Welcome to Part 4 of our Web Site Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to grow your business online automatically using the WordPress CMS.
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 website or blog is the key to automating traffic to your website …
(With an expertly configured WordPress website, all you have to do is publish web content on a consistent basis to start driving web traffic!)
In Part 2, we discussed critical setup decisions. We helped you understand 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 website was built with WordPress.
(In Part two we show you how to set up WordPress on your domain)
In Part Three, we focus on important configuration decisions.
In this step, we configure hosting settings, internal settings, and external settings that can affect your website’s ability to generate traffic automatically …
(In Part 3 we explain how to configure hosting settings, internal settings, and external settings that can affect your site’s ability to generate traffic automatically)
In Part 4, we discuss ways to automate your traffic with plugins.
Why It Makes Sense To Automate Your Traffic Generation Process
Depending on which business marketing guru you listen to, you could find yourself investing an hour every day (or more) promoting your business on social media.
Most small businesses lack the time, human resources and financial means to engage in the kind of content marketing that many marketing experts are prescribing. If you were to spend half a day checking Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter in addition to planning and writing articles for your website or blog, how would anything in your business get done?
(Small business owners spend most of their time keeping their businesses up and running. Infographic: NFIB)
Small businesses spend most of their time trying to keep 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.
A study of small businesses done by email and social media marketing company Vertical Response found that:
- 43% of all businesses surveyed spent six or more 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 research was done today, the numbers would most likely be significantly higher.
- More than half of all businesses surveyed spent 1-3 hours or more to create a blog post.
- Finding and posting content for social media consumed the most time online.
(Small businesses spend more time every year marketing and promoting themselves online. Infographic source: VerticalResponse.com)
As businesses spend increasingly larger amounts of time marketing and promoting 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 budget, time, and resources and many business areas to focus on require careful planning of their marketing strategy.)
Another important thing to consider is that, in addition to spending time promoting and marketing your business on a number of social media websites, you are investing all of your efforts into virtual real estate that you don’t control. You don’t own Twitter, Facebook, or Pinterest. These sites often will make decisions that can significantly affect your business without requiring your input. Why invest so much effort and time building content on rented real estate? With WordPress (self-hosted), you can control your own virtual real estate and post your content automatically to other online properties.
Automating processes to leverage time is not new. Businesses have been doing it since the Industrial Age. In the Digital Age, however, the exponential growth online marketing channels creates a number of dilemmas for business owners, especially for those with limited time, marketing budgets, and resources. For example:
- Which of these marketing channels do you invest more time, efforts, and your budget on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building assets on sites that do not belong to you (e.g. YouTube, Twitter, Tumblr, etc.) while ignoring the benefits of building content on your own website?
- Do you create new content for every channel you plan to include in your marketing strategy?
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 allows you to automate your traffic-getting process 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 focus more time, efforts, 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 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 recommend staying away from all black hat solutions, methods, websites, and anything that violates the terms of service and policies of sites like Facebook, Google, Pinterest, etc..
(Web traffic automation doesn’t need to involve using black hat techniques!)
The purpose of this article 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 websites frequented by your target audience.
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, resources and financial means 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 service, which can be extremely time-consuming …
(Posting content to individual channels is extremely time-consuming!)
Why not choose this time-saving strategy 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 your content distribution to all other services.
You can:
- Distribute content automatically to social media channels and bookmarking sites,
- Automatically distribute content (and comments) 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 do all of this?
Simple … first, set up your WordPress website or blog as shown in Part Two. Then, get it configured as described in Part Three. Once all of this is in place, you then automate your content distribution using plugins such as the ones discussed in the next section.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Traffic Automation Blueprint – Plugins
Let’s take a brief look at some examples of traffic-generation plugins that can be used to:
- Post content to social media sites and social bookmarking accounts
- Syndicate comments automatically to other blogs
- Post content automatically via RSS to other blogs
Jetpack WordPress Plugin
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, GooglePlus, LinkedIn 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 great functions.
After installing Jetpack, you will need to connect the plugin to your WordPress.com account …
(Connect Jetpack to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate the Publicize feature …
(Activate the Publicize feature on Jetpack)
Configure this section to automatically share your posts on Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, and more …
(Publicize your posts automatically to several social sites.)
After all of the settings have been configured, your content is ready for distribution.
The Publicize feature adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize settings in the publishing box.)
Now, whenever you publish a new post, it will automatically be shared on all of the accounts you have set up …
(As soon as you publish, your new posts are automatically syndicated online.)
To learn more about this WordPress plugin, go here: Jetpack
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
The WordPress built-in commenting system lets your site users interact with your web site, post new comments, reply to other users and engage with your content as part of an online community.
You can enhance the WordPress default commenting feature with a 3rd-party commenting plugin like Disqus, IntenseDebate, LiveFyre, or CommentLuv that integrates with social media, helping to share and spread your content online.
For example, with a plugin like CommentLuv (Premium version), you can make your site more attractive to commenters by offering them a choice of backlinks if they tweet, like, or +1 your post. 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 submit.
(CommentLuv can encourage a greater level of commenting and improve user engagement on your web site.)
Go here to learn more about the benefits of using this plugin:
Social Link Machine
(Social LinkMachine – Set-and-forget content distribution plugin for WordPress)
Social Link Machine is a plugin for WordPress that allows you to syndicate and drip-feed content, build backlinks, include relevant images and videos, and 2nd-tier links and social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social Link Machine – syndicate your content automatically to many authority platforms)
With Social Link Machine installed, you can automatically syndicate and drip-feed your content to many authority websites, including:
- Social Bookmarking Platforms: e.g. Bitly, Linkagogo, Plurk, Stumbleupon, etc.
- Blogs: e.g. Livejournal, Sett, Tumblr, etc.
- Social Media Platforms: Google Plus, Twitter, etc.
- Image Sharing: e.g. Pinterest, etc.
- Document Sharing: e.g. Issuu, Scribd, etc.
Go here to learn more about this handy plugin: Social Link Machine
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), we have written a comprehensive article about social media measurement tools and technologies that will help you identify new business opportunities, track competitor activity, see what conversations are taking place online that affect your business,etc here:
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 Sharing Process – Summary
Once your site and plugins have been set up and expertly configured, all you have to do is post new content on a regular basis to drive more traffic.
If you need topics for content that you can post on your site, then subscribe to our email training series on growing your business online with content marketing here:
Once you have expertly configured your WordPress site, the next step is to optimize the web-traffic generation process. This step is covered in the next article in the WordPress Traffic System series.
This is the end of Section Four
To read the rest of this article series, click on the link below:
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"I am beyond impressed with what you have put together. I can tell that you put a ton of hard work into building what you have. You have the absolute best content on WordPress I have ever seen!" - Robert T. Jillie
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