Welcome to Part Four of our WordPress Web Site Traffic Blueprint article series, where we explain how to create an automated traffic generation machine using the WordPress CMS.
So far, we have covered the following in this article series:
In Part 1 of this article series, we explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website is the key to automating traffic to your website …
(With an expertly configured WordPress web site, all you have to do to automatically drive more web traffic is add web content on a regular basis!)
In Part 2, we looked at critical setup decisions. We helped you understand the best way to start 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 how to set up a WordPress website or blog on your domain)
In Part Three, we focused on configuring the system.
In this step, we configure all the settings that can affect your website’s traffic-getting ability …
(In Part 3 you learn how to configure all the settings that affect your site’s ability to generate traffic automatically)
In this section, we look at ways to automate traffic generation using WordPress plugins.
Why Automating The Traffic Generation Makes Sense
Depending on who you listen to, you could find yourself trying to spend a couple of hours or more each day promoting your business on social media.
Most small businesses lack the time, resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that many marketing experts advise. If you spent all of your time posting updates on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn in addition to planning and writing articles for your website or blog, how could you get anything in your business done?
(Small businesses spend most of their working hours keeping their businesses up and running. Infographic: National Federation Of Independent Businesses)
Small businesses 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 remain competitive and make sales in order to survive.
A study of small businesses conducted in 2012 by email and social media marketing company Vertical Response 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 survey was conducted 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 was the activity that consumed the most time online for all businesses surveyed.
(Businesses are spending more time every year marketing and promoting themselves online. Infographic source: VerticalResponse.com)
As businesses spend more time marketing and promoting themselves online as a matter of business survival and competition, this leaves even less time for under-resourced businesses to focus on other important areas …
(Businesses with limited resources, budget, and time and many areas to focus on require careful planning of their marketing strategy.)
Another important thing to consider is that, in addition to spending time social media sites, all of your efforts are going into virtual real estate that you don’t control. You don’t own Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube. These sites often will make decisions that can significantly affect your business without first consulting you. Why invest so much time and effort building a business on someone else’s real estate? With WordPress, you can control your own real estate and distribute your content automatically to other sites.
Automating business systems and processes to save time is nothing new. Businesses of all sizes have been doing it ever since the dawn of the Industrial Age. In the Digital Age, however, the exponential growth online marketing channels creates a number of dilemmas for small business owners and marketing managers, especially for those with limited resources, time, and budgets. For example:
- Which channels should you focus more efforts, time, and your budget on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building assets on sites that you do not control (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc.) while neglecting your own domain?
- Do you create new content for every channel you plan to promote and market your business on?
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 your web traffic generation process 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 marketing channels you should focus more of your efforts, budget, and your time on,
- Invest most of your time 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 urge you to avoid using black hat websites, techniques, tools, and anything that violates the terms of service and policies of sites like Twitter, Facebook, Google.
(Web traffic automation does not require the use of black hat methods!)
What we are focusing in this series of articles is not to game web services or flaunt their terms of service, but to show you how to be smart with your limited resources and automate your content distribution so you can leverage your time and marketing 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 small business owners lack the time, resources and budget 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 budget, time, and resources.
So, instead of posting content to different services one by one, which is very time-consuming …
(Posting content to individual marketing channels is extremely time-consuming!)
Why not opt for a smarter, time-saving approach like the one shown below 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 your content distribution to all other channels.
You can:
- Automatically distribute content to social media sites and social bookmarking sites,
- Automatically distribute comments and content 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 get all this done?
Simple … first, set up your site as shown in Part Two. Then, expertly configure everything as shown in Part Three. After all this is in place, you then automate these processes using plugins.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Traffic Blueprint – Traffic Plugins
Let’s take a quick look at a number of WordPress plugins that can:
- Post content automatically to social media sites and social bookmarking accounts
- Distribute comments automatically to other blogs
- Distribute content to other websites via RSS
Jetpack WordPress Plugin
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ 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 many great features.
After installing Jetpack, you will need to connect the plugin to your WordPress.com account (as described in Part 3.) …
(Connect Jetpack to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate the Publicize feature …
(Activate the Publicize feature)
Configure this section to automatically share your posts on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Google+, LinkedIn, and more …
(Share your posts automatically on various social networks.)
After configuring all plugin and account settings, your content is ready for distribution.
The Publicize feature adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize details show in your Publish section.)
Now, whenever you publish new content, it will automatically get shared on every account you have set up …
(As soon as posts are published, they will be automatically shared online.)
This is an automated and hands-free way to create more exposure for your content online on social media sites.
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
The WordPress native commenting feature allows your blog readers to interact with your website, post new comments, reply to existing comments and engage with your content.
You can expand the WordPress default commenting feature using a 3rd-party plugin that integrates your comments with social media, helping to spread and share your content around.
For example, using a WordPress plugin like CommentLuv (Pro version) can help attract more comments and create more user engagement on your web site. The plugin encourages readers to comment using SEO and social rewards like social enticements for sharing content, search-indexable backlinks, using keywords in the name, and adding twitter usernames to comments. This plugin will visit the website or blog of the comment author while they are typing their comment and retrieve their latest blog posts, which they can include below their comment when they click the submit button.
(CommentLuv Pro version can attract more comments and visitors and create more user engagement on your site.)
For more details about this WordPress plugin, go here:
SocialLinkMachine
(SocialLinkMachine – Content distribution plugin)
Social LinkMachine is a plugin for WordPress that lets you automatically drip-feed your content to dozens of traffic-generating sites, build backlinks, include relevant images and videos, and create second-tier links and social signals on auto-pilot …
(SocialLinkMachine – syndicate and drip-feed your content to dozens of authority platforms)
With Social Link Machine installed, you can automatically drip-feed content to many social websites, like:
- Bookmarking Platforms: e.g. Delicious, Folkd, Kippt, Scoop.it, etc.
- Web 2.0 Blogging Platforms: e.g. Blogger, Sett, WordPress.com, etc.
- Social Platforms: Facebook, Xing, etc.
- Image Sharing Platforms: e.g. Pinterest, etc.
- Document Sharing Platforms: e.g. Issuu, Scribd, etc.
To learn more about this WordPress plugin, go here: SocialLinkMachine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media tracking (in order to get actionable information about your content marketing efforts), we have created a comprehensive article where we explore over 30 social media tracking tools and technologies that will help you manage, measure, and analyze your social media marketing campaigns. Go here for more details:
The above are just a few 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 Blueprint: Automated Content Sharing Stage – Summary
Once you have your site and plugins expertly configured and set up, all you then need to do is publish content on a regular basis to begin bringing more traffic organically.
If you need great ideas for content that you can post 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 as much of the process as you can. This step is covered in the next article in the series.
This is the end of Part Four
To read the rest of this article series, click here:
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