Welcome to Part Four of our Web Site Traffic Blueprint article series, where we explain how to create an automated traffic machine using WordPress.
So far, here is what we have covered in this article series:
In Part 1, 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 site, all you have to do to automatically begin attracting new web traffic is add great content on a regular basis!)
In Part Two, 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 site, and what to do if your website was built with WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you how to set up a WordPress website or blog on your domain)
In Part Three, we looked at important configuration decisions.
Here, we configure all the settings that can affect your website’s ability to generate traffic automatically …
(In Part Three we show you how to configure hosting settings, WordPress settings, and external settings that affect your website’s ability to generate traffic automatically)
In Part Four, you will learn how to set up various plugins that can drive traffic automatically to your site.
Why It Makes Sense To Automate Your Traffic Generation
Depending on which expert you get your advice from, you could end up trying to spend an hour or two (or more) every day posting content on social media.
Many small businesses lack the time, resources and budget to employ the services of a full-time marketing and content creation department and engage in the kind of content marketing that many online marketing experts are recommending. If you spend all of your time posting updates on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter in addition to researching and writing content for your website or blog, how does anything in your business get done?
(Small business owners spend most of their working hours just keeping their businesses up and running. Infographic: NFIB)
Small business owners 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 make sales in order to survive.
Marketing research conducted in 2012 by email and social media marketing company Vertical Response found that:
- 43% of all small businesses surveyed spent around 6 hours per week on social media (the other half 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 figures would most likely be significantly 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.
(Businesses are spending more time marketing and promoting themselves online. Source: VerticalResponse)
As businesses spend more time on online marketing as a matter of business survival and competition, this leaves less time for under-resourced businesses to focus on other important areas …
(Businesses with limited budgets, resources, and time 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 marketing and promoting your business on a number of social media websites, all of your efforts are going into virtual real estate that you don’t control. You don’t own Twitter, Facebook, or StumbleUpon. These companies often will make decisions that affect 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 publish your content automatically to other online accounts.
Automating systems and process to save time and increase productivity is not new. Businesses of all sizes have been doing it since the Industrial Age. In the Digital Age, however, the increasing availability of many new online marketing channels creates a number of dilemmas for small business owners and marketing managers, especially for those with limited resources, marketing budget, and time. For example:
- Which of these channels do you focus more of your time, efforts, and budget on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building assets on sites that belong to other companies (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 The Traffic-Getting Process With WordPress
What I’d like to show you now, is a free, simple, and effective method that allows you to automate your web traffic generation with WordPress.
With this formula, you will be able to:
- Save time creating content for your website and social media,
- Save money on content creation and unnecessary online marketing channels,
- Determine which channels you should invest more time, efforts, and budget on,
- Invest most of your time 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 strategies, sites, solutions, and anything that violates the terms of service and policies of sites like Facebook, YouTube, Google, etc..
(Web traffic automation doesn’t require using black hat methods!)
What we are focusing in this article series is to show you how to automate your content distribution in order to leverage your time and 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
As we’ve just seen in the previous section, most small business owners 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 to be strategic and work smart within your limitations.
So, instead of choosing this approach, which is very time-consuming …
(Posting content to different channels can be very time-consuming!)
Why not use 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 once, and automate your content distribution to all other marketing channels.
You can:
- Automatically distribute content to social media channels and social bookmarking sites,
- Automatically distribute content (and comments) 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 do all of this?
Simple … first, set up your site as described in Part Two. Then, configure your site settings as described in Part 3. Once all of this is in place, you can then connect all of the dots using plugins like the ones discussed in the following section.
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 brief look at a few traffic-generation WordPress plugins that can be used to:
- Distribute content automatically to social sites and social bookmarking websites
- Post comments automatically to other blogs
- Distribute content via RSS feeds to other websites
Jetpack
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, LinkedIn, GooglePlus and more as soon as you publish your content using a WordPress plugin like JetPack.
Download URL: https://jetpack.com/
Jetpack is a free WordPress plugin with loads of great features.
After installing Jetpack, connect the plugin to the WordPress.com account you set up in Part 3 …
(Make sure the Jetpack plugin is connected to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate the Publicize feature …
(Jetpack – Publicize)
You can share your posts on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Google+, LinkedIn, and more …
(Share your content automatically on various social accounts.)
After all of the settings have been configured, your content is ready for distribution.
Publicize adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize account options displayed in the Publish area.)
Now, as soon as you publish a new post, it will automatically get shared online to every account you have set up …
(As soon as you publish, your new content will be automatically shared online.)
For more details about this WordPress plugin, go here: Jetpack
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
The built-in WordPress commenting system allows your blog readers to interact with your site, post new comments, reply to other users and participate in discussions as part of an online community.
You can enhance the WordPress native commenting feature using a 3rd-party plugin that integrates your comments with social media, helping to spread and share them around.
For example, a plugin like CommentLuv (Premium version) can help attract more comments and create more user engagement on your website or blog. The plugin encourages readers to comment using SEO and social reward features like the ability to add twitter usernames to comments, using keywords in the user name, backlinks, and social enticements for content sharing. This plugin will visit the comment author’s site while they are entering their comment and retrieve their last blog posts, which can be included with their comment when they click the submit button.
(CommentLuv can help attract more comments and improve user engagement on your website.)
To learn more about the benefits of this plugin, go here:
Social LinkMachine
(Social LinkMachine – WordPress content distribution plugin)
Social Link Machine is a plugin for WordPress that lets you drip-feed content, build anchor text backlinks, include relevant videos and images, and create social signals on auto-pilot …
(SocialLinkMachine – syndicate and drip-feed content automatically to over 30 online platforms)
With Social Link Machine installed, you can automatically drip-feed content to over 30 social platforms, such as:
- Bookmarking Sites: e.g. Bitly, Linkagogo, Kippt, Scoop.it, etc.
- Web 2.0 Blogs: e.g. Blog.com, Rebel Mouse, WordPress.com, etc.
- Social Media Platforms: Facebook, Xing, etc.
- Image Sharing Platforms: e.g. Flickr, etc.
- PDF Sharing Platforms: e.g. Issuu, Gett, etc.
To learn more about the benefits of using this plugin, go here: 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 marketing efforts), we have written a detailed article listing over 30 social media tracking tools and technologies that are worth knowing about. More information:
The above are just a few examples of the many plugins that WordPress makes available for automating 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 Automation Blueprint: Automated Content Syndication Stage – Summary
Once you have your WordPress site and plugins set up and expertly configured, all you need to do then to automatically generate traffic is publish new content on a consistent basis.
If you need help coming up with ideas for posting content on your site, then subscribe to our FREE email training course on content marketing here:
Once you have expertly configured your WordPress site, the next step is to optimize the process. This step is explained in the next section of our series.
This is the end of Part 4
To read more, click here:
***
"If you're new to WordPress, this can stand on its own as a training course and will stay with you as you progress from beginner to advanced and even guru status." - Bruce (Columbus, Ohio)
***