Welcome to Part 4 of our Website Traffic Blueprint article series, where we explain how to grow your business online automatically using the WordPress CMS.
So far, we have covered the following in this series:
In Part 1 of this series, we explain why using an expertly configured WordPress website or blog is the key to generating automated web traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress site, all you have to do to generate more traffic is post new content regularly!)
In Part 2, we focused on 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 everything up if you already have a website, and what to do if your site has been built with WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you where to set up a WordPress website or blog on your domain)
In Part Three, we look at important configuration decisions.
In this step, we configure all the settings that can affect your site’s ability to generate traffic automatically …
(In Part Three you learn how to configure all the settings that can affect your website’s ability to generate traffic automatically)
In Part 4, we will show you how to set up various WordPress plugins that can drive web traffic automatically to your site just by publishing fresh content regularly.
Why You Should Automate The Traffic Generation Process
Depending on which marketing experts you listen to, you could find yourself investing an hour or more every day posting content on social media.
Most small businesses simply lack the time, resources and financial means to run a full-time marketing department and engage in the kind of content marketing that many marketing experts prescribe. If you spent half a day posting updates on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn in addition to researching and writing content for your blog or website, how would anything in your business ever get done?
(Keeping their business running is how most small business owners spend their time. Infographic: National Federation Of Independent Businesses)
Small businesses spend most of their working hours trying to keep their businesses up and running. On top of this, there’s sales and marketing. After all, businesses need to stay competitive and grow in order to survive.
Research conducted in 2012 by email and social media marketing company Vertical Response found that:
- Almost half of all businesses surveyed spent at least six hours each week on social media (most of the other businesses surveyed using social media spent even more time – between 6 and 21+ hours per week). This usage of social media was a 66% increase from the previous year, so if the same research was done today, the figures would most likely be significantly higher.
- More than half of all small 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. Source: VerticalResponse.com)
As small businesses spend more time promoting and marketing themselves online as a matter of business survival and competition, this puts more and more pressure on businesses to focus their time on other areas …
(Businesses with limited time, marketing budget, and resources and many different areas to focus on require careful planning of their marketing strategy.)
One other thing to consider 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 Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest. These companies often will make decisions that can significantly impact your business without prior warning. Why invest so much time and effort building content on someone else’s asset? With WordPress (self-hosted), you can control your own real estate and publish your content automatically to other online accounts.
Automating processes to save time and increase productivity is nothing new. Businesses have been doing it since the Industrial Age. In the Information Age, however, the increasing availability of hundreds of new channels for promoting and marketing a business online creates a number of dilemmas for small business owners, especially for those with limited marketing budget, resources, and time. For example:
- Which of these channels do you invest more of your time, efforts, and your budget on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building assets on sites that you do not control (e.g. Facebook, LinkedIn, Tumblr, 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 Your Traffic-Getting Process With WordPress
What we’d like to show you now, is a free, simple, and effective strategy that allows you to automate the web traffic generation process with WordPress.
With this formula, you will be able to:
- Save time creating web content and social media,
- Save money on content creation and unnecessary online marketing costs,
- Determine which marketing channels you should focus more of your time, budget, and your efforts on,
- Invest most of your time and efforts building your own asset 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 urge you to avoid using black hat software, methods, sites, and anything designed to “game” or violate the terms of service and policies of services like Facebook, YouTube, Google, etc..
(Web traffic automation doesn’t have to involve using black hat methods!)
The focus of this article series is not to game web services or flaunt their terms of service, but to show you how to automate your content distribution so you can 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
We’ve just seen in the previous section that many businesses lack the time, resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that many experts recommend doing. What you want to do, then, is work smart within your limited resources, budget, and time.
So, instead of posting content to each channel, which is very time-consuming …
(Posting content to marketing channels one by one is very 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 once, and automate the distribution of your content to all other channels.
You can:
- Automatically distribute content to social media sites and 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 do all of this?
Simple … first, set up your website or blog as described in Part 2. Then, expertly configure everything as shown in Part 3. After all this is in place, you can then connect all of the dots using plugins.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Web Traffic Automation System – Traffic Plugins
Let’s take a quick look at some WordPress plugins that can help to:
- Post content automatically to social sites and social bookmarking sites
- Distribute comments automatically to other blogs
- Syndicate content automatically via RSS feeds to other online properties
Jetpack by WordPress.com
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, GooglePlus and more as soon as you publish your content using a 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 set up in Part Three …
(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 Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, and more …
(Publicize your posts automatically to several social media accounts.)
After all of the plugin and account settings have been configured, your content is ready for distribution.
The Publicize feature adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize options displays in the publishing section.)
Now, as soon as you publish a new post, it will automatically get shared online to all of the accounts you have set up …
(As soon as you publish, your new posts will be automatically shared online.)
This is a hands-free, automated way to create more exposure for your content online on social media websites.
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
The WordPress built-in commenting feature allows your visitors to engage with your web site, post new comments, reply to existing comments and participate in discussions as part of a community.
You can enhance the WordPress default commenting feature with a third-party plugin that integrates your comments with social media, helping to share and spread them around.
For example, using a plugin like CommentLuv (Premium version) can help make your blog more attractive to commenters by offering them a wider choice of backlinks if they +1, like, or tweet your content. This plugin will visit the website of the comment author while they are typing their comment and retrieve their most recent blog posts, which can be included with their comment when they click submit.
(CommentLuv can attract more comments and web traffic and improve user engagement on your website or blog.)
Go here to learn more about this plugin:
SocialLinkMachine
(SocialLinkMachine – Set-and-forget content distribution plugin for WordPress)
Social Link Machine is a set-and-forget plugin for WordPress that allows you to syndicate and drip-feed your content to dozens of authority sites, build backlinks, include relevant images and videos, and 2nd-tier links and social signals on auto-pilot …
(SocialLinkMachine – drip-feed content to over 30 social sites)
With SocialLinkMachine installed, you can automatically drip-feed content to over 30 traffic-generating sites, such as:
- Bookmarking Sites: e.g. Deviantart, Linkagogo, Instapaper, Scoop.it, etc.
- Blogs: e.g. Blogger, Overblog, WordPress.com, etc.
- Social Media Platforms: Google Plus, Xing, etc.
- Image Sharing: e.g. Pinterest, etc.
- Document Sharing: e.g. Docdroid, Scribd, etc.
Visit this site to learn more about this plugin: SocialLinkMachine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media monitoring (so you can get actionable information about your content marketing campaigns), we have written a comprehensive article about social media measurement tools and technologies that will help you manage, measure, and analyze your social media marketing initiatives 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 Blueprint: Automated Content Distribution Process – Summary
Once you have your website or blog and plugins set up and configured, all you need to do is post great content regularly to start driving traffic organically.
If you need endless topics for posting content on your web site, we recommend subscribing to our FREE email training series here:
Once you have expertly configured your WordPress site, the next step is to optimize the process. This step is explained in the next article in the series.
This is the end of Part Four
To keep reading about this topic, click here:
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