Welcome to Part 4 of our WordPress Website Traffic Blueprint article series, where we explain how to automate traffic to your website using the WordPress CMS.
So far, we have covered the following in this series:
In Part One of this series, we describe the traffic automation process, and explain why using an expertly configured WordPress website is the key to generating automated traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress blog, all you have to do to begin bringing more web traffic is add new content on a consistent basis!)
In Part 2, we discussed the setup phase of this process. We explained 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 existing website was built with WordPress.
(In Part two we show you how to set up WordPress on your domain)
In Part Three, we focus on the configuration phase of the automation system.
Here, we configure all the settings (hosting, internal and external) that can affect your site’s ability to generate traffic automatically …
(In Part Three we show you how to configure all the settings that can affect your site’s ability to generate traffic automatically)
In Part Four, we will discuss ways to automate the traffic system with plugins.
Why Automate The Traffic-Getting Process?
Depending on which expert you talk to, you could end up trying to spend an hour or more each day posting content on social media.
Most small business owners simply lack the time, human resources and budget to run a full-time marketing and content creation department and engage in the kind of content marketing that many online marketing experts prescribe. If you spent most of your time checking LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook in addition to researching and writing articles for your website or blog, how would you get anything in your business done?
(Small businesses spend most of their working hours just keeping their businesses up and running. Image source: NFIB)
Many business owners spend most of their time trying to keep their businesses up and running. In addition to running a business, there’s also sales and marketing. After all, businesses need to stay competitive and grow in order to survive.
Research conducted in 2012 by VerticalResponse – an email and social media marketing company, found that:
- 43% of all businesses surveyed spent at least six hours each week on social media (the other half 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 conducted today, the figures would probably be even higher.
- More than half of all 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 every year marketing and promoting themselves online. Source: VerticalResponse)
As businesses spend increasingly larger amounts of time promoting and marketing themselves online in order to compete and survive, this leaves less time for under-resourced businesses to focus on other areas …
(Businesses with limited time, budgets, and resources and many different 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 websites, you are investing all of your efforts into virtual real estate that you have no control over. You don’t own Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn. These companies can and will make decisions that can significantly affect your business without consulting you. Why invest so much time and effort building a business on rented real estate? 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 systems and process to leverage time is not new. Businesses have been doing it since the Industrial Age. In the Digital Age, however, the exponential growth online marketing channels creates a number of dilemmas for small business owners and business managers, especially for those with limited resources, time, and marketing budgets. For example:
- Which marketing channels should you focus more budget, efforts, and your time on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building assets on sites that belong to other people (e.g. Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, 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 we’d like to show you now, is a free, simple, and effective strategy that lets you automate the web traffic generation process with WordPress.
With this strategy, you will be able to:
- Save time creating content for your website or blog and social media,
- Save money on content creation and unnecessary online marketing channels,
- Determine which marketing channels you should invest more of your budget, efforts, and your time 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 urge you to avoid using black hat methods, solutions, websites, and anything designed to “game” or violate the terms of service and policies of sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, Google, etc..
(Web traffic automation does not require the use of black hat methods!)
What we are focusing here is not to game online services or break their terms of service, but to show you how to be smart with your resources and automate your content distribution in order to leverage your time and efforts, and increase your exposure online to websites used 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, human resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that most experts advise doing. What you want to do, then, is to be strategic and work smart within your limited resources.
So, instead of doing this …
(Posting content to individual channels is very time-consuming!)
Why not choose this one 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 one-time, and automate your content distribution to all other services.
You can:
- Automatically distribute content to social sites and bookmarking sites,
- Distribute content (and comments) automatically 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 WordPress website or blog as shown in Part Two. Then, configure it as explained in Part Three. Once all of this is in place, you can then connect all of the dots with plugins such as the ones shown in the next section.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Web Traffic System – Plugins
Let’s take a brief look at a number of plugins that can be used to:
- Distribute content automatically to social media sites and social bookmarking websites
- Post comments automatically to other blogs
- Syndicate content automatically to other blogs via RSS feeds
Jetpack
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Google+, 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 useful functions.
After Jetpack has been installed, you will need to connect the plugin to the WordPress.com account you set up in Part 3 …
(Make sure that Jetpack is connected to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate the Publicize feature …
(Jetpack plugin – Publicize feature)
Once this section is configured, you will be able to automatically share your posts on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, and more …
(Publicize your content automatically to several social networks.)
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 in the publishing box.)
Now, as soon as you publish new content, it will automatically get shared online to all of the accounts you have set up …
(As soon as new content is published, it will be automatically shared online.)
Go here to learn more about this powerful plugin: Jetpack Plugin
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
WordPress has a built-in commenting feature that lets your visitors interact with your site, post comments, reply to other users and engage with your content.
You can enhance the WordPress built-in commenting feature with a number of 3rd-party plugins that integrate your comments with social media, helping to share and spread your content around.
For example, with a plugin like CommentLuv (Pro version), you can improve user engagement on your web site. The plugin encourages readers to comment using SEO and social rewards like adding twitter names to comments, search-indexable backlinks, ability to use keywords in the name, and social enticements for sharing content. This plugin will visit the comment author’s website while they type their comment and retrieve their last blog posts, which they can include with their comment after clicking the submit button.
(CommentLuv can help attract more comments and web traffic and improve user engagement on your website or blog.)
Visit the plugin website to learn more about using this powerful plugin:
SocialLinkMachine
(Social LinkMachine – Content distribution plugin)
Social Link Machine is a 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 …
(SocialLinkMachine – syndicate and drip-feed your content automatically to many authority websites)
With Social LinkMachine installed, you can automatically syndicate and drip-feed content to dozens of online platforms, including:
- Social Bookmarking Platforms: e.g. Delicious, Folkd, Kippt, Scoop.it, etc.
- Blogs: e.g. Blog.com, Rebel Mouse, Tribe, etc.
- Social Platforms: Facebook, Xing, etc.
- Image Sharing: e.g. Flickr, etc.
- Document Sharing: e.g. Issuu, Scribd, 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 campaigns), we have written a detailed article listing over 30 social media tracking tools and technologies that are worth checking out and knowing about. Go here to learn more:
The above are just some examples of the many plugins that WordPress makes available for automating and sharing 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 System: Automated Content Distribution Stage – Summary
Once you have your site and plugins configured and fully set up, all you need to do is publish content on a regular basis to attract new traffic.
If you need endless topics for content that you can post on your web site, then subscribe to our 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 explained in the next article in our series.
This is the end of Part 4
To keep reading this article, 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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