Welcome to Part Four of our Web Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to turn your site into an automated traffic machine using the WordPress CMS platform.
So far, we have covered the following in this series:
In Part One, we provided an overview of the traffic automation process, and explained 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 to automatically attract traffic is post web content on a regular basis!)
In Part Two, we discuss critical setup decisions. We help you understand the best way to get started if you don’t have a website yet, how to set everything up if you already have a website, and what to do if your existing website is built using WordPress.
(In Part 2 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 all the settings (hosting, internal and external) that can affect your site’s ability to generate traffic automatically …
(In Part 3 you will configure hosting settings, WordPress settings, and external settings that can affect your site’s traffic-getting ability)
In Part Four, we look at ways to automate traffic to your website using WordPress plugins.
Why It Makes Sense To Automate Your Traffic-Getting Process
Depending on which online 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 in addition to trying to run your business, creating content and managing your web presence.
Most small businesses lack the time, resources and financial means to engage in the kind of content marketing that many marketing experts recommend. If you are spending all of your time posting updates on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook in addition to planning and writing articles for your blog or website, how can anything in your business get done?
(Small businesses spend most of their working hours just keeping their businesses up and running. Source: NFIB)
Many business owners spend most of their time simply keeping their businesses up and running. On top of this, there’s sales and marketing. After all, businesses need to stay competitive and make sales in order to survive.
Research conducted by VerticalResponse – an email and social media marketing company, found that:
- 43% of all businesses surveyed spent at least 6 hours per 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 use of social media was a 66% increase from the previous year, so if the same research was done today, the numbers would probably be even 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 consumed the most time online.
(Businesses spend more time each year marketing and promoting themselves online. Infographic: VerticalResponse)
As small businesses spend more time on online marketing in order to compete and survive, this leaves less time for under-resourced businesses to focus on other equally important areas …
(Businesses with limited time, marketing budgets, and resources and many different 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 marketing and promoting your business on a number of social 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 sites can and will make decisions that affect your business without prior notification. Why invest so much time and effort building content on someone else’s asset? With WordPress (self-hosted), you can have complete control of your own virtual real estate and distribute your content automatically to other online accounts.
Automating business processes to leverage time is nothing new. Businesses of all sizes have been doing it since the Industrial Age. In the Information Age, however, the increased availability of hundreds of new marketing channels creates a number of dilemmas for business owners and business managers, especially for those with limited marketing budgets, resources, and time. For example:
- Which of these marketing channels do you invest more of your efforts, budget, and time on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building a web presence on other people’s sites (e.g. Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc.) while ignoring your own domain?
- Do you create new content for every channel you plan to market and promote your business on?
The Benefits Of Automating The Web Traffic Generation Process With WordPress
What we’d like to share with you now, is a free, simple, and effective formula that allows you to automate your web 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 online marketing channels,
- Determine which channels you should invest more efforts, budget, and your time 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 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 solutions, strategies, sites, and anything designed to “game” or violate the policies and terms of service of sites like Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc..
(Web traffic automation does not require using black hat techniques!)
What we are focusing here is to show you how to automate your content distribution in order to leverage your time and marketing efforts, and increase your exposure online to sites visited 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 business owners lack the time, resources and financial means to engage in the kind of content marketing that many online experts advise doing. What you want to do, then, is be strategic with your limited resources, budget, and time.
So, instead of choosing this approach, which is very time-consuming …
(Posting content to different marketing channels can be extremely time-consuming!)
Why not choose this approach 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 channels.
You can:
- Distribute content automatically to social media channels and social bookmarking sites,
- Automatically distribute comments and content to other blogs and web 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 Two. Then, get everything configured as shown in Part Three. After all this is in place, you can then automate these processes using plugins like the ones discussed below.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Traffic Automation System – Traffic Plugins
Let’s take a quick look at some examples of plugins that can:
- Syndicate content automatically to social sites and social bookmarking websites
- Syndicate comments automatically to other blogs
- Distribute content via RSS feeds to other online properties
Jetpack 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 plugin like JetPack.
Download URL: https://jetpack.com/
Jetpack is a free WordPress plugin with many great functions.
After Jetpack has been installed, you will need to connect the plugin to your WordPress.com account (which you would have set up in Part Three.) …
(Make sure that Jetpack 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 Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, LinkedIn, GooglePlus, and more …
(Share your posts automatically on several social media sites.)
After all settings have been configured, your content is ready for distribution.
The Publicize feature adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize details displays in your publishing area.)
Now, as soon as you publish new content, it will automatically be shared on every account you have set up …
(As soon as new content is published, it will be automatically syndicated online.)
To learn more about using this plugin, visit this website: Jetpack
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
WordPress has a native commenting function that lets your site users engage with your website, post comments, reply to existing comments and engage with your content.
You can enhance the WordPress built-in commenting feature using a third-party plugin like Disqus, IntenseDebate, LiveFyre, or CommentLuv that integrates your comments with social media, helping to spread and share them online.
For example, with a plugin like CommentLuv (Pro version), you can improve user engagement on your website or blog. The plugin encourages readers to comment using SEO and social reward features like social enticements for content sharing, using keywords in the name, search-indexable backlinks, and adding twitter names to comments. This plugin will visit the comment author’s website while they are entering their comment and retrieve their most recent blog posts, which can be included with their comment when they click submit.
(CommentLuv can encourage a greater level of commenting and create more user engagement on your web site.)
To learn more about the benefits of using this handy plugin, go here:
Social LinkMachine
(Social LinkMachine – WordPress content distribution plugin)
Social Link Machine is a set-and-forget plugin that lets you automatically drip-feed your content, build diverse anchor text backlinks, include relevant YouTube videos and images, and social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social LinkMachine – syndicate your content automatically to dozens of social platforms)
With SocialLinkMachine installed, you can automatically syndicate your content to many authority websites, including:
- Social Bookmarking Platforms: e.g. Delicious, Linkagogo, Kippt, Scoop.it, etc.
- Web 2.0 Blogs: e.g. Blogger, Sett, Tribe, etc.
- Social Platforms: Facebook, Xing, etc.
- Image Sharing: e.g. Flickr, etc.
- PDF Sharing Platforms: e.g. Docdroid, Scribd, etc.
To learn more about this plugin, go here: SocialLinkMachine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media tracking (so you can get actionable information about your content marketing campaigns), go here to learn more about social media tracking tools and technologies that you may want to check out:
The above are just a few 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 Automation Blueprint: Content Sharing Phase – Summary
Once your WordPress site and plugins have been configured and set up, all you have to do then is publish new content on a consistent basis to attract new traffic organically.
If you need help coming up with ideas for posting content on your web site, we recommend subscribing to our FREE 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 process. This step is covered in the next section of the WordPress Traffic System series.
This is the end of Section 4
To keep reading, click on the link below:
- Web Site Traffic Blueprint Part 5 – Learn How To Create A Web Traffic-Getting Machine With WordPress
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"This is an awesome training series. I have a pretty good understanding of WordPress already, but this is helping me to move somewhere from intermediate to advanced user!" - Kim Lednum
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