Welcome to Part 4 of our WordPress Web Traffic Blueprint article series, where we explain how to automate traffic to your website using the WordPress CMS platform.
So far, we have covered the following 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 is the key to automating traffic to your website …
(With an expertly configured WordPress website or blog, all you have to do to automatically begin bringing new traffic is publish web content consistently!)
In Part 2, we look at the setup phase of the automation blueprint. We help 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 website, and what to do if your website was built with WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you where to set up WordPress on your domain)
In Part Three, we focused on the configuration phase.
In this step, we configure all the settings that can affect your site’s traffic-getting ability …
(In Part Three you will configure all the settings that can affect your website’s traffic-getting ability)
In this section of the article series, we will show you how to set up various WordPress plugins that can help get new visitors automatically to your website.
Why It Makes Sense To Automate The Traffic Generation
Depending on which experts you get your advice from, you could end up investing an hour or two per day (or more) posting content on social media, as well as managing your business, your content and your web presence.
Most business owners lack the time, resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that many online marketing experts advise. If you spend half your day posting updates on LinkedIn, Facebook, or Twitter in addition to writing content for your website or blog, how does anything in your business get done?
(Keeping a business running is how most small businesses spend their time. Infographic: NFIB)
Many business owners spend most of their working hours trying to keep their businesses up and running. In addition to running a business, there’s sales and marketing. After all, businesses need to remain competitive and make sales in order to survive.
A study of small businesses done by VerticalResponse – an email and social media marketing company, found that:
- 43% of all small businesses surveyed spent 6 or more hours each week on social media (most of the other businesses surveyed that used social media 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 every year marketing and promoting themselves online. Infographic: VerticalResponse.com)
As businesses spend increasingly larger amounts of time on online marketing in order to compete and survive, this leaves less time for under-resourced businesses to focus on other equally vital areas …
(Businesses with limited resources, budget, and time and many different business areas to focus on have to plan their marketing strategy very carefully.)
Another thing to keep in mind is that, in addition to spending time marketing and promoting your business on various 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 LinkedIn. These companies can and will make decisions that can significantly impact your business without prior warning. Why invest so much effort and time building a business on rented real estate? With a self-hosted WordPress website, you can have complete control of your own real estate and post your content automatically to other sites.
Automating business 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 increased availability of hundreds of new channels for marketing and promoting a business online creates a number of dilemmas for small business owners and marketing managers, especially for those with limited budgets, time, and resources. For example:
- Which channels should you invest more time, budget, and efforts on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building a web presence on other people’s sites (e.g. YouTube, Twitter, Pinterest, etc.) while neglecting the benefits of building content on your own domain?
- Do you create new content for every channel you plan to promote and market your business on?
The Benefits Of Automating Your Traffic Generation Process With WordPress
What I’d like to share with you now, is a free, simple, and effective method that allows you to automate the web traffic generation with WordPress.
With this formula, you will be able to:
- Save time creating content for your website and other marketing channels (e.g. social media),
- Save money on content creation and unnecessary online marketing channels,
- Determine which marketing channels you should focus more of your 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 recommend avoiding black hat techniques, tools, sites, and anything designed to flaunt or violate the terms of service and policies of services like LinkedIn, Google, Facebook, etc..
(Web traffic automation does not have to involve the use of 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 in order to leverage your time and 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 businesses lack the time, human resources and financial means to engage in the kind of content marketing that many online experts advise. What you want to do, then, is be strategic with your limited time, budget, and resources.
So, instead of choosing this time-consuming approach …
(Posting content to different marketing channels 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 once, and automate your content distribution to all other channels.
You can:
- Automatically distribute content to social media services and social bookmarking sites,
- Distribute comments and content 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 Two. Then, get everything configured as shown in Part Three. After all this is in place, you then automate the process with plugins.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Web Traffic System – Traffic-Getting Plugins
Let’s take a quick look at a number of plugins that can:
- Distribute content automatically to social sites and social bookmarking websites
- Distribute comments automatically to other blogs
- Distribute content to other web properties via RSS feeds
Jetpack
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn 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 useful features.
After Jetpack has been installed, connect the plugin to your WordPress.com account (set up in Part 3.) …
(Make sure the Jetpack plugin is connected to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate the Publicize feature …
(Jetpack plugin – Publicize)
Once this section is configured, you will be able to automatically share your posts on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, LinkedIn, GooglePlus, and more …
(Share your content automatically on several social accounts.)
After configuring all account and plugin settings, your content is ready for distribution.
The Publicize feature adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize account options appear in your post publishing section.)
Now, as soon as you publish new content, it will automatically be shared on every account you have set up …
(As soon as content is published, it is automatically shared online.)
Go here to learn more about using this powerful plugin: Jetpack
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
The native WordPress commenting feature lets your site users interact with your site, post comments, reply to existing comments and engage with your content as part of a social community.
You can enhance the WordPress native commenting feature using a third-party plugin that integrates your comments with social media, helping to spread and share your content around.
For example, with a WordPress plugin like CommentLuv (Premium version), you can create more user engagement on your website. The plugin encourages readers to comment using SEO and social reward features like the ability to add twitter names to comments, social enticements for sharing your content, ability to use keywords in the user name, and backlinks. This plugin will visit the site of the comment author while they are entering their comment and retrieve their most recent blog posts, which can be included with their comment after clicking submit.
(CommentLuv can encourage a greater level of commenting and create more 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 Link Machine is a set-and-forget plugin for WordPress that allows you to automatically drip-feed your content to over 30 social platforms, build backlinks, include relevant videos and images, and create 2nd-tier links and social signals on auto-pilot …
(SocialLinkMachine – syndicate your content automatically to over 30 traffic-generating sites)
With SocialLinkMachine installed, you can automatically syndicate content to dozens of social platforms, including:
- Bookmarking Sites: e.g. Deviantart, Folkd, Plurk, Zotero, etc.
- Blogs: e.g. Livejournal, Sett, Tribe, etc.
- Social Platforms: Google Plus, Xing, etc.
- Image Sharing: e.g. Flickr, etc.
- PDF Sharing Platforms: e.g. Issuu, Sendspace, 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 marketing efforts), we have written a detailed article listing over 30 social media monitoring tools that will help you keep track of online trends, monitor competitor activity, see what conversations are taking place online that can affect your business, etc, see what conversations are taking place online that affect your business,etc. For more details, 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 Blueprint: Content Distribution Phase – Summary
Once you have your WordPress site and plugins configured and fully set up, all you need to do then is post web content regularly to start generating new traffic.
If you need great content ideas for your site, we recommend subscribing to our FREE email training series here:
Once you have configured your WordPress site, the next step is to optimize the web-traffic generation process. This step is addressed in the next section of our series.
This is the end of Section 4
To read the rest of this article series, click here:
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"Wow! I never knew there's so much to learn about WordPress! I bought one of the WordPress for Dummies three years ago, such authors need to be on this course!" - Rich Law, Create A Blog Now
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