
(In Part Three we explain how to configure all the settings that affect your site’s ability to generate traffic automatically)
In this section of the article series, we look at ways to automate the traffic system using various WordPress plugins.
Why Automating The Traffic Generation Makes Sense
Depending on which online marketing experts you get your advice from, you could find yourself spending an hour or two per day (or more) posting content on social media.
Many small business owners lack the time, resources and budget to employ the services of a full-time marketing department and engage in the kind of content marketing that many marketing experts are recommending. If you are spending hours checking Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn in addition to writing articles for your website or blog, how can anything else in your business get done?
(Keeping their business up and running is how most small business owners spend their time. Infographic: National Federation Of Independent Businesses)
Many 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 grow in order to survive.
A study of small businesses done in 2012 by VerticalResponse – an email and social media marketing company, found that:
- 43% of all businesses surveyed spent around 6 hours per 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 done today, the numbers would most likely be even 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 spend more time every year marketing and promoting themselves online. Infographic source: VerticalResponse)
As businesses spend more time marketing and promoting themselves online in order to compete and survive, this leaves even less time for under-resourced businesses to focus on other equally vital areas …
(Businesses with limited time, budget, and resources and many different business areas to focus on have to plan their marketing strategy very carefully.)
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 have no control over. You don’t own Twitter, Facebook, or Pinterest. These companies can make decisions that can significantly impact your business without first consulting you. Why invest so much time and effort building content on rented real estate? With WordPress, you can control your own virtual real estate and distribute your content automatically to other websites.
Automating business processes to save time is not new. Businesses have been doing it since the Industrial Age. In the Information Age, however, the exponential growth channels for marketing and promoting a business online creates a number of dilemmas for business owners, especially for those with limited budget, resources, and time. For example:
- Which of these channels should you invest more of your time, budget, and your efforts on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building assets on sites that you do not own (e.g. YouTube, LinkedIn, Tumblr, etc.) while neglecting 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 Generation With WordPress
What we’d like to share with you now, is a free, simple, and effective method that lets you automate your traffic-getting process with WordPress.
With this strategy, 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 costs,
- Determine which channels you should focus more of your time, budget, and your efforts 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 strongly urge you to avoid using black hat strategies, software, websites, and anything that violates the terms of service and policies of companies like Google, Facebook, Pinterest, etc..
(Automating your web traffic doesn’t need to involve using black hat methods!)
What we are focusing in this article is to show you how to automate your content distribution so you can leverage your time and marketing efforts, and increase your exposure online to websites visited by your target audience.
An Automated Content Distribution, Traffic And Lead Generation, And Sales & Marketing System
We’ve just seen that many small businesses 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 be strategic with your limited resources, time, and budget.
So, instead of doing this …
(Posting content to different services one by one can be 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 once, and automate the distribution of your content to all other marketing channels.
You can:
- Automatically distribute content to social media sites and social 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 of this done?
Simple … first, set up your site as explained in Part 2. Then, configure it as shown in Part Three. After all this is in place, you then automate your content distribution with plugins.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Traffic Automation System – Traffic Generation Plugins
Let’s take a brief look at some WordPress plugins that can be used to:
- Syndicate content to social media sites and social bookmarking sites
- Distribute comments automatically to other blogs
- Distribute content via RSS feeds to other blogs
Jetpack by WordPress.com
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ and more as soon as you publish new content using a WordPress plugin like JetPack.
Download URL: https://jetpack.com/
Jetpack is a free WordPress plugin with loads of useful functions.
After installing Jetpack, connect the plugin to the WordPress.com account you set up in Part Three …
(Make sure the Jetpack plugin is connected to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate a feature called Publicize …
(Activate the Publicize feature on Jetpack)
Configure this section to automatically share your posts on Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, GooglePlus, LinkedIn, and more …
(Share your posts on several social networks.)
After all account and plugin settings have been configured, your content is ready for distribution.
Publicize adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize account options in the Publish section.)
Now, whenever you publish new content, it will automatically be shared on all of the accounts you have set up …
(As soon as content is published, it is automatically distributed online.)
For more details about the benefits of using this WordPress plugin, go here: Jetpack
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
WordPress has a built-in commenting system that allows your blog readers to engage with your site, post new comments, reply to existing comments and participate in discussions.
You can enhance the WordPress built-in commenting feature with third-party commenting plugins that integrate your comments with social media, helping to spread and share your content online.
For example, with a WordPress plugin like CommentLuv (Premium version), you can improve user engagement on your web site. The plugin encourages readers to comment using SEO and social reward features like search-indexable backlinks, social enticements for sharing your content, using keywords in the user name, and the ability to add twitter usernames to comments. This plugin will visit the website or blog of the comment author while they are typing their comment and retrieve their latest blog posts, which they can choose to include with their comment after clicking the submit button.
(CommentLuv can encourage a greater level of commenting and create more user engagement on your site.)
For more details about using this WordPress plugin, go here:
SocialLinkMachine
(Social Link Machine – Set-and-forget content distribution plugin)
SocialLinkMachine is a plugin that lets you syndicate and drip-feed your content to over 30 authority websites, build backlinks, include relevant images and videos, and create second-tier links and social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social Link Machine – syndicate content automatically to dozens of online sites)
With Social Link Machine installed, you can automatically syndicate and drip-feed your content to many authority sites, such as:
- Bookmarking Sites: e.g. Delicious, Diigo, Plurk, Stumbleupon, etc.
- Blogs: e.g. Blog.com, Sett, Tumblr, etc.
- Social Media Platforms: Google Plus, Xing, etc.
- Image Sharing: e.g. Flickr, etc.
- PDF Sharing Platforms: e.g. Issuu, Gett, etc.
For more details about using this great plugin, visit this site: Social LinkMachine
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), or to learn more about social media monitoring tools and technologies that you may want to check out, see this article:
The above are just some 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 System: Content Syndication Phase – Summary
Once you have your website and plugins fully set up and expertly configured, all you need to do then to bring traffic is add web content consistently.
We have created an entire email training series aimed at helping you never run out of great content ideas for your website:
Once you have configured your WordPress site, the next step is to optimize the process. This step is addressed in the next section of our series.
This is the end of Section 4
To read the rest of this article series, click on the link below:
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