Welcome to Part Four of our Web Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to automate traffic to your website using the WordPress CMS platform.
So far, here is what we have covered in this article series:
In Part 1 of this article series, we provide an overview of the traffic automation process, and explain why using an expertly configured WordPress website or blog is the key to generating automated web traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress website or blog, all you have to do is post content regularly to start generating web traffic!)
In Part 2, we discussed critical setup decisions. We explained the best way to start 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 has been built using WordPress.
(In Part two we show you where to set up WordPress on your domain)
In Part Three, we focus on configuring the system.
In this step, we configure hosting settings, WordPress settings, and external settings that affect your website’s ability to generate traffic automatically …
(In Part 3 you learn how to configure all the settings (hosting, WordPress and external) that can affect your site’s traffic-getting ability)
In this article, you will learn how to set up various plugins that can help bring new visitors automatically to your website or blog.
Why You Should Automate The Traffic-Getting Process
Depending on who you get your advice from, you could end up spending a couple of hours per day (or more) promoting your business on social media in addition to managing your business, your content and your online presence.
Most small business owners lack the time, 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 prescribing. If you are spending hours checking Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn in addition to planning and writing articles for your blog or website, how will you get anything else in your business done?
(Small business owners spend most of their working hours just keeping their businesses up and running. Image source: National Federation Of Independent Businesses)
Small businesses spend most of their time trying to keep their businesses up and running. On top of this, 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 by VerticalResponse – an email and social media marketing company, found that:
- Almost half of all businesses surveyed spent 6 or more hours each week on social media (the rest 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 survey was conducted today, the figures 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 the activity that consumed the most time online for all businesses surveyed.
(Businesses are spending more time marketing and promoting themselves online. Source: VerticalResponse)
As small businesses spend more time marketing and promoting themselves online as a matter of business survival and competition, this puts more and more of a squeeze on businesses to focus their time on other equally important areas …
(Businesses with limited resources, marketing budget, and time and many business areas to focus on require careful planning of their marketing strategy.)
Another important thing to keep in mind is that, in addition to spending time social media sites, you are investing all of your efforts into virtual real estate that you don’t control. You don’t own Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube. These companies often will make decisions that affect your business without first consulting you. Why invest so much effort and time building a business on rented real estate? With WordPress, you can control your own virtual real estate and distribute your content automatically to other online properties.
Automating processes to save time is not new. Businesses have been doing it since the dawn of the Industrial Age. In the Digital 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 resources, time, and marketing budget. For example:
- Which of these channels should you invest more of your budget, efforts, and your time on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building assets on sites that you ultimately have no control over (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 market and promote your business on?
The Benefits Of Automating The 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 strategy, you will be able to:
- Save time creating content for your website or blog and other marketing channels (e.g. social media),
- Save money on content creation and unnecessary online marketing costs,
- Determine which channels you should focus more efforts, time, and your budget 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 strongly recommend avoiding black hat sites, solutions, techniques, and anything designed to manipulate or violate the terms of service and policies of sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, Google, etc..
(Web traffic automation doesn’t need to involve the use of black hat techniques!)
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 get additional exposure online from sites visited by your target audience.
An Automated Content Distribution, Traffic And Lead Generation, And Sales & Marketing System
We’ve just seen that most small businesses lack the time, human resources and budget 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 posting content to services one at a time, which can be extremely time-consuming …
(Posting content to individual channels is extremely time-consuming!)
Why not use this method 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 your content distribution to all other marketing channels.
You can:
- Automatically distribute content to social channels and bookmarking sites,
- Automatically distribute comments and content 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 this done?
Simple … first, set up your website or blog as described in Part 2. Then, configure it as shown in Part Three. After all 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 Web Traffic System – Traffic Plugins
Let’s take a look now at some examples of plugins that can help:
- Distribute content to social sites and social bookmarking sites
- Syndicate comments automatically to other blogs
- Syndicate content to other web properties via RSS
Jetpack
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, 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 many great functions.
After installing Jetpack, connect the plugin to your WordPress.com account …
(Connect Jetpack to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate the Publicize feature …
(Jetpack plugin – Publicize feature)
You can share your posts on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, and more …
(Share your content on various social accounts.)
After all settings have been configured, your content is ready for distribution.
Publicize adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize options in the Publish section.)
Now, as soon as you publish a new post, it will automatically get shared on every account you have set up …
(As soon as you publish, your new posts are automatically syndicated online.)
The Jetpack plugin provides you with a hands-free way to get more exposure for your content online on social networks.
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
WordPress has a native commenting function that lets your visitors engage with your site, post new comments, reply to other users and participate in discussions as part of a community.
You can expand the WordPress native commenting feature with a third-party plugin that integrates your comments with social media, helping to spread and share them online.
For example, with a WordPress plugin like CommentLuv (Premium version), you can create more user engagement on your website or blog. The plugin encourages readers to comment using SEO and social rewards like social enticements for sharing content, adding twitter handles to comments, using keywords in the name, and SEO backlinks. This plugin will visit the comment author’s website or blog while they type their comment and retrieve their most recent blog posts, which they can choose to include with their comment when they click submit.
(CommentLuv can encourage a greater level of commenting and improve user engagement on your website or blog.)
To learn more about this plugin, go here:
Social Link Machine
(Social LinkMachine – WordPress content distribution plugin)
Social LinkMachine is a plugin for WordPress that lets you syndicate and drip-feed your content to over 30 authority platforms, build backlinks, include relevant images and videos, and social signals on auto-pilot …
(SocialLinkMachine – drip-feed your content to over 30 authority websites)
With Social LinkMachine installed, you can automatically syndicate and drip-feed content to dozens of online websites, such as:
- Social Bookmarking Sites: e.g. Deviantart, Folkd, Kippt, Reddit, etc.
- Blogging Platforms: e.g. Blog.com, Rebel Mouse, Tumblr, etc.
- Social Media Platforms: Facebook, Twitter, etc.
- Image Sharing Platforms: e.g. Pinterest, etc.
- PDF Sharing Platforms: e.g. Docdroid, Sendspace, etc.
For more details about the benefits of this plugin, go here: Social Link Machine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media monitoring (in order to get actionable information about your content marketing campaigns), we have written a detailed article about social media tracking tools and technologies that are worth knowing about. To learn more, go here:
The above are just a few 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 System: Content Syndication Phase – Summary
Once you have your site and plugins expertly configured and set up, all you need to do to automatically generate more web traffic is publish web content regularly.
If you need endless content ideas for your website or blog, we recommend subscribing to our email training series on growing your business with content marketing here:
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 System series.
This is the end of Part 4
To read more, click on the link below:
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"These tutorials have so much information and are easy to understand. If you use WordPress or plan to in the future these will help you with everything you need to know." - Valisa (Mesa, Arizona)
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